In the Talmudic period, there was a group of rabbis known as the nehutei. They traveled between the great rabbinic centers of Babylonia and the Land of Israel, carrying teachings, arguments and legal traditions from one world to another. They were not merely messengers but interpreters between Jewish centers that shared a people and a tradition, even when they did not share the same language, assumptions or daily experience.

The Jewish people still need this role, and the Haggai Segal episode made that clear, though not for the reasons most commentators have named. Gidi Grinstein noticed something real when he observed the silence of American Jewish institutional leaders after Segal’s column (“American Jewish leaders, where were you?” April 30). But the silence was not the whole story, and the institutional response he called for would not have solved the deeper problem.

Francesco Carta fotografo/Getty Images

Segal’s piece was not a broadside that Israeli discourse launched into the open while American Jewish leaders looked away. It was a Hebrew-language argument, published in Makor Rishon, from inside a religious-Zionist conversation that most American Jewish institutional leaders simply do not read.

This is not for lack of investment in Israel. American Jewish institutional life channels enormous energy toward Israel through Federation missions, philanthropic partnerships, government relationships and organized travel. But that investment flows mostly through English-language channels and official Israeli interfaces. It does not usually flow through Hebrew-language media, internal religious-Zionist discourse or the ideological conversations happening inside Makor Rishon. American Jewish leaders know the Israel of Ben Gurion Airport arrivals and prime minister press conferences. They do not know the Israel of Segal’s column. The point is not that many were staying silent after seeing it, but that they likely never saw it at all.

That is not absolution. American Jewish leaders should pay closer attention to the Hebrew conversations that shape Israeli public life, especially when those conversations concern them directly. But it changes what the silence means, because not every silence is cowardice. Sometimes silence reveals that the people being attacked did not know the attack had happened, which is its own problem, but not the one Grinstein named.

The problem also runs in the other direction. On the Israeli side, the gap is not that American Jewish life is inaudible, but that it is misread. The Israeli mental image of American Jewry often oscillates between the generous Federation donor and the soft assimilationist who lacks the courage to come home. Segal’s column drew on both images at once. American Jewish silence then confirmed a story Israelis were already telling themselves.

I write this as an Israeli living in Palo Alto who reads Makor Rishon regularly. Segal’s column appeared on April 18. Within days, Makor Rishon itself published rebuttals from figures whose work sits directly on the Israel-Diaspora seam, including Daniel Goldman, Netanel Fisher, Doron Perez, Ilan Geal-Dor and others. My own response appeared in Makor Rishon online on April 23. Gil Troy, Lilach Sigan, Zvika Klein, Esther Sperber and Judah Ari Gross also helped carry the debate across Hebrew and English, Israeli and Diaspora audiences. A clear pattern emerges: the people who responded were the ones whose roles positioned them to hear both registers at once, the surface attack on American Jewry and the deeper Israeli anxiety it was carrying.

That visibility problem, on both sides, is still not the deepest thing the episode revealed. Segal’s piece was not really about American Jewry. American Jews were the object of the argument but not its true subject.

Israel is currently tearing itself apart over the question of shared burden: who serves in the military, who pays taxes, who receives exemptions and who gets to enjoy the fruits of sovereignty while others carry its weight. The Haredi exemption crisis, the post-Oct. 7 reservist exhaustion and the bitter public argument over who belongs to the collective and on what terms are consuming Israeli society.

Segal’s column did not emerge from outside that argument, but from within it. By calling Jews who do not make aliyah traitors and contrasting their absence with the burden carried by those who live inside the state, Segal turned the Diaspora into a foil for a fight he was already having at home.

Defending American Jewry’s record, its contributions, its legitimacy and its staying power is not wrong. It is just aimed at the wrong target, because Segal was not really asking whether American Jewry has been useful. He was offloading Israeli anxiety onto a community that could not hear him doing it.

This is the real infrastructure problem. If Hebrew-language Israeli discourse can attack Diaspora Jewry without most Diaspora leaders knowing the attack happened, and if Hebrew-speaking Israelis can then read that unawareness as indifference or weakness, the Jewish people has a structural problem. One side speaks into a room the other side does not know exists, and concludes from the absence of an answer that the other side has nothing to say.

What the Jewish people needs are modern nehutei: people and institutions that move between our centers and carry the context, anxiety and stakes that do not survive ordinary translation. The point is not to protect either side from the other’s critique. The nehutei did not travel between Babylonia and the Land of Israel to smooth things over. They traveled so that each center could hear what the other was saying, argue about it seriously and be changed by the encounter.

That kind of chavruta between Israel and the Diaspora is not a communications fix or a crisis-management tool. It is part of what Jewish life with sovereignty requires if it is to be lived to the full. That is still the work, and it is still not being done at the scale the Jewish people requires.

Rabbi Amitai Fraiman is the founding director of the Z3 Project and the founder of Shazur/Interwoven, two initiatives working from different directions to strengthen the relationship between Israel and world Jewry.