They cannot stand Israel when it becomes human and real rather than ideal. And the more human and real Israel becomes, the more uncomfortable American Jews become with its being human. The myths sustain us and reality gives us despair. Almost none of them have anything to do with Jewish life in a serious way. America is the first Jewish community in history to have effectively eliminated the intellectual in the governance of the Jewish community.
Money is almost the sole criterion for admission to Jewish governance.
Los Angeles is one of the exceptions. In analyzing whatever United States Jewry has become, until this point the bulk of the accomplishments were revived or renourished by immigrants. For the first time now in three hundred years, the American Jewish community will be on its own. Whatever the number of Israelis, Soviet Jews, Iranian Jews, and South Africa Jews who have immigrated to America, numerically speaking there will never again be an in-migration where in each instance the new wave exceeded the numbers in place. We wonder why the young fear the elderly and fear aging.