No wonder nobody in Israel gives a hoot…..I don’t.

I believe you are making several false assumptions here. Firstly, when Jews go to pray in Synagogues or “prayer rooms” either on or off campus we are never asked to “pledge our loyalties” to anything. Like all people of faith, we go to pray and be part of a larger community. While it is true that the vast majority of Synagogue attending Jews will more often than not be pro-Israel, there are many divergent feelings and opinions as to how Israel does and should act. Often there is open discourse either from the pulpit or just amongst the congregants. Nobody is ever asked to or forced to “pledge loyalty” to anything.

Secondly, and you kind of touch on this in your last sentence, it is really not accurate to compare going to a Christian church in this country to going to a Jewish Synagogue.
Like it or not, Israel was created as a homeland for the Jewish people after centuries of persecution throughout the world that culminated with the holocaust. Jews are inextricably connected to Israel. While I am sure there are many Jews in this country that feel little for and could care less about Israel, chances are that those Jews that are connected to a prayer group, a student group, a Synagogue or any otherwise “Jewish” group also feel at least some sort of affiliation with the state of Israel. Therefore, when we attend our Synagogues and the like it is quite natural for Israel to often be at the forefront of the discussion. Unlike Christianity, where the vast majority of congregants have zero connection to any sort of Christian homeland, Jews do have a connection to Israel and when Israeli politics are discussed in our places of prayer it is done so openly with room for differing opinions. To compare that to Christian places of prayer with presumably no affiliation to a homeland is really comparing apples to oranges.

I agree that Israel has provided the mainstream U.S. Jewish community with a means to “glue” together widely divergent views about Jewish life, but the author refuses to connect that to the undeniable reality that that this obsessive focus on Israel right or wrong is the reason why there is ‘so little that keeps them connected to their Jewish identity.’ Our spirituality and the beauty that comes from communing together as Jews always takes a backseat to Israel. The result is that at most college Hillels, there isn’t much Kavana. Services are either spiritually rigid and inaccessible or schmaltzy, upbeat and interpretive. But since it is presumed at least that everyone supports Zionism, it holds an otherwise untenable model for community together. Now that young people are vociferously questioning Israel’s policies and even its underpinnings, we are beginning to see the ways our communities have been desiccated because Jews just drift away from places where they can find neither satisfying spiritual community or satisfying politics.