What are yordim — who left Israel to join the great melting pot of America — seeking by calling a conference emphasizing their cohesive community and separate identity? Has their American dream been shattered so soon?
As its name suggests the Israeli American Council or IAC is an organization for Israeli expats who have settled in the US. The IAC held its annual conference in Washington recently. The organization’s very existence testifies to a huge failing of the Zionist movement.
The IAC claims to represent nearly a million yordim who have left the Jewish state to live among the gentiles. That’s a million slaps in the face to the Zionist ideal that mandates living in Israel as the supreme obligation. In fact according to various polls and statistics yordim are the group at highest risk of assimilation many of them weary of sharing the destiny of their people as they left Israel with the clear intention of disappearing into the American melting pot. It’s a bit of a twist then that dozens of Zionist leaders went streaming into a conference that symbolized Zionism’s great failure after decades of denouncing yordim as traitors and casting them as untouchables in the eyes of the Zionist establishment.
It is in fact not hard to understand why Knesset members government ministers and other Israeli leaders would take part in the IAC conference. The Israeli population in the US is growing nonstop and the official Zionist presence at the conference is a de facto admission that Israel must recognize the potential power of that sector.
