The Reformed and Conservative denominations of Judaism that have risen in the American exile and to which most American Jews belong, are a writ of divorce between Israeli and American Jews. These "Judaism-lite" versions defang our common heritage and seek to falsify our history. They do so by downplaying the role of the Hebrew language in the liturgy and by removing form the prayer book passages that relate to the longing to return home from exile, longing for Zion, and longing for revenge against the Gentiles for all the unimaginable slaughter that they have perpetrated against our people. What remains is a new-agey mumbo-jumbo, a social justice compote of two-faced derision for the intellectual inferiority of the Gentiles (especially the colored ones) and the satisfaction derived from virtue signaling on their behalf.

A century ago, in 1919, my great-grandparents and those of the American Jews now living, were one people. They practiced the same religion, they married only within their own ethnic group, they spoke the same language, they knew Hebrew, and they used the same prayer books. Most of all they knew that no place except for Israel can ever be their forever home. They knew that America, just like Poland was a place of exile.

Today, none of this is true. American Jews know neither Yiddish nor Hebrew and cannot follow the prayer service in its original language, the only language that makes it worth following. They do not seek to marry other Jews and most of them have given up on at least two of the foundational aspects of being Jewish: the people of Israel as a distinct ethnic group and the Land of Israel as its one and only homeland. American Jews today mistakenly think that America is somehow fundamentally different from Poland or from Germany or from any other place of exile. They have lost the Jewish perspective on things, a perspective that illuminates the indisputable fact that the Jews far predate not only America, but even the empire of antiquity upon whose example America was founded: Rome. American Jews have lost their sense of belonging to the Chosen People, the Eternal People, people who will be here long after the Mall in Washington DC resembles the ruins of the Roman Forum.

American Jews and Israeli Jews have nothing in common. We are not the same people, we do not practice the same religion, we share no values that really matter. It may be sad, but it is simply a fact. The Jewish-American hyphen may have been heftier than other hyphens for a brief moment in time, but now it is as weightless as the rest of them. Pasta, kielbasa, latkes, this is the fluff, this is the stuff American hyphens are made of and the Jewish one is no different.