This is how the story is portrayed: a new conversion law in Israel would put conversions in the hands on “non-zionist” orthodox Jews from the most fundamntalist of sects.  Those from the ultra-Orthodox applaud the proposed bill, while all other Jews are hostile to it:

The bill that so angered American Jewish leaders was actually aimed at making conversion easier for the 300,000 Israelis among the 1 million who moved to Israel from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Those Israelis are not, by Orthodox rabbinic law, considered Jewish because they come from mixed parentage. The law would have tried to make conversion easier by granting conversion powers to local rabbis across the country, a group considered closer to their communities.  But after objections from the ultra-Orthodox, the bill formally placed authority for conversion in the hands of the chief rabbinate and declared Orthodox Jewish law to be the basis of conversion, making Americans fear that their more lenient conversion processes would be invalidated.

The “who is a Jew?” question is a very old one, and one that is separating American Jews from the right-wing Orthodox in Israel:

David Rotem, the lawmaker behind the conversion bill, said in an interview that such views were based on a misreading of it.  “They need to check the facts before they speak,” he said of Reform and Conservative Jewish leaders. “They are acting like absolute idiots.”

The question of “who is a Jew?” is as old as the state of Israel. The more liberal forms of Jewish practice advocated by the Reform and Conservative movements, with which most American Jews are affiliated, have never taken root here. Israel has left liturgy in the hands of the Orthodox, with most Israeli Jews leading almost completely secular lives, seeking out rabbis only at birth, marriage and death.

The idea is that helping to build the Jewish state is their central means of expressing their ethnic identity. By contrast, Jews abroad seek one another out in synagogues, and have come up with ways to integrate spirituality with identity, forging rituals that respect tradition while adjusting to careers and life in a non-Jewish world.

To understand this from a rather pointed American perspective, Peter Beinhart’s New York Review of Books article, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” is required reading.  In essence, he says:

Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

In good Jewish tradition, it is necessary to have a dissenting view.  This is one from Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, of whom in his article Beinhart had particularly harsh words:

[Beinhart] sees an Israel that is clearly moving to the right, that has less regard for the “other,” no matter who that may be, and that is unwilling to take seriously efforts toward peace. Beinart seems to be suffering from the same problems we have seen in the Obama administration, ignoring what Israel has gone through over the last decade and thereby misreading what Israelis are thinking today.

Of course, Beinhart replies.  At this point, I want to point out that Judaism is a broad tent, regardles of whether the fundamentalist wing thinks of it this way.  Since 1948, Israel has been the Big Reality that all Jews, regardless of whether they have faith in the Lord, or are secular, or express their ethnicity in some way meaningful to them, or whatever.  Israel, the Big Reality, is a Big, Complicated Place, and its problems are not going to disappear quickly, no matter who does the conversions.  Personally, I would rather see conversions not controlled by a fundamentalist sect; such control would serve to weaken an already beleaguered state.  To reject Reform, or Conservative or, in some cases, Orthodox conversion because the far-right fundamentalist wing thinks the conversion by the American Orthodox wasn’t done correctly, is to pull the plug on Israel’s future.

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