Ross Douthat has a response to Peter Beinart that suffers from a bit of mirror imaging.

What I wonder is whether the trend that Beinart describes — the diminishing bond between secular American Jews and the state of Israel — was more or less inevitable, no matter what policies were pursued in Israel and what kind of attitudes American Zionist organizations struck. Benjamin Netanyahu and Abe Foxman may have accelerated the process, but it’s hard to imagine that the more secular, more assimilated sections of the Jewish-American population wouldn’t have eventually drifted away from an intense connection with Israel anyway, in much the same way and for many of the same reasons that Italian-Americans are less attached to both Italy and Catholicism than they were in 1940 or so, or that Irish-American are far less interested in the politics of Eire and Northern Ireland than they used to be.

Yes, Jewish identity is far stronger and “stickier” than most other ethno-religious ties. But that doesn’t mean that liberal Jews are immune to the impact of secularization and intermarriage, or that what we think of today as secular Judaism won’t eventually melt away into something that’s basically post-Jewish.

There’s a bit of a conflation going on here. First and most importantly, Jewish identity is not a function of religiosity. We’re a nation and a culture primarily, in the classic sociological and political senses of those terms, with religion a separate but not (obvs) irrelevant factor. Second and relatedly, the historical American Zionist establishment for generations has been primarily a secular establishment — by which I don’t mean that the individual leaders were secular, but that the outward presentations of, say, AIPAC and the ADL and the AJC were secular ones. I suppose I don’t actually know statistically the degree to which American Jewish attachment to Israel corrolates historically with religiosity, but I would suspect that you would see in prior generations that very secular Jews would express a firm love of Israel. Peter’s concerned with why that looks less and less to be the case in current and younger generations, and his contention is that Israel and the mainstream American Zionist institutions are deficient in the liberalism that American Jewish youth still possess. (That helps explain why young religious American Jews with lesser commitments to liberalism don’t feel any comparable estrangement.)

I don’t mean to suggest that Ross is totally wrong here or that religiosity wouldn’t play a mixture in the brew of decision-making amongst, essentially, my peer group. It may even be — and I leave this for sociologists to explore — that in today’s thoroughly-assimilated American Jewry, Jewish identity has become religiosity, and I’m a throwback secularist who feels particularly Heeby, particularly liberal and particularly Zionist. But my suspicion is that nothing here is as demographically determined as Ross presumes, and that whatever’s at work, it doesn’t come down to how observant the current crop of American Jews are.