Ms. Schakowsky pointed to her own rabbi in Evanston, Ill., Andrea London, who, in an interview, voiced an opinion that would have once sounded heretical: “Israel’s not going to be destroyed” by its hostile neighbors, she said.
The question facing world Jewry is no longer whether Israel will survive, Rabbi London said. “It’s whether Israel will become a Jewish and undemocratic state, or whether Israel will become a state for all its inhabitants, from the Jordan River to the sea, and lose its Jewish character,” she said.
Such strains are surfacing even among Orthodox Jewish leaders, long considered part of the natural alliance between Mr. Netanyahu, conservative Christians and religious Jews. Morton A. Klein, the longtime president of the conservative Zionist Organization of America, said his organization was the only one of a vast array of Jewish organizations running the religious gamut to back the Netanyahu government’s push to allow a Knesset majority to override rulings of Israel’s Supreme Court.
As Israel’s politics and voters move right, Mr. Klein said, American Jews of all stripes see its high court as the last lever of liberal power. “That is the main motivator” of American Jewish criticism, he contended. “They’re losing their power to control policy.”
It is not just liberal-leaning organizations that have expressed concern. When Mr. Smotrich, Mr. Netanyahu’s finance minister, visited the United States last month, many Jewish leaders refused to meet with him; some protested his presence.
The Orthodox Union did meet with him, said Rabbi Moshe Hauer, the union’s executive vice president. “We don’t do ourselves a service by disengaging from members of the government and relying on the opposition’s portrayal of them as the extreme,” he said.
But, Rabbi Hauer hastened to add, he understands the difficulty of the moment — for all Jews.
“The intensity of the debate has made this a delicate moment in terms of the internal fabric of the State of Israel,” he said, “and an equally delicate moment for North American Jewry in terms of being able to relate.”
