Since its founding, Israel’s effort to define Jewish status—codified in the Law of Return, which determines eligibility for Israeli citizenship—has had profound consequences for Jews inside and outside its borders, making it a reliable pain point between Israel and American Jewry decade after decade. Perhaps one of the most emotional episodes in the ongoing drama took place following Israel’s 1988 elections, when ultra-Orthodox parties made their participation in the government coalition contingent on a legislative change requiring the state authority to recognize Orthodox conversions exclusively.
The proposed amendment triggered an unprecedented backlash from American Jews, who brought their voice directly into Israeli politics. This crisis eventually led to a secret negotiation process between Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s office and the heads of the three major American Jewish religious movements—Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox. Following nearly a year of talks, the negotiation team reached a compromise that Israel’s ultra-Orthodox rabbinate was prepared to accept and the Israeli government to adopt.
And then the entire process fell apart.
The founding of the Jewish state, born from the ashes of six million lives lost, placed Israel as the protector of the Jewish people’s future. Israel’s intentionally vague 1950 Law of Return gave every Jew the right to citizenship. A 1970 amendment defined a Jew as anyone born to a Jewish mother, as dictated by Jewish law, or who converted. It left open whether non-Orthodox Jewish converts, while eligible for citizenship, would be recognized as “Jews” by the state. The amendment’s “grandparent clause” ensured citizenship to anyone with one Jewish grandparent or married to a Jew.
The amendment’s failure to recognize progressive movements’ religious authority struck at the heart of American Jewry’s budding relationship with Israel. After Israel’s stunning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, American Jews increasingly positioned Israel as their source of Jewish pride, identity, and security. Israel’s refusal to protect the legitimacy of Reform and Conservative Judaism wasn’t merely a bureaucratic issue affecting a small number of converts. As longtime American Jewish leader John Ruskay explained, “[The debate around] ‘Who is a Jew’ gave us a sense that the Judaism that [the majority of American Jews] embraced was not acknowledged. That conversion by [non-Orthodox] rabbis wouldn’t be recognized was a blow, a punch in the gut, not because it was a legal thing. It was about [American Jews’] ideology and their being in the context of Jewish identity …”