I can only speak for the Jews I know best, the Jews who live on the comfortable fringes of Charedistan, ensconced in McMansions, with TV, and Internet, and jobs at top firms, even as they embrace the grimiest corners of Eastern Europe in their customs, manners, dress, and ideas. You know the types. Elsewhere their wives are lambasted as "Hot Channies," but these "Yuppy Yossies" deserve discussion, too.
A Yuppy Yossie has television, and internet access even if some of their kids wear ear-locks and are sent to schools that ban such conveniences. Typically, a Yuppy Yossie works - either in his dad's business, hid own shop, or on Wall Street or at a top firm - and trades in his pinstripes for beckeshes or black hats on the weekend . He's intimate with the wait staff at the kosher restaurants with the highest Zagat ratings yet his guiltiest pleasure is still a plate of greasy pastrami kugel topped with cholent. He either knows Shas cold, or can barely read Aramaic, but in any event will refuse even to look at a "controversial" Rishon. He subscribes to no newspaper or magazines, aside for what he needs for work, gets his information from the mikva or YWN, and is perfectly confident that his lifestyle, whatever its flaws, is monumentally superior to the Jewish lives lived in Teanek or other YU enclaves.
These are the Jews I know, and their children most definitely have given up on Israel. Or, to be more precise, they've given up on Israel because they were never taught to care about Israel in the first place.The Hasidic pathologies have conquered the right wing of Judaism. These pathologies include a love of magic and superstition, rebbe worship, fear or outright disdain of women, idolatrous practices like upshurin* and a indifference or coldness toward the state of Israel. A Yuppie Yossie, subscribes unreflectively to all of the above.
According to Shafer, Beinart has a study that shows "young American Jews have grown estranged from Israel and the Zionist dream because of the bullying and illiberal ways of both the Israeli government and the American Jewish establishment."
Perhaps, but this isn't why young Yuppie Yossies are indifferent to the Jewish state. They are cold toward Israel because their parents are cold, and their parents are cold because slowly but surely the Satmar perspective is winning the day here in the American charedistan.
A CLARIFICATION AT E-FINK'S REQUEST
Young Yuppie Yossies don't care at all about Zionism. They are suspicious of chilonim. They think its a scandal that Israel's beaches are open on Yom Kippur. But they aren't without some passion for Israel. Their connection to Israel is religious, not political, or even national.. And though one suspects they be just as happy if their free access to the graves and yeshivot were provided by an Arab, European, or American government, instead of a secular Jewish government, I did not mean to deny their connection to the religious sites and aspects of the religious culture within Israel. However, I stress this has nothing to do with Israel per se. The same sort of thing is what takes them to Uman and Munkatz and the like.
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*look it up
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