Missing the war

Author Samuel Freedman probes the split in Israeli-American Jewish perspective | Mindy Belz

In 1967 when Israel fought Arab forces, Jews across America emptied their bank accounts to support the Israeli cause. Some made aliya, or pilgrimage to Israel, as a show of solidarity. In what Samuel G. Freedman calls the Iran-Israel war, a Jewish outpouring in America is, by contrast, muted—a reflection of increasingly fractured Jewish belief, culture, and community explored in the Columbia University journalism professor's fourth book, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry.

WORLD: In The Jerusalem Post you recently wrote, "No aspect of daily experience more separates American and Israeli Jews than the role of military service and the broader sense of physical power and a classless society that it has come to represent." How does our relative ignorance of soldiering—for American Jews but also Americans in general—affect our view of the present conflict?