I really enjoyed Larry Derfner's piece in the Jerusalem Post, which was a response to Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua who said...

[Being] Israeli is my skin, not my jacket. You are changing jackets... you are changing countries like changing jackets. I have my skin, the territory," the author told the audience, adding that Israeli Jews live a Jewish life in a totality that the American Jews do not know.

...or in other words, you can't be as good a Jew in America as you can in Israel.

Derfner: Who's living an incomplete Jewish life?

For serious, honest-to-God religious Jews in the Diaspora - people whose days revolve around Jewish law, prayer, mitzvot and usually religious study as well - Judaism isn't in the outer shell of their lives, it's in the core. It suffuses their personal life, and usually their communal life as well. Imagine the Jewish Diaspora without the State of Israel. Then imagine a 100% secular State of Israel in a whole world without any practicing, believing Jews. Obviously I wouldn't want to choose either one, but if I had to, as an atheist Israeli but also a Jew, I'd choose the former.

Yes, their lives would be more Jewish, completely Jewish, if they lived in Israel. But the lives of us secular Israeli Jews would be so much more Jewish, completely Jewish, if we were religious.....

I, being neither Orthodox nor Israeli have a long way to go. The majority of Jews in the U.S. obviously don't think you need to be either to be a good, or "complete Jew". I disagree, but that's a topic to write a book about or to fill future hours on a psychiatrist's couch when I have some time to kill.