I very much appreciate Dov Waxman’s thoughtful review of my book. There is relatively little that divides Waxman and myself. We are not only members of the same tribe, but also probably of the same clan. Yet there are two significant areas of disagreement that I want to consider: the evidence used to assess the state of American Jewry's relationship with Israel, and the “use” of history to understand the present.

We both agree that American Jews are growing increasingly unnerved by Israel, but take slightly different positions regarding the kind of evidence required to make the case. Waxman places a larger confidence interval around the survey evidence than I do. Because I am less confident, I am more emphatic on the necessity of multiple and qualitative indicators, and especially indicators of the rate, intensity, and ease of mobilizing Jews around “pro-Israel” issues and events. This is one of the many reasons why I supplemented the survey evidence and a thorough review of the secondary literature with archival work and dozens of interviews, and why I accompanied the American Jewish World Service to El Salvador.

There is another reason for our differing attitudes toward survey evidence: Waxman wants to isolate “trouble” (which he defines as “more critical”) and I am trying to engage and explain “ambivalence.” These are two different things. My argument is that, historically speaking, American Jews have been torn between universalism and particularism; American Jewish orientations toward Israel are an effect of these tensions; it is better to think about whether American Jews are more or less ambivalent toward Jewish nationalism and Israel; and that, historically speaking, American Jews are more ambivalent regarding Israel in ways that resemble their ambivalence about Jewish nationalism a century ago. But to trace ambivalence it is not enough to identify attitudes toward Israel and Jewish nationalism, because ambivalence also is affected by universalism and cosmopolitanism.

Hence, my insistence on taking a historical approach. If we want to understand contemporary Jewish positions on Israel, then we need to situate them with respect to the long history of American Jewish positions regarding the relationship between universalism and particularism. In other words, my explanation for the rising ambivalence relies on structural and situational variables. Structural variables refer to the deep causal forces that explain the mixture of universalism and particularism. Situational variables refer to the historically specific factors. I agree with Waxman that Israeli policies and behavior are a major reason for the rising ambivalence, but these situational variables are having the impact they do because of the existing configuration of the structural variables. So, to answer the big question—Why is this happening?—requires a careful look at history. A historical perspective is doubly important, in my opinion, because the contemporary quantitative and qualitative evidence regarding distancing is compelling but not convincing – and that history provides even greater grounds for our conclusions.

I need to end by thanking Waxman not only for writing a necessary book for the times but also for situating my book in relationship to international relations theory and my previous work on humanitarianism, religion in world politics, and international justice and ethics. With regard to international relations theory, I have always been dissatisfied with the state-centric focus of the field. With regard to American Jews and Israel, the important point here is not that we are dealing with “second image” politics but, rather, that these are religious and diaspora groups that have different ways of understanding the world and their place in it. Simply put, the modern story of the Jews is of a transnational people attempting to navigate a world defined by nation-states. This theoretical disposition, I think, offers a quite distinctive view of American Jews, their understanding of themselves in the world, and their positioning in relation to nationalism and Israel. My sense is that if scholars of American Jews and Israel took a little distance from their subject, they would see a lot more.