As intellectual Gertrude Stein lay dieing, her disciples are said to have pleaded with her, “Gertrude, Gertrude, what is the answer?” She responded, “What is the question?” Everything depends on the question.
Hence, the Passover Haggadah’s “Four Children” narrative. What makes each questioner wise, evil, or naive is the question they ask.
What question, then, should we ask about Zohran Mamdani’s election as the Democratic party’s mayoral candidate in New York City? Wall Street wonders how a socialist mayor can run the city that is the epicenter of American capitalism. Jews agonize over an anti-Israel candidate who even advocates the “globalization” of the Intifada.
These are real issues, and immediate ones. But long-term, we might wonder whether the voting pattern that brought Momdani his victory spells something larger: the passing of one Jewish era and the birth of another. Trigger warning, first: if you are a baby boomer or older, you might not like the answer.
Precincts populated by older and established Jews voted against Mamdani. Precincts where young Jews predominate voted for him. The explanations are several. Young people who suffer from New York’s high cost of living found Momdani’s populist socialism appealing. Momdani also mastered the social media by which young people follow the news. But many young Jews supported him not just despite his anti-Israel rhetoric, but because of it.
This Jewish generational split may be temporary. But what if it is more? What if we are witnessing a genuinely historic moment: not just the end of the boomer generation’s influence but the end of the entire era. As boomers continue aging out of their influential years, the younger generations’ ambivalence about Israel may become the new norm.
At stake is what has been called “Jewish Civil Religion,” an idea that goes back to a 1967 article (“American Civil Religion”) by sociologist Robert Bellah.[i] Bellah analyzed religion into its component parts: beliefs, sacred holidays, sacred stories (or “myths”), a code of behavior, and so on. All of those, he said, are offered by just being American. “Americanism” is itself a sort of shadow religion to which all Americans can feel that they belong.
In 1987, Jonathan Woocher applied Bellah’s theory to American Jews.[ii] Side by side with their official Judaism, he said, Jews here are fiercely loyal to a civil Jewish religion, in which pride in Israel is central. Its sacred “myth” is the story of near destruction in the Shoah, but rebirth in the Jewish State. Its rituals include missions to Israel, or even (acting out the myth) travel first to Auschwitz and then to Israel to celebrate redemption there.
Israel in the 1980s, when Woocher wrote his book, was threatened as much as (and maybe even more than) it is today. Israelis were regularly being killed or maimed by terrorist attacks, to the point where Israel launched an all-out invasion of Lebanon in 1982. But the attacks continued. A 1983 assault on an IDF base caused 60 Israeli casualties.1984 ended with the UN denouncing Israel as “not a peace loving nation.” In 1985, Israel had to down two Syrian MIGs; and sink a terrorist ship just off the coast in the Mediterranean; on October 7 of that year (yes, October 7) Palestinian terrorists hijacked a ship and then shot and dumped overboard the body of a wheelchair-bound American Jew, Leon Klinghofer.
But through it all, the sacred myth remained intact, because Israel still looked to be on the side of the angels. In the face of the crisis, Yitzchak Shamir (right-wing Likkud) and Shimon Peres (left-wing Labor) formed a unity government. We were shocked to hear that in Lebanon, Israeli officers looked away, while their allies, Christian militias, massacred the Muslim population in Sabra and Shatila. But almost immediately, the Knesset empowered a Supreme-court appointed commission of inquiry, which censured those involved and forced several resignations.[iii] In 1985, an Israeli court convicted west-bank settlers of terrorism and even murder. Can we imagine that happening today?
I will not address here the complex situation in Gaza, because debate over the extended war there hides more obvious and unforgivable travesties on the west bank. Israeli settlers, often aided by the IDF itself, are systematically taking over Arab land, while terrorizing and even killing its long-time owners. This wanton behavior hardly comports with our civil-religion tale of an Israel to be proud of.
This Jewish civil religion animated the baby-boomers’ love affair with Israel. Their Gen X children grew up with at least some familiarity with it. Not so, the millennials who supported Mamdani; they were born well after these glory years of a Jewish State with a conscience. They have probably never even heard of the Jewish civil religion from the 1980s; and if they have, they would find it laughable.
Every generation has a window of influence, usually the period from about age 40 to 65 or 70. Boomers born in 1946 to 1964 are now 61 to 79 years old. Their Gen X children (born 1965–1980, now aged 45-60) are still a moderating bridge to what’s coming. But tomorrow will be written by generations who see Israel altogether differently. That is not just a generational turnover; it is a change of era.
Some caveats apply. The current war may end with Hamas, Hezbollah, and even Iran so weakened, that Gaza can be rebuilt into a Palestinian partner with Israel. The Israeli electorate may at last drive out its current ruling coalition and the west-bank adventurists whom it is empowering. Maybe also, the absurdity of demanding the dismantling of a Jewish state because of so-called “colonial” beginnings will dawn on the American Jewish critics; who simultaneously may discover the vast majority of their Israeli Jewish counterparts who supported this war because Hamas had to be destroyed, but who deplore the Jewish thugs as much as they, the American millennials, do.
It may be too that the Jewish youth in New York are so utterly different from the rest of the country that my entire analysis is irrelevant. But I doubt it. The Mamdani phenomenon may repeat elsewhere, with other Mamdanis, and other Jews too who will attain their own era of influence while believing that Zionism is evil, and that the Israel of their parents was an illusion. That is what scares me.
[i] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Dædalus 96:1 (Winter 1967), pp. 1-21.
[ii] Jonathan Woocher, Sacred Survival (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
[iii] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-kahan-commission-of-inquiry
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 