Israelis have also been extraordinarily successful in reaching their goals over the country’s first 50 years. Though security remains a constant emotional, physical, and financial strain, survival is no longer a real question. Israel has become not only a dominant military power but an economic one as well. The current recession notwithstanding, Israel has a per capita gross national product greater than that of its four neighbors -- Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt -- combined.

The country has come a long way from the fifties or even the sixties Israel, which was dominated by the kibbutz ethic and the collective sensibility of its European founding fathers. Today’s Israelis have grown up in the Middle East. They speak Hebrew and perhaps some Arabic but not always English. They have also been buffeted by the cultural and political impact of absorbing hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Sephardic countries.

“Any serious culture derives its images from its surroundings,” says Leonard Fein. “So when Israelis think about rivers, they don’t think about the Mississippi; they think about the Jordan. Everybody in Israel has experienced war. There’s only a very tiny percentage of Americans who have. Whenever there’s a terrorist incident or a military one, everybody knows someone who was involved. Israel is really a neighborhood pretending to be a country. It’s a very different experience from the American one. So culturally we’re drawing apart.”

What has developed over the past fifteen years or so is a kind of pyramid structure. Relations between Israeli and American Jews are very tight on the leadership level -- between, say, Netanyahu and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. But the farther down you go, the less serious, sustained contact there is. “Most Americans, even those who know a great deal about Israeli politics, don’t know much about daily life in Israel,” says Fein. “They don’t know what’s taught in the schools. They don’t know what songs are on the pop charts, or what plays Israelis go to. Amos Oz is read by a small number of Americans, A. B. Yehoshua by an even smaller number, and David Grossman by a smaller number still. And that’s about it.”

It is also true that the farther you get from the top of the pyramid, the less American Jews matter to Israelis. “By and large, the Israeli leadership recognizes that American Jewish support is important and necessary,” says Dr. Steven Bayme. “But increasingly, the rank and file believe that the American Jewish community is withering away. Israeli education shows very little understanding or appreciation of American Jewry. There’s no sense of the vitality of the American Jewish community. So Israelis grow up knowing only that America means assimilation. And if American Jews are going to disappear anyway, Israelis feel, why should they be important to us?”

In the near term, the critical issue, the one with the potential to continue doing the most damage to the relationship between Israeli and American Jews, is what’s known as the conversion issue, or sometimes the pluralism issue. The controversy spins around two central questions: Who is a Jew? And what should be the character of a Jewish state?

Back in 1948, when Israel was founded, David Ben-Gurion allowed the Orthodox to continue their control of all religious affairs. The government sanctioned a board of rabbis known as the Chief Rabbinate, and it was given complete dominion over all marriages, divorces, burials, and conversions.

The issue is critical now because there are several hundred thousand Israelis -- mostly non-Jewish Russian immigrants married to Jews, or children with Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers -- who are not considered Jewish by the state. Though they are citizens, they cannot marry in Israel or be buried there in a Jewish cemetery unless they convert. And this must be done under the auspices of an Orthodox rabbi -- a rigorous process that requires a commitment most are not willing to make.

Conversions performed by Conservative or Reform rabbis in Israel are not recognized by the Chief Rabbinate. In other words, they’re not legal. The impact of this has been to create a group of citizens who are denied basic rights: To marry, they must go overseas. This creates the prospect of a two-tiered society. It also creates the possibility that -- given the number of Jews in the U.S. whose religious identity would also not be accepted by the Orthodox -- there will be two groups worldwide as well.

“If Israel wishes to remain the center of the Jewish world,” says Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative movement’s academic center in New York, “it must have a level playing field in which no religious community has the ability to restrict, impose, or harass everyone else. It is not the business of a modern government to determine who can marry whom and who can be buried where.”