The Unfashionable Inheritance of Being American-Israeli

There are two words I grew up with that I believed were honorable: patriot and Zionist. Today, in many spaces, both require explanation, and often, defense. As a kid, my patriotism was represented in my unyielding admiration for the US military. My Zionism, though I was still unaware of who Theodore Herzl was, shined through the desire – as the only Jewish kid in my class – to teach my fellow fourth-grade classmates about a small country called Israel. As an adult, my life path has reflected those same instincts. My upbringing in America, combined with my deep sense of responsibility to the Jewish people, eventually shaped something more defined, and led me to take ownership of my hyphenated identity: American-Israeli. 

I didn’t inherit that identity in full. I chose part of it. But the choice itself was shaped by something older– a collective narrative, memory, and a set of obligations that made it feel less like a decision and more like a continuation.

But today, identifying yourself with America or Israel (let alone both), places you on the wrong side of a cultural shift that increasingly views the idea of national identity as suspicious. For me, October 7th didn’t create this tension, it revealed it.  At no point in history have these identities represented such a liability. 

Older generations of Americans understand that this shift didn’t come from nowhere. There used to be a core value underpinning what it meant to be American: that where you came from mattered less than what you achieved. There was an optimism that was hard-won, that stood the tests of war and civil strife, and anchored the country to shared visions of the future with a collective sense of purpose. 

All of that is now measurably eroding. My generation and the current one inherited an America defined ostensibly by unaffordable housing, student debt, and political fracture so deep that basic facts have become tribal affiliations. These are the subjects of conversations I’m having with my peers, and the Gallup Polls only confirm the sentiment: only 41% of Gen Z adults say they are extremely or very proud to be American, compared with 75% of Baby Boomers; similarly, 42% of those under 50 believe the American dream is achievable, compared to 68% of those over 65. Add into this mix that loneliness in younger generations is now a public health crisis, it becomes clear that this disillusionment is not invented, it is lived. 

These numbers, however, do not represent a generational failure of character. In some cases, I’ve felt similar feelings, so I will not dismiss them. But I will draw a distinction that gets lost in the contempt for national identity now fashionable in many cultural spaces: disillusionment is fair. Rejection is a choice. Choice implies consequences, and consequences have impacts on history. 

America’s history is rich with examples of how years of disillusionment have consequently impacted the direction of the country. The 1970s, largely defined by the unpopularity of the  Vietnam War, Watergate, and Stagflation, highlighted a clear moment of civil disillusionment in American values. Public distrust in the government and faith in institutions plummeted. However the answer was not rejection, rather reform, and the America of the 1980s looked vastly different. National pride resurged and a sense of “new patriotism” fervently captured American households. Conversely, when disillusionment results in rejection, the results also have historical precedence. When American optimism declined staunchly following WWI, it bred an intense isolationism that made it easier to ignore the growing rise of facism in Europe until the cost of ignoring it became catastrophic. 

The pattern is not that America is always right. The pattern is this: disillusionment answered by reform produces progress. Disillusionment answered by rejection produces danger. A country that cannot defend the legitimacy of its own founding ideals, however imperfectly realized, cannot summon the will to repair them either. The failure of a country to live up to its ideals is not proof that the ideals are worthless. That is the argument I inherited from America. And it is the one I am reluctant to relinquish. 

Being Israeli used to have an attractive exoticness about it. A people embattled, “resilient”, often misunderstood but rarely dismissed. Now, Israeli identity arrives with pre-judgement. You are assumed guilty before you’ve spoken a word. With anti-Israel sentiments at an all-time high in America and anti-Zionism establishing itself as increasingly acceptable, the social cost of Israeliness, whether you were born as de-facto Israeli or chose to be Israeli, has become measurable and steep. 

Israel isn’t perfect. I criticize its decisions, I didn’t vote for Bibi in the last election and don’t plan on voting for him in the coming elections. But the imperfections of Israel’s internal political calculations is usually not what’s being debated. Rather, its very existence, not its accountability, is treated as its original sin. A reminder to readers that between 1940 and 1960, over 60 countries were either formed or gained independence; how many of their rights to exist are called into question? The selectivity of that scrutiny is not incidental, and it is hard to ignore. 

What’s been lost in this broader shift has been the narrative of the founding logic of Zionism, which its critics rarely engage with honestly. Theodor Herzl wasn’t a mystic or self-proclaimed demi-god. He was a liberal journalist in Vienna who, after covering the events of the Dreyfus Affair, soberly concluded that even in a post-Enlightenment Europe that promised equal citizenship for Jews, they had a ceiling. Jewish self-determination, according to Herzl, was therefore a liberal response to liberalism’s own failure to protect Jews. The rise of the nation-state ideology in the decades to succeed Herzl’s death in 1904 would prove his hypothesis true, and political philosopher Hannah Arednt summarized it succinctly: that statelessness is not merely a personal tragedy. But a people without a state had no protection. Therefore when the vision of Zionism was realized with the creation of the state of Israel, it was a declaration that the Jewish people would no longer be stateless. The Jewish people could defend themselves.

That is what Zionism represents. Not colonization or supremacy. The same right to sovereignty, security, and self-determination that no one questions when extended to any other people on earth. 

Now, I did not inherit my Israeli identity the way I inherited my American identity. By making Aliyah (immigrating to Israel) at 22, I chose Israeli citizenship with full knowledge of what that choice meant: the obligations it created, my IDF service in a combat unit, and the identity it would complicate on both sides of the Atlantic. But in my opinion, chosen identity demands more of you than an inherited one. The choice forces a clarity that inherited identity given at birth does not require. It’s the reason why I saw my Aliyah as simply the continuation of the Zionist story. The very founders of the State of Israel, from Ben Gurion to Golda Meir, were entirely committed to the idea of national reconstitution before the country even existed. The Zionist project was in many ways the largest act of chosen national identity in modern history: a diasporic people, scattered in every corner of the globe, with no shared language of daily life, deciding collectively to reconstitute sovereignty from scratch. That is not inheritance. That is will.  

But there is a cautionary parallel worth highlighting here. The German-Jewish intellectual tradition before 1933 produced some of the most sophisticated thinking on questions of dual identity at the time. These philosophers argued that German and Jewish identity were not just compatible but mutually enriching. The tragedy of their stories is not only what happened to them. It is that the identities they held with such pride were ultimately declared incompatible by forces they could not stop. Hyphenated identities require more courage to hold, not less. The people who abandoned one half of themselves in hopes of safety did not fare better. This is not to compare historical outcomes, but proves that the answer to pressure on a dual identity is not to simplify it. It is to defend it more precisely.

America gave me possibility. Israel gave me consequence. America taught me that people can build lives beyond inherited limits. Israel taught me that history is not an academic subject– it has borders, sirens, funerals, and enemies. These lessons are not in conflict, rather, they are what the current moment requires. 

The deeper issue underneath both American disillusionment and Israeli delegitimization is the same: the West has lost confidence in the legitimacy of its own national projects. And when that happens, it loses the ability to defend anything, whether it’s borders, values, allies, citizens, or truth. Again, not a new pattern. Historians note the fall of Rome not due to external pressures but because of an internal collapse of civic virtue. Before the empire lost any amount of territory, it lost belief in its own purpose. 

The current moment has its own version of this very test. As the United States and Israel work with unprecedented cooperation to confront the Islamic regime in Iran, leaders in the West have once again returned to a similar pattern: acting, then apologizing for acting, then debating whether action was legitimate in the first place. The collapse of the West’s own guiding ideals has created a situation where now it cannot build a credible deterrence on the foundation of civilizational self-doubt. How can you defend allies if you are not sure your own national project is worth defending? As history has shown, the abstract question about identity has concrete stakes. 

Patriotism is not blind loyalty. It is a responsibility for a national project; it is an understanding that a country’s failures are partly yours to repair, not just condemn. Zionism is not colonization or supremacy. It is the belief that Jews have the same right to sovereignty, security, and self-determination as any other people. 

Both of those beliefs are unfashionable right now. But the generation that rejects imperfect national projects without offering anything to replace them does not inherit the future. It inherits the vacuum. And vacuums, in history, are never empty for long. I made Aliyah because I believe in the continuation of the Jewish narrative, and that Jewish self-determination is not a colonial imposition but a moral necessity born out of historical consequences. I remain American because I believe that the American promise of building a better tomorrow, is valid and worth striving for. 

I do not feel caught between America and Israel. I am shaped by both. The hyphen connecting them is not a source of confusion, but clarity. And at a time when both are increasingly unfashionable, I believe that clarity is exactly why they are both worth defending.