16

Israel and American Jews: Who Is Dreaming about Whom?

Sir, I arrived in Israel five months ago and enrolled in the WUJS programme in Arad in an effort to learn Hebrew and to extend my embarrassingly limited knowledge of my people’s history, tradition, culture and religion. The problems of maintaining a Jewish identity in the Diaspora seemed to me insurmountable and I felt it my duty to at least explore life in Israel. Imagine my sadness and bewilderment when, after talking to many [Israeli] high school students (ages 14 to 16), I discovered that all their dreams and aspirations centered on “making it in America … .”

—William H. Finestone,
Letter to the Editor in
the JERUSALEM POST,
December 24, 1986

Some people remember where they were the day President John F. Kennedy was shot. Others remember where they were when the space shuttle Challenger went down. I remember where I was the day I discovered Israel.

I don’t mean discovered it on a map. I mean the day Israel really entered my consciousness and became something of an obsession. It was June 6, 1967. I was sitting in the family room of our home in Minneapolis watching the 5:30 p.m. CBS evening news. Walter Cronkite was broadcasting the first reports of Israel’s dramatic victory in the Six-Day War, and to this day I can still see him sitting there reading the news with a map of Israel and the Sinai Desert projected behind him.

Although I had attended Hebrew school as a young boy, Israel had never really meant much to me before that day. But after June 6, 1967, I was never the same. Like so many American Jews of my generation, I was momentarily swept up by this heroic Israel, which captured my imagination and made me feel different about myself as a Jew.

During high school, I spent all my summer vacations living on Kibbutz Hahotrim, south of Haifa. It was an exciting time to be in Israel; everything was in motion, the economy was booming, and, although there was a deadly war of attrition going on along the Suez Canal with the Egyptians, the flush of victory had not been erased from the cheeks of the Israeli boys. Everything and everyone in the country seemed larger than life. Every soldier was a hero, every politician a statesman, every girl a knockout. With the kibbutz teenagers my age, there were trips to the Sinai, hikes in the Golan, and long afternoons on the Mediterranean beach. I taught them how to play baseball and they taught me how to identify the different fighter planes in the Israeli air force (something which came in very handy when I later ended up in Beirut). The kibbutz was full of lost Jews, some from Europe, some from America, who had flocked to Israel in search of themselves. They made for a kind of Jewish foreign legion. Most of them stayed for a summer and never came back. But I was hooked. Whatever I was looking for, I had found.

During those post-1967 summers, I was constantly challenged by my Israeli hosts with the question: “Nu, when are you going to make aliya?”—When are you going to immigrate? “What is there for you in America? Here is where you belong.”

Somehow I always managed to mumble my way out of these challenges, usually with something about how wonderful Minneapolis was with all its lakes. I liked the way Israel made me feel as an American Jew—the pride it instilled in me and the way it stiffened my spine—but I was never convinced that having an Israeli identity could be an end in itself for me.

Then a decade passed. There was college, graduate school, and eventually a career in journalism that by quirk of fate brought me back to Israel in 1984 as the correspondent for The New York Times. But when I drove into Jerusalem from Beirut that spring of ’84, I found a very different country from the one I remembered as a youth.

Upon arrival, I braced myself for the seemingly inevitable question beginning “Nu, when are you going to immigrate?” But it never came. What came instead was “Nu, how do I get a Green Card?” Or, “What’s it like to live in New York City?” Or, “Can I really get a job in L.A.?”

After enough such conversations, it became clear to me that many Israelis had adopted a profoundly different view of America since those heady days after the 1967 war. After all, Israel had been founded on the thesis that the Diaspora was not a viable solution for Jewish national existence—that Jews could not survive there for long either culturally or physically and hence had to have a homeland of their own. Israel was going to be the center of the world, with its own original Hebrew culture, and all Jews were supposed to settle there. America, in the mind of Israel, was going to be little more than an afterthought. What I quickly discovered, however, was that America, with its bounty, its pluralism, and its burgeoning opportunities for Jews and other minorities was disproving the thesis of Israel’s founding fathers. Not only was America attracting more Jews from the Soviet Union, Argentina, and South Africa than Israel, it was also attracting thousands of Israelis themselves. Just how much things had changed since I was in high school was driven home to me when my high-school history teacher from Minneapolis, Marjorie Bingham, visited Jerusalem in 1987 and told me, “When you were in high school, Tom, you and all your friends went to Israel. Now I have three Israeli immigrants in my class.”

At the same time that I found Israelis looking differently at America, I also met many American Jews who were reassessing their views about the Jewish state. The Lebanon war, Israeli spying in Washington, the rising influence of the ultra-Orthodox in Israeli politics, and the Israeli response to the Palestinian uprising had combined to produce a profound rethinking on the part of many American Jews about their emotional ties to Israel, and its role in their own identity as Jews. Where all this rethinking will end is not easy to predict. But what is clear, undeniably clear, is that the relationship between Israeli Jews and American Jews is undergoing a radical transformation from that moment on June 6, 1967, when Walter Cronkite introduced me to my Jewish identity and introduced Israel to America.

Israel in the mind of American Jews always touched two emotional chords—one pride, the other fear. As such, Israel has traditionally played two roles for American Jews—one as a visible symbol which places the Jew in the world and integrates him with dignity, and the other as a haven that could protect the Jew from a world turned hostile.

Between 1948 and June 1967, the balance between these two roles was very much weighted in favor of Israel as a safe haven and not as a symbol of Jewish identity. Of course, American Jews took pride in Israel, but it was quiet and understated, the sort of pride you take in a good charity. Some people gave money to their synagogues, others gave to the local Jewish hospital, and others planted trees in Israel. Israel, to my mind then, was symbolized by the blue-and-white boxes I dropped coins in every week at Hebrew school to buy trees. True, Hebrew education became more popular after 1948, as did the Zionist element in Jewish summer camps. People played “Hava Nagila” and a few other Israeli songs at weddings, and they danced the hora along with the waltz, but for most American Jews that was the extent to which Israel touched their lives culturally.

The more important role played by Israel in the mind of most American Jews was as a bomb shelter, a haven against persecution, and a source of Jewish power and real estate that could protect Jews if another Hitler were to appear on the world scene. But even though they saw Israel as a haven, most American Jews thought of it as a haven for other Jews, refugee Jews, displaced Jews—not for themselves. That is why the reaction of most American Jews to Israel’s victory in the 1948 war of independence was more relief than anything else—relief that the remnants of the Holocaust would have a place to go; very few American Jews moved there themselves. As one senior American Jewish official once confided to me, “Before 1967, Israel in the eyes of many American Jews was a nation of nebachs. In my family, Israel was where we sent our used clothing. Really. When I outgrew my shirts and pants we put them in a box and sent them to Israel. That is how I thought of the place—a place you send used clothes to.”

After the 1967 war, the perception of Israel in the mind of many American Jews shifted radically, from Israel as a safe haven for other Jews to Israel as the symbol and carrier of Jewish communal identity. This radical transition, I believe, can be understood only in the context of the foreboding that preceded the Six-Day War, when many American Jews feared Israel was going to be erased: the people who came out of the death camps were going to be thrown back in.

Itzhak Galnoor, an Israeli political scientist who was studying in upstate New York in June 1967, attended a rally for Israel at a synagogue in Syracuse a few weeks before the war. “The meeting was devoted to what was developing in the Middle East,” said Galnoor. “I can still see the rabbi standing up and saying, ‘We in the congregation feel in total sympathy with our brave brothers and sisters in Israel, and we are sure that they will be able to take care of themselves and we will do everything we can to help.’ But then he mentioned that the Jewish people had suffered disasters before. He mentioned the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and then added, ‘If, God forbid, something should happen now to destroy Israel, we should not worry because, like our forefather Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who went and established a spiritual center in Yavne when the Romans besieged Jerusalem, we would establish a Jewish spiritual center in the United States.’ You can imagine what I thought of all this. I said, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we’re gonna win!’”

And win they did—in a big way. When the smoke cleared and the extent of Israel’s victory became apparent, American Jews pored over the headlines, watched all the television footage of Israeli soldiers swimming in the Suez Canal, and said to themselves, “My God, look who we are! We have power! We do not fit the Shylock image, we are ace pilots; we are not the cowering timid Jews who get sand kicked in their faces, we are tank commanders; we are not pale-faced wimps hiding in yeshivas, we are Hathaway Men, handsome charismatic generals with eye patches.”

The whole image of the running, craven Jew was, at least momentarily, healed by the Six-Day War, and at the same time, a romance was born between American Jews and Israel. American Jews could not embrace Israel enough; they could not fuse their own identities with Israel enough. They visited Israel in droves, climbed on the captured Egyptian tanks, sat in the cockpits of Israeli Phantom jets, and posed arm in arm with literally any Israeli soldier who walked down the street. The impact of Israel on American Jews was so powerful that for many of them Israel actually replaced Torah, synagogue, and prayer as the carrier of their Jewish identity. Israel came along at a moment in American Jewish history when Judaism was ceasing to have a compelling religious hold on the vast majority of Jews. In this era of secularization and general loss of traditional values, Israel offered American Jews a new way to organize their own identity and remain connected to Jewish history—but without having to be observant, without having to go to synagogue every Saturday and “spoil” the weekend.

I know. I was the epitome of this transformation. It was Israel’s victory in the 1967 war which prompted me to assert my own Jewishness—not five years of Hebrew school as a young boy, not five summers at Herzl Camp in Wisconsin, and not my bar mitzvah. Hebrew school only embarrassed me, because I had to get on the Hebrew bus in front of the Gentile kids at my elementary school, and my bar mitzvah bored me, except for opening the envelopes stuffed with money. But Israel as a badge of pride actually saved me as a Jew at a time when I easily could have drifted away, not only from religious practice, but from Jewish communal identification altogether.

But I was hardly unique. It is safe to say that thanks to the pride instilled in American Jews by Israel, the American Jewish community as a whole was transformed from a timid, sleepy, minority community focused largely on its own local needs and the war against anti-Semitism to a visible, nationally galvanized community of power focused around support for Israel and related issues such as freeing Soviet Jewry. In Minneapolis, as in every other Jewish community in America, virtually all Jewish philanthropy was funneled through the local United Jewish Appeal. Each year, there would be a kickoff dinner in which the wealthiest Jews in the community would have to stand up in front of each other and announce how much money they intended to give “for Israel” that year. The speaker would always have some connection with Israel, preferably a general with a heroic war record. He would breathe some fire, flex some muscles, tell some war stories, and the American Jews would puff out their chests and open their wallets. No one talked about the fact that some 50 percent of everything they gave “for Israel” actually remained in Minneapolis to pay for the local Jewish hospital, the home for the aged, and the Jewish community center. Israel enabled American Jewish communities to vastly increase their fund-raising and thereby build stronger, more self-sufficient, and more varied local Jewish institutions than ever before.

That wasn’t all. The United Jewish Appeal fund-raising campaign replaced the synagogue as the source of Jewish leadership. Being on the synagogue board became passé; being on the UJA board reflected real power and status. The fund-raising campaign became the factory and testing ground for Jewish leaders. There was the UJA young leadership, old leadership, singles’ leadership, women’s leadership, lawyers’ leadership, and doctors’ leadership. Israel crowned a whole new generation of American Jews as “leaders,” giving them status in America and status when they came to Israel. In fact, I discovered that plain old American Jews stopped visiting Israel after 1967. Instead, everyone who came seemed to be a “leader,” and leaders had to meet with leaders, so when they came to Israel on fund-raising missions, they met with Peres, Rabin, and Shamir. I was always being asked to speak to visiting American Jewish groups in Jerusalem, but no one ever called me and said, “Come speak to a group of rich Jews from Chicago.” I was always invited to speak to a group of “Jewish leaders” from Chicago.

Having become organized and energized around support for Israel, the American Jewish community began to really assert itself on the American political scene. The so-called Jewish lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), became one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in Washington, thanks to its ability to organize important constituencies of Jews all across America to vote in their local elections on the basis of which candidate was most supportive of aid to Israel and the cause of Soviet Jewry. In the old days, when American Jews were known to support an array of liberal issues, an American politician who received campaign contributions from Jews could not really know if that support was linked to his position on labor rights, civil rights, abortion, or school prayer. However, as key Jewish philanthropists formed political action committees focused exclusively on contributing money to those office seekers ready to support Israel, it became obvious to candidates that the most efficient way to raise funds was not by focusing on the five hundred issues which span the spectrum of liberal ideology, but rather by focusing exclusively on Israel and Soviet Jewry. The more that happened, the more American Jews realized that they could ride Israel and Soviet Jewish issues into the corridors of power. Jews did not get invited to the White House to discuss the Jewish aged or prayer in public schools. But a Jew who contributed large amounts of money to AIPAC, either at the local or the national level, might find himself being consulted by his congressman about a particular foreign aid bill, or, if he was really lucky, invited to the State Department for an audience with the Secretary of State himself. Tom Dine, the executive director of AIPAC, once remarked—not boastfully, but honestly—in a speech to a large gathering of American Jews, “Israel gave us our political pride and the opportunity to stand where we never stood before.”

Ironically, as American Jews were spurred by Israel to become a more politically active and powerful community, they developed an even deeper sense of being at home in America. American Jewish leaders had real influence, they had real dignity, they felt part of their society, there was no occupation closed to them. There were Jewish senators and congressmen and a Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, whose members could see the American President virtually any time they requested. So with all of that going for them, many American Jews started to ask themselves, “Why move to Israel? I have everything I could ever want as a Jew right here in the U.S.A. If Scarsdale exists, who needs Tel Aviv?”

Just as American Jews fell in love with Israel after 1967, Israelis fell in love with America. It is easy to forget today that back in the early 1950s, when Israeli politics was dominated by the Labor Party, there was much talk about bipolarity and the importance of balancing Israel’s relations between America and the Soviet Union—which was still referred to by many Zionist—Socialists as “Ha’Moledet Hashniya”—the second homeland. The Soviet Union was the first country to recognize the Jewish state and the social, cultural, and ideological links between the Eastern European Zionists and Moscow were far stronger than anything that existed between America and Israel. Ehud Gol, the former spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, liked to tell me, “I may be married to a nice Jewish girl from New York today, but when I am in the shower in the morning, I still sing all the Russian Red Army songs I learned in my [Zionist] youth group in the fifties.”

It was only after Stalin’s anti-Semitic rampage and Israel’s open support for America in the Korean War that the Soviet Union faded permanently as a potential Great Power patron of the Jewish state. But the instinct of Israeli leaders was still not to look toward Washington. Instead, Israel in the late 1950s and early 1960s began a love affair with Charles de Gaulle’s France, which became the Jewish state’s main arms supplier. French culture was all the rage in those days; the Israeli elite vacationed in Paris, and French singers like the Compagnons de la Chanson dominated the airwaves. Elvis was a distant echo. Few Israelis could afford to travel beyond Europe, and since television was not introduced in Israel until 1968, popular American culture was largely unfamiliar. What Israelis did know of American culture was often consciously rejected out of their then prevailing feeling of pioneer superiority.

“When I immigrated to Israel in the 1960s,” observed Ze’ev Chafets, “I wouldn’t say that people pitied me for being an American, but there was no great attraction. America was seen as being in eclipse then. There were race riots, drugs, Vietnam, hippies. Israelis laughed at Coca-Cola and women who shaved their legs and weird things like underarm deodorant.”

But Israel’s victory in 1967 injected a new spirit of grandiosity, of manifest destiny, into the Jewish state. It ushered out the pioneer era of simplicity in Israeli life and ushered in an era of consumerism, stock speculating, dollar accounts, credit cards, and living beyond one’s means, which peaked in the 1970s, when Israel almost spent itself into bankruptcy. The material riches offered by America suddenly gained a new appeal for Israelis.

In the old days when you lived “American-style” in Israel, it meant you stood out like a sore thumb. After 1967, you stood out if you didn’t. Israelis ate hamburgers at “MacDavid’s” instead of “McDonald’s,” shopped at American-style supermarkets, counted their wealth in dollars not shekels, and were as likely to dress up as Rambo on the Halloween-like Purim festival as they were Haman or Esther. Americans who immigrated to Israel after 1967, attracted to the simple and primitive frontier ways of Israeli life, began to complain that Israel was turning into precisely what they were trying to escape.

I once heard an advertisement on Voice of Israel Radio for frozen food in which one actor said to another, “This is our frozen-food product.” The second man responded, “Excuse me, are you from America?” The first man answered, “No, our system is, but thanks anyway for the compliment.”

Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli army’s chief of staff during the Six-Day War, was sent as ambassador to Washington, and then came more generals and more heroes, and then the Israeli kids, and America wined and dined and spoiled them all. Israelis in America could do no wrong; everything they did was either “adorable” or “heroic.” No wonder some of the Israeli envoys sent by the Jewish Agency to recruit American Jews to come to Israel ended up staying in America—including the one who came to Minneapolis and tried to convince me to emigrate.

The 1967 victory not only left individual Israelis “hooked” on America; it also, paradoxically, left Israel as a state hooked on America. De Gaulle’s romance with Israel ended with the Six-Day War. On the eve of that conflict, the French President imposed an arms embargo on Israel. When Israel launched a preemptive strike against its Arab neighbors to break the stranglehold they were about to impose, de Gaulle was furious. He never forgave the Jewish state, or, it seems, the Jewish people, whom he described a few months later as “an elite people, self-assured and domineering.” This forced Israel to look increasingly to Washington for the military support it needed in order to maintain a balance of power with Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, its three main opponents in the ’67 conflict. Until 1963, the United States had not sold weapons systems to Israel and was leery about becoming her patron for fear that this would damage ties with the emerging Arab oil powers. However, after 1970, when the Soviets deepened their direct involvement with Egypt and backed a Syrian attempt to destabilize Jordan, the Nixon Administration felt compelled to supply Israel in order to maintain a regional balance of power as part of the global structure of detente which Nixon and Kissinger were trying to build with Moscow. Israel was not seen so much as an ally by Nixon as a local client, which, like Vietnam or Korea, needed to be kept strong enough to prevent its region from becoming a source of Soviet—American friction. It was only thanks to this perception that the real floodgates of economic and military aid from Washington to Jerusalem began to open. After the 1973 Middle East war, when Israel’s defense costs soared astronomically due to its tank and aircraft losses, American aid became a matter of life and death for the Jewish state. Today, Israel receives $3 billion a year in American military and economic assistance, which is about 20 percent of the Israeli government’s annual disposable budget.

No wonder Israelis like to repeat what their late Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, once said when a group of farmers from the Negev came to visit him in his office to inform him that there was a drought.

“A drought!” exclaimed Mr. Eshkol. “Oh my God, where?”

The farmers answered, “In the Negev, where else?”

Mr. Eshkol looked relieved. “If it’s in the Negev, okay,” he said. “Just as long as there is no drought in America.”

Although Israelis and American Jews began dating and fell in love after 1967, they never got married; they never made that total commitment to each other. Theirs was a romantic fling—an affair. As with any love affair, it was only skin deep; the two parties didn’t really know that much about each other. In many ways, American Jews liked Israel for her body and Israelis liked American Jews for their money. Theirs was not a love based on true understanding, mutual respect, and mutual commitment. The relationship worked as long as the two parties dealt with each other in a facile, superficial manner—as long as not too many Israelis moved to America and saw how attractive life there really was compared to life in Israel, and as long as those American Jews who went to Israel never got off the tour bus or, if they did, met only heroes and dead people and then got right back on again.

But, as in any romance, there comes a moment when the starry-eyed couple discover who the other really is, and, just as important, who the other’s relatives are hiding in the bedroom closet. Only if the relationship survives that process of mutual discovery can it really last. That mutual-discovery process began for American Jews and Israelis in the mid-1970s. American Jews suddenly found themselves exclaiming to Israelis, “Hey, I fell in love with Golda Meir. You mean to tell me that Rabbi Meir Kahane is in your family! I went out with Moshe Dayan—you mean to tell me that ultra-Orthodox are in your family! I loved someone who turns deserts green, not someone who breaks Palestinians’ bones.” Israelis eventually found themselves equally aghast and exclaiming, “Look, American Jew, just because we are dating doesn’t mean you can tell me how to live my life. And anyway, American Jew, if we are in love, then you should move in with me. You can’t just date me so that all your neighbors will ooh and aah, and then drop me off at the end of the evening. You also can’t start taking aerobics classes and building up a physique of your own that my daughter finds so attractive she wants to move in with you! That’s just not fair.”

As the New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem, I was both an eyewitness to, and a catalyst for, this process of mutual discovery. At times it was funny, at times it was tragic; at times I saw it happen in synagogues and at times I saw it occur in places one would least imagine—like a tennis court.

It was a normal Saturday morning in Jerusalem, and Bob Slater, a correspondent for Time, and I were having our usual Saturday-morning tennis match at the Jerusalem Tennis Center. We happened to arrive at our assigned court two minutes before 10:00 a.m. and the Israeli players on the court were in the middle of a point. We walked onto the court but stayed over on the side so as not to disturb them. At that point, one of the Israeli players asked if we would please wait outside. We said no problem and stayed outside until the clock struck 10:00 a.m., at which point we returned to claim the court. They were still in the middle of a game and left reluctantly. As we passed each other, one of the Israelis began mumbling in Hebrew something about “arrogant Americans” pushing them off the courts. After a few seconds of this, I told the fellow that if he had something to say he should say it in English, at which point he erupted with a lava flow of vile invective: “Fucking Americans … arrogant Americans … go back to your own country where you belong.”

When I calmly pointed out that without American money there would have been no Jerusalem Tennis Center, the man became positively apoplectic. The veins were bulging in his neck, and his playing partners had to literally drag him off the court, as he shook his fist at me and sputtered, “Go home, go back to America, arrogant Americans … arrogant …”

When the man was finally off the court, Bob and I just stared at each other across the net, dumbstruck. “What in the world was that about?” we asked each other.

It was clear to me that this Israeli was bothered by something more than just tennis etiquette. He must have been nursing a grudge against American Jews for a long time and our entering his court early simply lit his fuse. This contretemps occurred in 1987, just as the United States was putting heavy pressure on Israel to turn over for questioning several Israeli officials alleged to have been involved in the Israeli espionage caper in Washington. The key figure in the Israeli spying operation was a young American Jewish U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, Jonathan J. Pollard, who was arrested in November 1985 and two years later sentenced to life in prison for providing Israeli agents with a mountain of top-secret military data. At the time of Pollard’s arrest, many American Jewish leaders were highly embarrassed by the fact that Israel had been spying in the United States, and they lectured Israeli ministers for weeks on how insolent this was—much to the annoyance of many Israelis, who felt that their country was as entitled to spy as any other and didn’t have to put up with any lectures from American Jews.

It always seemed to me that this Israeli tennis player’s anger was rooted somewhere in the resentment many Israelis had come to feel upon discovering, through the Pollard affair and other incidents, that they were not as superior to America and American Jewry as they might have thought. As my Jerusalem neighbor, Harvard-trained Israeli economist Yoram Ben-Porath, described it: “When I was much younger, Israel was at the takeoff of enormous achievement, growth, absorption of Jews, and turning the deserts green, with all the macho pioneer spirit that went with it. We had a certain supremacy complex toward American Jews. There was no doubt that we were in the right place for Jews. With our maturity we lost some of these elements. The society became more normal; it became clear after the 1973 war that the fight for survival was not a one-shot affair but a never-ending struggle. It wasn’t so patently obvious that this was the safest or most exciting place for Jews. The sense of absolute moral superiority began to disappear.”

Because Israeli leaders always had a romanticized notion of America—as a country that fawned all over them, adored them, and confirmed them as heroes—they never really took it seriously as a way of life for Jews, and hence they were very late in realizing the potential of a thriving America as a magnet for Jews, a magnet as powerful, if not more so, as Israel. One day, though, Israelis woke up, looked at the emigration-immigration statistics, and realized that America had become the greatest threat to the Zionist revolution.

By 1988, an estimated 300,000—400,000 of the roughly 4.2 million Israelis had moved to the United States on a permanent or semi-permanent basis—with an estimated 100,000 in California alone. These figures must be compared with the fact that only about 50,000 of the 6 million American Jews have moved to Israel since the Jewish state was founded in 1948—some of them having moved back since—and only 25 percent of American Jews are estimated by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism to have visited Israel even once in their lives. In the decade of the 1970s, 265,000 Jews left the Soviet Union. Of those, roughly 165,000 went to Israel and 100,000 to the United States and Canada, with the percentage of those going to North America rising so sharply in recent years—to 90 percent—that Israel has tried to force Soviet emigrants to take direct flights from Moscow to Tel Aviv, so that it would be impossible for them to “drop out” in European transit points and go to America as refugees instead.

It used to be a stigma for Israelis to immigrate to America. No Israeli ever left Israel for America for good, only for “visits”—or as one Israeli teacher remarked to me, “My sister went to New York for one year—fifteen years ago.” No longer. In 1988, Bezek, the Israeli national telephone company, began running a television commercial during prime time featuring an elderly Israeli grandfather sitting in front of a shabby bare desk and dialing a number. Subtitled beneath the man were the words Netanya, Israel, 6:30 a.m.The screen was then given over to what appeared to be the Israeli grandfather’s children living in Los Angeles. They were seated in a comfortable, affluent-looking living room, which included a color television and an Israeli boy playing with a football in the background. Their plush surroundings were subtitled: Los Angeles, 8:30 p.m. The family members then have a trans-Atlantic conversation in Hebrew.

This commercial occasioned the following letter to the editor in the Jerusalem Post from one Sarah M. Schachter of Jerusalem: “Sirs, I was appalled to see the new Bezek commercial … . The not-so-subliminal message: [Grandpa] is still in Netanya, but Los Angeles is the land of opportunity for the young and ambitious. Emigration is indeed a major problem for the state of Israel, but I think it is in poor taste for Bezek to legitimize and exploit this unfortunate fact, and I am surprised that the editors of Israel Television included this message on the air.”

The letter was followed by an editor’s note which read: “This public service announcement has been discontinued following complaints that it would encourage emigration.”

It was bad enough for Israelis to find themselves in competition with America, but it was even more galling to find themselves dependent on an American Jewish community that Israel itself was largely responsible for emboldening, revitalizing, and transforming into an energetic community of power.

Although Israeli officials never admitted it aloud, they came to understand that Washington gave the extraordinary amounts of aid to Israel that it did in large part because of the electoral clout of the American Jewish community. It was not only American Jews’ political lobbying of Congress that was important for Israel but also their lobbying of the American public at large—the way they kept Israel on the American agenda and reiterated its affinity with American values. Zvi Rafiah, who served as the congressional liaison for the Israeli embassy in Washington in the early 1980s, once conceded with unusual candor for an Israeli, “Pull the American Jews out of the [America-Israel] relationship and the whole thing will start to shake.” In other words, Israelis discovered, their security and economic well-being had become partially dependent on assistance from America—assistance that would be forthcoming on a large scale only if there continued to be an energetic, wealthy, powerful American Jewish community that did not move to Israel.

That has not been an easy reality for Israelis to swallow, and they have responded in a variety of ways. One is to argue that America gives $3 billion a year to Israel not because of the electoral clout with Congress of American Jews but because Israel is such a “strategic asset.” Or, as a well-known Israeli T-shirt emblazoned with an F-16 fighter jet says: Don’t worry, America, Israel is behind you.

Another tendency has been to ignore American Jewish life. In 1987, the American Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith brought an exhibit on the history of American Jewry to Israel. “When it was touring in America, it was called ‘Jewish Life in America: Fulfilling the American Dream,’” said Harry Wall, the director of the ADL’s Jerusalem office. “But when we brought it to Israel we decided that we had better change the name, so we took off the business about fulfilling a dream, because there is only supposed to be one dream and that is the Zionist dream. We just called the exhibit ‘Jewish Life in America: From Pre-Revolutionary War to Today.’ I invited the top people from the Ministry of Education to come to the opening, and when it was over I told them that they could have the exhibit. They said to me, ‘Well, that would be just great, because we’ve never done anything about American Jews in our curriculum before.’ I said to them, ‘Huh? You’ve never taught about American Jewry?’ They said no—a few little things here and there, but never anything comprehensive. I said, ‘We’re talking about the largest, most successful Jewish community in the world.’

“It turns out that every year they study about a different Jewish community,” explained Harry. “They’ve done Russian Jews, European Jews, and Ethiopian Jews, but never American Jews. It seems that American Jews are too secure and too prosperous to be taught about here. It wasn’t a stated policy not to teach Israeli kids about them. No one said, ‘Don’t teach about American Jews.’ It was just understood that you didn’t.”

Still another Israeli response to the dependence on America has been to impugn American Jewish life, or hope for an outbreak of anti-Semitism there that will drive American Jews to Israel.

Yaron Ezrahi, the Hebrew University political theorist and a man deeply involved in the Israeli peace movement, encountered this latter trend in its baldest form when he was invited to debate a representative of the Gush Emunim settler movement before a visiting delegation of “Jewish leaders” from Florida.

“Before the debate began,” recalled Ezrahi, “I prepared myself to try to explain to these Jews from Florida why the Gush Emunim settlement movement was destructive to our traditions and collective identity and not helpful to our security and dangerous foraliya[immigration]. The Gush man was the first to talk. He said that the West Bank belongs to the Jews, that it was part of Eretz Yisrael [the land of Israel] and that the Arabs don’t count and that no one should dictate to the Jews what to do. This was a time when a lot of illegal settlements were being built. Then he gave this very impassioned speech about biblical and historical rights. So one guy from Florida stands up and says to him, ‘You’re counting on massive aliya from the West to realize your plan, aren’t you?’ And the man said yes. So the guy from Florida says, ‘How can you possibly expect immigration from Western liberal democrats when what you project through the settlements is the kind of aggressive lack of consideration of minority rights and all kinds of other things which tarnish the image of Israel and can only encourage anti-Semitism abroad? Because the way you treat your minorities is how Jewish minorities will be treated. What right will we American Jews have to claim to be treated well as a minority?’ So this Gush Emunim guy smiled from ear to ear. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘you don’t understand what you’re saying. Anti-Semitism is the means through which massive Jewish aliya will come, so if we can contribute by enabling you in the West to see all the anti-Semites around you, it will encourage you to emigrate—and especially to the West Bank. That is what we want.’

“Well,” added Ezrahi, “these American Jews devoured him. There was so much anger directed at him from those people from Florida that I didn’t have to say another thing. Israelis like this Gush Emunim guy believe only in aliya through Apocalypse Now. For him, the best news of the year was that Jesse Jackson was running for President. If he lived in Miami, he would have voted for Jackson. For him and his kind, the worst case scenario for American Jews is always the best possibility.”

But such attitudes are by no means confined to the lunatic right. Many American Jews were shocked by an open “Letter to an American Friend” that the well-known Israeli political theorist Shlomo Avineri published on the back page of the Jerusalem Post on March 10, 1987, at the height of American Jewish criticism of Israel over its spying on America. Avineri, who, as I noted, was a leading Labor Party ideologue, once served as the Director-General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

Avineri began his open letter by saying that the Pollard case was bringing out “a degree of nervousness, insecurity, and even cringing on the part of the American Jewish community which runs counter to the conventional wisdom of American Jewry feeling free, secure, and unmolested in an open and pluralistic society. Let me not mince words: Some of the responses of American Jewish leaders after Pollard’s sentencing remind me of the way in which Jewish leaders in Egypt under Nasser and in Iran under Khomeini ran for cover when members of their respective Jewish communities were caught spying for Israel … . You always told us Israelis that America was different. Of course, it is … . Of course no one will put you in jail or legislate against you: but you are afraid that Jews will not be able to get responsible positions in your bureaucracy, that Jewish employees in the defense and intelligence branches will be under some kind of handicap, that Jews will be denied access to sensitive positions. One Jewish spy—and look how deep you find yourself in galut [exile mentality] … . Don’t misunderstand me: in no way am I condoning what Israel did in the Pollard affair … . But the truth of the matter is simple: You, in America, are no different from French, German, Polish, Soviet, and Egyptian Jews. Your Exile is different—comfortable, padded with success and renown. It is exile nonetheless.”

What American Jews found so disturbing about this article was not only the fact that so intelligent a man as Avineri could make such a mistaken argument but that many Israelis endorsed it wholeheartedly. Avineri completely misread the American Jewish reaction to the Pollard case. To begin with, he equated the reaction of so-called American Jewish leaders with that of American Jews. Most American Jews I knew did not give the Pollard affair more than a passing shrug, which only showed how secure they really are. Those who did think about it, and articulated concerns, primarily leaders of Jewish organizations, were cringing—not out of fear for themselves, but in response to the monumental stupidity and breach of trust evinced by Israel by spying on its closest ally, thereby damaging its standing in Washington and the credibility of American Jews who had always argued that Israeli interests and American interests were synonymous. But American Jews were not cringing about their own future. They understood, rightly, that the Pollard affair would not undermine that.

American Jews have felt at home enough in America to lobby Congress for $3 billion in aid every year for the Jewish state. They have felt at home enough to stand up and defend Israel publicly in every embarrassing crisis it has been involved in—from Suez to the Lebanon war to the intifada—before and after the Pollard affair. To compare such American Jewish forthrightness with the behavior of Egyptian Jews or Iranian Jews is ludicrous.

Avineri’s argument was rightly viewed by most American Jews as the panicked analysis of an ideologue fighting for his life. Secular Zionists, such as Avineri, have always argued that Jews can never really feel normal, safe, and rooted outside their own nation-state. That is why they all must come to live in Israel. Therefore, his ideology is threatened by the success of American Jews and the fact that they have “made it” in America, where they aren’t just normal but truly comfortable. Avineri’s ideology requires that American Jews not feel at home, hence his desperate attempt to equate them with Russian or Iranian Jews. Instead of selling Israel to American Jews as the most compelling adventure in Jewish cultural, political, and spiritual renaissance—and the most exciting and dynamic place for Jews to live—Avineri told them that they were doomed to live in Israel, so they might as well move now.

For American Jews, discovering the “real” Israel began in earnest in 1973, when Egyptian troops overran the Israeli army along the Suez Canal and American Jews realized that their Israeli heroes were not supermen after all. This was reinforced by the banking scandals and exposure of corruption under the Labor governments of the mid-1970s. But the real jolt for American Jews came in 1977, when Menachem Begin and his right-wing Likud Party took power for the first time, replacing the Labor Party pantheon—Abba Eban, Golda Meir, Shimon Peres, Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin, Simcha Dinitz—with whom American Jews had been working since Israel was founded.

Begin brought to the government of Israel a whole new cast of characters, with an agenda that was alien to many liberal, non-Orthodox American Jews. Begin spoke of settling the whole West Bank, and was not ashamed to appear on American television wagging his finger and telling the United States that it had no right to lecture the Jews about what to do. Begin was ready to indulge messianic Jewish settlers and ultra-Orthodox rabbis who wanted to use the Israeli parliament to delegitimize the Reform and Conservative branches of Judaism. Begin was also ready to use Israel’s military might, not only for defensive purposes, but for offensive ones as well.

Once American Jews were dragged off the tour bus and forced to look at Israel as a living reality, and not just as a symbol of Jewish identity, they found it quite different—both religiously and politically—from what they had imagined. Many of them still haven’t gotten over the shock.

“Whores, whores, this is a whorehouse, a house of promiscuity, whores, whores,” the black-coated rabbi bellowed with disgust at the predominantly American-born congregation of men and women dancing with Torah scrolls in the gymnasium-turned-synagogue.

“This is whoredom,” the rabbi screamed at the congregants, while they danced even more vigorously with their scrolls. “Because of you there was a Holocaust.”

It wasn’t the usual synagogue sermon you would expect from the neighborhood rabbi, but then an American-style Reform service being conducted in Jerusalem was about as usual as a mosque operating in Great Neck. The day was Simchas Torah, the Jewish holiday commemorating the completion of the annual cycle of reading the Torah. The year was 1986. The scene was a new, makeshift Reform synagogue in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem. The story shows what happens when a group of Anglo-American immigrants to Israel try to open a Reform congregation in the Israeli capital.

The tale began in the early 1980s, when Levi Weiman-Kelman, an American-trained rabbi from the Conservative stream of Judaism, moved to Israel. After experimenting with several styles of life in the Jewish state—from the kibbutz to graduate school—Rabbi Kelman, then in his early thirties, decided he wanted to get back to the pulpit. But when he looked around Jerusalem for a non-Orthodox congregation with which to affiliate, he found none. While some 90 percent of synagogue-affiliated American Jews belong to either Reform or Conservative congregations, such synagogues are almost nonexistent in Israel. The Orthodox stream of Judaism is the only form of observance supported by Israel’s national rabbinical council, known as the Chief Rabbinate. And since the Israeli government has officially sanctioned and funded the chief rabbinate to oversee all matters of religious practice involving the state—most notably marriages, divorces, and burials—it leaves little room for American Conservative or Reform rabbis to practice. A marriage performed by a Conservative or Reform rabbi in Israel is not recognized by the Chief Rabbinate, and hence the state of Israel, as legal and binding. (If the marriage is performed outside Israel by a Conservative or Reform rabbi, or by a justice of the peace, for that matter, it is recognized—but only because of reciprocal treaties between Israel and other countries to recognize marriages.) The Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbinical establishment believes that Conservative and Reform rabbis do not operate in accordance with the totality of Jewish law, or Halacha, and therefore should not be allowed to marry or divorce Jews, let alone convert Gentiles to Judaism. More important, since the Orthodox have a monopoly on religious authority in Israel, they do not want to see their power and funding diluted by having to share it with the Reform and Conservative movements. After all, business is business.

Unable to find a synagogue to his liking, Rabbi Kelman did what Jews have been doing for centuries. He started his own. He first approached his Conservative movement for support, but they told him he was too avant-garde for Israel, so he turned to the American Reform movement’s representatives in Israel, who were only too eager to help by arranging for Kelman to get access to a Labor Party—owned hall in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem. Baka is populated by a mélange of highly educated American, Australian, and South African—born Ashkenazi Jews and relatively poor Moroccan Oriental Jews. By simply spreading the word around the neighborhood, Kelman was able to attract some 150 people for his first Yom Kippur service, most of them immigrants from English-speaking countries who did not feel comfortable attending the rigidly Orthodox services—where men and women are not allowed to sit together and participate equally—that were held everywhere else in the neighborhood.

“I had a feeling that we were in the right place at the right time,” Kelman recalled. “There was clearly a need for us that was not being met by the Israeli rabbinate. There is a tremendous thirst among immigrants to Israel, and among many nonobservant Israelis themselves, I think, for an alternative to the ultra-Orthodox Judaism that is practiced in Israel. The minute all these people from our service started spilling out into the street, people in the neighborhood noticed. Before long, the Orthodox Sephardi neighborhood rabbi, Eliyahu Aubergil, and the Ashkenazi rabbi, Avraham Auerbach, who had not been on speaking terms for many, many years, found an issue that they could agree on—attacking us. These guys are employees of the state. They get their salaries from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which gets its money from me and other Israeli taxpayers. So these two Orthodox rabbis immediately began to put pressure on the Labor Party to have us evicted from the building. They just did not recognize Reform Judaism as being Jewish, and they saw us as a threat to their monopoly.”

Within a week, the secular Labor Party caved in to the pressure of the local rabbis and the national ultra-Orthodox religious parties that stood behind them. Kelman and his congregants were told by the Labor Party to find another home, as though they were some strange sect practicing levitation and blood rituals instead of the same basic Jewish service observed in many synagogues throughout the Western world. Fortunately, the local neighborhood municipal council was not as craven as the Labor Party, and when its members heard about the eviction they directed the local community center to provide a room for the Reform group. Within one year, Kelman’s congregation grew into the second largest in the neighborhood.

To mark the end of their first full year of reading the Torah together, Kelman planned a special evening for Simchas Torah, 1986. By then, his flock had outgrown their side room in the community center and overflowed into the gymnasium, where the ark containing the Torah scrolls was placed under the basketball hoop. Being a highly egalitarian congregation, Kelman’s allowed women to read from the Torah and to dance with the scrolls on Simchas Torah. Such practices are forbidden by Orthodox Jews because of a Talmudic passage often interpreted as prohibiting women from reading from the Torah.

About 150 congregants gathered that evening for Simchas Torah, and as Kelman put it, “We were pretty high—not on drugs, but on the joy of the moment.” Men, women, and children were dancing around in concentric circles, taking turns lifting the Torahs and singing a litany of table-stomping, toe-tapping Israeli religious songs.

Then all hell broke loose.

“All of a sudden,” recalled Kelman, “I see Rabbi Aubergil coming into the corner of the gymnasium. He’s a big guy and he came in with about thirty people of all shapes and ages and sizes that you could imagine—from little kids to old Haredim. Some of them were dressed in suits; some of them were dressed in army jackets and T-shirts. The look in Aubergil’s eye was sort of confused for a moment, until he focused on the two women dancing with the Torahs. Then he was not confused. Then there was a rage and singleness of purpose that took over. What bugged him more than anything else, I think, was that there were men and women dancing together. Let me jump ahead for a minute. This is a guy, I found out later, who has never read a secular book in his life. I don’t know if you can imagine that. He has never read The Catcher in the Rye. He has only read stuff from the Middle Ages, so what Reform meant to him, I have no idea. It meant Christian-like, I’m sure, and our service is as Jewish as anything else, except that men and women sit together.

“So he was standing there,” continued Kelman, “and it was an incredibly visual scene. You have to imagine 150 people dancing in concentric circles to these hypnotic tunes, and people just really into it. Though people were getting tired, the minute Aubergil walked in, I had a sense of what was going to happen, so I went around the room and said to everyone, ‘Get off your behinds and up there dancing. Under no circumstances are we to enter into a confrontation with these guys and under no circumstances are we going to stop our dancing. They are not going to tell us what to do.’ So everyone got up and the dancing just took off again. It was then Aubergil started screaming, ‘Whorehouse, whorehouse.’ I went over to him and I said, ‘Ah, excuse me, can I help you?’ He said, ‘I demand to speak before the congregation to say what a disgusting …’ I said, ‘Listen, this is not the time for talking. Now is the time for dancing. Why don’t you join us in dancing?’ So he just really started screaming. About that time, two guys from his entourage went into the middle of the circles and asked if they could dance with the Torahs. So I gave the order that they could get the Torahs, but under no circumstances should they be let out of the circles. They took the Torahs and immediately made a break for it, trying to get out of the circles. I got behind one of them and grabbed him by his belt and the back of his shirt, and sort of danced him back into the middle of the circle, where we started wrestling with this Torah. At one point, we were facing each other and started wrestling with the Torah between us. You have to imagine this scene. There are 150 people going around in concentric circles and singing, really on the warpath, and there are thirty people at the entrance screaming and cursing, shouting at us, ‘Because of you there was a Holocaust. You’re evil …” and I look at this guy I am wrestling with, and I wasn’t thinking, and I just started saying to him, ‘I love you.’ He screamed at me, ‘I am going to kill you,’ in Hebrew and English. It was clear that I wasn’t going to let go of him and it was then that he lifted his knee and kicked me—right in the groin. At the same time, he let go of the Torah and made a break for it.”

Slowly, Kelman and his congregants widened their circles until they pushed the local rabbi and his followers right out the door, with the uninvited guests shouting on their way out, “We’re never going to let you pray. We’ll keep bothering you until you close this whorehouse.”

The Baka synagogue incident became national news in Israel, and gave Reform Judaism the biggest exposure it had ever had in the Jewish state, shattering at the same time many of the Orthodox-inspired myths about the supposedly Christian-like quality of Reform services. Kelman filed criminal charges against Aubergil, but he dropped them after the Orthodox rabbi reluctantly agreed to write a public letter of apology.

What happened to Kelman and his congregation—from the way they were dumped by the Labor Party to being abused by the Orthodox establishment—brought into stark relief the fundamental difference between the way in which many American and other Western Jews relate to Judaism and the way in which Jews in Israel relate to Judaism.

In America, Jewish life is organized around the synagogue, yet most American Jews in this day and age join a synagogue not for religious or ritual reasons but for communal solidarity. The synagogue is the island clung to by American Jews in order to avoid assimilation in a sea of Gentiles. It is also the place to which they come in order to rub shoulders with other Jews and to express their own ethnic identity. The decision over whether to join a Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox synagogue, for most American Jews, is a decision based on which one is most conveniently located, which one has the best nursery school, and whose rabbi gives the best sermon; the actual religious content of the synagogue’s service is secondary for most people.

In Israel, by contrast, the vast majority are nonobservant Jews. They don’t need to join a synagogue in order to avoid assimilation or feel part of a community, because there are other outlets for that which do not take synagogue or ritual forms. They avoid assimilation simply by paying taxes to a Jewish state, speaking Hebrew, and sending their children to state schools, which observe the Jewish holidays as national holidays. That is why a majority of Israelis neither belong to synagogues nor even know what to do once they get inside one.

I was once invited to speak to a group of Israeli army officers about how Americans perceive Israel. It was part of an educational seminar to prepare a group of Israeli colonels and majors for studying in the United States. Before I began my talk, the Israeli officer in charge of the seminar showed me the program of speakers. I was being followed by a lecture entitled “How to Behave in a Synagogue.”

“What in the world is that for?” I asked the Israeli officer.

“Well,” he explained, slightly embarrassed, “we have a lot of officers who have never been in a synagogue in their lives, so we have to prepare them for when they go to America. We show them what to do in case they get invited to a synagogue or are called on to read from the Torah or something. We had a little problem, though, getting a rabbi to come here and explain it to them, because all the army rabbis are Orthodox and they don’t recognize Reform or Conservative, and they aren’t willing to speak about how to behave in those kinds of synagogues. But we looked all around and we finally found this Orthodox rabbi, some guy who grew up in America, who said he would talk about Reform and Conservative as well as Orthodox.”

Because nonobservant Israelis don’t care about religious ritual, the only form of practicing Judaism that took root in Israel was that which was already there for centuries—the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox streams, with small pockets of pro-Zionist modern Orthodoxy. Only in the last decade have the Reform and Conservative movements made a concerted effort to open congregations in Israel, such as Kelman’s, in an attempt to offer nonobservant Israelis a spiritual alternative to rigid Orthodoxy.

Not only has the Israeli rabbinate tried to put obstacles in their way, but for the past fifteen years, the Israeli Orthodox parties have been trying to force the Israeli parliament to amend the Law of Return, which stipulates that any Jew in the world can come to Israel and automatically be granted citizenship. The so-called Who-is-a-Jew amendment—which Israel’s Orthodox parties have been pushing—would, in effect, define as Jewish, and hence eligible for Israeli citizenship, only those persons born of a Jewish mother or converted to Judaism by an Orthodox rabbi according to Jewish law (Halacha). Any Gentile converted by Reform or Conservative rabbis would not be considered Jewish. Israel’s Orthodox parties try to ram this amendment through anytime they feel that they can blackmail the Labor or Likud Party into supporting it. Following the November 1988 Israeli national elections, when both Labor and Likud were desperate to gain the support of religious parties in order to put together enough parliament seats to rule, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir each indicated a willingness to vote in favor of the amendment—Peres reluctantly, Shamir without any apology.

Although the amendment has yet to pass, the debate over it reveals how little American Jews and Israeli Jews understand about each other’s relationship to Judaism and Israel. American Jewish leaders who rush to Israel to lobby against the Who-is-a-Jew amendment any time it appears close to passage could not believe how easily Shamir and his Likud Party gave in to the demands of the Orthodox and voted in favor of a bill that would essentially entail formal Israeli delegitimization of Reform and Conservative rabbis. What American Jews did not understand was that for Shamir, and most secular Israelis, either you observe or you don’t observe, and if you observe, then you are either like Grandpa was in Europe—Orthodox—or you are not authentic. When a delegation of American Reform and Conservative rabbis once went to lobby Shamir against voting in favor of the Who-is-a-Jew amendment, Shamir began the meeting by asking the delegation, “Is it true that in America you can get a conversion to Judaism over the telephone?” (For years, the standard Israeli junior-high-school textbook on modern Jewish history dealt with the entire history of Reform Judaism in two pages. The section heading read “Movement of Assimilation.”) What is more, Shamir would say to visiting American delegations, Why are you so upset? The number of Gentiles who are actually converted by Reform and Conservative rabbis and want to immigrate to Israel are so few in number—maybe twenty-five a year—nobody will really be affected.

What Shamir and many other secular Israelis didn’t appreciate—because they didn’t understand the role the synagogue and Israel play in the life and identity of American Jews—was that for the Israeli parliament to tell an American Reform Jew that his rabbi was not legitimate was to tell him that his synagogue was not legitimate. Since for most American Jews, support for Israel and membership in a synagogue are the two links through which they remain connected to Jewish history, this is a real double blow. It is akin to having your life-long hero, the person around whom you have modeled your whole identity, tell you that you are a fraud—but don’t take it personally. Not surprisingly, it has left many American Jews angry, confused, and wondering aloud, How can I support a Jewish homeland that makes me feel less a Jew?

Most Israelis simply have no conception of how important they and their state are for American Jews. Israelis are, understandably, so involved with their own domestic issues of economics and security that they have very little appreciation of how world Jewry is actually constituted. They know Israel needs Diaspora Jews, but they don’t understand how Diaspora Jews need Israel—how much they are enriched by Israel and how much Israel provides the glue that both connects them to Jewish history and holds together their Jewish identities. Cut American Jews off from Israel and many of them will have no reason to go to synagogue or continue identifying as Jews; ritual will not sustain them. Then they will really assimilate. If the Who-is-a-Jew bill ever passes, Israel, instead of being a vehicle for saving Diaspora Jews, will become a prime force for spiritually destroying them.

My father-in-law, Matthew Bucksbaum, got the bad news while on a weekend visit to Aspen, Colorado, during the summer of ’82. It came via a business contact of his from New York City, who was also visiting the mountain resort. The message was short and not very sweet.

“Your son-in-law Tom Friedman,” the man told Matthew gravely, “is the most hated man in New York City today.”

What had I done to deserve this shame? My crime, it turned out, was that of the messenger. As the Times bureau chief in Beirut, I had helped to inform the Jews of New York City of the less-than-heroic behavior of the Israeli army in Lebanon, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and other unsettling stories.

While some of the news reporting out of Beirut that summer left something to be desired, most of it was accurate and sober. I am convinced that the anger which the American Jewish community, from the leadership on down, directed at the news media, and reporters such as myself, was largely the result of the fact that they were deeply disturbed and confused by what Israel was doing in Lebanon. How could they not be? Israelis themselves were divided and confused over the invasion. But because most American Jews did not feel comfortable publicly criticizing Israel, they took out their anguish on Matthew Bucksbaum’s son-in-law, among others.

As long as Israel was a story about David against Goliath, as long as it was a story about victims who showed courage and remarkable achievements, as long as it was a story about a pioneer frontier democracy, many American Jews were only too happy to have Israel be their visible body and face on the world stage. Naturally, they devoured every bit of press attention Israel received. In fact, they could not get enough of it. They never thought to criticize Israel, because it did not seem to warrant criticizing.

But the Lebanon invasion, the Pollard espionage affair, and the Palestinian intifada really forced American Jews to look at some of the more unpleasant, but very real, rhythms of political life in today’s Israel—instead of just the episodic moments of celebration. Many American Jews seemed to say when they saw Israel bombing Beirut, or Israeli soldiers breaking Palestinians’ bones on the evening news, “Wait a minute. If this is my visible body in history, then I don’t recognize myself. Who am I?” Instead of Israel serving as a source of identity for American Jews, it became, for some, a source of confusion.

The confusion Israeli actions engendered was graphically displayed on the editorial pages of The New York Times, most notably in an Op Ed piece by Woody Allen published on January 28, 1988, when stories about Israeli brutality in the West Bank and Gaza were a daily affair. In his article, Allen echoed the sentiments of many American Jews when he said: “As a supporter of Israel, and as one who has always been outraged at the horrors inflicted on this little nation by hostile neighbors, vile terrorists and much of the world at large, I am appalled beyond measure by the treatment of the rioting Palestinians by Jews. I mean, fellas, are you kidding? … Breaking the hands of men and women so they can’t throw stones? Dragging civilians out of their houses at random to smash them with sticks in an effort to terrorize a population into quiet? … Am I reading the newspapers correctly? … Are we talking about state-sanctioned brutality and even torture? My goodness! Are these the people whose money I used to steal from those little blue and white cans after collecting funds for a Jewish homeland? I can’t believe it, and I don’t know exactly what is to be done … .”

I happened to be vacationing in Minneapolis when the intifada was just beginning, and stopped in to see Herman Markowitz, the head of the Minneapolis Federation for Jewish Service, to get a sense of how my own hometown community was reacting to theintifada. A thoughtful man, committed both to Israel and to American Jewish life, Markowitz described the painful transition which American Jews were going through as they discovered Israel in the 1980s.

“Mr. Average American Jew,” he explained, “looked at Israel as that wonderful country that prompted their Christian friends to say, United States, and they never ask for help from American boys. You guys are great.’ And our chests swelled with pride, and we felt marvelous. But since Lebanon there have been all of these things. In the eyes of the unsophisticated American Jew, Israel for the first time is perceived as the aggressor. Then you see that television coverage and it shows the worst, and people don’t understand it. People don’t understand the nuances. They only see that Jews are doing something which is antithetical to the value system of Western Jews. Pollard wasn’t helpful. American Jews are now feeling we are an aggressor, we are an occupier, we are taking away people’s rights, we are killing eleven-year-olds, and we are shutting down universities. Now American Jews feel less good about Israel. They are concerned about being confronted by their Christian neighbors about Israel. They don’t know how to respond. They don’t have the tools to respond. At one time Israel enhanced Jews’ self-image. We felt a lot better as Jews. We all felt three inches taller because of Israel, and now the Israelis are taking away those three inches.”

Among the young generation of American Jews, and by that I mean those under forty, I have found some very different reactions to the widening awareness of the reality of Israeli life.

But first a joke.

Ya’akov Kirschen, the American-born Israeli cartoonist, who goes by the pen name Dry Bones, liked to tell this joke to visiting American Jewish groups just to see how many in the audience wouldn’t laugh.

“There is this American Jew who immigrates to Israel,” Kirschen would tell his audiences, “and he moves into a highrise apartment in Tel Aviv and gets an office job. After a few days, he starts to feel that he is missing out on all the local color of being in the Middle East, so he goes out and buys a camel. Each day he rides the camel to work, while Israelis whiz past him on the highway in their cars. One day, his camel gets stolen, so he goes down to the police station and reports the theft to the police. The Israeli policeman takes out a Missing Camel form and starts to fill it in. ‘This camel of yours,’ the policeman says, ‘what color was it?’ ‘Well,’ says the American Jew, ‘it was sort of brown and sort of gray. I don’t really remember.’ So the policeman writes down ‘Color unknown.’ Then the Israeli cop asks, ‘This camel of yours, how many humps did it have? One or two?’ ‘Well,’ says the American Jew, ‘it’s hard to say. You see I had a saddle on him and I couldn’t tell if it was between two humps or on top of one.’ So the policeman writes down ‘Humps unknown.’ Finally the cop asks him, ‘This camel of yours, what sex was it?’ So the American Jew says, ‘It was a male.’ So the cop says, ‘Say, tell me something. You didn’t know what color it was. You didn’t know how many humps it had, so how come you know what sex it was?’ The American Jew answered, ‘Because every time I would ride him to work down the highway every Israeli who saw us go by would say, ‘Look at the big shmuck on that camel.’”

In order to get the joke, explained Kirschen, “you have to know that ‘shmuck’ in Yiddish actually means penis, even though in modern English usage it has become a synonym for jerk. For the first ten years I was here every American whom I told that joke to laughed, but slowly the number of people who understood it, who understood enough Yiddish, began to dwindle. Now almost no one who comes from the new generation of American Jews understands it.”

My parents’ generation and the founding generation of Israel had a great deal in common: together they experienced anti-Semitism in the thirties, forties, and fifties, the horrors of the Holocaust, and the birth of the new Jewish state. They often shared common European roots and, most of all, a common language—Yiddish. When we first visited Israel in 1968, my dad got on better than I did, because with his Yiddish he could speak to more Israelis than I could with my pidgin Hebrew. But that is not true for the young generation—forty and under—of American Jews and their Israeli counterparts. About all that many of them have in common is Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

“Our generation of American Jews,” said Harry Wall, the ADL representative in Jerusalem, speaking for the under-forties, “came of age after the Holocaust and they grew up with little anti-Semitism. They felt as secure in America as an Israeli feels in Ashkelon. They also took for granted the existence and the durability of the state of Israel. Most of them have no common language and no real common experience with Israelis of their generation, who served in the army and speak Hebrew. They are also different culturally. Our parents and the founders of Israel both came from predominantly European backgrounds, while today you have American-born American Jews dealing with Israeli-born Sabras, a majority of whose parents come from Arabic-speaking Muslim countries. This has made emotional distancing between the two communities much easier in these difficult times. Of course, there is still a deep underlying sense of common peoplehood, and that will always remain. But to maintain a dynamic relationship and to keep the new generation of American Jews interested in and identifying with Israel is going to take a new approach. Fear of another Holocaust alone is not going to do it. There is a need to rekindle the old magic. We have to put some romance back in this relationship.”

Most intelligent young American Jews cannot live with the idea that when South Africa does bad things to the blacks they should protest and when Israel does bad things to Palestinians they should remain silent. It is like the Jewish mother who is always telling her son, “Don’t say anything that will upset your father, he’ll have a heart attack.” The average son’s response after a while is “Look, Ma, I can’t live with Dad that way. I am moving to the coast. I don’t want him to die, but I can’t live with him this way anymore.” So the son drifts away, always loving Dad but unable to really have a relationship with him.

I find this emotional distancing particularly prominent among the Jewish boys I grew up with back in Minneapolis, who are all in their mid-thirties now. They rooted for the Israeli team when it was a winner and made them feel proud. But when the team started to lose some of the time, most of them stopped cheering, and some of them even stopped coming to the games. As one of my closest childhood friends said to me, “Look, Tommy, I signed up for the heroic Israel, not this crap.” It is not surprising that during theintifada, the biggest drop in tourism to Israel was among American Jews. They simply cannot handle looking at an Israel in the throes of such a messy, unheroic dilemma.

To be sure, many young American Jews continue to be involved emotionally and institutionally with Israel. That was made clear when Prime Minister Shamir visited Washington in the spring of 1988, at a time when Israel’s handling of the Palestinian uprising was being hotly debated in the American media. While Shamir was in Washington, he met with 3,000 members of the UJA Young Leadership, who had gathered together at the Washington Hilton from across America to listen to the Israeli Prime Minister on the eve of his meeting with President Reagan. The young American Jews greeted Shamir with a standing ovation, cheers, whistles, and repeated curtain calls.

“Twice Shamir sought to acknowledge the invigorating show of support by raising clenched hands in a gesture of victory,” the Jerusalem Post reported. “And, indeed, a victory it was. His slight figure magnified on two large video screens, Shamir lambasted the distortions of the media [and] said he was ‘astounded’ that Israel was being asked to give back territories.”

The Jerusalem Post correspondent Menachem Shalev was so stunned by the standing ovation given Shamir that he compared the behavior of the young American Jewish leaders to the behavior of teenagers at a “long-anticipated rock concert.” An Israeli air force colonel I know was also in the audience at the time, and he told me later, “I felt so uncomfortable I wanted to go back to Jerusalem immediately. All I could think of was that these Americans were worshipping an Israel that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Shortly after Shalev’s article appeared, the Jerusalem Post published the following letter to the editor:

… I was one of the nearly 3,000 Jews at the three-day conference, and as one who is by no means a naive observer of the Israeli scene, I must challenge Mr. Shalev to look deeper. Shamir did get a rousing welcome, but not because 100 percent of the audience sided with the Likud. Rather, it was because we wanted the world to see that we will not abandon Israel in times of crisis. Unlike some of our “co-religionists,” we were not there to apologize for Israel, but to show a united front. I must also add that during the banquet I was seated with a number of prominent Israelis, not one of whom stood up, much less applauded, when their prime minister entered the room. I may not have voted for Ronald Reagan, but as an American, I stand out of respect for the office that he holds. Perhaps Mr. Shalev would have preferred us to greet Mr. Shamir (in front of all the network cameras) in the manner of many of the Israelis present. What message would that have sent to the enemies of Israel?

—Gabrielle Rabin Tsabag, Los Angeles

The recognition among Israelis that their country no longer projects a heroic image in America has prompted a variety of reactions on their part as well.

One has been to say that if Israel can’t be America’s little David any longer, maybe it can be its Goliath. In the initial alliance between Israel and the United States, which lasted from 1948 to the late 1970s, Americans supposedly liked the Israelis for their “beautiful eyes,” as Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit liked to put it. “They liked Israelis for who they were and the values that they represented—democracy, pluralism, and a kind of pioneer spirit,” said Margalit. Israel was always identified with the Democratic Party in America, with liberal causes and with the American labor movement, and was depicted as a country that wanted nothing more than peace with its neighbors and the American dream for its children.

However, after Begin and his Likud Party took power in Israel in 1977, they realized that they did not fit this image. The Likud “Young Republicans”—men such as Moshe Arens, Ehud Olmert, Dan Meridor, Uzi Landau, and Benjamin Netanyahu—wanted something more than the platitude of “peace with all our neighbors.” They wanted the West Bank and Gaza Strip for ideological reasons. They realized that if Israel was going to continue holding these territories, and maintain an amicable relationship with the United States at the same time, it could not go on selling itself to Washington on the basis of beautiful eyes alone. Beautiful eyes did not go well with a Lebanon invasion or military occupations. So they took down the beautiful-eyes posters and replaced them with new ones: Israel as aircraft carrier, Israel as strategic asset, Israel as America’s club against the Soviets and Soviet-backed regimes such as Syria and Libya, Israel as counterterrorist force. This approach happened to coincide with an administration in Washington—the Reagan Administration—which tended to look at the world as being divided between the pro-Western children of light and the pro-Communist children of darkness. Since the Reagan Administration put Israel into the category of the children of light, it did not particularly care if the Israeli moral light bulb had dimmed from 200 watts to 50 watts. Whether it was in the Lebanon war or in the West Bank, the Reagan Administration was ready to tolerate behavior by Israel that no other American administration would have countenanced, certainly not Reagan’s predecessor Jimmy Carter. “The motto of the Labor Party era was strength through peace,” said Netanyahu, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations and one of the main proponents of the new basis of Israel–American ties. “Our motto was peace through strength. We tried to put the relationship with America into a larger context. Labor had no larger agenda. They were not animated by the threat of the Soviet Union or radical Soviet regimes in the Middle East. We were, and so was the Reagan Administration. So we put the relationship into a larger context, and when we did the West Bank and Gaza took on a much smaller perspective. The truth is that the ground was already moving in the United States in a more conservative trend, and people like Moshe Arens [who served as ambassador in Washington in 1982] and myself just helped give it some direction regarding the relationship with Israel. American Jews were also part of this shift. You walk into a room with ten American Jews and you will find that maybe two believe in strength through peace and the other eight all believe in peace through strength.”

Instead of using the backing of the Reagan Administration as a source of strength that could be exploited to make Israel’s bargaining position more flexible at the negotiating table with Jordan and the Palestinians, the Likud made the same mistake Amin Gemayel made in Lebanon. It said, When I am weak, how can I compromise? When I am strong, with the Americans behind me, why should I compromise? Therefore, the Reagan years must be remembered for Israel as the years the locust ate—the years in which Israel squandered every opportunity, and took virtually no initiative to reach out to the Palestinians and forge peace agreements with the help of an administration that would have provided Jerusalem with virtually any assurances and any inducements it wanted. Ironically, it was Reagan who, by accident of history more than by design, would be the one to open a dialogue between Washington and the PLO just as he was leaving office—thereby spoiling forever Israel’s emotional monopoly in Washington and even bringing to life the Likud’s ultimate nightmare: PLO-American cooperation in fighting terrorism.

The Likudniks were also ready to forge a relationship with the avowedly pro-Israel American Christian fundamentalists, who were particularly strong in shaping public opinion in the South. The fundamentalists saw a reborn Israel paving the way for the return of the Messiah and were not particularly concerned about the details of daily life in Israel or its Jewish and democratic values. The Messiah would straighten it all out when he arrived. Many liberal Israelis and American Jews were deeply disturbed by Begin’s friendship with the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and urged him to sever his relationship with such people. They explained to Begin that the fundamentalists were only supporting the Jewish state because they saw it as the necessary first stage in the return of Jesus Christ and the ultimate triumph of Christianity. To which Begin is said to have responded, “I tell you, if the Christian fundamentalists support us in Congress today, I will support them when the Messiah comes tomorrow.”

But while some Israelis on the right of the political spectrum sought out new American allies who would not be disturbed by the direction in which the country was drifting, other Israelis, a significant but dwindling minority, appealed to the United States and American Jews to use their strength, influence, and resources to save Israel from its worst instincts. For example, on February 21, 1988, four distinguished Israeli writers, Yehuda Amichai, Amos Elon, Amos Oz, and A. B. Yehoshua, published a letter to the editor of The New York Times calling on American Jews to “speak up” about Israeli policies in the West Bank, because “the status quo will further corrupt Israeli society and inevitably lead to another major war.” By their silence, said the Israeli authors, American Jews were “massively intervening in Israeli politics and silently but effectively supporting one side in the debate, the tragically wrong side. We implore them to speak up.”

The letter was a cry from the heart of the Israel of beautiful eyes. But it was like a volcano appealing to a desert for help. American Jews were so stunned, so divided, and so confused about the Israel they woke up next to in the 1980s that they simply didn’t know what to do with her.

The slogan with which the UJA raises money from American Jews for Israel is “We Are One.” But it is clear today that American Jews and Israelis are not one; they are many. Whenever I think of Gabrielle Tsabag writing to Israelis, telling them to please be a good unified symbol, and Shlomo Avineri writing to American Jews, telling them that they are nothing more than the nervous Jews of Berlin in the 1930s, it becomes clear to me that the relationship between Israelis and American Jews may not survive another generation. Israel in the eyes of American Jews has gone in twenty years from a substitute religion to a source of religious delegitimization, and from a source of political identity to a source of political confusion; America in the eyes of Israelis has gone from a huge Disneyland to an essential lifeline, and from the world’s largest pool of potential Jewish immigrants to Israel to the world’s largest magnet for Jews, including Israelis. If Israel and American Jewry are ever to be one in any meaningful sense, then the foundations for real unity will have to be constructed anew from the bottom up, and that must begin with certain myths being set aside on both ends of the ocean.

Israelis were nurtured on the myth that the Diaspora does not count and that Jewish life there is not authentic, that American tolerance and pluralism won’t last. But all indications are that life for Jews in America is viable. Most American Jews, except the ultra-Orthodox, are not going to immigrate to Israel, and if by some miracle they all did, it would be a disaster for Israel, since it would undermine the foundations of the United States–Israel government-to-government relationship. Instead of trying to compete for American Jews by offering them more fulfilling lives as Jews and as human beings, an increasing number of Israelis have opted for impugning American Jewish life and crying wolf about the coming pogrom in America. Israel would do itself, American Jewry, and their whole relationship a big favor by taking up the challenge posed by America. The more American Jews feel at home, the more they challenge Israel to be more than just a home against persecution. It is not enough anymore for Israel to proclaim its “centrality.” With America out there, it now has to prove it.

What does that mean? As David Hartman taught me, it means that “Israel can’t ask the Jewish people to give allegiance to it, to say that it is the central carrier of Jewish history, if the content of Israeli values and life is not something that a Jew living anywhere in the world could identify with and want to emulate. Israelis love to think that they are the center of Jewish history today, they love to be told that they are the center of Jewish history, but they don’t always like the responsibility that comes with being the center.”

If all Israel is about is developing into a nation that will be like all other nations, in the long run it will have nothing to offer American Jews.

But while Israelis are going to have to face up to the challenge of America, American Jews are going to have to rethink some of their basic attitudes toward Israel. Israel is not a Jewish summer camp, where you come for a weekend and see that your kid is eating okay and then go home; Israel also isn’t a coffee-table book with an introduction by Abba Eban that you keep out in the living room and never read. Israel is the most difficult, outlandish experiment in Jewish history—an attempt to build a Jewish nation out of Jews who have never lived together. Yes, they dreamed about living together. Yes, they prayed about living together. But in the real world radical Russian Jews and primitive Moroccan Jews and wealthy South African Jews and hot-blooded Argentinian Jewsnever actually lived together in the same space, let alone in the harsh environment of the Middle East. Taking Jews from so many diverse cultures and moral backgrounds and asking them to form a society that will be the carrier of Jewish history in the modern era is no easy task. When American Jews relate to Israel as a heroic symbol, they are in effect saying that the task of building this nation is over. The statue is complete. It is not. It is an unfinished work. The country is still teeming with differences, jealousies, unfulfilled dreams, not to mention people who have to hustle their banker just to get to the end of the month and who were not raised on the writings of Thomas Jefferson. It is also filled with excitement, kinetic energy, and amazing achievements for so young a society.

That is why when people ask me, “So, Friedman, where do you come out on Israel after this journey from Beirut to Jerusalem?” my answer is that I have learned to identify with and feel affection toward an imperfect Israel. Mine is the story of a young man who fell in love with the Jewish state back in the post-1967 era, experienced a period of disillusionment in Lebanon, and finally came out of Jerusalem saying, “Well, she ain’t perfect. I’ll always want her to be the country I imagined in my youth. But what the hell, she’s mine, and for a forty-year-old, she ain’t too shabby.”

Ya’akov Kirschen, the cartoonist, used to tell me that whenever he heard American Jews complaining about the real Israel, he would say to them, “You know what? You’re right. Israel really is an impossible place. If there were another Jewish state, I would go live there instead. But there isn’t. This Israel is all we’ve got.”

Precisely because it’s all they’ve got, the key question for many American Jews is how they can influence the still ongoing building process in Israel—to ensure that it develops as a modern, tolerant, democratic, pluralistic society—without actually living there.

I, and many others, are not particularly optimistic that American Jews will find the time, the understanding, or the commitment required to really deal with this challenge. One afternoon, before I left Jerusalem, I found myself in Rabbi Kelman’s new Reform synagogue, listening while he poured his heart out in anguish over where the American Jewish–Israeli relationship was heading.

“American Jews can’t understand our needs here, because the needs they have from Israel are different from what the real needs are,” said Kelman. “They need a symbol, something black and white that they can rally around. That is why American Jews, who have a love of democracy and a love of individual freedom, instead of helping us to see reality, help us close our eyes. They helped us close our eyes by buying our myth of the benign occupation and not challenging it. Most of them never challenged it for a second. Never ever. And they ignored the voices in Israel who raised the issue from the beginning and stifled the voices of American Jewry that also tried to raise it. American Jews needed this lily-white symbol, so they never related to reality, never said, ‘Hey, guys, let’s look at our own history and see how people handled an occupation.’ They could have been helpful; instead, it was see no evil, speak no evil, and hear no evil. You see, basically what it comes down to is this: I don’t think American Jews really care about Israel. Because nobody really cares about a symbol. So few American Jews come to Israel. So, to begin with, if they don’t know us in any real way, I don’t know what we can talk about. When I talk about Israel with American Jews I have to discuss things in the most basic, simple, vulgar terms because they don’t want to know from complexity.”

The relationship between American Jews and Israeli Jews is “an infatuation,” continued Kelman, his voice rich with emotion and anger. “Think of who you were in love with in high school. You didn’t really know that person. A real love is knowing someone and knowing their faults and accepting their faults and learning how to help them, and learning how to listen. That’s not an infatuation, that’s a real relationship. I have to tell you one story that really moved me deeply. It happened just a couple of weeks ago. Richard Scheuer, who gave tons and tons of money to build the [Reform] World Union of Progressive Judaism complex [in Jerusalem], was being made an honorary fellow of Jerusalem. It was a beautiful ceremony. He’s given some money to my synagogue, so I was invited. There were less than 150 people there. A quartet played some music and Abe Harman from the Hebrew University gave a beautiful erudite talk and Teddy Kollek gave a little talk and then it came time for Richard Scheuer to speak. And he gets up there and says, ‘You know, I had a speech all prepared, but I’m not going to give you the speech. I want to just share with you’—and he is not a real speaker, you know—‘I just want to share with you how upset I am about what is going on in Jerusalem today and in Israel today. When I think about the Jerusalem that we imagined’—and he told all about meetings with the architect Moshe Safdie and Teddy Kollek and planning all sorts of Jewish–Arab things—and he said, ‘I don’t think they’re going to happen.’ And then he stood there and cried. He cried! The guy stood there and wept his eyes out. Well, needless to say, everyone in the room was devastated. Teddy got up there and put his arm around him. For about a minute no one was talking; they were just crying about the situation. So here is the exception—someone who comes to Israel every year and knows and cares. American Jews aren’t crying about what is going on. American Jews aren’t crying about the situation. They’re embarrassed. They’re embarrassed and angry. Well, fuck all their embarrassment and anger. They’re not crying about what is going on. Because it is not them. You’re angry, you’re embarrassed, because the girl you’re infatuated with embarrassed you in front of the goyim. Who cares! You’re telling me what is going on now is bad because it is embarrassing? What is going on now is bad because the Jewish state might not make it! And all they can do is give Shamir a standing ovation.”