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Our Thanksgiving table has never been a political battleground — not until this year. We made it through some difficult chapters (the war in Iraq, for one) and escaped others (no crazy uncle defending the Trump administration).

This year is different. We are a Jewish family, so you might think the horror of the Hamas attack would bring us together. Anything but. Instead, in the interests of family harmony, the Thanksgiving table has been preemptively declared an Israel-free zone. Pass the corn pudding and drop the cease-fire talk. Tell Grandma not to discuss settlements.

I suspect we are not alone. The Oct. 7 attack exposed many painful realities, including the prevalence of antisemitism in our own country, especially on college campuses. A related one is the generational divide — broadly, for sure, but also within the American Jewish community — over support for Israel and the importance of Israel as a Jewish homeland.

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This is a multigenerational schism: the younger you are, the less supportive of Israel. It predates the current war but has been both exposed and widened by it. A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that 45 percent of Jewish adults in the United States reported that caring about Israel is essential to what being Jewish means to them.

But that was true for just 35 percent of those ages 18 t0 29 and 52 percent of those 65 or older. Likewise, 48 percent of those younger Jewish Americans felt somewhat or very attached to Israel, vs. 67 percent of seniors. A similar generational divide manifested itself in support for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, and, conversely, backing for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

Really, how could it be otherwise? I was born in 1958, just 10 years after the establishment of Israel. The nation’s existence was new and tenuous; it was embattled, encircled by enemies committed to its destruction. It needed our support — our dimes diligently tucked into the cards we collected to plant trees in its fledgling forests.

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My childhood memories are of the Six-Day War and the accompanying joy over access to the Western Wall; of the shock of the Yom Kippur War. I was walking back to synagogue to join my father for evening services that day when a neighbor stopped to ask: Had I heard the terrible news?

And, I am obliged to confess, the narrative of Israel’s founding that Jewish children of my generation were offered in Hebrew school and on trips to Israel was deeply misleading at best, tinged with anti-Palestinian bias at worst. This account utterly failed to acknowledge the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 or consider Palestinians’ legitimate claims to a homeland. The tenor of our rabbi’s sermons, the discussions in my childhood home, were that Israel could do no wrong.

My children grew up in a different environment — more honest about the contours of the conflict, more complex in the nature of the political discussion, and more fraught. They have scarcely known an Israel without Netanyahu, which is to say an Israel whose aggressive settlement policy that has made a two-state solution increasingly unattainable, and an Israel that fails to treat Palestinians with fairness and dignity.

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It is, in short, an Israel that has made itself hard to love. My love for Israel is strong enough to survive my exasperation with the policies of its current government. It might be unrealistic to expect the same of my daughters. It is hard to demand that Israel constitute a central part of their Jewish identity when Israel’s behavior, during their conscious lifetimes, has been so impossible to defend.

So, we confront the events of Oct. 7 and its terrible aftermath, including the bloodshed in Gaza, from different baselines, clashing perspectives that have generated painful conversations, and tears on both sides.

I am disappointed that, as much as they recognize the horrors of the Holocaust and the “never again” imperative, they do not link that tragedy to the accompanying imperative of Israel as a Jewish homeland. I blame myself for having failed to instill that lesson, and for not having done a better job at convincing them of the interconnectedness of Judaism and Zionism. I worry that they underestimate the persistence of antisemitism and overestimate the willingness of Israel’s neighbors to tolerate a Jewish state.

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In turn, they are disappointed at what they see as my reflexive tribalism and my deficit of empathy for the suffering of innocent Palestinians. For them, a deeply felt Jewish identity does not inexorably demand commitment to Israel; the two can be disaggregated.

Judaism teaches the duty to care for the stranger, my daughter reminded me, when I said our charitable contributions would go to ease suffering in Israel, not Gaza. Hadn’t I taught her better than that? My pride in having helped raise a caring person collides with my worry that she does not fully grasp the evils of the world in which we live.

Perhaps that is the essence of youth. But perhaps the bond of young American Jews with Israel, already frayed, has irretrievably severed with Oct. 7 and what many view as an Israeli response that has killed too many innocent civilians.

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Opinions among young Jewish Americans are not monolithic — we’re fractious Jews, after all. Some friends report that the shock of the Hamas attack has turned their adult children, previously staunch Netanyahu critics, into strong proponents of Israel’s right to self-defense. But much as I would prefer otherwise, I suspect that my family’s generational divide is more typical — and more ominous for the long-term survival of the Jewish state. For that, there can be no giving thanks.

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