For J.D.
The ongoing and escalating debate among many Jews in America considering what I am calling the collapse of the Zionist consensus in the aftermath of the war on Gaza often lands on the question of “love of Israel.”
Do you love Israel?
I love Israel.
You don’t love Israel.
I recall hearing that an American-Israeli public intellectual once said that he would not appear on a panel with any Jew who first did not profess their “love for Israel.” I’m quite certain that if that Jew had just come from eating a cheeseburger, and was intermarried, but “loved Israel,” it would be fine.
Loving Israel has recently become a flash-point of New York City politics. Andrew Cuomo has been professing how much he loves Israel, and how much Zohran Mamdani doesn’t, on his visits to synagogues across New York City, where he also tells congregants that Mamdani holds “antisemitic” stances. But this has a longer history. In 2021, Gil Troy and Natan Sharansky published an article in Tablet, “The Un-Jews,” chastising Jews for not loving Israel. It is not just that American Jews should “love Israel,” but those who don’t are not Jews but Un-Jews, a play on the 7-Up advertisement from the 1970s of being the Un-Cola.
Perhaps the most recent case is a sermon given on Oct. 18, 2025, by Park Avenue Synagogue rabbi Elliot Cosgrove. In this sermon, Cosgrove argued that Zohran Mamdani is a “danger to the security of the New York Jewish community.” About eighteen minutes into a twenty-four-minute sermon, Cosgrove began talking about love: love of one’s family, love of one’s friends, and ahavat yisrael—love of Israel.
That we should or must choose those we love over those we don’t is well and good. But Cosgrove’s effortless shift from love of one’s family to “love of Israel” (the state) is striking, as if love of one’s child, or spouse, and love of the state of Israel are one and the same—different in degree, perhaps, but not in kind. He even states that “love of Israel does take precedence over other loves.” What, then, does “love of Israel” mean?
The ongoing and escalating debate among many Jews in America considering what I am calling the collapse of the Zionist consensus in the aftermath of the war on Gaza often lands on the question of “love of Israel.”
Cosgrove continues to build upon the ideas that appear at the end of his 2024 book, For Such a Time as This: Being Jewish Today. There he writes that he cannot separate his Jewish identity from loving Israel: “As someone of my generation, I can’t imagine Judaism without Zionism.” In a recent interview with Bonnie Goldman in The Times of Israel, Cosgrove said, “For me, engagement with Israel is a constituent element of modern Jewish identity…. To be a Jew means to be engaged with the well-being of the sovereign state of Israel. Period.”
On this logic, however, one who opposes Zionism, for whatever reason, is in effect, albeit not in intent, anti–Elliot Cosgrove. I can’t challenge the rabbi’s fusion of his own Jewish identity with “loving Israel,” but I can challenge the implication that, therefore, one who doesn’t love Israel, or even like Israel, denies or opposes Cosgrove’s Jewishness. Or alternatively, that one should love Israel in order to affirm Cosgrove’s Jewishness. If not, you are a “danger” to those like Cosgrove—that is, to Jews.
Part of what I am suggesting here is that the largely stable relationship between American Jews and Israel for the past half century is in a liquid state of transition, and the anxiety that transition has evoked is part of what is raising the stakes in the requirement to “love Israel.” That is, the state, not the people.
While in part the result of the Gaza War, this shift is really something that has been evolving for most of the twenty-first century. It is ironic but not surprising that the very thing that united American Jewry over half a century ago—love of Israel—is now dividing it. This is the context in which the new dogma of “loving Israel” is reaching a new phase.
The deployment of “love” language is quite curious. What does “love” mean here? Love, as the poets and philosophers note, is a delicate, fragile, and precarious idea. And that’s assuming it’s an idea at all. What is the object of this love? What work does this declaration of love do? How is it different from “I support Israel” or “I pledge fidelity to Israel” or myriad other ways to express one’s identification with that nation-state that American Jews, including Cosgrove, choose not to live in?
In a famous response to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem accused Arendt of lacking “ahavat yisrael” (“love of Israel”—here referring to a people, not country). Scholem never really explained what he meant, but it was Arendt’s response to him that is most relevant here. In a letter dated July 20, 1963, Arendt wrote,
How right you are that I have no such love, and for two reasons: first I have never in my life “loved” some nation or collective—not the German, French, or American nation, or the working class, or whatever else might exist. The fact is that I love only my friends and am quite incapable of any other sort of love. Second, this kind of love seems suspect to me, since I am Jewish myself. I don’t love myself or anything I know belongs to the substance of my being.
Then she recounted a conversation she had with a “leading political figure,” likely Golda Meir, who said, “You understand of course that as a socialist I do not believe in God. I believe in the Jewish people.” Arendt refers to this as a “horrible comment.” She continued, “And now this people believes only in itself? In this sense I don’t love the Jews, nor do I ‘believe’ in them. I belong to this people, in nature and in fact.”
There are a few striking things about Scholem’s accusation and Arendt’s response. First, Scholem seemed to mean it as a slight, whereas Arendt took it as a legitimate philosophical and historical question. She wrote to Scholem: “I would be extraordinarily grateful to you if you would tell me when this expression began to play a role in the Hebrew language and literature, when it”—ahavat yisrael—“appeared the first time, and so on.”
For a historian like Scholem, this should have been a home-run pitch. But it seemed Arendt caught Scholem off-guard. He never responded to her query. One reason might be that the phrase doesn’t have much of a history in “Hebrew language and literature.” In fact, it does not appear in the Hebrew Bible, nor the Talmud or Midrash, nor Maimonides’ legal code Mishneh Torah. There is no formal mitzvah of ahavat yisrael. It appears intermittently in the Zohar as “ahavat Knesset yisrael,” which means loving the “collective Israel.” In the Zohar, this likely refers to a metaphysical construct and not a physical people.
By contrast, “love of God,” “love of Torah” “love of neighbor [rea],” and “love of stranger [ger]” are all biblical in origin and appear throughout classical Jewish literature.
For my purposes, the use of the term “love” in “I love Israel” is a reference not to a people, as Scholem meant it, but to a nation-state, and for Diaspora Jews, a state one chooses not to live in. This makes it even more quizzical. What does “love” of a state mean? And Arendt’s use of the term “belief” complicates the issue even more. What did Meir mean when she said to Arendt, “I don’t believe in God…. I believe in the Jewish people”?
To get a better sense of what may be at stake here in “loving” the state of Israel, I turn to a debate between perhaps the greatest Jewish philosopher of the early twentieth century, Hermann Cohen, and one of the great Jewish philosophers of the next generation, Martin Buber. Buber penned the essay “The Love of God and the Idea of the Deity,” originally published in Hebrew in 1943 in the journal Knesset. It was later published in English in 1948, in Buber’s collection Israel and the World: Essays in a Time of Crisis, and then re-printed in 1952 in his Eclipse of God.
Buber’s essay engages with Cohen’s thought—particularly the neo-Kantian philosopher’s rendering of Kant’s distinction between “believing God” and “believing in God.” Believing God is the introduction of “God into a system of knowledge.” It is, as Cohen argues, a postulate of Truth. This is different from “believing in God” which requires relation. That is, for Cohen, God must be a relational being in order for one to believe in God. Cohen’s God is not one of belief but of affirmation. He believes God, but he doesn’t quite believe in God.
Buber summarizes this to say, “God is an idea for Cohen, as he was for Kant. Cohen writes, ‘We call God an idea’ … ‘meaning the center of all ideas, the idea of truth.’” Buber concludes, “Cohen has constructed the last home of the God of the philosophers.” This is the God that Buber rejects.
For both Cohen and more so for Buber, the real test case for this distinction rests on the question of love. Can one love God if God is an idea? Cohen argues that, in fact, one can only love an idea—that is, even when one loves a person, one loves an idealized version of that person. We don’t love an idealized God, Buber argues. If we did, we could not love God if God did not fulfill that ideal. For example, when God allows Jews to suffer: could an idealized God that we love possibly do such a thing? If so, would that God still be deserving of our love? Rather, Buber writes, “God loves as a personality and He wishes to be loved like a personality.” One can believe an idea, i.e., that there is a postulate upon which I can found my faith, Truth, the moral law, etc. But one cannot love that idea, because love requires relationality. This is why Arendt said she never “loved” a people, only those with whom she was in relation, such as family and friends.
But if love demands relation, how can I love my neighbor, even one with whom I have no relation? Buber makes a novel suggestion here: “The Bible knows that it is impossible to command love of man. I am incapable of feeling love toward every man, though God himself commands me.” If God does not command what one cannot do, how can God command love of one’s neighbor? Buber suggests that the commandment to “love one’s neighbor” (Lev. 19:18, 34) is not “to love” them, not exactly. Rather, “I must act lovingly toward my rea [neighbor], my ‘companion,’ that is toward every man with whom I deal in the course of my life, including the ger, the stranger or sojourner….” The commandment is thus one of action, not emotion, behavior, not principle. Love is a gesture, not an identity. I can act lovingly toward someone without knowing them, but I can’t love someone without knowing them unless, of course, I am loving the idea of them, which Buber claims, contra Cohen, is not possible. Acting lovingly is not necessarily reciprocal, but loving is.
When the tradition “commands” love, is that an act of reciprocity, or is it independent of “being loved”? In his 1987 essay, “The Sema and its Blessings: The Realization of God’s Kingship,” Reuven Kimelman makes an interesting observation about the relationship between the liturgical blessings that precede the Shema, the declaration that begins, “And you shall love your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might.” Kimelman points out that the blessing in the liturgy that immediately precedes the Shema concludes with the words, “And God loves His people, Israel.” This line directly connects to the first paragraph of the Shema, “And you shall love your God.” Kimelman writes, “The case for God’s love is made in the second blessing. Positioning it before the Shema makes the point that we are to love God, because He loved us first…. [T]he biblical commandment to love God becomes liturgically the reciprocation of divine love.”
If the commandment to love God is an act of reciprocity—if it is an act whereby God as the object of our love is first the subject in God’s love for us—then liturgically, at least, and to use Buber’s language, God is “a personality, and not an idea.”
This is one way to understand Arendt’s reply to Scholem that she doesn’t “love any people”—that is, any entity with whom she has no relation. Do the “people of Israel” love Hannah Arendt? Scholem remarks that he considers her a full member of the Jewish people, but membership, even responsibility or fidelity, is different from love.
In our time, most states are entities that are composed of citizens. That is how membership, and thus reciprocity, is determined. Therefore, an Israeli can easily say, “I love Israel,” because as a citizen one is in relation to that entity, that object of love, in a very formal way. And that object of love—the country—pledges fidelity to the subject (the citizen) through citizen rights. This is one way of defining patriotism. I love my country because, in some way, I am my country.
One needn’t then say that America loves all its citizens, nor that it treats them all equally, but a state is (at least nominally) obligated to its citizens, for example if a citizen is in danger outside the state. That is part of what passports and embassies are about. So, while the language of love may be dissonant regarding a state, there is an inherent relationship between the state, or country, and its citizens, whereby love could function as a descriptor. Thus, it is natural and recognizable for an Israeli to say, “I love Israel.” I know what that means. But what about a non-citizen, a diasporic Jew? And particularly a diasporic Jew who chooses to make their life outside the state. What do they love when they say, “I love Israel”?
This is complicated by the notion of “shlilat ha-golah” (negation of the Diaspora), which stands at the very center of the early Zionist vision and remains operative today to some extent. Zionists knew early on that if the Diaspora was a safe place for Jews, convincing them to immigrate would be difficult. Europe’s collapse contributed to both the need for, and success of, Zionism and subsequently the state of Israel. The notion that the Diaspora is an unstable place for Jews remains alive today. After a terror attack in Paris some years ago, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at a synagogue there imploring his audience to move to Israel. They responded by spontaneously standing and singing the French national anthem.
While the language of love may be dissonant regarding a state, there is an inherent relationship between the state, or country, and its citizens, whereby love could function as a descriptor.
There were Zionists such as Ahad Ha-Am who opposed this idea of shlilat ha-golah, but it remains subtly operative in various forms today. Does the state of Israel then “love” diaspora Jews? No, and why should it? Israel is a nation-state responsible to its citizens. But the state of Israel offers the Diaspora Jew an alternative: immigration and citizenship. So, when the 2018 Nation-State Law says, “Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people,” that declaration is more rhetorical than actual. The state may claim to represent the Jewish people—itself problematic for other reasons—but it is not really “the nation-state of the Jewish people.” The state owes no allegiance to those Jews who choose not to live there. The embassy for American Jews around the world is the American and not the Israeli embassy. When one arrives at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, the American Jew goes to the passport line for “foreigners.” There is no special line for “diaspora Jews.”
It is true that Israel’s “Law of Return,” which basically offers Diaspora Jews automatic citizenship to the state of Israel if they chose to immigrate, constitute the conditions for a “love” between diaspora Jews and the state. But that relationship remains latent until the individual chooses to make the choice to move there. As long as they don’t, the relationship between the individual and the state remains dormant, and the state bears no responsibility toward that individual, certainly formally. It would make no sense for passport control to have a separate line for “potential citizens.”
One can recall a few years ago that in a hot-mic moment, Israeli/American political consultant Ron Dermer said that Israel should give up on American Jews, who are too liberal, and focus on evangelical Christians for support. In some way, that makes sense. Israel is not responsible for American Jews, who have their own country, and are useful to the nation-state only the extent to which they support it and advocate for it. If they don’t, when they don’t, that responsibility disappears.
To return to my original question, what does an American Jew mean when they say they “I love Israel,” and what does it mean when someone says they would not share a podium with a Jew who does not first declare “I love for Israel”? I can understand the language of “support,” although not as a litmus test or requirement of authenticity. One can support something that one does not love. Support requires no relation or reciprocity. But, at least in the Jewish tradition, love does. Perhaps what is meant is closer to Cohen’s notion of loving an idea, something Buber rejected as a precept for loving God. Is what one loves the idea of Israel, as a Jewish state, a refuge for Jews?
There are two interrelated issues here. The first one is about one’s own “love” of Israel, whatever that may mean, even if it means love of a state that does not reciprocate its love. The second is that such love is presented as a requirement for legitimate Jewishness. As Kimelman showed in regards to the Shema, love of God is commanded as an act of reciprocity—God loves us, and we ought to love God in turn. For Buber, the commandment to love another (a neighbor or stranger) is to “act lovingly,” because the feeling of love cannot be commanded.
So Arendt was correct in her response to Scholem’s accusation that she lacked “ahavat yisrael,” when she said, “I have never in my life loved some nation or collective.” Not that she didn’t but that she couldn’t, and implicit in her answer is the challenge that Scholem can’t either. Arendt’s Jewishness was not a product of, nor contingent upon, her “love” of the Jewish people. It was, as she said, something about which she never doubted, and about which she had no control. To be a Jew is to be a Jew. Nothing more can be, or should be, required. It is her very “being.”
It is hard to assess what an individual means when they say they “love” something, and thus here I only raise some issues to consider in that regard. But the tacit requirement of a Jew, surely a diaspora Jew, or even a non-Jew, to “love Israel” is a category error at best, a manipulation at worst. Israel is a country. It is responsible to protect its citizens—that itself may be an act of love, or at least responsibility—and thus its citizens can love it back. Jews who do not hold Israeli passports are not the responsibility of the state of Israel. The love language is inauthentic and misplaced.
“Loving Israel” has become a form of Jewish dogma. And aside from what some say, it really has nothing to do with antisemitism. This is a true internal Jewish schism that has happened many times before. The battle over the crumbling Zionist consensus is unfolding before our eyes, and that, I submit, is healthy for Jewry. Ideological hegemony is not good for a collective. My focus on love (of Israel) is not simply an exercise in semantics. I think the locution represents something more nuanced. Understanding “love of Israel” as a powerful tool, as a secularized version of an older religious idea, may be the first step toward a serious investigation into this influential, problematic, and sorely undertheorized nomenclature.