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Moment Magazine is known for its award-winning journalism, first-rate cultural and literary criticism and signature “Big Questions”—all from an independent Jewish perspective. Founded by Leonard Fein and Elie Wiesel in 1975, it has been led by Nadine Epstein since 2004. Moment is published under the auspices of the nonprofit Center for Creative Change and is home to projects such as the Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative, the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest, the Antisemitism Project and MomentLive! To learn more about Moment visit momentmag.com.

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27

SONGS TO BUILD A NATION

departments features

ESSAY

The Women Who Shaped Israel

A look at the state’s unsung heroines and the forces holding women—and Israel—back today.

by

Nadine Epstein, illustrations by Isaac Ben Aharon

What does 75 years of the State of Israel mean in the context of 3,000 years of Jewish history?

48 62

A MOMENT BIG QUESTION 48

PLAYLIST

Songs to Build a Nation

Yossi Klein Halevi describes the songs that inspire Israelis—and made him fall in love with Israel. as told to Nadine Epstein

52 INTERVIEW

When Water = National Security

Environmentalist Gidon Bromberg builds bonds in the Middle East by expanding the definition of national security.

interview by Noah Phillips

A LITERARY TOUR OF ISRAEL

Traveling the Land, Book in Hand

Literature that illuminates Tel Aviv gardens, Jerusalem cafés, kibbutzim and more. by Omer Friedlander

4

From the Editor-in-Chief

Finding a balance between Israel and the diaspora by

Nadine Epstein

6 The Conversation

12 Opinions

Love for Israel can’t be unconditional by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Life after ‘Never Again’ by Marshall Breger

Do Jews’ beliefs count on abortion?

Opinion interview with Dahlia Lithwick by Amy E. Schwartz

16 Moment Debate

Has the word Zionism outlived its usefulness?

Mira Sucharov vs. Derek Penslar interviews by Amy E. Schwartz

18

Ask the Rabbis

What does Israel reaching 75 mean in the context of 3,000 years of Jewish history?

21 Poem

“Fruit of the Land” by Yonatan Berg; translated by Joanna Chen

22 Jewish Word

Israel: What’s in a name? by Jacob Forman

24 Visual Moment

Sigalit Landau’s immersion in the Dead Sea by Diane M. Bolz

60 Talk of the Table

A feast to celebrate 75 years by Vered Guttman

62 Literary Moment

We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel; The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

review by Robert Siegel

The House of Love and Prayer and Other Stories

review by Erika Dreifus

72 Caption Contest

Cartoon by Ben Schwartz

73 Spice Box

PLUS! Moment’s Higher Learning Guide, a special advertising supplement Page 56

from the editor-in-chief

principles on which Israeli civil society is built and has acted as the counterweight to the nationalist and theocratic tendencies now running rampant.

FINDING A BALANCE BETWEEN ISRAEL AND THE DIASPORA

When we started talking about an “Israel at 75” anniversary issue, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was out of office for the first time in 12 years. That brief interlude, during which the country cobbled together a centrist consensus, came to an end last fall when Netanyahu’s new far-right coalition took over. After years of simmering, the divisions within Israel have now boiled over and are testing its unity. We are seeing Israeli Jew vs. Israeli Jew, communities with sharply divergent visions of what Israel should be, each adamantly convinced they are right.

Those divisions may come down to this: those who want Israel to be a secular modern democratic nation—at least for Jews—with all its joys and flaws, and those who want a very different kind of state, one markedly less free and inclusive. It’s no secret why Israel’s far-right wing has made the country’s Supreme Court its sacrificial lamb. While the nation’s founders clearly envisioned Israel as a full-fledged parliamentary democracy, they failed to draw up a constitution or abolish the rabbinate, which was absorbed from the Ottoman legal system. Without a constitution on the books, it is the court that has established the

Tensions between the court and Israel’s legislative and executive branches are not new. But never has a ruling coalition come so dangerously close to destabilizing the balance of Israel’s separate branches of power. That the court has been branded left-wing is not wholly accurate. Its decisions fully satisfy neither right nor left, and it treads carefully, aware of the precariousness of its position. In 2020, for example, the court ruled that Netanyahu could form a new government despite being under indictment for corruption, to the dismay of his opponents. Let us hope that the court’s independence will not be curtailed. Democracies are messy, but in the long run those with independent judicial systems are less likely to slide into authoritarianism.

Even before the legislative offensive by the Netanyahu government, we had planned to ask historians and others a “Big Question” in search of some much-needed perspective. After considerable discussion we settled on “What does Israel reaching 75 mean in the context of 3,000 years of Jewish history?” Due to the crisis, the responses are less celebratory of this milestone than we originally imagined, and many are tinged with pain, even despair. We asked our rabbis the same question, and their answers are also telling.

One common refrain is the belief that the modern State of Israel is or should be the center of Jewish life and is the best hope for Jewish continuity. I am uncomfortable with this for several reasons. One is historical: Many of the great achievements of Judaism and Jewish culture have occurred in galut, exile, or to use the slightly less negative word, diaspora. These include the Babylonian Talmud; the classic commentaries of Rashi and Maimonides; Iberian mysticism; the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment in Western and Central Europe; Hasidism in Eastern Europe; and the great flourishing of new denominations in the United States, just to name a few.

BY NADINE EPSTEIN

The millennia-long tango between diaspora Jews and their surrounding cultures has brought us many gifts, though it has been punctuated by much suffering.

There is another reason for my discomfort, stemming from my role as editor-in-chief of a magazine founded nearly 50 years ago for the American Jews who didn’t pack up and move to Israel, but chose to stay and build a vibrant Jewish life here. Moment is part of the extraordinary thriving of Jewish life in the United States that has evolved largely unfettered by the kinds of religious strictures imposed by Israel’s rabbinical courts, although of course it has been affected by them, as well as by Israel’s wars and politics. I am always amazed at the fresh ways Judaism is expressed and practiced here. This phenomenal creativity is constantly transforming the American Jewish world, birthing new ideas and projects, theology, literature and art, all nourished by endless kibitzing and arguments.

This is why we should not be hesitant to say that both the diaspora and the ingathering enhance Jewish resiliency and creativity. Israel is an astonishing achievement of the Jewish people, a melting pot of cultures, a cauldron of creativity and a necessary home for Jews—but it is not the only home. The Jewish past and future demand both a homeland and a diaspora, and it is our ongoing responsibility to find a balance between them.

Building bridges between the diaspora and Israel is more than a matter of language. I know Israelis who speak English fluently who cannot understand America, or American Jews for that matter, and I know Americans who speak Hebrew who see only very narrow slivers of Israel. Travel, too, is not reliable: it depends on where you visit and who you meet. In this issue, we bridge the divide through the power of culture. One of our guides is Yossi Klein Halevi, who shares his favorite Israeli songs—a playlist that illuminates how Israelis think. Another guide is Omer Friedlander, who leads us on a tour of the land through its literature. In “Visual Moment,” by Arts & Articles Editor Diane M. Bolz, we see the

Moment is a close-knit family, and we were shocked as we prepared to go to press with this issue when George E. Johnson, one of our senior editors, suddenly passed away. George, who came to Moment after a distinguished career as a lawyer and writer, became observant after serving as an intelligence officer in Vietnam as a young man. He was a wise and thoughtful colleague and a beloved presence in editorial meetings. We miss him greatly. To read his work and watch his MomentLive! program about his experiences in Vietnam, visit https:// momentmag.com/george-e-johnson.

We dedicate this issue to George. May his memory be a blessing.

Dead Sea through the inventive eyes of an artist concerned for its survival.

“Jewish Word” by Moment fellow Jacob Forman is a historical dive into how Israel got its name just a few hours before the state was declared. Digital Editor Noah Phillips introduces us to an environmentalist who has expanded the definition of national security. “Moment Debate” asks: Has the word Zionism outlived its usefulness? And since we couldn’t mark Israel’s 75th without inviting women to the party, I pay homage to some of Israel’s great ones. Finally, there’s food, perhaps the greatest human connector of all. Chef Vered Guttman has designed a menu drawn from the foods Israelis ate in 1948. It is a feast that fuses together the varied and rich cultures on which Israel was built.

As usual, we couldn’t fit everything into print—so sign up for Moment Minute at momentmag.com/newsletter to read about Israel’s top innovations, iconic objects and archaeological finds, as well as what may happen when Mahmoud Abbas is no longer on the scene. At momentmag.com/zoominars, watch an “Israel at 75 Book Series,” in which Opinion & Books Editor Amy E. Schwartz talks with Robert Alter about poet Yehuda Amichai and with Etgar Keret about short stories. We hope your spring will be enriched and inspired by these offerings and look forward to hearing your thoughts!

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the conversation

HATEFUL ENCOUNTERS NOT A “NOTHINGBURGER”

Reading Nadine Epstein’s “First Encounter of a Hateful Kind” (“From the Editor,” Winter 2023), I was struck and saddened that the cutting antisemitic remark, “Jew ’em down,” muttered by a man in rural Pennsylvania to Epstein’s father, is an incident that would go down, as she put it, “in the annals of hate...as a nothingburger.” Once antisemitism is pervasive, accepted and normalized in a culture, this creates fertile soil for further dehumanization and then normalization of greater degrees of dehumanization. This phenomenon within a society is clear in Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust and many other books. The slow drip, drip, drip of antisemitism that inevitably permeates an entire society starts with normalizing “nothingburgers.”

Chris Mayka Arlington, VA

ARE ALGORITHMS DANGEROUS?

THE MAGIC OF SEMICHA AN INEFFABLE LEANING

I love words and so was pleased to see yet another “Jewish Word” column (“Semicha—When a Rabbi Becomes a Rabbi,” Winter 2023). I found George Johnson’s article compelling and educational, especially the historical review of ordination through the generations. I appreciated how the article progressed from numerous historical examples of rabbis/teachers leaning on their successors to convey semicha to a current-day example in which a female rabbi was told to “lean back” into the hands of her teacher as she was being ordained. The feeling of pressure from her teacher’s hands as they transmitted the blessing caused her to shake, feeling that “something ineffable was happening.” Including this modern-day example was insightful, as how Moshe and Joshua might have felt during the laying of hands is not mentioned in the Torah. In a religion that focuses so much on rules

Andrew Michael’s first-person account “From Zero To Hate In Just a Tik And a Tok” (Winter 2023), describing how the TikTok algorithm can lead to Nazi content even for those not looking for it, generated a spirited response online. On the web forum Reddit, a debate ensued over the concept of radicalization described by the author. “This whole concept of algorithmic extremism is frankly nonsense,” a commentator with the username Party_Reception_4209 wrote. “What the algorithms do is optimize for engagement. If you constantly signal to the platform that you want a certain kind of content then you’ll get it. No platform serves up extremism when all the user ordered was memes of hot moms dancing in their kitchen, which is all I ever see on the app.” Disagreeing, another commentator (username: Vecrin), explained that it is the ability of algorithms to shift a user’s recommended content over time that makes them insidious. “Let’s say you’re a random teenager who likes gaming. TikTok feeds you amazing Fortnite clips. All good. But then it starts to push this guy who starts making fun of some ‘crazy’ woman who is ‘ruining gaming.’” Over time, Vecrin noted, a user’s feed will continue to develop. “You happen upon a TikTok talking about how feminists are trying to ruin culture...Pretty soon you’re listening to people complain about how women aren’t having relationships with guys like you anymore. Feminism has corrupted them…So you start to listen to that type of content more. It’s fun. They’re just joking around. What’s the harm in listening to a few slurs drop every once in a while?...So you continue to listen and think, huh, maybe they’re right about this stuff.” They warn, “It starts with a normal, fun subject (like gaming) and slowly pushes you down the rabbit hole.”

MANY OF US HAVE BEEN WONDERING WHY ANTISEMITISM SEEMS TO BE GROWING BY LEAPS AND BOUNDS AMONG MANY WHO ARE NOT THE USUAL SUSPECTS.

CONVERSATION:

and obligations, it was refreshing to read about human touch as reinforcement of the transfer of authority.

Elaine Amir Rockville, MD

INSIDE TIKTOK A MODERN HELL

Jennifer Bardi’s chilling article about antisemitism on TikTok (“The Good, the Bad and the Algorithm,” Winter 2023) unfortunately reinforced a grim conclusion that I’ve long harbored about social media in general. Bardi’s suggestions about how to thwart antisemitic deportment on TikTok reflect the assessments of an intelligent, civilized individual. However, I’ve concluded that bigots and their ilk, having found cybermegaphones that allow them, literally, to reach practically everyone, will never be purged from the internet. Dante’s Hell was a place of punishment; the web is a very modern kind of hell, a ghastly theater of the depraved for antisemites, racists, etc. And the future? I dread what will happen when the bigots are able to manipulate AI—or the other way around.

Howard Schneider New York, NY

A PERFECT STORM

I have close to zero familiarity with TikTok (to me it’s just cool dances and fun stuff), but your article describes a really appalling development. Many of us have been wondering why antisemitism seems to be growing by leaps and bounds, and among many who are not “the usual suspects.” It seems to be a perfect storm between the advent of this technology with its ingenious algorithms and the vanishing generation of people who experienced the Holocaust firsthand or knew those who did. For a lovely interlude in the second half of the 20th century, antisemitism seemed to be on the wane, and young people, Jewish or other, were oblivious to what it was like to experience it. Thank you for your coverage, and please keep presenting information like this so we know what we’re up against, even if we don’t use TikTok.

Joan Reisman New York, NY

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VISUAL MOMENT

FOUR WINTERS, TWO THUMBS UP

I just read the article about the film Four Winters (“Tales of Rifles and Resistance” Winter 2023) and I thought it was terrific—detailed and evocative. Great choices were made about which elements in the film to highlight, and there were vivid quotes from the film’s director. I also loved how the photos were used in the article.

All the attention that Four Winters is receiving means the partisans’ stories will be heard more widely. ABC News, for instance, did a piece about the film in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day. That sort of coverage as well as Moment’s article and all the other media attention is really useful in spreading the word about Jewish bravery and resistance during WWII.

Emily Mandelstam

MOMENTLIVE!

ANOTHER GREAT PROGRAM

Thank you for the recent program “The Educational Legacy of Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington.” I was aware of the Rosenwald schools and heard several interviews with Andrew Feiler when his book on the topic came out. My most enthusiastic praise is for the ease of registering and joining on my computer despite having registered on my phone. Thank you for a stellar program and for a very easy experience to join and enjoy it.

Louise Eighmie Turner

Atlanta, GA

Editor’s note: All programs are available at momentmag.com/zoominars

MOMENT DEBATE POLL

In the previous issue, Moment asked if changing the Law of Return will harm Israel-diaspora relations. We asked our Twitter followers to weigh in. The majority answered yes.

COTTIN POGREBIN

ISRAEL, WE’VE GOT TO TALK

Time to put some conditions on our tortured relationship.

In Hebrew, ahavat Yisrael means “love of one’s fellow Jews.” But for many of the millions of Jews who define their Judaism in a nationalist as well as, or rather than, a religious framework, ahavat Yisrael has come to mean love of the Jewish state.

For the past 75 years, the relationship between the average Jewish American and the State of Israel has flourished in large part because of a love pact of our own making: In return for helping us feel safe, strong and proud, we agreed to give Israel unconditional love. This tacit covenant has impelled us to do amazing things: defend every Israeli government regardless of party, policies or politics; lobby our legislators to give Israel advanced weapons and vast amounts of foreign aid; raise huge sums of money for its military, cultural and social institutions; and vigorously promote its entrepreneurship, ingenuity, technology and tourism.

All this time, our love of Israel has remained steadfast regardless of whether it is returned in kind, or in kindness. We’ve kept up our end of the pact, even when some Israeli leaders have humiliated our leaders (think Netanyahu making an end run around Obama to address Congress).

The romance kept its youthful blush, even after some Israeli rabbis blithely dissed some of our rabbis, delegitimizing the conversions of Reform, Conservative and several Modern Orthodox religious courts, ridiculing our denominational Judaism and restricting our prayer practices at the Western Wall, as if the ancient site belonged to the Orthodox rabbinate, not to the Jewish people.

So many American Jews keep saying “I love Israel,” even when the object of our love violates international law, as it does daily by encouraging settlement creep and permitting de facto annexation in the West Bank. Or when it routinely violates

the human rights and dignity of millions of Palestinians who live under constant scrutiny by the IDF and Israeli police and are subject to military, not civilian, law. My own eyes have seen the results of housing demolitions, evictions, preventive detention, confiscation of property, arrests of small children, gratuitous insults and casual dehumanization of Palestinians at checkpoints.

Most surprising to me, the love pact held firm even when the Knesset passed the 2018 Nation-State Law, which expressly denied equal rights to its Arab citizens and other minorities and flagrantly privileged Jews. Had our government taken equivalent discriminatory steps against U.S. minority groups, doubtless most American Jews would have catapulted themselves and their communal organizations into action. But when festering blemishes broke out on the face of “the only democracy in the Middle East,” our top spokespersons trotted out the concealer. Shoulder to shoulder with conservative evangelicals, most Jews continued to press their hyperbolic claim that Israel “shares America’s values.”

But at long last, we’re discovering that love has its limits. Since Bibi’s coalition of fascist, racist, ultranationalist, Orthodoxdominated far-right ministers assumed power, not only have hundreds of thousands of Israelis taken to the streets, but a number of U.S. machers—prominent mainstream Jews—have broken ranks and put their distress on the record in no uncertain terms.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president emeritus of the Union for Reform Judaism, said he felt morally obligated to criticize Israel’s elected rulers “for the first time in my life.” The revered former ADL chief Abe Foxman told The Jerusalem Post, “If Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won’t be able to support it.”

In a video that went viral, Sharon Brous, the charismatic rabbi of the IKAR community in Los Angeles, delivered a passionate

sermon on the urgency and the agony of not loving what Israel has become.

Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Manhattan’s Ansche Chesed revealed that he and his congregation would no longer recite the “Prayer for the Welfare of the State and Government of Israel,” which has been said on Shabbat and holidays in Conservative synagogues since the founding of the state.

Many ordinary Jews, too, have been struggling with pangs of conscience. Since September, I’ve given more than 60 talks to Jewish groups all over the country during which I heard Jews whisper that, for the first time in their lives, they’re ashamed of Israel. For some, it’s a shanda fur die goyim (an embarrassing act by Jews witnessed by non-Jews) that the Jewish state is being compared to Hungary, Belarus and the Philippines and its prime minister likened to their authoritarian leaders. Others admit they were embarrassed as Jews when settlers were filmed torching Palestinian villages, that the scenes awakened images seared into their memories of a time when we Jews were the victims of violent mobs. People said they couldn’t believe the Israel they love could possibly have come to this.

Also freshly motivated, a majority of the 27 Jewish members of the U.S. House of Representatives, including Jerrold Nadler, Brad Schneider, Jan Schakowsky and Debbie Wasserman Schultz—all well-known “lovers of Israel”—signed a highly unusual letter to Netanyahu, Israeli President Isaac Herzog and opposition leader Yair Lapid, registering “profound concern about proposed changes to

WE’RE DISCOVERING THAT LOVE HAS ITS LIMITS.

The Music & People of

POLAND & PRAGUE

Israel’s governing institutions and legal system that we fear could undermine Israeli democracy and the civil rights and religious freedoms it protects.”

Scattered push came to unified shove on March 12 when representatives of the center-right Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, including the American Jewish Committee, AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League (along with many progressive Jewish groups and the U.S. State Department) actually boycotted Israel Bonds’ Washington, DC fundraiser. This unprecedented act was precipitated by the group’s extending a speaking invitation to Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a rabble-rousing hatemonger who has identified himself as a “fascist homophobe,” called gay pride parades “worse than bestiality” and reacted to the settlers’ pogrom in an Arab village by saying the entire town “needs to be wiped out” (a war crime in any language).

I’m grateful to those notables who are

using their platforms, pulpits and personal prestige to come to the defense of Israeli democracy. Yet the full benefits of the democracy they want to save have, in fact, only been enjoyed by Jews. So I also can’t help feeling ashamed that it took a threat to dismantle Jewish rights and Jewish freedoms to burst the balloon of romantic delusion.

It shouldn’t have taken a settler pogrom, or a clear and present threat to freedoms previously taken for granted by Jews, to rile up our leaders.

Love of Israel must be conditional. We can’t support, reward or enable the Jewish state to do whatever it chooses, without taking some responsibility when its choice is to trample on the rights and freedoms of other human beings. Here’s what conditional love looks like:

• We don’t quit lobbying for the Jewish state. We lobby for Israel and Israelis, not their current government, which seems hell-bent on dismantling the founding freedoms granted to its people in its own

majestic Declaration of Independence.

• We don’t stop giving money. We stop giving undirected money to just any “pro-Israel” organization. We target our funds to entities working to secure an array of democratic institutions in Israel (free speech, press, minority rights and an independent judiciary).

• We don’t stop visiting Israel. We make sure our tour itineraries expose us to the whole truth about the land we love, not just its tech miracles and blooming deserts.

You’ve heard the expression “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” If someone we love is steering their life off a cliff, we try to stop them, redirect them, talk sense into them. It doesn’t mean we take away the car, it means we take away the car keys. We don’t want Israel to cease to exist. We just want its government to stop eroding the very foundations of its existence.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s most recent book is Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy.

M ore JEWISH HERITAGE Adventures CROATIA PRIVATE YACHT CRUISE OCTOBER 13-21, 2023

MOROCCO LED BY BILL CARTIFF NOVEMBER 1-12, 2023

CUBA PROF. STEPHEN BERK DECEMBER 3-10, 2023

GREECE PROF. NATAN MEIR JUNE 17-28, 2024

OPINION MARSHALL BREGER

BEYOND ‘NEVER AGAIN’

In the wake of war crimes, balancing collective memory and collective amnesia.

We have probably seen the end of the German trials of Nazi perpetrators. In the most recent one, in 2022, Irmgard Furchner, 97, a secretary to the camp commander at Stutthof, was found guilty and given a suspended sentence. In 2015 Oskar Gröning, 95, a desk officer at Auschwitz, was sentenced to two years in prison, but he died during the appeals process. How do we narrate the Shoah when the living consciousness of the Holocaust is gone? The natural human instinct for justice has been felled by time. What is left is the demand for accountability, transparency, memory.

Jews, of course, have a special focus on memory. One of the greatest Jewish historians of our age, Yosef Yerushalmi, wrote that “only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative.” We are sternly commanded in Deuteronomy, “Remember that you were once slaves in Egypt.”

There are two functions of memory. One is to ensure that the horrors are not forgotten—that the truth will out. In the Warsaw Ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum and a group using the code name Oyneg Shabbes collected documentation of the Nazi atrocities the ghetto underwent knowing he and his community were doomed. The documentation, buried underground in metal boxes and milk cans, was his group’s answer to the question “Who will write our history?”

These issues are not limited to the Jewish community. The invasion of Ukraine has focused international attention on the issue of war crimes trials. Ukraine has already held such trials against Russian soldiers for crimes in Bucha and elsewhere. The International Criminal Court intends to open war crimes cases against Russians, and the establishment of a separate international court for Ukrainian atrocities is being discussed.

Supposedly, knowledge of such acts aids future deterrence. As George Santayana iconically stated, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” On this view, memory is a prophylactic that can avert future horrors, as in the mantra “Never again.” But there is scant empirical evidence for that assertion. As David Rieff has written, “After Sarajevo, after Srebrenica, we now know what ‘Never again!’ means. Never again simply means never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.”

“Never again” may be treated as a warning—we must remember so that Jews (read: Israel) will be strong enough not to allow themselves to be destroyed when, in the Haggadah’s words, “in every generation they rise up to slaughter us.” Collective memory can reinforce communal solidarity. But it is also a social construct—in the words of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, “a reconstruction of the past in light of the present.” The annual trip that takes Israeli high school youth to Poland is focused on the death camps and what would happen if Jews again should become weak. Some would argue that the trip serves not only to memorialize the Shoah but to reinforce the Israeli right’s skepticism of rapprochement with the Palestinians.

However, collective memory can also increase collective trauma. A cult of memory can make reconciliation near impossible. The Jewish quarter of Hebron has transformed itself into a museum to the massacre of Jews by Arabs in 1929. The birthday of every child murdered is commemorated, as is the place where every Jewish inhabitant was slaughtered. In 1992, journalists covering the siege of Srebrenica recounted that when they asked Serbs why they were fighting, they simply answered “1453”—the year the Ottomans conquered Christian Constantinople. When I was in Kosovo after the 1995 Dayton

Accords, I asked some Serbs the same question. Their answer was “1389”—the date of a famous battle where the Serbs had faced off with the Ottomans.

All this suggests a certain argument for forgetting. Collective amnesia may allow not just a society but its citizens to rebuild their lives. Rieff suggests that the price of remembering “at least in certain social and historical conjunctures” might be too high. It is no accident that there was so little discussion of the Holocaust even in Israel in the early years of the Jewish state. In fact, relatively few “survivor memoirs” were published until the late 20th century. Some years ago the Rwandan ambassador to the United States, speaking of the murder of one million, told me that Rwandans had no choice but to forget because they have to live cheek by jowl.

For years, the Jewish community insisted on the uniqueness of the Shoah and denied the very notion of comparative Holocaust studies. But unique or not, the multigenerational experience of remembering atrocities and rebuilding identities and communities has generated not only valuable scholarship and reflection but legal and civic experience in dealing with the aftermath. That experience will be more than relevant in the years to come as Ukrainians in the wake of the conflict with Russia work their way through the trauma of war crimes, accountability and memory.

Marshall Breger is a professor of law at Catholic University.

A CULT OF MEMORY CAN MAKE RECONCILIATION NEAR IMPOSSIBLE.

“

DO YOU REALLY WANT THAT ABORTION?

Courts have no business deciding whether Jewish plaintiffs are sincere.

Deep-red Indiana isn’t a state you’d ordinarily look to as the leading edge of post-Roe v. Wade abortion politics. Now, though, a case in the Indiana state courts could have consequences not just for abortion rights but for religious liberty. A group called Hoosier Jews for Choice and several women, including three Jews and one Muslim, sued to block the state’s near-total abortion ban on the basis that it infringed on their religious liberty. A judge allowed the suit to go forward under the state’s robust Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA (signed in 2015 by then-governor Mike Pence). Having progressed furthest of the multiple religious-freedom challenges to abortion bans being brought by Jews and others around the country, the Indiana case has provoked the sharpest backlash. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a law firm that has represented many religious conservatives, filed a brief asserting in so many words that the Jewish plaintiffs were insincere in their religious convictions.

Dahlia Lithwick, Slate’s legal affairs correspondent and a court watcher, calls the Becket brief’s argument “astonishing in its frank and candid willingness to impugn the religious beliefs of Jews and other religious minorities.” Is this the shape that future church-state disputes could take once liberals, not just conservatives, assert that their religious convictions are entitled to deference? Lithwick spoke with Moment Opinion Editor Amy E. Schwartz.

Was this how you anticipated the post-Roe landscape would look? No!

To have the Becket Fund call into question the religious sincerity of Jewish and Muslim plaintiffs was shocking. It crosses so many lines on how we treat other faiths. There were many ways to oppose the plaintiffs’ case without inviting courts to engage in this really diabolical project of deciding who’s faking their religion and who isn’t. They could have stopped at the argument that the state has a compelling

interest in fetal life. I’m not suggesting courts never have to weigh issues of religious sincerity. Under RFRA they often must determine whether something is a real religious objection. But not like this. After another recent case, Becket issued a celebratory press release saying the result showed that “Courts can’t decide what it means to be Catholic—only the Church can do that.” But in this case they’re essentially saying, “We invite the courts to say what Judaism is and is not.”

Last summer, South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman wrote a piece with some “tentative thoughts” questioning the religious sincerity of non-Orthodox Jews generally. He argued that unless you follow all of halacha, you’re picking and choosing, and therefore you have no meaningful religious obligations. In other words, Reform and Conservative Jews don’t need to be taken seriously as religious objectors. University of Virginia Law Professor Micah Schwartzman and I responded at the time, writing how dangerous and deeply disturbing that argument was and how it was anathema to First Amendment religious provisions. Blackman’s not even describing the law correctly; under RFRA, you don’t have to break an affirmative religious command to have your religious exercise burdened; it’s enough to say, “This is my religious conviction.” And it’s really important to head off at the pass this notion that Reform and Conservative Jews just make it up as they go along.

There’s a very good brief in the Indiana case recounting the history of everything the Indiana Jewish community was doing pre-Roe, and also afterwards, to support women who needed abortion care. Nobody could suggest this is anything but long-standing Jewish conduct. There was an abortion underground, there was organizing, there were sermons explicitly supporting abortion and

birth control, rabbis taking the position that children need to be wanted.

How will these claims of insincerity play at the Supreme Court? It’s possible that Becket miscalculated: The court is probably reluctant to take a case that’s cast as “the Jews and the Muslims are lying liars.” The court wants to hold itself out as being open to all comers religiously. Still, in the Roberts court, some religions seem to win more. Whether it’s Hobby Lobby, where religious employers get an exemption from the contraception mandate, or the COVID cases, where the court overruled public health regulations that capped the size of religious gatherings, it’s been “Yes, yes, yes.” People who seek religious exemptions from providing abortions prevail far more frequently than people saying, “My religion prohibits me from waiting to help until someone is bleeding out on the table.”

Does this case uniquely impact Jews? Not at all. One plaintiff is Muslim. A lot of faiths require that the fetus not be privileged over the life of the mother. It’s really sad that we’re learning this only in the wake of Dobbs. Faith communities were absolutely central to liberalizing abortion laws in the 1960s and 1970s, but after Roe, they fell silent. And then the Moral Majority came in and claimed that only one side, the evangelical and Catholic groups, had skin in the game. The groups that had worked so tirelessly for decades stopped paying attention, and they stopped grounding their support for abortion rights in morality and faith.

What other cases should people be watching closely? There are abortion-and-religious-liberty cases filed in Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky and Texas, among others. Each one is a harbinger of where religious liberty is going.

moment debate

YES

Has the word Zionism outlived its usefulness? Yes. Because different people use it in so many different ways, we end up talking past each other, especially in conversations between those who say they support Zionism and those who say they oppose it. Supporters—and here I’m specifically talking about people with a generally liberal worldview—tend to think the term refers to either belief in a Jewish and democratic state, or a sense of personal and communal attachment to Israel. Opponents tend to focus on Zionism as a state-led ideology—because at the moment Zionism doesn’t exist apart from the single state, Israel, whose policies flow from it—and say that whatever those policies are, they all have at their root the inequality and the privileging of some people and groups over others, whether it’s Jews over non-Jews or citizens of the state over Palestinians under occupation.

I recently conducted a survey of American Jews, and unsurprisingly, a strong majority said they were Zionist. Then I posed a series of definitions, asking whether they were Zionist according to definitions A, B or C. When Zionism was defined as supporting the existence of a Jewish and democratic state, more than 70 percent said they were Zionists. Likewise when Zionism was defined as a sense of attachment to Israel. But when the definition was “Zionism means a set of policies that flow from a particular governing structure where Jews are inherently privileged over non-Jews,” only 10 percent said yes. That tells me the word’s not very useful. It’s better to talk about emotions and values directly.

How did the term collect so much baggage? It comes partly from looking at ideologies through the lens of who

wins and who loses. With Zionism, the winners were clearly the Jews, who succeeded in creating a state. The losers were clearly the Palestinians, actively displaced by Jews’ creation of that state. Awareness has grown about the cost of certain state-building practices on some marginalized populations. Even in my field, international relations, people are teaching and thinking more than they did 20 years ago about decolonization and racism.

Being a Zionist once meant you were committed to moving to Israel and making your life there. Now Jews feel more secure in North America—the rise of antisemitism notwithstanding—so Zionism tends to be more of an arms-length political and emotional allegiance. I think that’s another reason the term has become so contested. Now it’s a set of political beliefs, and all political beliefs are and should be subject to debate and critique.

Does using the word Zionist imply that the existence of the state is still in question? If you think of Zionism as the push to create a Jewish state, that’s right. But Zionism is not only a historical political program, it’s also a set of contemporary state-led ideologies and policies. The creation of Israel is a settled matter, but we should always be thinking of how its policies affect individuals and groups.

Then there’s the argument that opposing Zionism is opposing not just the state but the Jewish people—in other words, that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. I don’t agree with that equation, but it has to be heard and dealt with. And to debate it, we have to define our terms.

What other words could we use instead? Why not say pro-Israel? I

wouldn’t use any of those words. We should talk about policies that advance or impair dignity, equality, justice and freedom: What has Israel done, what can it or does it do, to advance those values? And where does Israel need to be held to account? That approach also avoids holding Israel to a double standard, because those are questions we should be asking everywhere in the world. Separately, we could talk about attachment to Israel. Am I a Zionist? If I’m attached to the people and the language of Israel, and want to make it a more just place for everyone who calls it home, maybe someone who defines Zionism as attachment would see me as a Zionist. But someone who sees Zionism as a matter of policies wouldn’t, because of the policies I argue for. If someone wants to ask me if I’m attached to Israel, ask me that. It doesn’t necessarily mean I support the policies of inequality that Israel advances. If I simply said I’m a Zionist, or an anti-Zionist, no one would know where I stood on emotions or values. If we eschew the term Zionism, then we can advance the conversation.

Can the word be reclaimed? I don’t think so. It’s not like reclaiming a negative word like “queer.” That was binary: You could use it in a positive way to take the sting out of it. But Zionism, while it’s sometimes a slur, is already being used in too many fundamentally different ways. There’s too much mixing and matching, when what we really need is clarity.

Mira Sucharov is a professor of political science at Carleton University, the author most recently of Borders and Belonging: A Memoir, and coeditor of Social Justice and Israel/Palestine: Foundational and Contemporary Debates.

If we eschew the term Zionism, then we can advance the conversation.

MIRA SUCHAROV

Has the word Zionism outlived its usefulness?

Has the word Zionism outlived its usefulness? No. I can understand why people might say so, but Zionism describes a series of beliefs, feelings and needs that transcend political reality. In that sense, it’s like any word that ends in “ism”—liberalism, conservatism, progressivism. These are bundles of ideas and feelings that survive across time, even if their meanings change. For example, to be a liberal today is very different from 150 years ago, but we still use the word.

How did the term collect so much baggage? On the left, the word Zionism has come to mean a particular approach to Jewish nationhood tainted with exclusion, domination and racism. In universities today it’s often a pejorative. I think the connotations are inaccurate: As Amos Oz said, Zionism is a last name that has many first names, religious Zionism, Labor Zionism, spiritual Zionism, Revisionist Zionism and more. But it’s not just 21st-century progressives who’ve contributed to those connotations. A lot of Arab Muslim countries have not wanted to call Israel by name, so they refer to “the Zionist entity.” Iran still does. In the former Soviet Union, “Zionism” was a crime. Before that, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—the most famous antisemitic tract in history—used the word “Zion” to connote a global conspiracy of Jews. It’s been used in slogans attributing negative qualities to Israel since the 1960s— Zionism as racism, Zionism as apartheid. But I don’t think throwing out the word would get rid of these underlying negative feelings.

Some people who associate Zionism with ethnocentrism, narrowness and racism don’t want anything to do with it, and it’s true that there are forms of Zionism

that are all those things—the current Israeli government embodies those aspects. But there are other types of Zionism that are more progressive and inclusive. When my daughter was in college, she would say, “I’m Zionish.” I hear something like that from a lot of my Jewish students, who feel connected to Israel but feel that “Zionism” has acquired too much negative meaning. And of course some Jews and even Israelis consider themselves anti-Zionist because their desire for equity and justice between Jews and Palestinians is so fundamental to their identity. But to be a Jewish anti-Zionist is to be engaged with Israel in a deeply personal way—which, in my definition, is also to be a Zionist. It means you care, even if you don’t want to admit it.

Does using the word Zionist imply the existence of the state is still in question? It’s true that if you define Zionism as the movement to create a Jewish state, that movement ended in 1948. Right-wing figures in the 1940s coined the term “post-Zionism” to describe just that. The idea reappeared, this time from the left, in the 1990s when the Oslo peace process appeared to herald the onset of a “normal” Israel, with peace and diplomatic ties with the Arab world, when it seemed that Zionism as a mobilizing movement would no longer be wise or necessary.

But Zionism was always about much more than simply the creation of the Jewish state. It was also about a profound sense of Jewish nationhood and the cultivation of that nationhood through the connection to Israel as a spiritual and cultural center. That sense of connection continues. Even the fact that so many Jews in the diaspora are upset with Israel at the moment means they care about it.

Some in Israel think that Zionism no longer applies because Israel has no connection with the diaspora. But in fact, both right-wing and left-wing diaspora Jews are constantly involved in Israeli politics.

What other words could we use instead? Why not say pro-Israel? We could call the ideology Israelism, but that assumes that we’re only talking about the State of Israel, and I don’t think that’s true. It’s about something more—global Jewish solidarity, interest in Hebrew culture, the religious heritage of the Jewish people. “Israelism” suggests we venerate or worship a country. Zionism’s a better choice—it’s more abstract and open-ended.

Can the word be reclaimed? Yes—it needs to be rescued from the anti-Zionist left and also from the illiberal, populist and hateful streams within contemporary Israel, shared by no small segment of American Jewry. We can’t stop them from calling themselves Zionist, but other Jews with other ideas can keep using it, too. There are many different ways one can identify with the state of Israel and the Jewish people. There are people in academia who say they are non-Zionist, anti-Zionist, post-Zionist—but they’re still using the word Zionist as a reference point. I don’t want to force anybody into a category; if they don’t want to use it, that’s their business. But the idea of Zionism is still useful, even if I don’t define it the way Benjamin Netanyahu does.

Derek Penslar is a comparative historian and a professor of Jewish history at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including the forthcoming Zionism: An Emotional State.

“

Zionism was always about much more than simply the creation of the Jewish state.

DEREK PENSLAR

ask the rabbis

What does Israel reaching 75 mean in the context of 3,000 years of Jewish history?

humanist

How is it even possible to judge the meaning of Israel against the very long history of the Jewish people and its Hebrew-Israelite-Judean predecessors? In the context of what necessitated a Jewish state, the State of Israel provided a true sanctuary, gathering Jews from the “four corners” of the world. Our ancient language was revived and our calendar and customs became culturally normative. Most significantly, Israel placed the Jewish people back on the stage of history, a Jewish nation determining its own destiny. But this also poses its biggest challenge.

independent

For one thing, 75 years is how old our ancestor Abraham was when God called him to journey to the land that would one day be called Israel (Genesis 12:4). Thus began not our 3,000- but our 4,000-year history. In that context, 75 years demonstrates beyond question the miraculous nature of the Jew and the authenticity of our sacred writ. Not once did we relinquish our sense of self-value, neither as individuals nor as a people, even though year after year, decade after decade, century after century, there appeared no sign of the ancient promise heralded by our prophets. Nonetheless, every Shabbat we celebrated our liberation, even while loathed and oppressed by the world

around us, subject to annual Easter pogroms and frequent expulsions. And every Passover—though remaining as exiled from our homeland as the Passover before—we concluded our seder with the song of audacity, leshanah ha’ba’ah b’Yerushalayim, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” until one day, 75 years ago, that is precisely where we found ourselves. This is the empowerment threading through our lengthy history, woven by the tradition that kept us afloat through the tsunamis of the past to this very moment. It is knowing deep inside that there is nothing we cannot face when we remember that God is facing us

Rabbi Gershon Winkler Walking Stick Foundation Monument, CO

To run a nation is to have power. In Israel’s case this power includes ruling over several million non-Jews. And because Jews in Israel hail from different Jewish subcultures and religious backgrounds, this power also generates nonstop infighting over the Jewish and democratic nature of the state. Add Israel’s relationship with diaspora Jewry—with its own stake in the state’s definition of Jewish authenticity—and the project becomes even harder. As the first modern attempt at a Jewish state, Israel is certainly unique. What it will ultimately mean in the context of 3,000 years of history remains to be judged by future generations.

Rabbi Jeffrey Falick

Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Metro Detroit

Farmington Hills, MI

renewal

A mere three generations! So much built and accomplished, so many challenges met and overcome. Having an independent Jewish state for 75 years—it’s but the blink of an eye in the context of our three millennia of history. And yet, à la Benjamin

MAGNES COLLECTION OF JEWISH ART AND LIFE, UC BERKELEY (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Tiberias, a 1944 painting by Marcel Janco.

Franklin, the question is, can we keep it?

Our last independent Jewish state lasted only about 100 years—from the Maccabean victory in 164 BCE until the Romans took over. (Life lesson: Never invite the Romans in to solve your domestic problems.) We didn’t do too well governing ourselves during that century.

cross. Though precarious, we often flourished; tragedies abounded, too.

conservative

I celebrate Israel’s 75th anniversary with a full heart. We are living in only the third time in 3,000 years that Jews have had sovereignty in the one land to which we are indigenous.

As Andrés Spokoiny,

president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network, noted in The Forward, the Hasmonean state saw a succession of venal Jewish leaders, rampant corruption, territorial expansion and annexation of non-Jewish populations, the blurring of separate internal institutional powers, divisions within the government and reliance on a single foreign power. He added: “The miracle ends in catastrophe, and becomes a short-lived, failed experiment.”

Eventually, after the collapse of the Second Temple, the rabbis created a jewel, rabbinic Judaism, out of the ruins. Babylonian Jewry built a new Talmudic Judaism to engage the mind and spirit. What about us? Will we learn from the past and avoid going off the rails? Will we fuse the greatness of democracy with the best of Judaism to keep Israel from falling into sectarianism, ultra-nationalism, expansionism and continuing violence? God, I hope so.

Rabbi Gilah Langner

Congregation Kol Ami Arlington, VA

reconstructionist

Sovereignty can be overrated. Sometimes, though, it’s vital. In order of importance, there’s Am Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael and Medinat Yisrael—people, land and state. Masada, that storied site, actually marked a first-century dead end: Extremists there held independence as the supreme value, even above life. Jewish history and values moved north, where, in choosing to accommodate rather than revolt against Rome, the Jews of that region accepted reality, lived in the land and developed the Mishnah. For nearly two millennia since then, while solemnly singing of sovereignty, we’ve pursued holy, creative, communal Jewish life under crescent or

With 19th-century secular nationalism, we debated the cultural Zionism of Ahad Haam versus the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl. Had sovereignty returned a decade earlier, many more Jews might be alive today, so yes, independence matters. Yet nationalism breeds insularity, and home ownership has its headaches. This diaspora rabbi prays (and donates, organizes and advocates) for many more years of a State of Israel that’s yet more democratic than it is at 75—while nurturing moral Jewish spirituality that transcends space and time. To tap statehood’s great potential, let it never become our idol.

Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation Bethesda, MD

reform

Jewish yearning for a home and place of self-determination in the land of Israel dates as far back as the prophet Jeremiah, who lamented the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile to Babylon around 586 BCE. Psalm 137, attributed to Jeremiah and popularized in song by Don McLean and Jimmy Cliff, among many, grieves, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we thought of Zion.”

Today should be a time of joy and celebration. We have a home and the national self-determination that we yearned for over millennia. Yet instead, many of us continue to weep. While we may have returned to the land of Zion, we have not yet fulfilled the dream of Zion—the creation of a sovereign nation and society that embraces all Jews, all peoples, and that is grounded in righteousness, justice, democracy and peace for all. As a lover of Israel, I approach this Yom Ha’atzmaut with a breaking heart. I weep for our unreached potential to truly be a “light unto the nations.” I weep for the pain, fear and threat that currently runs like a river through the land.

Rabbi Dr. Laura Novak Winer Fresno, CA

Israel’s founding turned the longprayed-for “ingathering of the exiles” into reality and massively altered the Jewish diaspora. We went from being a tolerated minority scattered among the nations to knowing we control our destiny. Jews in America could stand prouder (although Jews in Arab countries were subjected to Nuremberg-style laws and were driven out of places we had lived for many centuries). And while the Jewish leadership of 1947 accepted the UN Partition Plan, the Arabs rejected it, and resident Palestinians became either scattered refugees or citizens in a country to which they would have a complicated loyalty.

While we can take great pride in its countless accomplishments, the State of Israel has struggled to create a society that respects diversity and embraces all Jews regardless of origin or outlook. Sephardim and Mizrahim, Ethiopians and Russians, religious and secular have all struggled to find and define their place in Israel. Israel’s founding resulted in Jews having to govern not only themselves but non-Jews—namely, the Arab population, which numbers 20 percent “within the Green Line” and 80 percent of the West Bank. Is it a state of Jews or a Jewish state? Amid the intense rancor of this period, I honor the state and pray that it can be all that its founders hoped it could be, as expressed in its Declaration of Independence.

Rabbi Amy S. Wallk Temple Beth El Springfield, MA

modern orthodox

These 75 years of the existence of the State of Israel do not just resolve 2,000 years of exile but bring to a climax 3,000 years of Jewish history. It is a surprising redemption: Many of us were under the

impression that it would come in the blink of an eye on the wings of eagles. It turns out instead to be the redemption that Maimonides, quoting the Talmud, predicted: “There is no difference between this world and the messianic era except that the Jewish people will have sovereignty in their land” (Sanhedrin 99a).

Though one can be a religious Jew in Brooklyn or Washington without the modern State of Israel, the existence of this normal and imperfect state, after 2,000 years of waiting, is a messianic gift, one vital for the continued existence, safety and flourishing of the Jewish people. Its very existence confers a new religious obligation upon us: that of being a great nation on the world stage, as God first said to Abraham when He led him to the land, to “be a blessing to all the peoples of the world” (Genesis 12).

Rabbi Hyim Shafner Kesher Israel: The Georgetown Synagogue Washington, DC

orthodox

When the State of Israel was declared, many skeptics thought it wasn’t going to last. Some thought that it would be impossible to create a stable country militarily or socially; others saw a Third World backwater. And yet today Israel is a military, social and technological powerhouse and the largest Jewish community on earth.

Traditional Jews do not view history as random, as a series of peaks and valleys or a Hegelian spiral. We see it as leading to a conclusion: the realization of the Jewish vision for the world and the time of messianic redemption. Israel’s founding and its persistence over the decades offers optimism that although the Messiah has not yet come, some building blocks have been put in place. There’s the ingathering of exiles, a growing religious renaissance and a remarkable social cohesion that, despite the huge chasms that separate people politically, allows the country to come together at important moments. What we hope is for Israel to become a nation

that fulfills the Jewish mission: not to lead the world in unicorns or military might, but to make the teachings of the Torah and Jewish wisdom fundamental to our families and to the running of the nation. Israel must become a light unto the nations for spiritual, not only material reasons.

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein Cross-Currents Los Angeles, CA

sephardic

In the short time since I received this question, so much has changed in Israel that it seems to refer to another country. And yet the question is appropriate to the situation. The answer can be found in Deuteronomy 32:7: “Remember the days of old,/ Consider the years of ages past;/ Ask your parent, who will inform you,/ Your elders, who will tell you.”

How can 3,000 years of Jewish history inform us about Israel’s future when the country seems to be at the brink of a civil war and, according to some, the establishment of a dictatorship? Throughout the generations, many individuals have abandoned their Jewish identity willingly, while many others have joined voluntarily. We have experienced persecutions and catastrophes but also periods of tranquility and prosperity; the Jewish nation has expanded and contracted, but we have remained, against all odds, a nation.

This phenomenon, truly a miracle, reflects the essential values of the Bible, the principles that guide our behavior as a nation and are a corrective mechanism against apathy, dictatorship and total corruption. The ideas of Shabbat, of humanity being created in the image of God, the importance of supporting the poor, the importance of education and the golden rule “love others as you love yourself”: All Jews, even if they consider themselves unaffiliated or not observant, are guided by them one way or another.

In summary, I am a hopeless optimist. Our history teaches that we will overcome the current crisis, heartbreaking

and scary as it is, and emerge from it wiser and stronger.

Rabbi Haim Ovadia Torah VeAhava Potomac, MD

chabad

Seventy-five years is a long time— according to King David in Psalms, an average life span. Three thousand years (or more) is a whole other story. There is a big difference, especially in the region where Israel exists, between even an entire generation and the literal span of historical existence. The mistaken notion that Israel is somehow “only” 75 years old causes, and also reflects, several problems.

I have long thought that making peace with a 75-year-old entity, especially one that expounds Western values, is a challenging prospect for other nations in the Middle East that live with many ancient traditions. But coming to terms and even peacefully cooperating with an entity that is several millennia old might be another story. Seniority commands respect, especially in that part of the world, and we should cultivate that aspect of our identity—for others’ sake and for our own. Strengthening our own Jewish knowledge and traditions, especially in the young, is a good start here in the diaspora as well as in Israel, where basic awareness of simple Jewish concepts, historical as well as religious, is sorely lacking in too much of the population.

“Israel” is not a newcomer to the region. Basic archaeology confirms that we’ve been there as a people, with Jerusalem as our center, well before anyone else who currently claims it. But more than mere history, our real claim to the Holy Land is G-d’s promise that it will be the homeland of the Jewish people. If we internalize that sentiment and find courteous and respectful ways to share it, then prospects for understanding and for replacing conflict with coexistence are greater. Am Yisrael Chai!

Rabbi Levi Shemtov Executive Vice President, American Friends of Lubavitch Washington, DC

A biblical symbol of peace and plenty, the fig tree still flourishes in Israel today—but what promise can it hold in the heat of conflict? “Fruit of the Land” by Israeli poet and peace activist Yonatan Berg strikes me as a secular prayer lodged within a lament. Its plea? To refuse the tools of war, both literal and figurative. Moment is proud to publish the poem for the first time in its original Hebrew alongside Joanna Chen’s splendid English translation.

Jody Bolz, Poetry Editor

FRUIT OF THE LAND

The fig tree’s fruit falls to the ground, Its purpled flesh still burning.

A harsh wind rushes by, ruffling the treetop Like the head of a beloved child, and dies Within me. For once in my life I want to say rain And get soaked, to say eternity And lose both past and future.

The wire fence shudders and stills, A candy wrapper shudders and stills, Yet this shuddering inside me goes on. I ask for the courage to refuse The iron tools imprinted within my eyes.

I grasp the bark of the fig tree, Soil and sugar stick to my fingers: A filigree of bitter and sweet.

Translated by Joanna Chen

ץראה ירפ

,שיבכ לע םילטומ הנאת תוריפ

.רעוב דוע םהב לוגסה

הפלחו הרבע הקזח חור

.יכותב םג

תרמצה תא הערפ איה

בוהא דלי לש ושארכ

בטריהלו םשג רמול שקבמ ינא ייחב תחא םעפ

.דיתעהו רבעה תא דבאלו חצנ רמול

תעגרנו תדעור תכתמה רדג

תעגרנו תדעור קתממ תפיטע

ךישממ דימת דערה ונכותבש הז דציכ

ברסל חוכ שקבמ ינא

.ייניעב ורתונש לזרבה ילכל

העוצפ הנאתב זחוא ינא

:ידי לע םירתונ רפעו רכוס

קותמהו רמה לש ךוביסה

Yonatan Berg is the youngest-ever recipient of the Yehuda Amichai Prize for Hebrew Poetry and has won several other literary awards. He has published three books of poetry, one memoir and two novels. His most recent collection, Frayed Light, translated by Joanna Chen, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in poetry.

jewish word

Israel: What’s in a Name?

will flee and his brothers submit. This blessing was realized when, after the death of King Solomon and the collapse of the biblical Kingdom of Israel, the Kingdom of Judah emerged as its primary successor. But Judah was eventually invaded by the Babylonian Empire, its Temple destroyed and its people scattered. Some 70 years later, in the 6th century BCE, with the state reforged as Judah and later as the Greco-Roman Judea, Jews built the Second Temple and restored the kingdom. Various incarnations of Judea surfaced throughout the Alexandrian conquests, the Maccabean revolt and ultimately the Jewish-Roman Wars.

n the wake of the November 1947 UN vote on the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine, while Jews across the country were celebrating, David Ben-Gurion remained sober. Preoccupied by the imminent struggle to secure Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, he meticulously created a list of necessities for the fledgling state. The country would need an army, an airport, a civil administration and also a name.

A mere two days before the new state declared independence, with hundreds

dead from Arab-Jewish violence and enemy armies besieging Jerusalem, the Jewish National Council, then the primary executive body of Jewish Palestine and led by Ben-Gurion, met to create the Declaration of Independence. Among pressing military and logistical concerns, it was incumbent upon the council to come up with a name.

Initially, the most popular name for the would-be state was Judea, which derives from Judah, the fourth son of Jacob. In Genesis, Jacob blesses Judah as the leader of the tribes, before whom his enemies

Given this storied and emotionally salient history, it made sense that the members of the National Council would consider Judea as a name for their state. Indeed, “most people in the international community thought the name would be Judea because it was the last sovereign Jewish state in antiquity,” notes Martin Kramer, a Middle East historian at Tel Aviv University. However, the name was rejected, primarily on the grounds that it was irredentist—that is, that it advocated for the reclamation of lost historical territory—and that it might inflame an already volatile situation. “Under the partition plan, much of [ancient] Judea was not in the modern state envisioned by the United Nations, and Ben-Gurion was trying to make a vision of Israel as broad as possible,” says Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University. Ben-Gurion saw the danger in the territorial claim inherent in the name Judea. Neither he nor the council wished to further antagonize the international community, so they rejected it.

Another popular suggestion for the name of the new state was Zion. The logic was simple: Zionism is the ideological project and political pursuit of establishing a Jewish state, so Zion would be the state. Kramer notes that “in the Bible, Zion sometimes meant all of Israel” but that “Har Tzion, Mount Zion, was outside the Jewish state licensed by the partition plan.” This name was likewise rejected in the interest of avoiding provocation, as the city of Jerusalem, where Mount Zion

Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, Gustave Doré (1855).

is located, was designated an international city under the UN partition.

The name Ever was also considered. Derived from Ivri, the Hebrew word for “Hebrew,” Ever had the benefit of not representing a territory. However, writer Moshe Brilliant, in a 1949 Palestine Post article on the National Council’s deliberations, explained that “no one liked it.”

In addition to those names considered by the council, there were also some omitted from the conversation. The most prominent of these was the name Palestine. After the third Judean war and the destruction of the Second Temple, the Romans changed the name of the province of Judea to Syria Palaestina, derived from the Greek name for the region, Philista, meaning “land of the Philistines.” Given that the Philistines were the Israelites’ ancient enemy, it’s unclear whether the Romans merely picked the Greek word for the region or whether the choice was made out of spite. In the following centuries, as the land passed from the Byzantines to the Arabs to the Ottomans, it retained this new name in various incarnations, including “Palestine.”

In the years before the establishment of the state, when Jews were making aliyah, the common term for the region, even among Jews, was Palestine. Historian Gil Troy notes how the word Palestine “started to have a certain magic to Jews in the 1880s, much more so in the 1920s, and certainly in the 1940s.” The Zionist movement employed the word in a variety of contexts. Theodor Herzl himself, in his 1896 treatise The Jewish State, declared that “Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency.” Despite Herzl’s endorsement, this name may have been viewed as a Roman or imperial designation, having been used by non-Jewish regimes in the region for 2,000 years. In addition, the name Palestine could also have been seen as maximalist by referencing the whole of the British Mandate. Moreover, Ben-Gurion’s conception of Zionism centered on the idea of rebirth, whereas the name Palestine would emphasize continuity.

An obvious and popular option was Eretz Yisrael. Dating back to biblical times, Eretz Yisrael, Hebrew for “the Land of Israel,” has denoted a number of geographical and political entities in the area of modern Israel. During the British Mandate, it was even the country’s official Hebrew name, appearing on letterheads and currency. Given Eretz Yisrael’s historical and religious significance, the council considered it for the name of the state. However, since it had been used as the name for the whole of mandatory Palestine, the name could also have implied territorial maximalist aspirations and so was rejected. Distinct from the concept of Eretz Yisrael is Bnei Yisrael, the children of Israel. And while never considered for the name

than either Eretz Yisrael or the patriarch himself. “Israel appears about 2,400 times in the Bible, but the Land of Israel only a few times,” notes Kramer. “Israel in the Bible means the people or house or children of Israel—the people.”

Israel was not considered as a name for the new Jewish state until late in the deliberations. Partially as a result of its historical ambiguity, Ben-Gurion and the members of the National Council saw Medinat Yisrael, the State of Israel, as a relatively benign choice. “Israel had the benefit of referencing the people, not the land,” says Kramer. Future Labor Minister Ze’ev Sharef, in Brilliant’s 1949 article, explained that the councilors didn’t particularly like the name; they found it to be clunky and aesthetically displeasing. Regardless, the end of the mandate was imminent, and the council had more pressing matters to attend to. In his book Three Days, Sharef recounts how, “by a majority vote and in the absence of any other suggestion,” the council approved the name. Two days later, at the Tel Aviv Museum, Ben-Gurion declared the independence of the state of the Jewish people, the State of Israel.

of the state itself, Bnei Yisrael, rather than Eretz Yisrael, is the origin of the word Israel that would be used as the state’s name. Israel’s foundational biblical narrative describes how Jacob, after wrestling with and overcoming an angel, convinces God to confer upon him the name of Yisrael, or Israel. Just what exactly that name means is a matter of no small theological and etymological debate, although most often it is translated as “struggle” or “struggles with God.” According to Jack Bemporad, rabbi and professor of interreligious studies at the Pontifical University in Rome, “Jacob has contended with God and with man and has overcome, and therefore he is called Israel. But from then on, it’s basically given to the descendants of Jacob, in other words, the children of Israel.” And indeed, most subsequent biblical invocations of the word Israel refer to the children of Israel, Bnei Yisrael, rather

The significance of the word Israel has changed over time as its use has proliferated. Legendary Israeli writer Amos Oz once noted, “Israelites belonged to the land of Israel, but Jews, from the very beginning of this collective title, inhabited a wider world.” And while diaspora Jews spent millennia as Bnei Yisrael, with the realization of Zionism and the return to Eretz Yisrael, this process has, in many ways, reversed itself and become more like Oz’s description. Today, more often than not, Israel does not mean the people of Israel, but the people and the State of Israel. And while, in the 75 years since Ben-Gurion and the National Council selected the name, the relative ideological relationship between Israel as a people and a territory has waxed and waned, the fundamental tension between the two has remained the same. What the next 75 years will bring remains to be seen.

BY JACOB FORMAN

ISRAEL WAS NOT CONSIDERED AS A NAME FOR THE NEW JEWISH STATE UNTIL LATE IN THE DELIBERATIONS.

visual moment

Israeli Artist Sigalit Landau’s Immersion in the Dead Sea

BY DIANE M. BOLZ

Fishing nets, a ballet tutu, a baptismal font, boots, a barbed-wire lamp shade and watermelons. All are integral to “The Burning Sea,” an exhibition on view at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem featuring the evocative work of renowned Israeli artist Sigalit Landau. For some 20 years Landau has been creating art inspired by and dedicated to the Dead Sea, a subject, says Israel Museum director Denis Weil, “that holds specific significance and finds new context at the Israel Museum as home to the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

Landau’s innovative sculptures, largescale installations, videos and photographs reference ancient myths, historical events and classic images. At the same

time, they also forge a personal, environmental and political connection to the present, exploring the issues and political divisions surrounding the sea’s unique environment and highlighting the manmade ecological disaster there. “I see my works as both laments and robust ‘souvenirs’ from a sea that is on a path heading toward extinction,” says Landau.

Highlighting the exhibition are new works and sculptures from the artist’s series of objects—stretchers, nets, a handmade tapestry—transformed by the Dead Sea’s salt-rich waters. These objects, some scavenged from the sea, were all subjected to a process of crystallization in the sea’s salty waters, which turned these ordinary and practical items into salt-encrusted, otherworldly, time-defying works of art.

The art Landau has created in this primal moonscape, the lowest land-based elevation on earth, explores the dualities of life and death, injury and healing, destruction and hope—a central theme of the current exhibition and a motivating force behind Landau’s art. “Working outside the studio, away from usual artistic practices,” she has said, “gave me freedom. For me, creating art at the sea meant escaping the civilized world somewhat and being ex-territorial.”

Born in Jerusalem in 1969, Landau first encountered the Dead Sea on family outings as a child and began incorporating it into her art in the early 2000s. From her bedroom in the French Hill neighborhood of northern Jerusalem, she could watch the sun rise over the Dead Sea and

In the video DeadSee from 2005, artist Sigalit Landau floats amid a spiral of watermelons on Israel’s salt-rich Dead Sea.

the mountains of Moab, and on evening walks on a nearby hilltop, she could see the moon’s reflection in the water. Back then, the area of the Dead Sea was more than double what it is now.

One of the world’s natural marvels, the Dead Sea draws numerous visitors for its beauty and unique health properties. Unable to sustain aquatic life because of its high salinity (it is ten times as salty as the ocean), it is abundantly rich in a variety of minerals, including potash and bromine. Surrounded by desert on both sides and scorched by the sun, the Dead Sea has been drying up at an alarming rate, due in part to reduced flow from the Jordan River and mineral extraction. Its banks are collapsing, it has just one-third the surface area it had 50 years ago and its water level is dropping close to 4 feet every year—distressing indications of a dying sea.

The current exhibition, which runs through June 17, includes a series of eight underwater photographs, titled Salt Crystal Bridal, that picture a replica of the black dress worn by Hanna Rovina, the early 20th-century Hebrew actress who performed the role of a young bride possessed by the spirit of her dead lover in the play The Dybbuk (Between Two Worlds). The photographs document the process of crystallization that turns the black dress completely

“I see my works as both laments and robust ‘souvenirs’ from a sea that is on a path heading toward extinction.”

Top: Salt-encrusted objects seem to float on air in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem’s installation of Sigalit Landau’s exhibition “The Burning Sea.” Left: A tutu dress coated in salt crystals is raised from its bath in the Dead Sea in 2016. Above: De Deux (detail), 2017. A tutu embellished with salt crystals after immersion in the sea takes its place as a work of art in “The Burning Sea.”

white with salt crystals—evoking a bridal gown, seemingly “frozen” like the biblical Lot’s wife.

The show premieres a new video work titled Island in the Sun (Bridge II) depicting a pile of shoes Landau assembled on a natural salt island in the Dead Sea that gradually turns white as the shoes are exposed to the blanching effects of the salt. The exhibition also explores Landau’s recurring use of watermelons, a symbol of life and sweetness, including her famed video work DeadSee (2005), in which she floats in the sea amid a spiral of watermelons. Another work, Water-

melon Table (2007), suggests the imagery of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, with watermelon pieces placed on a table of salt, causing them to continually change form as they react to the salt.

A key part of the exhibition is dedicated to the idea of a bridge from the Israeli to the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, a proposal Landau has been working on for more than a decade. She created an installation titled Salt Bridge Summit for the 2011 Venice Biennale that posits a bridge—symbolic and actual—between cultures, religions, opinions and peoples—a bridge over “burning” water.

“After so many years of making art at the Dead Sea,” Landau told the show’s curator Amitai Mendelsohn, “I see this sea as a place for coming together. The environmental tragedy that both we and our neighbors must cope with can become a unique opportunity to realize our shared destiny in a concrete way. To recognize the fluidity of this troubled body of water as well as water’s scarcity and its importance. Working together—even on a conceptual bridge—would mean realizing our interdependence.”

Above: Still from the video Island in the Sun [Bridge II], 2022, in which Landau exposed an array of shoes she placed on a natural salt island in the Dead Sea to the blanching effects of the salt. Right: Salt Crystal Bridal Gown (Sigilit Landau and Yotam From) is suspended under the water of the sea in a work-in-progress video, 2014.

The video Across the Divide (Bridge III), 2022, features a young man walking on a tightrope above the landscape of the Dead Sea looking eastward.

shaped israel

The women who THEY DON’T GET THE RESPECT THEY DESERVE — EVEN GOLDA!

And Why We Need More Female Political Leaders in Israel ASAP

And Why the Status of Women in Israel Is More Precarious Than Ever

i’ll come right out and say it. Looking back at Israel’s history, there’s a glaring absence that helps explain some of the arrogance and intransigence of many of its leaders today—their pugilistic tone and appalling inability to listen and to forge the trust required for the country to move forward, not backward. There are not enough women in the upper echelons of politics, or for that matter, people of any gender who value and practice empathy and consensus-building. Israel’s hyper-macho political culture is one of the factors tearing the country and its democracy apart.

There’s an even deeper failing that if not addressed could doom the great endeavor of Israel, and in this case, I am not talking about the lack of resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The situation for women in Israel right now is more precarious than it is in most modern democracies. Should the judicial reforms announced by the current right-wing government proceed, the government would be in a position to roll back current laws protecting women’s equality, even possibly curtailing women’s freedom of movement in public spaces, such as buses (it’s been tried before and blocked by

ESSAY BY NADINE EPSTEIN • ILLUSTRATIONS BY ISAAC BEN AHARON

Israel’s Supreme Court), and restricting access to abortion under pressure from evangelical allies in the United States.

In theory, women are equal to men in Israel: The 1948 Declaration of Independence called for full gender and racial equality, and a “Women’s Equal Rights Law” was shepherded through the first Knesset in 1951 by the only other woman besides Golda Meir (1898-1978) to sign the declaration, Rachel Cohen-Kagan (1888-1982). This astonishing woman took on the task of women’s equality with relish and humor: Former Justice Minister Pinchas Rosen once recalled that when

Cohen-Kagan stood up in the Knesset to speak about equal rights for women, “she did not pass up the opportunity to remark with a mischievous smile that she also supported equal rights for men.” Her bill was not adopted in its entirety, and, like other women’s rights bills that have passed since, hasn’t been fully enforced. That’s partly because there’s a darkness pervading the heart of Israeli governance: the fundamental inability of certain powerful religious segments of the State of Israel’s population to accept changes in women’s roles and lives, even though the vast majority of Israelis—including many Orthodox Jews— support them. The societal breakdown we’re seeing today may be represented as left versus right, or secular versus religious, but in reality it’s also about the role of women.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The dream was that a new Jewish state would not only bring an end to the centuries-old European stereotype of the “feminized Jewish man,” who was frail, weak and learned, but also to the second-class status to which women were too often relegated in Jewish and other communities. Israel, as imagined by early Zionists, was to be a

secular modern state, and gender equality was considered to be one of the tenets of modern statehood, according to Margalit Shilo, professor emerita of history at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University. While Zionism quickly embraced the ideal of the new aggressive Israeli man (and we are seeing some of the consequences of this today), support was far more lackluster when it came to women’s equality.

“Theodor Herzl, a little before the second Zionist conference in August 1898, decided that women were equal in the Zionist movement and could take their place in the congress,” says Shilo, author of many books on the forgotten women of Israel. Of course, what this meant to women on the ground in the Yishuv—the pre-state Israel period that stretched from the 1880s to independence in 1948—is a different story. In practice, Herzl was ambivalent about the role of women; tellingly, the protagonist of his utopian 1902 novel, Altneuland (The Old New Land), declares that his wife is not interested in the national elections of the Jewish state and prefers to stay home with their baby. Indeed, women had to fight to be included in the Yishuv’s self-governing institutions.

SZOLD MANYA SHOCHAT

TODAY’S SOCIETAL BREAKDOWN MAY SEEM LIKE IT’S LEFT VERSUS RIGHT, OR SECULAR VERSUS RELIGIOUS. IN REALITY IT’S ALSO ABOUT THE ROLE OF WOMEN.

Their campaign for suffrage was bitterly resisted by both the ultra-Orthodox and Sephardi communities, who held fast to deep-seated Jewish religious beliefs relegating women to the private sphere. Not until the 1926 Second Constituent Assembly was it decreed that women had equal rights, again at least on paper, in all areas of civil, economic and political life.

These historical struggles, beginning long before David Ben-Gurion struck his fateful bargain with the Orthodox at the cusp of independence, set the stage for the vulnerable state of secular values in Israel today. That deal, which ceded personal status issues such as marriage and divorce to the rabbinate in return for the Orthodox parties’ support for statehood, has had lasting effects in limiting Israeli women’s political, economic and social options. In essence, it created a theocracy inside a parliamentary democracy by

GOLDA MEIR

absorbing the authority of the rabbinate, controlled today by the Orthodox, from Ottoman law. Unforeseen by Ben-Gurion and Israel’s other secular founders, the ultra-Orthodox population would surge rather than vanish, turning these parties into coalition powerbrokers that could wield civil power through the Israeli government, including the Ministry of Religious Affairs, and other institutions.

But the power of the ultra-Orthodox was not yet cemented during the prestate period, making “the Yishuv an era of great opportunities for women,” at least in those professions that were open to them, says Shilo. Those were the same fields accessible to women in the United States and Europe, an outgrowth of the progressive movement that was building steam around the same time as Zionism. Via these professions, immigrant Jewish women brought some of the greatest

hits of Western civilization to pre-state Palestine—education, public health and social work.

Although generally less well-known than their male counterparts, countless strong women helped build Israel into what it is today, and not only as wives and mothers. We would be remiss not to celebrate at least a few of them when we are marking Israel’s 75th year. Even the most famous don’t get the kind of widespread recognition they deserve. One of the best-known pioneers of the pre-state period was the brilliant Baltimore-born visionary leader Henrietta Szold (18601945), who first visited Israel in 1909 and settled there permanently in 1933. In the United States she is heralded as the founder of Hadassah, a rare women-run organization of the time (which gave American women direct opportunities to improve life for people living in

RACHEL COHEN-KAGAN

Ottoman-era Palestine), and although not credited, she was the de facto editor (even rarer) of the then-very-male Jewish Publication Society. She should also be known for completing rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary, although she was only allowed to attend on the condition that she not ask to be ordained. In Israel, Szold is also remembered as director of the Youth Aliyah, an agency established by another enterprising woman, Recha Freier (1892-1984), which rescued thousands of Jewish children from Nazi Germany and delivered them safely to Israel. Szold also opened Israel’s first nursing school, raised funds for and established Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem with its inclusive mission of helping Jews and Arabs alike, and set up the first professional social work agencies in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Petah Tikva, replacing what she disdained as “the old Lady Bountiful system” that was not based “on justice to the unfortunate.”

Szold was also unique in that she was included in the leadership of major Zionist organizations and, in 1931, became the first woman to serve on the executive committee of the National Council, the governing body of the Yishuv, which was

ADINA BAR-SHALOM

responsible for everything from education to defense. She commanded respect as an intellectual powerhouse: In a speech she gave in 1896, one month before Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), Szold had outlined her vision of a Jewish state in Palestine as a place to ingather diaspora Jewry and revive Jewish culture. “I can’t think of any other woman who was as influential in so many areas,” says Shilo. An authoritative biography by Dvora Hacohen, To Repair a Broken World: The Life of Henrietta Szold, Founder of Hadassah, came out in 2021,

SHULAMIT ALONI

ALICE SHALVI

but Szold has yet to be included in the first tier when it comes to recognizing Israel’s founding figures.

Another towering figure was Szold’s friend Manya Shochat (1878-1961). A colorful character, she established a small experimental farming collective at Sejera in the Lower Galilee in the early years of the 20th century that some consider to be the prototype for the kibbutz movement. She believed that the then-common practice of hiring Arab farmworkers was not a good model on which to build Jewish life in Palestine, and that European Jews like her should be trained to do the work themselves. At Sejera, women wore pants and participated as equals. Shochat also pushed the envelope in regard to other occupations considered off-limits to women. “She was one of only a few women who belonged to Hashomer, an association that protected the early Jewish settlements, and was known for dressing in Bedouin clothes and riding horseback throughout the land on her protective routes,” says Francine Klagsbrun, author of the 2017 book Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel. Lauren B. Strauss, director of undergraduate studies of the Jewish Studies Program at American University, describes Shochat as “a revolutionary in Tsarist Russia who came to Palestine and helped start the kibbutz movement and formed armed self-defense units.” Largely unknown in the United States, Shochat has been rediscovered in Israel in recent years.

However, it is Ada Maimon (1893-

1973) whom Israelis celebrate as the mother of Yishuv feminism, says Pnina Lahav, author of the 2022 biography The Only Woman in the Room: Golda Meir and Her Path to Power. Maimon is not wellknown outside Israel, but in 1921 she founded and ran the influential Women Workers Council (WWC), a subgroup of the Yishuv’s powerful Histadrut trade union, to fight for women’s interests. In a failed effort to curb the group’s independence, the Histadrut pushed Maimon out in 1928 and replaced her with a leader then still known as Golda Meyerson. It wasn’t a good fit—Golda had other goals besides advancing women, which incensed Maimon and other WWC members, and the two women remained at odds throughout their lives. Like Shochat, Maimon also established a working farm that gave women the skills needed to break into agriculture, the dominant industry of the time. After 1948, she served in the first and second Knessets, spearheading laws related to women’s equality, and never gave up on her quest for “equality in all walks of life” between women and men.

Which brings us to Golda Meir, who preferred to be called by her first name. As the only female prime minister so far of the State of Israel—as well as the first female head of a government in the Middle East since ancient times, one of the first three women to lead a modern nation and the only one of those three not to follow a husband or father—she certainly has more name recognition than almost any other Israeli woman. Without the American money and support raised by the Russian-born, Milwaukee-raised Golda, there might not even be a Jewish state. But her many achievements and the wonder of Golda herself—how she came to be the only woman operating at the highest levels of power—are still underappreciated. To gain the trust of the men around her, this vastly talented woman had to, consciously or unconsciously, adopt their values and, to some extent, their behavior, says Lahav. This strategy catapulted her into many powerful positions unattainable to other women, including Israel’s first fe-

Clockwise from top left: Ada E. Yonath (b. 1939) is a biochemist and crystallographer best known for her pioneering work on the structure of ribosomes. In 2009 she became the first Israeli woman (and only one to date) to receive a Nobel Prize (in chemistry). Ofra Haza (1957-2000), an iconic Israeli singer and songwriter of Yemenite ancestry, was famous worldwide and helped popularize Mizrahi culture. Aida Touma-Suleiman (b. 1964) is a Christian Palestinian who has been in the Knesset representing the Arab party Hadash since 2015, and was the long-time chair of its Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality. Many consider Rachel Bluwstein (1890-1931) the founding mother of Hebrew poetry.

male foreign minister and, finally, head of state from 1969 to 1974.

Golda also possessed empathy, was a good listener, valued consensus and cared deeply about issues that affected women and children. But unlike Maimon, her overriding goal was statehood, and once that was achieved, the Labor Party unity she believed was required for the new country to survive and absorb massive numbers of immigrants. According to Lahav, Golda felt she didn’t have the luxury of focusing on women specifically. Nor, having mastered the subtleties of

being the only woman in the room, did she invite many other women in. One woman she did mentor was Esther Herlitz (1921-2016), who in 1966 became the first woman to serve as an Israeli ambassador (to Denmark) and later served in the Knesset. It is also noteworthy and often forgotten that as minister of labor, Golda pushed through maternity leave and other policies that transformed Israeli women’s lives, long before these policies were common in other countries. For years, she was pointed to as proof of women’s equality, both in Israel and in

From top: Sara Aharonson (18901917) was a member of Nili, a ring of Jewish spies working for the British in World War I. When eventually caught, she was tortured and took her own life to protect other members of the intelligence network. Yael Rom (19322006) was one of the first female pilots of the Israeli Air Force. Vicki Shiran (1947-2004) was an Egyptian-born Israeli social activist dedicated not only to feminism, but to fighting discrimination against Mizrahim in Israel.

the diaspora, covering up the lack of it. Although she is revered by many American Jews, these achievements have been shamefully ignored in Israel, and some feminists today believe that her leadership, particularly in regard to her role in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, was judged harshly in part because she was a woman.

Golda’s unwillingness to prioritize women’s rights also vexed lawyer and writer Shulamit Aloni (1928-2014) Aloni was 30 years younger than Golda and, when it came to feminism, her chief nemesis. Aloni pushed aggressively for women’s rights and civil rights in ways that irritated Golda, who had no patience for what are now known as second-wave feminists, with their sweeping critique of Israeli society—she famously once called their American counterparts “bra-burners.” Golda did her best to torpedo Aloni’s political career, while Aloni, equally unbending, never gave Golda the respect she deserved, says Lahav. In 1974, after Golda resigned, Aloni became the first woman other than Golda to serve in the cabinet, as minister without portfolio. Aloni later went on to found and represent Meretz, a left-wing party, in 1992. She served as minister of education from 1992 to 1993, then minister of communications as well as minister of science and culture. Her strong views shaped contemporary Israeli civil society: At her death, The New York Times heralded her as “an early champion of civil liberties, challenger of religious hegemony and outspoken opponent of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.” She minced no words about where she saw Israel going: On the cover of her 2008 book, Israel: Democracy or Ethnocracy?, she declared, “The state is returning to the ghetto, to Orthodox Judaism, and the rule of the fundamentalist rabbinate is becoming more profound.”

Alice Shalvi (b. 1926) is another unstoppable giant of Israeli feminism—at age 96 she recently joined demonstrators on the streets of Jerusalem to protest the proposed judicial reforms. Born in Germany and educated in England, she was already pushing for women’s inclusion in the Jewish world before she made aliyah

in 1949. She has never held political office, but she paved the way for women’s rights in other ways. After being denied a deanship in 1973 at the Institute of the Negev (now Ben-Gurion University) on the basis of gender, Shalvi organized other female faculty members and shone a spotlight on the ugly discrimination women faced in Israeli academia. As founding director of a progressive school for Orthodox girls, she made sure they studied the same Jewish texts as boys did, training a generation of Orthodox feminists. Like Aloni, Shalvi helped build the civil and legal infrastructure that promotes Israeli women’s rights. In 1984, she founded and led the Israel Women’s Network, one of the premier organizations populating Israel’s civil sphere, focusing on consciousness raising, advocating for litigation and legislation to improve the status of Israeli women, and increasing the number of women elected to national and local government.

The odds have always been stacked against women climbing the ladder to Israel’s highest political strata. In 1949, there were 11 women out of 120 members in the Knesset. Since then the number has plunged to as low as seven women and reached an all-time high of 35 in the 2021-2022 Bennett-Lapid government, according to a recent article by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI). Since the new far-right coalition forged by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took over last fall, the number of women has fallen to 31. As a result, Israel is currently ranked 97th among 190 countries in representation of women in its parliament, down from 61st place last year, and below countries such as Kazakhstan, China, Morocco, the UAE, Singapore, Mali, Egypt and Bulgaria, according to monthly data collected by the Switzerland-based Inter-Parliamentary Union. Among OECD countries, Israel ranks 31st out of 38. Knesset representation, however, is just one indicator. Women in Israel hold far fewer ministerial positions than men; representation peaked at nine during the Bennett-Lapid government. Only six women out of 38 are in the current cabinet. “After many years

of an upward trend,” the IDI report says, “women’s presence in the political arena is now in retreat.”

But numbers don’t begin to tell the full story. Only two women have led the foreign ministry (one of them Golda) and to date, no woman has held either of the two other most prestigious portfolios— defense and finance. The IDI also reports that the party pipeline for women is drying up: Women are now less likely to serve as party leaders, a critical route into higher leadership. The report concludes that as long as the ultra-Orthodox parties persist in their refusal to include women on their slates, there will be little chance of gender parity in the Knesset. And while one would hope that women would be taking the lead in municipalities, female mayors in Israel are surprisingly rare, and only one of the country’s three largest cities, Haifa, has ever had a female mayor, Einat Kalisch-Rotem (b. 1970), who was elected in 2018.

Another daunting obstacle to political power for women has been the prominence of the country’s military, in particular its elite units, in launching young men into politics. This dynamic began in the Yishuv era, when only small numbers of women (such as Shochat) were part

of the Hashomer groups. And although women made up as much as 20 percent of the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization that led the fight against the British for independence, they were often expected to cook and clean at the same time they carried a gun, according to some accounts. In the early years of the state, women were eligible for combat duty, including piloting warplanes. The first female Israel Air Force (IAF)

though she didn’t qualify for medical reasons, her victory empowered female Knesset members to successfully pass a bill that allowed women to volunteer for any military position they could qualify for. In 2001, Roni Zuckerman (b. 1981) became the first IAF female jet fighter pilot, and in 2014, Oshrat Bacher (b. 1979) was appointed Israel’s first female combat-battalion commander. Today, despite the opposition of religious Zionists, many more combat and combat-intelligence units are open to women. Even so, the military is “not a path to political leadership for women,” says Moment Israel Editor Eetta Prince-Gibson. “Rather, such women are seen as exceptions.”

pilot, Yael Rom (1932–2006), earned her wings in 1951 and led the parachute drop at the Mitla Pass at the start of the 1956 Sinai campaign. Shortly afterward, women were barred from combat positions out of fear for their safety. In 1994, a brave young woman named Alice Miller (b. 1972) successfully petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to allow women to take the pilot entrance exams. Al-

One such exception is Tzipi Livni (b. 1958), who after Golda, held more top leadership positions than any other woman in Israel. An IDF officer who worked for the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, before finishing her law studies, she served in six consecutive Knessets from 1996 to 2019. She was Israel’s first female minister of justice, minister of agriculture and minister of housing and construction, as well as vice prime minister. In both 2008 and 2009, Livni’s party, Kadima, won enough seats for her to lead the government, but ultimately she was unable to

Continued on page 55

SHIKMA BRESSLER ESTHER HAYUT

AFTER MANY YEARS OF AN UPWARD TREND, WOMEN’S PRESENCE IN THE POLITICAL ARENA IS NOW IN RETREAT.

? ISRAEL

75 YEARS

3,000 YEARS CONTEXT OF MEAN IN THE

WHAT DOES OF THE STATE OF OF JEWISH HISTORY?

INTERVIEWS BY

Diane M. Bolz

Suzanne Borden

Sarah Breger

Nadine Epstein

Noah Phillips

Eetta Prince-Gibson

Amy E. Schwartz

Francie Weinman Schwartz

Meir Buzaglo

Daniel Fainstein

Konstanty Gebert

Yitz Greenberg

Rokhl Kafrissen

Yossi Klein Halevi

Aviya Kushner

Taya Mâ Shere

Nadia Matar

Yehudah Mirsky

Susan Neiman

Fania Oz-Salzberger

Judea Pearl

Dina Porat

Simon Schama

James S. Snyder

For some this new state was a haven after the horrors of the Shoah, for others it was the birth of a new, muscular Jew after centuries of stereotype, and for yet others it was reishit tzemihat geulateinu (the beginning of the flowering of our redemption). Of course, there was not much time to ponder Israel’s place in Jewish history—within hours of Ben-Gurion’s speech, five Arab nations invaded the new state. But Israel survived, and even its critics would have to say it has thrived in its 75 years of existence. Almost half of world Jewry currently lives there, and the nation typically ranks among the 30 countries with the highest GDP per capita. It is hard not to view it as a success.

But what do these past 75 years, a mere blink of the eye, mean in the context of three millennia of Jewish history? Has Israel’s presence signaled a rebirth or the start of a new covenant? Do we err in allowing it to overshadow the diaspora? Is it the most significant milestone in Jewish history or one of many? We asked a selection of historians, religious leaders and other insightful observers to weigh in. That Israel’s existence is miraculous is clear—as every respondent made sure to let us know—but the rest, like everything in Judaism, is up for debate.

On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion announced the establishment of the State of Israel.

FANIA OZ-SALZBERGER

The First Temple lasted about 400 years, the Second Temple held for 600 years, and the Third Temple—if modern Israel may assume that name—is dangerously close to kicking the bucket at 75. Only this time there is no Assyria to whisk ancient Israelites into oblivion, no Babylon to herd Judeans into exile, and no Rome to extinguish Jewish sovereignty for two millennia. Today the Jewish state is demolishing itself from within.

The buildup began, perhaps, when Menachem Begin won by a landslide in 1977 by riding the hostility of Mizrahi “Second Israel” against the largely Ashkenazi “First Israel.” During the four following decades, Israel’s fragile web of coexistences was politicized and crudely mishandled. Since the late 2000s, Likud’s public voice has been aggressively sectarian: anti-secular, anti-liberal and anti-Ashkenazi. The three millennia of Jewish history became chips in Israel’s political game, with nationalists claiming biblical borders miraculously emptied of Arabs and ultra-Orthodox leaders despising nonbelievers.

Secular and liberal Jews like myself entered the fray to claim our right as legitimate heirs to Jewish history and culture, with a modern and selective approach to such treasures as the Bible and the Talmud. I tend to believe that the Bible was wiser than we are when it commanded equal human rights for the strangers “living among you.” The conquest of the Palestinians—whether or not their leadership ever allowed a viable peace agreement—sent its rot down to the roots, both Jewish and democratic. It educated three generations of Israelis to believe that democracy is the tyranny of the majority and that the losers need not be heard. First, the Palestinians; then, the Israeli Arabs; soon, the left; possibly the seculars. Is the great Jewish tradition of intellectual democracy, of putting differences into words, dead and gone?

So much for prophecies of doom. Here is a cautious prophecy of redemption: At

75 years, Israel is not a new country. Its democracy dates back to 1897, when the first Zionist Congress was held in Basel. It was a democratic congress, even more so (and astoundingly early) in the following year when women entered as full delegates. But only in 2023 did Israeli civil society discover its dormant power. We are now more comprehensive than the so-called “First Israel” of the secular, liberal and sometimes well-to-do. There are many more of us than merely “the left,” and we are out to reclaim symbols all too easily hijacked by the nationalists, including Israel’s flag and national anthem, “Hatikva.” Above all, we have the leading light of the Declaration of Independence, a magnificent document of Jewish national pride, commitment to peace with the Arabs, and equal civil and human rights.

I am awed by the number of my countrywomen and countrymen who are out on the streets fighting this good fight. It is a very dangerous moment, civil society pitched against state, honest ideology straining against counter-ideology coupled with power-mongering and individual self-interest. I must conclude, fingers trembling on the keyboard, that 2023 may become a very significant year in Jewish history. May the Third Temple remain standing, but only as a democracy.

Fania Oz-Salzberger is an Israeli essayist and professor emerita of history at the University of Haifa.

YITZ GREENBERG

Israel represents the reentry of the Jewish people into history. For most of the last 2,000 years, Jews had only an internal life, enough to keep us alive and unassimilated, but generally without the rights of citizenship or sovereignty that would allow us to decide our own fate. The realization of our national self-determination was one of the great turning points of Jewish history.

ISRAEL REPRESENTS THE REENTRY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE INTO HISTORY.

On another level, Israel represents a renewal of the original covenant between God and the Jewish people, the covenant of tikkun olam—the Jewish commitment to repair the whole world, with our own nation as a role model. I and others have argued that the destruction and mass murder of the Holocaust was such a contradiction of the whole idea of Jewish covenant—such an assault on the idea that the good guys will win and the whole world is headed for universal justice and peace—that the covenant had been broken. I have changed my position on that. I would say now that the covenant itself is going through stages.

In the initial biblical covenant, God saves us from oppression as long as we are faithful to God: When Israel is destroyed, it’s because the Jews didn’t live up to God and were punished for it. The Haredim still believe this about the Shoah. I would argue rather that by rabbinic times, though the covenant continued, it had changed: God had self-limited and would no longer save the Jews by visible miracles. The Talmud says the First Temple was destroyed by idolatry but the Second by baseless hatred. In other words, the Second Temple was destroyed because we sinned against one another, not against God—by engaging in a civil war and a reckless revolt against a power we couldn’t beat.

Now, after the Shoah, we are in the third stage of covenant: God is with us, but we take full responsibility for our survival. In the Shoah, as I see it, the world learned what happens when it doesn’t take up the responsibility for preventing catastrophe. The Shoah made people wake up and see that everyone is a potential victim and you can’t depend on other people to protect you. If you’re not strong enough to protect yourself, you’ll be in serious danger. The Jewish response was to create the State of Israel. That’s what we’re living through right

now—a renewal of the covenant under new rules. God is present as our partner and companion, but one who has called us to take responsibility. This is what the Haredim are wrong about—they say they can learn Torah and be exempt from the army because God will protect us. But in Europe, all the prayers and learning of Torah didn’t stop the Holocaust. The Jewish people overwhelmingly get that. And in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the founders, although called secularists, said openly that their top priority would be to work in the spirit of the prophets: bringing back scattered Jews from around the world and fulfilling the traditional promise of justice for everyone. There was a very conscious taking of responsibility for what Jewish tradition defined as the covenant with God.

Eighty years ago, and for 2,000 years before that, if you were a Jew you were in more danger than other people. Jewish blood was cheap. Israel in 75 years has not only guaranteed a haven to ev-

ery Jew in the world, it has made Jewish lives more likely to be saved, as you saw happen in Ukraine. If you were a Jew, there were people out there who made special efforts for you. That’s an amazing accomplishment—Israel and world Jewry have restored the value of Jewish life.

Irving “Yitz” Greenberg is an Orthodox rabbi and president of the J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life at Hadar. His many books include the forthcoming The Triumph of Life: A Narrative Theology of Jewry and Judaism

YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI

Jewish history is a very strange mixture of success and failure. The Bible is the strangest ancient epic because its protagonists, the Jewish people, fail at their

mission. Their mission is to maintain a level of collective holiness, to live in the intensity of a relationship with a revealed presence of God in the desert, in the mishkan (tabernacle) and later in the Temple, through prophecy. And we failed. We couldn’t hold that level of holiness, and we went into exile, supposedly to learn from our mistakes and to do some form of penance. That’s the story that Jews have told themselves for thousands of years, that the Torah tells. It’s a magnificent story of failure.

And now, we’re at a particular moment, coinciding with our 75th anniversary, when the ability of Israeli society to hold together is really hanging in the balance. The question we’re facing is: Is this the beginning of the unraveling and one more tragic example of Jewish self-destructiveness? Or is this the beginning of finally facing deeply distorting processes in Israeli society that we’ve allowed to go unchecked—whether it’s settler violence or the ultra-Orthodox

David Ben-Gurion announced the Declaration of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, in Tel Aviv, Israel.

state within a state?

If, almost at the last minute before these processes become impossible to stop, we face them, maybe this crisis will be a blessing, however traumatic. I hope I’m wrong, but I fear the worst is still to come, and that the decent, Zionist, Jewish, democratic Israel I fell in love with as a young American Jew, and that is embodied by the two flags on the bimah of American synagogues, is in danger.

Hope is being expressed every day in the streets of Israel. I never thought we would see a movement of this magnitude and intensity where every week, sometimes every day, hundreds of thousands of Israelis are turning out. We’re fighting for the right to continue loving Israel, to continue being proud of Israel. That fighting spirit has taken liberal Israelis by surprise. I come from the center, and we are militant centrists, which means we’re a little bit left-wing, a little bit right-wing. But now, we really have to fight for the center. If we fail to maintain a minimal sense of unity, of cohesiveness, then to my mind it’s the effective end of the Jewish story.

So long as there’s a Jewish state, the diaspora is not exile, because exile is the condition of coerced distance from the land of Israel. If, God forbid, there’s no Israel, the exile returns. There’s no diaspora anymore, there’s just exile again. And I don’t believe we will be able to sustain Jewish life with the failure of a Jewish state. That’s what we’re fighting for now. We’re fighting for the future of the Jewish people, not just for the state of Israel. This is showtime for Jewish history.

And the fourth is the creation of Israel. Those are the four great, overwhelming moments that have shaped Jewish life. But the Israel that was created in 1948, the Israel of its Declaration of Independence, promising, according to its noble text, “freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel;” and “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex;” a “guarantee of freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture;” “safeguarding the Holy Places of all religions” and “faithfulness to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations...” is the Israel whose existence is now imperiled by a radical alternative: a halachic-nationalist state in which other religions—Islam and Christianity—have no rights to full citizenship or possibilities of true allegiance. So this moment of existential crisis turns on the most fundamental issue of all: Is Israel to be a liberal democracy in which all who live there have equal rights, or is its destiny to be a Bible-authorized nationalist theocracy? Is it a state for Jews or a state for Judaism?

I saw, during the recent demonstrations, that there were two great hangings posted on the walls, I think outside the Jaffa Gate of the Old City—Turkish walls, of course. And one of them was the enormous Israeli flag that the protesters have adopted, rather brilliantly, making the point “We are patriots, too.” And the other was a huge flag with the text of the Declaration of Independence and that very important and dignified clause about the protection of minority rights.

SIMON SCHAMA

I think there are four fundamental moments in Jewish history. One is the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The second is the expulsion of Jews from Iberia in 1492. The third is the Shoah.

It was moving to me because throughout our history—not, of course, just during the Shoah—Jews have suffered because our minority rights have not been protected. So it was critical to the founders in 1948 to say very unequivocally that minority rights would always be protected. And anybody who reads the crucial document about liberal constitutional democracy, which is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, will know that one of his bugbears, even though he’s a classic liberal, is what he calls majoritari-

anism or what we’ve called since, the tyranny of the majority. And the entire program of these proposed reforms in Israel is imposing, as hundreds of thousands of people of all ages and types understand, a majoritarian tyranny. And democracy cannot stand with a majoritarian tyranny.

English historian Simon Schama hosted the five-part BBC documentary series The Story of the Jews, based on his three-volume book of the same title. His new book, Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations, is due out in September.

AVIYA KUSHNER

There have been many dramatic moments in Jewish history, but certainly the establishment of the State of Israel and the incredible fact that Israel has survived for 75 years has to be a high point. It’s not just that there’s a country; the importance of Hebrew as a national language, an achievement that was unimaginable 150 years ago, can’t be underestimated. Nor can the fact that there is now a common second language among many diaspora Jews. It’s so rare for a language to be revived. It’s a tremendous achievement for Hebrew to be alive and to be so vibrant.

Of course, there were and are other Jewish languages. Yiddish is approximately 1,000 years old, and it was the common language of the Jews of Europe and Ashkenazi Jewry. Ladino, the mother tongue of Jews in the Ottoman Empire for 500 years, was the common language for many Sephardi Jews. So, prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, the Jewish world was split into Ladino speakers and Yiddish speakers. When Hebrew was revived, these two very different traditions folded together and started using Hebrew as their major language.

So to me, Hebrew is a bridge. It’s a bridge to tefilah (prayer) and to the Tanakh. It’s a bridge to contemporary

Yossi Klein Halevi is an American-born Israeli author and journalist.

Israel. It’s a bridge to the medieval Hebrew poets of Spain. It’s an incredible bridge between Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardi Jews and Mizrachi Jews. It’s a bridge to many different eras, and it’s up to you which lane of the bridge you want to walk down. But you can’t even cross the bridge if you don’t speak any Hebrew. You’re stuck on one side and the rest of Jewish history is on the other.

Hebrew also offers a sense of safety and community. Recently I learned that each city in Iran had its own Jewish language—for example, the Jews of Isfahan spoke Isfahani. Why weren’t the Jews of Isfahan speaking Farsi exclusively? Because they needed a language that their neighbors didn’t understand in times of danger. Now, we have that on a much larger scale—instead of a “city” language, or a regional language, we have a national language, a language of the entire Jewish people.

Today, there’s a growing division between Hasidic Jews or ultra-Orthodox Jews and other Jews—and Hebrew can help bridge that gap as well. You may not be fluent in Yiddish, but you may be able to speak enough Hebrew to get through that gap. That’s why a secular Israeli might more easily have a conversation with a Hasid at a bus stop compared to what you might see in the United States. Why? Because there’s a common language

My personal view is that a major reason why there’s a growing gulf between American Jewry and Israeli Jewry is because American Jewry hasn’t emphasized Hebrew language study. If you speak with South American Jews, their Hebrew is often excellent. European Jews often have terrific Hebrew. It’s only in the United States that the Hebrew level is very low. That’s why American Jews are sort of on an island and the rest of Jewry is communicating through Hebrew. But American Jews who can acquire competence in Hebrew can participate in the world Jewish conversation.

As someone who teaches in college, I encounter a lot of teenagers and 20-somethings with views on Israel that are really divorced from what you might think if you read a newspaper in Hebrew.

A lot of the students I encounter who have very strong opinions on Israel are unfortunately not able to read anything in Hebrew. So they’re always getting their information through a curtain. They’re not able to listen to Israeli radio or watch Israeli television or speak to Israelis in Hebrew. They have strong feelings on Zionism, but often can’t read essential texts in the language they were written in. When you read a lot of prominent American commentators on Israel, the people they quote are almost invariably journalists or scholars who speak fluent English. That’s great, but that’s not everyone in Israel. I would say a lot of the voters for Netanyahu don’t speak a word of English. So if you’re only speaking to the reporters who maybe made aliyah, or are American in some way, you’re not really getting the full picture.

Do people see speaking Hebrew as a political statement? That is the big danger. I see more and more young people who are really drawn to Yiddish or Ladino. My personal theory is people want to connect to Jewish language but feel uncomfortable making any sort of statement in favor of Israel. Unfortunately, that means they feel pressured to avoid the Hebrew language. There have also unfortunately been writers and academics who have turned any connection with the Hebrew language of any era into a political and even a military statement. I have endured some really nasty statements. For example, when I was speaking recently at a panel on translation at a literary conference there was a woman in the audience who kept raising her hand over and over and saying, “Why don’t you translate from Arabic?” And so I said, “Because I’m not fluent in Arabic.” She just wouldn’t let go. She kept disrupting the talk and finally said, “Nobody should be translating Hebrew.” I responded, “Thank you for saying this out loud because this is the way, unfortunately, a lot of people in this space feel—that Hebrew as a language is somehow illegitimate.”

I believe every language is legitimate. I certainly don’t believe in banning languages or boycotting them. For the Jewish people, the revival of Hebrew is

I

DON’T

BELIEVE WE WILL BE ABLE TO SUSTAIN JEWISH LIFE WITH THE FAILURE OF A JEWISH STATE

something to be deeply proud of. Modern Hebrew is a miracle—a language spoken by a people exiled and persecuted and expelled from every European country and many countries in the Middle East—who found the strength to rebuild. No matter how much flak you get in certain American intellectual spaces, Hebrew is the greatest gift that we have. It’s our connection to the past and it’s our bridge between the past and the present and the future. For Jews, Hebrew is our precious connection to each other, ancient and alive.

Aviya Kushner is the author of The Grammar of God, an associate professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and The Forward’s language columnist.

JAMES S. SNYDER

Up until the time I began my tenure at the Israel Museum in 1996, my academic and intellectual focus had been literature and the visual arts from the middle of the 19th century to the present. Then I arrived at a place where you could experience a million and a half years of material cultural history that informed that entire timeline from prehistory to the present, and, for me, everything changed.

Thinking about modern Israel, you can contextualize the creation of the modern state in relation to this incredibly long narrative. And there is an especially meaningful flow of history for us across these last 2,000 years, which includes the unfolding of Christianity and Islam after Judaism and galvanizes an understanding and appreciation for what the land of Israel is all about.

The birth of the State of Israel 75 years ago created a modern democratic state in the Middle East. And the ongoing beauty and complexity of this picture can be seen in relation to the unfolding of all the other cultures that are also there. The richly textured diversity of the place also demonstrates an innate duality, on the one hand promoting an incredibly meaningful narrative of cross-connection among cultures, while at the same time underscoring the complexity of these cultures as they move in different directions, even though they share a common heritage.

During the Ottoman Empire, there were no countries in the Middle East. There was only the Ottoman Empire, and there were cities—Cairo, Jerusalem, Amman, Beirut—and before World War I you could easily travel by train between all of these cities. And, although they are not so far from Jerusalem, today they seem very distant. This is not about divisiveness, but rather about national borders that have risen up between countries that did not then exist.

In terms of Judaism in a Jewish state, remember too that one of its foundational tenets is that it’s not about nationhood, but rather about peoplehood— about people with a shared identity who live all over the world and share an underlying value and belief system that connects them. The potential, and also the challenge, for the State of Israel is how to balance all of this.

As an American who was not deeply connected with the Middle East before moving there in the mid-1990s, I did not yet fully appreciate the mix of Eastern and Western Jewish cultures and the distinct pathways to the history of Ju-

daism in the East and the West. Now, of course, I know well the importance of the foundational history of the Jewish people in the region from the time before the First Temple, to the First Temple, and then to the First Temple diaspora to the east, followed by the history of the Second Temple, leading to the diaspora to the west. We were a peoplehood dispersed in two directions who became acculturated separately. Part of the potential and complexity of the founding of the State of Israel was the act of reuniting and unifying us, and all of this was surely part of the excitement, as well as the challenge, of the founding of the state 75 years ago. From a Western perspective, creating Israel as a modern democratic state in the Middle East was also hugely meaningful, and this remains an essential part of the picture today.

At the moment, Israel is struggling with extreme differences in views about how to shape and interpret the state’s value system. At the same time, there is an amazing rising generation of young leaders of cultural and community-based nonprofit organizations who want to envision a vital future for the country and who are committed to looking past the political darkness of the moment and realizing the potential of what can be accomplished in the miracle that is the State of Israel at 75.

When I came to Israel and Jerusalem 30 years after the Six-Day War, I still felt the closeness of that history. Today is very different. Now Israel is a contemporary country, and Jerusalem is a contemporary city. From Jerusalem, on a clear day, you can still see the landscape cascading downward 6,000 feet to the Dead Sea, with the hills of Jordan beyond. You see the beauty of that juxtaposition, and you see the complexity. And you cannot forget the potential that can still be realized there.

James S. Snyder is the executive chairman of the Jerusalem Foundation, Inc. He served as The Israel Museum’s Anne and Jerome Fisher Director from 1997 to 2016 and then as its international president through 2018.

YEHUDAH MIRSKY

That this Jewish commonwealth exists in the historical land of Israel and just goes about its business on a daily basis, when you step back and think about it, is nothing less than astonishing. It’s not at all to be taken for granted. Jews were powerless just the blink of an eye ago— and yet so many people have trouble even imagining it. For others, including some Israelis, Jewish powerlessness is still such an overwhelming presence in their minds that it gets in the way of coherently assessing how much power Jews in Israel actually have—or the limits to that power.

Seventy-five years is and isn’t a substantial chunk of time. One relevant point of comparison might be the Hasmonean kingdom, which lasted 80 years. Those 80 years were significant, with outsized historical consequences, but they were limited. The Hasmonean kingdom began in glory and ended in obloquy. There’s a reason why the story of the Maccabees was sorely diminished in rabbinic memory, and why it then became so important to the Zionist rebellion against that tradition. In any society, 80 years is also the span of three generations or so. We know that living memory lasts about three generations: If you want to keep a culture alive, you need a generation of grandparents who can talk to grandchildren.

The founders of Zionism and the revolution, even when rebelling against Jewish tradition, were in very deep dialogue with it. And increasingly the various inheritors of it don’t understand each other at all. It’s a measure of the success of Zionism that Israelis who leave the borders of the state sometimes have no idea what Judaism or Jewish identity is. Their sense of peoplehood becomes very attenuated—what do I possibly have in common with Jews outside Israel? That’s one reason the

75 YEARS IS AND ISN’T A SUBSTANTIAL CHUNK OF TIME. ONE COMPARISON MIGHT BE THE HASMONEAN KINGDOM, WHICH LASTED 80 YEARS.

non-Orthodox denominations have failed in Israel. Partly it’s because of the official war against them, but it’s also partly because they’re not indigenous.

Has having sovereignty in Israel changed Jews? Of course; it’s utterly transformative—the empowering effect, the pride. You can’t be Jewish without dealing with it; even if you choose to ignore it, you’re choosing. It’s hard to think of people who are Jewishly identified for whom it doesn’t play some role.

A common denominator between the problems with the Palestinians and the problems of internal Israeli society is the need to look at and rediscover and rebuild political society and civil society. There were many reasons for the failure of the Oslo process, and one is that no attention was paid to building a viable Palestinian political culture. Israel played a role in that, by not caring about it. And in this most recent crisis we also see very fundamental questions as to what is and should be the political culture of Israel and its legal regimes, still to be determined.

Israel isn’t the only country in the world where liberal institutions are under siege, or where we see massive politics of resentment against global elites. And Israel is not the only place where we see a kind of hyper-capitalism ravaging social democracy, breeding social unrest and nationalism and so on. In Israel as elsewhere, you can’t underestimate the extent to which socioeconomic and class divisions really drive these things. Societies need solidarity, and class divisions make that difficult. We may think liberalism is the default setting for humanity, but it’s not. It’s a position and it needs to be defended. Should these things have been more settled by now? Who knows? They’re big questions, and always in motion. But always there’s this mysterious, compelling Jewish will to survive. Divine? Human? Both? That’s an eternal argument too.

Yehudah Mirsky, a former U.S. State Department official, is a professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University and lives with his family in Jerusalem.

He is the author, most recently, of Towards the Mystical Experience of Modernity: The Making of Rav Kook, 1865-1904.

MEIR BUZAGLO

When the State of Israel was created, one group was dominant—the Ashkenazim who made up the workers’ movements. They created the hegemony, the power structures, social inequality. We can be very critical of them today—and as a Jew from Morocco I am indeed critical—but it was this group that enabled us to build our state. Today, everything that was pushed aside or pushed away because of the need to create a state—all of this is surfacing now, and sometimes it seems that we will never be able to bridge the rifts between us.

We recognize the miracle that is the State of Israel at age 75—not so young, but certainly not so old—but we must also ask: Will we emerge from the current situation stronger or weaker? Will we progress to a better time—or will we regress to civil war? Can we recognize our differences, yet agree that we are part of a greater whole, the whole of the Jewish people? This is Israel’s question at the age of 75, but it is also the question for the entire Jewish people: Can we develop new forms of peoplehood and relationships and structures?

Here in the Middle East, we are Arabs and Jews—Jews from very different backgrounds and with very different ways of viewing the country. Players from outside of Israel—both conservatives and progressives—come to us and tell us how to handle the conflict with the Arabs and how to handle the conflict among ourselves. But these ideas are foreign to our own DNA, and they were created to solve problems for other people in other places, and that is why they are leading us either into violent, zealous racism or simplistic attempts to flatter the rest of the world at our own expense.

We must learn to provide our own

Jewish answers to the problems we face. I am a religious man, and I am troubled because I see that in Israel, and for much of the Jewish people, Jewish thought has taken on a narrow, even closed-off and xenophobic character. This is not the living, universal Jewish Torah.

It is true, historically, that most of Jewish creativity occurred either in the desert, in Babylon or in the context of the broader world. Some might say we were never meant to be a state, that Jewish creativity can flourish only when we live among other peoples. There are also those who would say that throughout history, Jewish sovereignty never lasted very long. Yes, our state has already existed for 75 years, but this 75-year-old state has failed to provide a true, relevant response to the challenges of modern thinking. The lack of initiative and philosophical-political entrepreneurship is our failure; and instead, we fall into the traps of zealotry, or simplistic progressivism, or crude co-optation of Jewish thinking into Western thought.

At age 75, Israel must develop its own thinking—we must come back to the

humanities, which will lead us to broad, compassionate interpretations of the Torah today. And we must pay attention to the Sephardi dimensions of thought. The Sephardic world was always open to philosophy, science, language. Sephardi history and the lessons it could teach us have been completely neglected. In the Sephardic world, there never was a violent rupture between the secular and the sacred—there was never a secular revolt against the church, and the distinction between secular and sacred is not important. But we continue to replay, over

CAN WE RECOGNIZE OUR DIFFERENCES, YET AGREE WE ARE PART OF A GREATER WHOLE THE JEWISH PEOPLE?

and over, the Western response to the challenges of modernity and to make that distinction, which creates entire worlds of meaning and significance that have led to some of the difficulties Israel and the Jewish people face today. In the Sephardi world, concepts of unity and togetherness are paramount—not in the fascist sense, but in the sense of making space for the other, for all.

Meir Buzaglo is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Hebrew University and is the founder and leader of the Tikun Movement dedicated to the renewal of society and culture in Israel.

DINA PORAT

The first 1,000 years of Jewish history were during the times of the two Temples, and so much in the Jewish canon is related to this period when Jewish independent life was practiced as a sovereign entity. Then, during the following 2,000 years of exile, there were prayers, poems, songs and writings (both rabbinical and secular) about the longings for the land and the wish to come back to it. The establishment of the State of Israel at the end of these 2,000 years of exile was like taking all those prayers and poems and wishes and habits, with the Bible in the center of it all, and giving it meaning. It was the wishes realized.

Today’s State of Israel was not “born out of the ashes of the Holocaust”—a phrase that should be retired from use. Rather, Israel was created by Zionism— building and settling, developing agriculture and industry and culture, accepting newcomers and so on—starting in 1860. Imagine if there had been no Zionism and the country had been empty of Jews when World War II ended: Where exactly would the destitute, sick survivors have gone? Instead, there were already close to half a million Jews here and a vibrant volunteering entity that accepted them.

After the vote in the United Nations

in November 1947 that called for two countries, an Arab one and a Jewish one, there was dancing in the streets, and people were thrilled and crying for a Jewish state. But the vote was not the result of the Holocaust or of the world’s conscience suddenly waking up. Where was their conscience a few months before when Jews were killed by the millions? It wasn’t because of the Holocaust. It was because of political interests—the Soviet Union pressured nations in Latin America and the Far East to vote yes on partition because it wanted to build its influence in the region.

With all that said, the Holocaust, though not the primary cause of its birth, had an enormous impact on the young state, and for decades after. The impact is still here. If you take the number of those who came after World War II and subtract the 70,000 who could not manage here and went back, we had 370,000 survivors. This includes survivors who came right after the war in the late 1940s, those who came in the 1950s from Poland and Hungary, and then, in the 1970s, immigrants from the Soviet Union who also were survivors. They participated in large numbers in the War of Independence in 1948. Don’t listen to post-Zionists who say that they were forced to participate— they wanted to participate. According to surveys, at the end of 1951, one out of four Israelis was a survivor, which means a quarter of the population. They rebuilt themselves, and then were able to contribute. They grew older, and many started writing their memoirs. They were very active and present in the building of museums, in Holocaust memorial days, in creating laws and regulations related to the Shoah.

But the terrible loss, the tortures, the humiliations, the whole history of the Holocaust left behind an imminent fear that you cannot ignore. It’s very easy to speak about the new Israeli who is brave, who goes to the army, but—as the great poet Dahlia Ravikovitch said—the Holocaust was like a hand grenade that exploded, and each person living in Israel had a little splinter of it that he carries with him. There isn’t one day in Israel

when the Holocaust is not mentioned in some way. It is still with us, part of living life, even though life here is vibrant.

Dina Porat is professor emeritus of modern Jewish history at Tel Aviv University and chief historian of Yad Vashem.

KONSTANTY GEBERT

Even if you throw in the several hundred years of independent Jewish kingdoms in antiquity, we’ve spent most of our time in the diaspora. We’ve been shaped by the diaspora, we’ve adapted to living in diaspora, we’re a diaspora people. However, we could survive in the diaspora only because of the spiritual and intellectual bond that connects us with the land of Israel. Without that, we would have disappeared like the other peoples we know only from the long lists in, for example, the writings of Julius Caesar. So what Israel’s 75th anniversary means for me in the diaspora is another reconnection with the source. Our diaspora life and identity assumes a new meaning, informed and transformed by what Israel does, thinks, prays and hopes.

Of course, the existence of modern Israel changed life in the diaspora. My first encounter with antisemitism was in 1967, when the “wrong” side won the Six-Day War and the Polish state was unhappy about it. Most people in Poland today react to me as a Jew, whether positively or negatively, because of Israel. So many more people know the name of Benjamin Netanyahu than they know those of Abraham Joshua Heschel or Martin Buber or, frankly, Isaiah. I am seen by others through an Israel prism. As for me, I see Israel through a diaspora prism: I find it very easy to understand what an Israeli Arab citizen feels, being part of a country whose anthem and symbolism and religion are not mine—because that was the Polish Jewish experience.

Yet I feel the most connection with Israel when Israel does something I’m not

happy with, like the judiciary overhaul now, or, going back further, the Lebanon War—because I have to accept that this is done in my name. Israel is acting in the name of its own citizens, but it has a claim to speak in the name of world Jewry, and therefore its actions are also in my name. I’m immensely happy and appreciative of Israel’s successes, but it’s appreciation, not pride. I didn’t contribute to it; I didn’t help build the country. But when Israel goes off the rails, I feel unhappy and co-responsible. It doesn’t make sense logically, but emotionally it’s very clear.

In terms of individual events, no single event, apart from the Shoah, was as important in the sweep of Jewish history as Israel’s independence in 1948. In terms of processes, yes, some longterm diaspora processes have been just as important as Israel’s 75 years. The development of the community and its institutions in isolation in the ghetto, the emancipation, Hasidism, Jewish socialism were to my mind as important to Jewish development as Israel’s 75 years. But in terms of discrete events, only the Shoah’s as important Jewishly as the rebirth of Israel.

Konstanty Gebert is a journalist in Warsaw, Poland. His books include a forthcoming history of Israel’s 75 years, A Room with a View of the War.

excising the whole of the post-Second Temple Diaspora experience from Jewish history. To me, that presents a tremendous paradox within modern Jewish existence. Jews have gone through previous catastrophes, but it seems like people had decades and centuries to process those events in various ways, and in a sense, it feels like in the 20th century, we didn’t. The catastrophe was so quickly followed by the birth of the new state, and a continued negation of the diaspora, that somehow, the mourning was always kind of incomplete.

There have always been Jews both in the land of Israel and in galut (exile/diaspora), so there’s always been a complex dynamic between the two groups. But not like today. There have never been this many Jews in Israel—half of world Jewry now lives there—and this has heightened our sense of our connection to the land. But then there’s also the spiritual state of exile. We’re all still within the state of spiritual exile, whether we live in the State of Israel or the state of New York. Personally, I think this is fertile ground for connection between Israeli Jews and American Jews.

It’s so hard to disentangle the establishment of the State of Israel from the destruction of European Jewry. Even 75 years on, Jews never got a chance to fully process what happened during the war; they just got on with life and, for so many, turned their focus to supporting the new State of Israel. At the same time, baked into the ideology of the new state, especially that of its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was the belief in a “historical leap,” effectively

There’s still a very highly romanticized and idealized idea of the State of Israel that people cling to and that was essential to building global consensus about it. It can create real problems because Americans don’t understand the way people live in the state, how they perceive the state or what really goes on there. The majority of American Jews vote Democratic and those are their values, in a very broad sense. If you’ve traveled to Israel in the last six or seven years, you’ve seen how popular Trump is there, and the disjunction in political values can be pretty shocking. What does that mean? It could be that it shows that American Jews—who are largely center-liberal-leaning—don’t fully understand the realities of the State of Israel as a modern political entity.

Israelis live in a Jewish state where the language is Hebrew and the rabbinate has significant power over their lives. They are Jewish citizens in a way that we aren’t in the United States. The

majority of American Jews are not religious and are not shulgoers. A very large part of Israeli society are secular Jews, but that secular identity exists in a very different place and is expressed in very different ways. It is true what people always say, that Israelis exist in a much richer and thicker Jewish context, just by dint of where they are. American Jewish secular identity, if you want to call it that, is much more American than it is Jewish, in that the values are in large part American. American Jews are not really aware of that because they’re so deeply enmeshed within American values. Monolingualism is a very American value, for example, and one that is at odds with the length of Jewish history. Polling data shows us that, when asked what is essential to their Jewish identity, American Jews say that remembering the Holocaust is at the top, along with being a good person and supporting Israel. All the way at the bottom is being part of a Jewish community or observing Jewish law. American Jews are very, very American, and our values are very American. Even our Jewish values are very American. But that doesn’t make them less important.

Both of our countries, the State of Israel and the United States, seem to be at these moments of being extremely tested. This also gives us opportunities to renew and rethink our relationships to each other. There’s a lot for American Jews to engage with and not just say, “Oh, we’re the diaspora,” and accept that we play a supporting or a lesser role. It’s just not true. Israelis need us in many ways, and Israelis need the culture of the diaspora. Israelis need Yiddish, they need Ladino, they need all the things that were left by the wayside in the de-

OUR STATE HAS FAILED TO PROVIDE A TRUE, RELEVANT RESPONSE TO THE CHALLENGES OF MODERN THINKING.

velopment of a unified Israeli culture at the beginning. It’s a good time for us to rethink the dynamic and roles that we play with each other and for each other.

Rokhl Kafrissen is a journalist and playwright in New York City and the winner of the Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish Award in 2022.

SUSAN NEIMAN

In a certain sense, I am not sorry that Israel’s about to celebrate its anniversary under the most right-wing government in its history. That has pulled away a veil a great many people have lived with for some time. The last government was considered moderate and was formed just to keep Benjamin Netanyahu from power, but more Palestinians were killed in the year of that government than in the year before. We’ve been seeing a continual weakening or entire devaluation of the values on which the State of Israel was built.

I think it’s impossible for anyone who cares about democratic values to celebrate 75 years of the State of Israel at this point in time. Even aside from the increasingly violent occupation of close to half the people who live under Israeli sovereignty, in the past 20 years Israel has allied with the worst, most nationalist, most antidemocratic governments in the world, greatly distressing those of us who thought Israel would be a light unto the nations. Turn on the TV and in Brazil,

Jair Bolsonaro’s wife is wearing an Israel t-shirt as she goes to vote. (Fortunately, he lost.) The government of Israel loved Trump and was incredibly happy with his administration—not with the Obama administration, although it gave more aid to Israel than any previous one. And it enrages me that Israel has refused to give the Iron Dome technology—defensive weaponry—to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for fear of offending Russia. What we’re seeing is an intensification of all the tendencies we’ve seen in the 20 years since the second intifada.

It’s not as well known as it should be that there are two tendencies in Jewish tradition, both rooted in the Book of Exodus—and both in the Haggadah, actually. One is universalist: “Let all who are hungry come and eat.” A great scholar, Shalom Spiegel, once told me that that phrase in the Haggadah is in Aramaic, the language of the region, so “all” really means all. We were strangers, so we have an obligation. Then later, when we’ve drunk the wine and eaten the meal, we’re supposed to talk about Amalek, invoking a nationalist tradition about how Jews will always be attacked and victimized. I asked my rabbi if he could sort out the contradiction, and he said no, it’s the civil war that has run through the history of the Jewish people. The favorite Jews everyone loves to cite—Einstein, Freud, etc.—are all universalists. But what’s dominant today, particularly in Israel, is the nationalist tradition. Nationalism is rising all over the world and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be happening in Israel, but I’m a Jewish universalist. I grew up in Georgia in the middle of the civil rights movement, and the message I got from my mother was that we were slaves in the land of Egypt and that’s why we stand with those who were slaves in the land of Georgia. It was also taught by Rabbi Jacob Rothschild of the temple that was bombed for its association with Martin Luther King Jr. And that’s where I get my sense of Jewish universalism.

I actually made aliyah after the Oslo accords, with three children, for a number of reasons. It was argued that American Jews who wanted to actually contrib-

ute to peace and justice in Israel should make aliyah—that 1,000 left-wing American Jews would be a useful addition to the country’s politics. I thought it would be a great place to be an engaged intellectual. It was an interesting five years. I didn’t leave for political reasons, but part of it was realizing that my heart was really universalist rather than tribalist. I am, in fact, a rootless cosmopolitan Jewish intellectual.

I think universalism is compatible with cultural nationalism—in principle. There’s a parable told by Isaac Deutscher that compares the foundation of the State of Israel to someone who tries to escape a burning building by jumping and falls on a passerby and breaks all that person’s bones. It’s understandable—if the jumper then does everything they can to make up for the broken bones. But that hasn’t happened. At this point I can only be in favor of some kind of binational state or confederation. I don’t see anything else as an option, now that the settlers and the government have destroyed the twostate solution as a possibility.

My one distant hope for the 75th anniversary—I don’t really see it happening, but friends were writing to me exuberantly about the recent protests, so who knows—is that this is a case of having to hit bottom before you can rise. If in this moment Israel has reached the nadir of anti-democratic racist violence and begins to realize there is another way to go, a universalist way that would be as Jewish as Jewish nationalism, that would be a fitting celebration of this anniversary.

Susan Neiman is a professor of philosophy and chair of the Einstein Forum in Berlin. Her most recent book is Left Is Not Woke

Seventy-five years ago I was a schoolboy living in Bnei Brak when independence was declared. “Be careful,” my mother told me the next day. “Do not play too far from home because there are things

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE FOR ANYONE WHO CARES ABOUT DEMOCRACY TO CELEBRATE 75 YEARS OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL AT THIS TIME.

in the air which are uncertain.” I remember huddling with my friends in a staircase when Egyptian warplanes attacked our town. One of the neighbors said, “Kids, it’s going to get much worse, but we will prevail.” Warplanes bombarded us, shrapnel flew all around and the house was vibrating and shaking. Things did get much worse. And we prevailed.

It’s a miracle that Israel has lasted for 75 years. Every historian will tell you that we never had this luck before. We have to preserve it, realizing that it’s given to us as a gift, perhaps even as a trial.

Getting sovereignty is really returning to ourselves because we are a special kind of tribe. Unlike other ancient civilizations, we were always a collective that was bound by common memories and by land. There is no individual redemption, there is no afterlife. Listen carefully to what God tells Abraham, the first Jew: “Follow Me to the land where I’m going to show you how I’m going to make you into a great nation.”

I think that Jews everywhere appreciated this return to ourselves and the transformation from being a scattered tribe without identity into something that is very important and not usually mentioned—normalcy. What is a normal form of identity? Sovereignty. The striving for sovereignty is a yearning for normalcy, proof that we carry with us seeds of resilience and rebirth that other tribes do not. That was the idea of Zionism and the idea of establishing a State of Israel.

Before the Holocaust, in the 1930s, Israel already had a healthcare system, education, transportation, electrical supplies. Everything was built by people who were not exactly experts in those fields, but for all intents and purposes it was a state, there to receive the survivors. It’s a mistake to present ourselves as victims of a tragedy rather than a tribe capable of rebirth and hope and resilience. It’s a miracle that the State of Israel has enabled a scattered tribe of middlemen and peddlers to become a world center of art, entrepreneurship and science. It’s how we express ourselves that combines our roots in history and our legends with modernity. This is the key element to ev-

ery aspect of Israeli lives—the combination of our past with the future.

Judea Pearl is professor emeritus of computer science and statistics and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA.

NADIA MATAR

The return of the people of Israel to its land; its social, economic, technological and security achievements; the blossoming of the Hebrew language; settlements springing up where, until a few decades ago, there was barren land; the ability to conduct debate over the future of the people of Israel without depending on dictators and oppressors—all of these things and more constitute the great miracle of the State of Israel’s existence. The realization of the prophets’ vision is happening despite all expectations and despite all odds. However, the miracle is still far from complete. And now, at age 75, Israel is at the phase of clarification. Where to turn?

Zionism was so easy when it was all longing for Zion. In every part of the diaspora, in Poland, in Russia, in Yemen and Morocco, the metaphorical compass needle pointed the way. But the moment that we came here and built an exemplary state, the needle began behaving erratically. And now the third generation asks: Where should the needle be pointing? What is the destiny of the Jewish people in our land?

Israel’s Declaration of Independence states: “By virtue of our natural and historical right and based on the resolution of the League of Nations, we hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish State in the Land of Israel, namely, the State of Israel. We call on the Jewish People in the entire diaspora to unite around settlement, immigration and building and to stand to our right in the great struggle to realize the aspiration of generations for the redemption of Israel.”

The word “democracy,” by the way, does not appear even once. Democracy is necessary as a form of government, but is not the main value of the State of Israel. The purpose of the State of Israel is to be the nation-state of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.

In the postmodern world every person has the right to define his own truth according to whatever suits him. Judaism, in contrast, believes that the source of truth is the Creator, especially in the revelation of His will in the Torah of Moses. Postmodern man views the question of his existence as “What are my rights in the world?” The Jew asks, “What is my duty in the world?”

Currently there is a struggle between the Jewish concept and the postmodern concept in Israel. Twenty-five years ago—with the emergence of the third generation—a revolution of the Israeli cultural elite began declaring openly that they were adopting the postmodern value system. This meant a transition from belief in a Jewish nation state to a state of all its citizens. This was all led by Aharon Barak and the Israeli Supreme Court, which turned Israel from a democracy of government by the people to a dictatorship of postmodern values. Despite all of this, the majority of the people remained conservative. But the “enlightened” minority controls the conservative majority with the court.

Yet, anyone who believes in democracy must respect the will of the majority of the Jewish people, who clearly voted for a right-wing government. The recent elections have shown clearly that an overwhelming majority of the people of Israel have chosen the destiny of a Jewish,

WE HAVE TO PRESERVE THE STATE, REALIZING THAT IT’S GIVEN TO US AS A GIFT, PERHAPS EVEN AS A TRIAL.

nationalist, Zionist, sovereign state. This did not please the minority that now has embarked on a rebellion. Implementing judicial reform will bring back democracy and will finally enable a right-wing government to actually govern.

There is no end to the Jewish people’s challenges and the State of Israel’s challenges. Challenges will be with us even in the State of Israel’s 150th year, but we will deal with these challenges as a great and strong people, the great majority and perhaps all of whom live in the Land of Israel. I am part of a sovereignty movement that works to promote Israeli sovereignty over all parts of the Land of Israel starting with the Jordan Valley. The more our hold on the entire Land of Israel increases, the more we will be sovereign and free in our Land, the more the message of the People of Israel will increase in light and in power. As a sovereign people in its Land we will be able to focus on the People’s spiritual and practical goal: spreading goodness to the entire world as a light unto the nations.

Nadia Matar is the co-chair, with Yehudit Katzover, of the Sovereignty Movement, formerly Women in Green, which seeks Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and all the land considered to be part of the traditional land of Israel.

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TAYA MÂ SHERE

Seventy-five years is but a drop in the sea when we tap into ancient remembering and legacies that span thousands of years. Yet, the enormity of this anniversary cannot be underestimated, given the devastation of Palestinian lives, land, homes, culture and dreams that continues even now in the alleged name of safety of the Jewish people—as if Jewish safety weren’t linked to the safety of all peoples, and particularly inextricably linked with the safety of our Palestinian and Muslim kin.

This in no way denies a deep spiritual connection between Jews and the biblical lands now known as Israel-Palestine. I’ve had the blessing of supporting thousands of people in their yearning to connect with Jewish traditions and stories by excavating, reclaiming, renewing and innovating embodied and earth-honoring Jewish practices from our ancient ancestors. These paths often bring folks into sacred encounters with biblical lands, but that needn’t require a literal return to place: around the world we find and are creating joyous and generative expressions of a Judaism that is earth-centered, embodied and liberatory. A Judaism that re-imagines rituals for the times we are living in, that engages at intersections of faith and culture.

For thousands of years Jewish teachings have held that when we are away from “the holy land,” the Shekhinah—the indwelling presence of God often understood as an expression of the sacred feminine—remains in exile. Yet the true exile of Shekhinah, of God/dess within, is not when we are far from “the holy land”—it is when we are far from ourselves, far from each other and far from our core values and embodied knowings. When we embrace embodied prayer and counter-oppressive devotion, when we connect with and honor the earth where we are, and when we cultivate capacity to show up fully in times of ecological, social and spiritual crisis, this is when we return from exile.

So this 75th anniversary marks not our being nearer to God but farther away. We are not closer to God when democracy is threatened, when olive trees are bulldozed in the name of faith, when our peoples’ traditional languages and practices are discouraged amidst pressures of assimilation. We are not closer to God if Jewish safety comes at the detriment of the well-being of our kin.

My prayer at this 75th anniversary of the formation of the State of Israel and of the Nakba is that oppressive structures be transformed toward a shared weaving that honors the sovereignty and interdependence of Palestinians, as well as Jews. May we release the grip of

THE MORE OUR HOLD ON THE ENTIRE LAND OF ISRAEL INCREASES, THE MORE WE WILL BE SOVEREIGN AND FREE IN OUR LAND.

patriarchy, militarism and harmful expressions of theology that devalue body and earth and disconnect us from sacred cycles. May we shift out of the hypervigilance of survival mode and stop the perpetration of violence in the alleged name of Jewish tradition and safety. May we attune to the sacred and embrace what is generative and liberatory toward the thriving of all.

Taya Mâ Shere is the cofounder of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute. She teaches Jewish ancestral healing and is on the faculty at Starr King School for the Ministry in Oakland, California.

DANIEL FAINSTEIN

Sovereignty as the main framework for Jewish life or the renewal of Jewish life— not just to live in the Jewish community or in the synagogue but to live Jewishly in public spaces with the spirit of Judaism and Jewish values—is a revolution in terms of Jewish history.

German-born Israeli philosopher and historian Gershom Scholem said that Zionism is a movement that expresses the dialectical tension between continuity and rebellion. It expresses continuity of the historical territory of the Jewish people, of the Hebrew language, of many issues connected with Jewish texts and traditions—and to the promise of God to Abraham in the book of Genesis. On the other hand, it is a moment of rebellion. Why? Because the state was not achieved just by praying and waiting

for God’s intervention. It was activated by human agency, a political movement, and the idea that we would take care of our destiny rather than waiting passively for the Messiah. Zionism expressed traditional and modern motives at the same time. And with the creation of the state came a flourishing of Hebrew language, Hebrew culture, Hebrew music. It was a new kind of Judaism beyond the traditional religious Judaism.

Israel also is a story of success as a functional state that provides a good life to its citizens. In spite of the many challenges that affected its history, Israel is in 22nd place on the Index of Human Development compiled by the United Nations, just after the United States and ahead of countries like France and Italy.

I recently finished a large study of Jews in Latin America that found Israel to be one of the key elements of Jewish identity—even stronger than in the United States—even if people said it was a negative element. In Latin America there is a strong connection to Israel in terms of family living there, and some view it as a kind of “insurance policy” because

of the political instability in their home countries. Many Jews in Latin America have created new Jewish practices based on the existence of Israel. Besides following traditional practices and Jewish holidays, there are many Jews in Latin America who follow daily news from Israel, are active in Zionist organizations or travel periodically to Israel as a kind of secular-religious peregrination.

Of course, Israel and the Israeli-Arab conflict have strong implications for Jews in the region. In Argentina in the early 1990s, for example, there were two separate Iranian-sponsored terrorist attacks on the Israeli embassy and the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA, a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires). Jewish destiny today, as in the past, is a transnational matter.

I once heard a story about Imre Kertész, the Hungarian Holocaust survivor, who was in Israel for a visit after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He saw the Star of David on the side of a tank and remarked that he preferred it there rather than on his own clothes. Some people speak about the “Jewish emergence from

powerlessness” after the Shoah, but this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t look at the problems of Israeli society vis-à-vis the Palestinians, its own Arab citizens, or the social gaps in Israeli society. We are realizing the cost of sovereignty, the cost of having to deal with the issues of the state, which means authority, power, dealing with minorities, among others. I think the current government is a worrisome development in the history of Israel and perhaps the history of the Jewish people. I hope that reason and political democratic resilience and the best of the Jewish values will prevail.

Daniel Fainstein is dean of Jewish Studies at the Hebraic University of Mexico in Mexico City. M

An estimated 300,000 to 350,000 protestors demonstrate in Jerusalem against the government’s proposed judicial overhaul, Feburary 2023.

SHELLEY ADELSON

THIS 75TH ANNIVERSARY MARKS OUR NOT BEING NEARER TO GOD BUT FARTHER AWAY.

A SOUNDTRACK FOR ISRAEL AT 75

Songs to Build a Nation

BY YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI AS TOLD TO NADINE EPSTEIN

My first visit to Israel was in the summer of 1967, right after the Six-Day War, which was the happy-ever-after of Jewish history. “That’s it. It’s over. We won. The Arabs are going to realize it’s futile to try to destroy us.” Israelis really believed that in the summer of 1967. And the soundtrack of my falling in love with Israel was made up of the songs that emerged in the weeks just before the war. It starts with “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” (“Jerusalem of Gold”), still the most haunting Israeli song ever written. It’s by Naomi Shemer, who shaped Israeli music more than any other figure.

There’s an extraordinary story about that song. When it first came out, no one knew there would be a crisis three weeks later that would lead to Israel reuniting Jerusalem. Shemer wrote it for the Israeli Song Festival and performed it there on May 15, 1967, the day after Independence Day and the day Gamal Abdel Nasser started moving troops into Sinai. The song took the country by storm just as the lead-up to the Six-Day War began. “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” became the anthem for the metaphysical, the mythic story of Israel in that war. It became the catalyst for all those emotions of the Israeli story that are beyond the rational.

Another song that came out in May 1967 is “Natzer Mechake LeRabin” (“Nasser Is Waiting for Rabin”). It was a response to Nasser’s boast that he was waiting for Yitzchak Rabin, who was then the commander of the IDF, to come get him. So the Israeli response to Nasser was a song, “Oh, Nasser’s waiting for Rabin, aye aye aye. Nasser, don’t move, don’t move.

LISTEN ALONG AS YOU READ AT MOMENTMAG.COM/SONGS-TO-BUILD-A-NATION BY SCANNING THIS QR CODE WITH YOUR PHONE .

We’re on our way.” The country was in the grip of existential fear. And the way that it responded, the way that it coped with its fear, was through a song. Those songs of May 1967 gave me a connection to the spirit of the country, its defiance and its humor, and I just loved it all.

Then there were the victory songs of June 1967, just a month later. They’re emotionally complicated. One of my favorites is another Naomi Shemer song called “Machar” (“Tomorrow”). The words are: “Tomorrow a thousand housing projects will arise, and if not tomorrow, then the day after.” What I love about that song is how touching it is in its modest expectations. This is the great song of victory—that Israel’s going to build 1,000 housing projects. It’s a rousing song, and it expresses the sense of can-do Israel at the peak moment of the Israeli success story. Yet in retrospect it’s such a small aspiration. It’s not an arrogant, boastful, militaristic empire. It’s this small and battered country saying, wow, now we can really start building all those housing projects and start moving immigrants out of the slums and out of Jaffa. There’s something very touching about that.

Another important song from the summer of 1967 is “Yerushalayim Shel Barzel” (“Jerusalem of Iron”) by an

Israeli paratrooper named Meir Ariel, who fought in the battle of Jerusalem and revolted against the sweetness of “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav.” He said, no, for those of us who fought in Jerusalem, this is the city of iron, the city of blood and wounds. It’s not a shimmering city of gold. But he ends on an affirming note, singing about how the paratroopers have come to cry out freedom and liberation to Jerusalem’s walls. Ariel went on to become one of Israel’s most important singers and composers.

These were the formative songs that introduced me to Israel. And to this day, I can’t hear any of them without feeling awe and gratitude for having been there and been introduced to Israel at that moment.

Throughout Israel’s history, its music has responded to the changing tides of politics. Pre-state Zionist music captured the pioneer ethos with a combination of determination and melancholy. You hear an awareness of the enormous human price that the pioneers were paying personally and of the wider context in which the Zionist return home was happening, that is, the destruction of the diaspora in Europe. A song about the Yishuv period that really expressed this sentiment is “Ruach Stav” (“Autumn Breeze”) sung by Arik Einstein. Autumn, of course, is the most melancholy season, and even if you’re a cynical person, there’s a pinch in the heart. The song tells the story of a young man who goes to a party, and he’s shy, and he asks someone to dance. It’s a metaphor for the Yishuv, the prestate Jewish community in Israel, which is aware that it’s heading toward a major confrontation with the Arab world. And meanwhile, the communities the pioneers left behind in Europe are being erased, and all of those hundreds of thousands of young Zionists who are supposed to join them in building the country are never going to come. You can feel all that in the music.

Another of the most famous pre-state Zionist songs was “Hafinjan” (“The Coffee Pot”). That one is about the ca-

maraderie of the Palmach fighters, the pre-state military defense force, and the excitement of youth. It’s nighttime, the fighters are sitting around the campfire and they’re singing. After the War of Independence, another stanza was added to the song, about the fighters sitting around the campfire who don’t come back from battle. There’s often this mixture in the music of the Yishuv, the exuberance of youth and the sense of imminent tragedy.

There’s a beautiful song from 1948, “Hu Lo Yada Et Shema” (“He Didn’t Know Her Name”) made popular by Esther Ofarim. It’s about a chance encounter: A soldier is on his way to battle, and he meets a nurse. It’s an instant romance in a parking lot; they don’t even know each other’s names, and he is mortally wounded in battle. The song is about youth, and war, and thwarted expectations, and courage, and melancholy. Those are themes running through all these 1948 songs. You can see from these songs about 1948 and 1967 that there’s a very developed tradition of Israeli singers and composers responding in real time to the latest crisis. Israeli musicians tend to be intuitively connected to what the country is going through. I don’t know of other countries quite like that, where the music so deeply and immediately reflects what’s happening in the country. We’re seeing that beginning to happen with the political situation now.

Interestingly, while the first intifada didn’t produce much music, the second intifada changed Israeli music. It brought in God and the spiritual quest in an overt way. Classical Zionist music was the carrier of the secular ethos; it promoted the vision of the new Hebrew man. To use the old terminology, it was very much a rejection of diaspora culture. The second intifada brought prayer and diaspora Judaism back into the heart of Israeli music. And it did so through piyyutim, medieval prayer poems, some from the Golden Age of Spain and Spanish Jewry, many from Morocco and Iraq. Some of Israel’s leading rock musicians rediscovered the beauty of these medieval poems, and you then had an extraordinary and totally unpredicted turn in Israeli music, from be-

ing the expression of Tel Aviv bohemian culture to being the instrument for the re-Judaization of Israeli culture.

I think this happened in the second intifada because during the years of the suicide bombings we experienced the total breakdown of any pretense of Israeli personal security. Before that, there was always a sense that there was a distance, however minimal, between the home front and the battlefront. The second intifada was the final undoing of that sense. The home front became the battlefront.

And perhaps in response, you saw among Israelis the beginnings of a serious spiritual search. It’s taken many forms. Many people have adopted Orthodox Judaism to one extent or another, others went in a

THROUGHOUT ISRAEL’S HISTORY, ITS MUSIC HAS RESPONDED TO THE CHANGING TIDES OF POLITICS.

New Age direction—Israel is one of the world capitals of New Age culture—and Indian spirituality became part of Israeli culture. Much of this was triggered by the second intifada. And the Israelis who were the first to intuit this were the musicians, the troubadours.

At this time, in the mid 2000s, several albums were seminal. One was called Shema Koli (Hear My Voice) by Meir Banai, one of our great rock musicians, who did contemporary versions of the Yom Kippur liturgy that combined traditional melodies with some of his own. One of the songs from that album, “Lecha Eli” (“To You, My God”), won the Israeli equivalent of a Grammy. The words are from a famous piyyut (liturgical poem) written by Avraham Ibn Ezra, the medieval biblical commentator and poet: “Lecha eli teshukati,” “To you, my God, I give all my longing.”

One of the most beloved Israeli songs of all time was inspired by economic change—the transition of the Israeli economy from socialism to capitalism. It’s called “Mehakim LeMashiach” (“Waiting for the Messiah”) by Shalom Hanoch and came out in 1985, just

Mashiach also isn’t phoning.” And who is Mashiach? In the song, Mashiach, Hebrew for “Messiah,” is just the name of a wheeling and dealing businessman. It’s a Mizrahi name, not one that Mizrahi parents give their children anymore, but in the immigrant and post-immigrant generations, there were a number of Israelis whose first name was Mashiach.

The drama takes place in an investment office where people are sitting nervously smoking cigarettes, one after another, drinking one cup of coffee after another, waiting for Mashiach to come to tell them how their investments are doing in the stock crisis. And instead of Mashiach coming, there’s a knock on the door and it’s a policeman, who says there’s been a terrible tragedy: The Borsa [Stock Exchange] has collapsed. People are jumping off the roofs, and one of those people is Mashiach. The atmosphere in the room turns black. Mashiach isn’t coming, he’s never coming. Mashiach is never going to call. This song became the anthem of the coarsening of Israeli ideals—that from a society that at least paid lip service to communal self-sacrifice, we’ve now become a society of quick investors and easy money. Shalom Hanoch grew up on a kibbutz and left it when he was young, so this is really a kibbutznik’s lament for the dark side of what we celebrate as a start-up nation.

and the army is on the move in the north. This is a song about the Galilee, messianism and madness. The army is moving into Lebanon, and he’s looking for love.

This song became my personal anthem. I moved to Israel permanently at the beginning of the first Lebanon war. I got very involved with mystical circles both in Jerusalem and the Galilee. Banai was singing about my Israel of the 1980s—this mixture of mysticism, madness and security threat. I went on a pilgrimage to Banai and told him that his song had helped make me an Israeli. And he was very touched. I think he didn’t quite expect that. And I think of that song in relation to Israel today, because it’s a song about the madness that’s just under the surface of Israeli society, in that things are not holding together, and what seems to be a rational start-up nation has deep undercurrents of the irrational. For me, this song is almost the anthem of the collapse of rational Israel.

e à e

ARIK EINSTEIN

One other song from the 1980s was very important to me: “Esther,” by Ehud Banai, who brought a kind of synthesis of Western rock and Mizrahi music and wrote songs that are just beautiful. “Esther” tells us a story about his trip to the Galilee. He’s in love with a woman there who is slightly mad, and she lives off the land, out in the country, and is waiting for the Messiah: “One day a man will come and he will illuminate the streets. One day everything will flower, the heart of the world will open.” And he realizes that she doesn’t really care for him, certainly not in the way he cares for her. It’s a song about loneliness. He leaves, and he sings, “Your life is like a star that’s alone in the sky.” And at the same time, almost in passing, he mentions that the army is on the move. It’s the mid-1980s, the time of Lebanon,

Israeli music is the carrier of the romantic spirit of Hebrew poetry, which had mostly been suppressed for 2,000 years of exile. It resurfaced in Spain in the Middle Ages with the great Hebrew poets. In the Ashkenazi tradition, you don’t have that romantic sensibility; it was considered to be immodest, a violation of religious norms. And so Zionism, in its sly, subversive way, resurrects this Hebrew romantic tradition through Israeli music. Modern Israeli music has restored the tradition of Shir Hashirim, of the Song of Songs with its endless, exquisite Hebrew love songs. This includes early songs such as “Erev Shel Shoshanim” (“Evening of Roses”) from the 1950s through Arik Einstein’s “Yesh Bi Ahava” (“There Is Love in Me”) of the 1990s.

this day, is one of the most popular Israeli songs. There are constant covers being done and it’s what the kids grow up with in school. The anxiety in the song is, “How’s this going to work out?” As we can see from what’s happening in Israel today, that’s still an open question.

There are also many songs with a feminist theme, like one by Corinne Allal called “Al Tikra Li Motek” (“Don’t Call Me Sweetheart”), an angry pushback against macho Israeli culture. Etti Ankri had a fantastic song in 1990 called “Roa Lekha Baenayim” (“I See It in Your Eyes”), about a man who wants to make her his prisoner for life. When I think of the great female vocalists, though, the singers I most appreciate are those who are working in the genre of spiritual music today. Ankri, for instance, began in the 1990s as a great female rock vocalist. She became observant and in the last 20 years has been producing beautiful piyyutim. She did a very powerful album based on the prayer poems of Judah Halevi and was part of the redirection of Israeli music in a spiritual way.

There’s a terrific singer today called Narkis, who goes only by her first name, and who is just coming into her own. Narkis has one song that I just find exquisite, called “Aneni” (“Answer Me”). It’s a prayer, and it’s also a piyyut which she puts to very haunting music. You can see how those Israeli musicians who are interested in the spiritual quest and in the search for God and meaning have moved from simply writing the music for traditional prayers to creating their own prayers, their own poems, and setting those to music. So a whole new body of work is emerging based on what I would call Israeli piyyut. And women are taking an important role in that process.

Biblical themes, of course, are a constant. There’s a song by Hanan Ben Ari, “Cholem Kmo Yosef” (“Dreaming

Like Joseph”), in which he takes biblical

stories and uses them as psychological archetypes to explain how each of us is really all of these biblical characters. “Just like Abraham, every father sacrifices his son. Just like Joseph, we’re all dreamers.” He goes on like that. And he begins the song with the theme music from a TV feature that only Israelis of my generation would recognize. Israel TV in the 1970s and 1980s used to end with a biblical verse for the day, with a little snippet of someone chanting the verse. When I heard it on the album, I just couldn’t stop laughing. The song is about how the Torah holds up a mirror to human behavior and invites us to see ourselves in the biblical characters. It’s a great song that also shows how naturally Jewish tradition becomes part of popular Israeli music.

During the pandemic, a lot of songs came out with Israeli musicians trying to capture the surreal nature of the moment and find meaning in it. Hanan Ben Ari wrote another song called “Ga’aguim Livnei Adam” (“The Longing for Other People”) about how COVID-19 shut down the modern world and gave us an opportunity to do a reset. He uses biblical images of the Tower of Babel, which he compares to the skyscrapers in Tel Aviv that are standing empty during the lockdowns, and he compares the emptied streets to the biblical flood. He ends by addressing the virus, saying, “When you leave, please make sure that we’re not the same as before you came.”

True to form, the political crisis we’re living through now has already begun to produce its own music. One very beautiful song just came out by Shlomo Artzi together with Idan Amedi. The song is called “Achim” (“Brothers”), and it says, “We were brothers,” using the past tense, and asks, “Will we be brothers again?” It’s appropriately accompanied by melancholy music. It brings together an Ashkenazi singer and a very popular Mizrahi singer. That’s important, because Likud

has been working very hard to revive the division between those groups.

Nothing in Israel is ever really lost. Consider the song “Yihyeh Tov” (“Things Will Be Better”), written by David Broza and Yonatan Geffen in 1977 after Anwar Sadat’s visit, when the euphoria of that visit had died down. Nobody really sings it anymore, but it’s part of the consciousness of the country. The refrain is, “yihyeh tov,” “It’ll be okay,” but the music and the voice aren’t so sure. Or if it does turn out okay, we’re really going to pay a high price. You feel that tension. It’s not a sweet song. Israeli talent has an extraordinary range, but the best people don’t do sweet.

Another song that wasn’t sweet was “Shir LaShalom” (A Song of Peace”), sung by Miri Aloni in 1969, which became popular again after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination on November 4, 1995. Rabin had a copy of the lyrics to that song in his coat pocket when he was shot, and famously, his blood was on them. “Shir LaShalom” is not a paean to peace. It’s a protest against the Israeli tendency to just accept the status quo. The speaker is a soldier who fell in battle and is turning to Israelis and basically saying, “How many more have to fall before you finally start taking peace seriously?” It’s a very angry song, but it doesn’t sound angry. That’s one of the interesting ways in which Israeli music navigates protest. It sounds sweet, but it isn’t. There’s an edge to it.

One of my favorite examples of that is a song from the late 1960s by Arik Einstein called “Eretz Israel” (“Land of Israel”) and the refrain is: “How much I love you, land of Israel. So why am I so sad, land of Israel?” A person who’s in love isn’t supposed to be sad. So for me, in some way, that is the song of this moment. If I needed an anthem for this moment, it’s that. M

= when water national security

BY NOAH PHILLIPS

The 2014 war between Israel and Hamas destroyed much of Gaza’s water treatment infrastructure. On a hot July day three years later, with few other options to cool down, a five-year-old Gazan boy named Mohammed went swimming with his family at a nearby beach. Unaware that raw sewage was draining into the sea, they all came home vomiting. Mohammed fell into a coma and died from a toxic bacterial infection ten days later.

Last summer, after the construction of several new water treatment plants in Gaza, the Palestinian health ministry declared 65 percent of Gaza’s beaches clean, which meant the strip’s 2.2 million residents could return to the ocean. Environmental lawyer Gidon Bromberg had tears in his eyes. “I remembered the story of Mohammed,” he recalls. “Hopefully, we won’t see that again.”

Bromberg, 59, is cofounder and Israel director of EcoPeace Middle East, a tri-national—Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian—environmental NGO that was instrumental in getting the new water treatment plants built. EcoPeace is also a leading force behind the Green Blue Deal, a report and set of policy recommendations to address water scarcity in the region. One of the ideas in that report—a proposal for Israel, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates to exchange solar power for desalinated water—was introduced by U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry at the 27th official United Nations Climate Change Conference in Egypt in November 2022 and resulted in a memorandum of understanding between the three countries.

“Politicians speak of disengagement, like ‘Israel’s disengaged from Gaza.’ Well, environmentally, that’s bullshit,” says Bromberg. “It’s impossible to disengage from a shared environment. We share the same coastal groundwater. We share the same ocean. We breathe the same air. The environment doesn’t respect borders, and therefore the environment, by definition, creates interdependencies.”

From the construction of sanitation plants in Gaza to the mitigation of water pollution in the Jordan River to an EcoPark in Jordan, EcoPeace has been able to build from these interdependencies. The group’s Jordan and Palestine directors have each been invited to speak to the United Nations Security Council, and last year EcoPeace was awarded a grant of $3.3 million from the U.S. Department of State.

“The organization punches significantly above its weight in its impact,” says Nigel Savage, the founder and longtime CEO of the Jewish environmental organization Hazon (recently rebranded as Adamah).

“The Palestinian and Jordanian groups within the overall organization are equal in size and scale and voice to the Israeli group. In the time that EcoPeace has been active, we’ve seen wars in Gaza, instability in the region, and last year’s Jewish-Arab riots inside Israel,” Savage notes. “EcoPeace’s work has become steadily more important as each year goes by.”

Moment spoke to Bromberg about the organization’s push to advance water security and its insistence that regional peace can only happen by acknowledging ecological interdependence.

“the environment doesn’t resPect borders--it creates interdePendencies.”

Where did the idea of EcoPeace come from? The idea came out of my master’s thesis. I was studying international environmental law at American University in 1993 while the Oslo Accords were being negotiated, and I wanted to look at whether peace was going to be good for the environment. There was this sense that peace would bring tremendous economic opportunities, with major economic summits organized at the time in Casablanca, in Cairo and in Amman about what a new Middle East might look like.

That new Middle East frightened me, because it was just giving lip service to the environment. For instance, 50,000 new hotel rooms were being proposed to be built around the Dead Sea—how could the Dead Sea sustain 50,000 new hotel rooms? My recommendation was to put the environment on the political agenda of the peace process by creating a regional environmental NGO.

Before going back to Israel, I met with some half a dozen individuals in Washington, DC, and asked if they’d be able to fund $20,000 for an initial meeting to bring together Egyptian, Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli environmentalists. “Nice idea,” they said, “but come back when you’re a bit older.” One called me a week later, and said, “If you organize it, I’ll fund it, and I’ll be there.”

What in your background had equipped you to take this on? Although I was born in Israel, I moved to Australia when I was a young kid. Australia has the second largest percentage of foreign-born residents in the world, after Israel. I grew up in a neighborhood of immigrants: Greek and Italian and Vietnamese and Lebanese and Turkish, you name it. So I saw a lot of prejudice, but I also saw a system that was trying to bring everyone together and promote understanding. I think that upbringing, in that setting, gave me a sense of confidence that I could contribute to peacebuilding in Israel.

How did the environment come in?

My first year of law school, I went off to join an environmental campaign in Tasmania to stop a dam being built that would have damaged the sensitive ecologies of the Franklin and Gordon rivers. What halted the project was community activism on the one hand but also a decision by the High Court of Australia that stopped the dam being built after both rivers were listed as World Heritage sites. We used that model later to stop the wall being built between Israel and the West Bank in the area of Battir, a mountainous region with 4,000-year-old terraces built to utilize and control spring

bus bombings became prevalent, things changed. I myself missed the Dizengoff Street bombing [which killed 22 and injured 50 in 1994] by five minutes and the attack on the café on Ben Gurion Boulevard [which killed three and injured 48 in 1997] by half an hour. The Egyptians had left EcoPeace, due in part to a demand from the Mubarak government.

At that point, and with the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000 even more so, working with “the other” came to be seen as working for the other. I would give a presentation and someone would stand up and say, “Don’t listen to him, he’s a traitor. He’s working for the Arabs.” That misconception is something we still face. It’s even worse for our Palestinian and Jordanian staff.

How do you grapple with that?

water for agriculture. Palestinian farmers, through a special arrangement, continue to manage their lands not only on the West Bank side but also on the Israeli side. But the wall would have damaged the terraces and prevented access. We worked with the Palestinian community, particularly with the mayor of Battir, to convince the Palestinian Authority to register the area as a World Heritage site, which stopped the wall. Protecting a World Heritage site is clearly an issue that should go beyond the security interests of one particular generation.

What reactions have you experienced from Israelis? After Oslo, there was absolute euphoria: So many Israelis were certain that it would be the end of conflict. In those years, an organization such as EcoPeace was very welcome. But when

I’m constantly promoting the understanding that military security, as important as it is, is not the only security that matters. Water security, climate security and broader health security are all critical issues. Our different country directors think through what we’re trying to achieve together, but our messaging addresses the number-one concern of the respective populations. Security is something I speak a lot about at the Israeli office, water rights lead what our Palestinian office speaks to, and economic and development needs are the focus of our Jordanian office.

What’s an example of an environmental interdependency EcoPeace has been able to harness for cooperation?

After the 2014 Gaza War there was a water and sanitation crisis because Israel had bombed water and sewage infrastructure. In 2016, there were about 108 million liters of raw sewage flowing into the Mediterranean every single day. We were approached by an international NGO that had been trying for 12 years to get enough cement into Gaza to finish a modern sewage treatment plant. The Israeli military was restricting building equipment and electricity

“MILITARY SECURITY, AS IMPORTANT AS IT IS, IS NOT THE ONLY SECURITY THAT MATTERS. WATER, CLIMATE AND BROADER HEALTH SECURITY ARE ALL CRITICAL ISSUES.”

on security grounds, saying they had evidence that Hamas was stealing a high percentage of the cement coming into Gaza in order to build tunnels to attack Israel. The Israeli public was completely in favor of these restrictions. The sewage plant was something like 80 percent finished, with tens of millions of dollars already spent.

We understood that the likelihood of pandemic disease breaking out in Gaza was rising every day because when sewage is flowing, it’s mixing into the groundwater and people get exposed to it. Disease was not going to stop at the border. No fence around Gaza was going to stop cholera or typhus from also impacting Israel.

So we started testing the Israeli beaches north of Gaza for cholera: Shikmim Beach, Ashkelon Beach, Ashdod Beach. Out of pure luck, we chose the same laboratory for our tests that the Ashkelon desalination plant had been using. The lab had good news for us—no cholera. But they also told us that the Ashkelon desalination plant had been closed because of the sewage coming from Gaza.

It had been kept a secret, but the Ashkelon plant was 15 percent of Israel’s drinking water. We got hold of some

satellite imagery which showed that Ashdod, the second desalination plant north of Gaza, was also at risk of intermittent closure. We knew that the combination of health security and water security was going to be persuasive to the Israeli public.

And at the same time, we were building on community work around Gaza with seminars and workshops, some of which included medical practitioners. Eventually, we got all the mayors of those communities, who would be at the forefront of the threat of a tunnel attack (including the heavily right-wing city of Sderot) to say that these interests needed to be better balanced.

The sewage treatment plant was completed within two years. The change in mindset was so dramatic that four years after that, in 2022, two additional modern sewage treatment plants were built.

Can this kind of effort help build peace in the long run? Water insecurity across the West Bank and Gaza not only leads to increased animosity, but under a climate crisis where we have declining precipitation, it could lead to an uprising like what we saw in Syria in 2011, when rain-dependent farmers lost their livelihoods.

But the rationale as to why water issues were hard to solve back when Oslo was negotiated is no longer relevant today. At that time, there was only natural water. Now, thanks largely to Israeli leadership in the water field, you can desalinate or treat sewage water and reuse it for agriculture. Today, half the food in Israel is grown with treated wastewater. So, the water “pie” has tremendously expanded. Palestinians can gain their water rights without Israelis losing a drop—Israel can just increase its manufacturing. And guess what? The prices are even attractive.

As it stands now, Yatta, in the southern Hebron Hills, gets water once every two months in the summer. People can spend a quarter, a third of their income on water. But water rights are held hostage to the difficulty of resolving the other issues: Jerusalem, refugees and so on. By addressing the question of water rights we could build trust, show that there is a partner and improve the situation on the ground in every Palestinian home. Meanwhile, with the Israelis, we can strike a deal to move forward on a design to stop Palestinian sewage from polluting both the Palestinian side and the Israeli side. It would be another set of win-wins. M

Image of the Middle East taken by NASA.

Continued from page 33

put together a coalition. Now retired, Livni has fallen off most people’s radar, as has Ayelet Shaked (b. 1976). Shaked, a former software engineer, held several cabinet posts in various governments, including minister of justice from 2015 to 2019. She fought to limit the power of Israel’s Supreme Court, proof that not all female political leaders see the world the same way.

I have left the Israeli Supreme Court for last. Implementation of the looming reforms that have sparked recent mass protests would be a potent strike against the future of women in Israel. Today six out of 15 justices are women, 40 percent, making it the major branch of government with the highest proportion of women, and the only one to be led by a woman, Esther Hayut (b. 1953), currently chief justice and president of the court. The impressive status of women on the court, of course, was a long time coming: It took until 1976 for the first female justice to be appointed, Miriam Ben Porat (1918-2012), followed in 1981 by Shoshana Netanyahu (19232022), the current prime minister’s aunt. Dorit Beinisch (b. 1942) was the first woman to serve as president of Israel’s Supreme Court (2006-2012).

Israeli legal expert Gabriela Shalev, the first woman to be appointed as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations (2008-2010), is convinced that some of the right-wing furor regarding the court has to do with the fact that it is and has been led by women, and that its rulings—on petitions such as Alice Miller’s appeal to be allowed to take the air force pilot test—have advanced women in a variety of arenas. “The turning point was when Dorit Beinisch succeeded Aharon Barak as Chief Justice in 2006,” Shalev says. “Barak was the ‘rabbi’ of the secular majority in Israel, and he was admired widely throughout the country for his human rights work and for establishing the Basic Law of Human Dignity and Liberty. Dorit was a woman and a very liberal one, and once she became chief justice, all the macho and misogynist attitudes came out. This was the start of the attack on the Supreme Court.”

So how did a new state that promised gender equity, a state that was founded in 1948, not 1776 or 1792, end up with women’s rights still so contested? Shilo, the historian, says that “the declaration of equality was deceiving…People confused the declaration with its fulfillment.” For example, while the IDF conscripted women into military service at a time when few other countries did so, giving a superficial impression of equal status, their actual status within the military remained unequal. Several other factors came into play: After 1948, most immigrant women came from undeveloped countries that themselves lagged behind on women’s equality, and many arrived lacking formal education, “which is the basis for women’s equality,” Shilo says. Also, as exemplified by Golda’s approach, the aim of the newly established Jewish state “was foremost to gain security and to absorb the newcomers. Equality for women was moved aside.” Shilo’s final factor may be the strongest one: “the traditional attitude of Judaism toward women,” which is exacerbated by the lack of separation between religion and state in Israel.

As the IDI has reported, the ultra-Orthodox (now commonly referred to as Haredi) parties are impeding women from entering the upper echelons of political leadership. The power of the religious and far-right parties outstrips the numbers of people they represent. Unchecked, they could achieve any number of anti-progressive goals at odds with the current society, whether it’s an Israel in which women are confined to separate public spaces and barred from many, or are expected to work to support (with the additional help of government subsidies) husbands who study Talmud full-time.

I don’t want to end on a down note. Israel’s Haredi citizens are not one bloc: There are those who support women’s rights, at least in the secular realm, and some have even wrangled with the rabbinate on matters such as agunot (“chained women”) not being granted a religious divorce (known as a get) or for increased educational opportunities. These include Adina Bar-Shalom (b.

1945), founder of the first college for Haredi students in Jerusalem, and Leah Shakdiel (b. 1951), who won a landmark 1988 Supreme Court case against the Ministry of Religious Affairs that allowed her to sit on a religious council in a town in the Negev. The Haredi feminist group Nivcharot has undertaken extensive grassroots organizing to empower Haredi women, demanding that Haredi parties include women on their party lists for the Knesset.

Moreover, new waves of feminism keep breaking on Israel’s secular shores. Amazing women such as Shikma Bressler (b. 1980), a physicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, are leading the protests against the current Israeli government today. Women in fields as varied as finance, science, business and high tech are breaking multiple ceilings—although success stories remain rare, says Danielle Ofek, first vice president and head of high tech for Bank Hapoalim International (BHI) and head of Parliament51, a social impact venture aiming to achieve gender equality and equal opportunities for women.

But the fundamental conflicts baked into the bones of the nation must be addressed if Israel wants to be a modern democratic state—which these days not only requires equal rights for women but for LGBTQ people, as well as for Israel’s non-Jewish citizens. (That’s a whole other story but, many argue, connected, for how can a state that lives with its women as second-class citizens under Jewish law be expected to treat Palestinans any differently?) Then again, it could be that in the long run not enough Israeli voters will care if the Jewish state is a modern democracy. That, of course, is today’s trillion-shekel question. M

Thank you to Ido Aharoni, Ami Aronson, Linda Gallanter, Pnina Lahav, Francine Klagsbrun, Danielle Ofek, Judea Pearl, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Eetta Prince-Gibson, Shulamit Reinharz, Margalit Shilo and Lauren B. Strauss for sharing their recommendations about which women to include, more of whom we will cover in the future. I am also grateful to the Jewish Women’s Archive.

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talk of the table

A Feast to Celebrate 75 Years

BY VERED GUTTMAN

In 1955 the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture’s nutrition department published a proposed menu for celebrating the nation’s Independence Day at home. It was an attempt to formalize a national ethos and establish common traditions. The menu included a first course of mallow fritters in tomato sauce; Ashkenazi-style kreplach; Mizrahi-style stuffed chicken with a side of summer squash; and a cake made of the seven species (wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates) mentioned in the Bible as growing in the Land of Israel.

While this initiative never took off (Israelis preferred to celebrate their country’s independence at BBQs on any available piece of grass), the idea that a menu could serve as a representation of the Jewish state was an intriguing one. In honor of Israel’s 75th birthday I created a menu that serves as a culinary representation of the newborn State of Israel in 1948, with dishes demonstrat-

ing the nascent nation’s human diversity: Sephardi and Ashkenazi; urbanites and kibbutzniks; Moroccan, Iraqi, Dutch, Yemeni and Kurdish; energetic young socialists and tired parents; survivors who came after the Holocaust, and those who had been living in the land for generations.

But back in 1948, such a meal could never have been served. While the dishes were all common in Israel at the time, each was prepared by a different community. Culinarily speaking, the melting pot was still far from simmering, although pressure was already building to create a new, unified Israeli cuisine— building a nation from the kitchen up.

For Ashkenazi Jews, it would not have been unusual for a meal to start with some European rye bread. Each month citizens were given government-supplied rye bread rations, the bread of choice of the Ashkenazi-dominated establishment (although by the 1950s, half of Israel’s population preferred pita).

Another typical item to appear on a plate of 1948 forshpeis (appetizers) was

eggplant. For Ashkenazi Jews coming from cold Europe to the hot Levant, produce such as eggplants, zucchini, olives and tomatoes (which they called “treyf apples” and considered unkosher) were mysterious and unknown. Those who arrived in the First Aliyah, the wave of mostly Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated to Israel in the 1880s, learned how to use these local ingredients from the Palestinians who worked in their households or on their farms, says Yael Raviv, author of Falafel Nation and chief operating officer of the Jewish Food Society. Nutritionists from the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO), trying to familiarize Zionist women with these unfamiliar foods, came up with recipes that would remind Ashkenazi cooks of their home. Thus came eggplant “chopped liver” made of ground fried eggplant and hardboiled eggs. There were also recipes for mock herring and meatballs, goulash and schnitzel—all made of eggplant. “WIZO not only taught them how to cook in the most efficient, the healthiest and the most economical way, but also in the most He-

from 1948

brew way. The idea was to use food as a tool to connect people to a place, to the land and to each other,” says Raviv.

The War of 1948 put Jerusalem under long weeks of siege, with no food supplies reaching the city’s Jewish population. The starving Jews of Jerusalem thus turned to local herbs to nourish their families, especially khubeisa, which grew wild all over the city. Khubeisa, the Arab name for mallow, is rich in iron and vitamins and was abundantly available. Its stemmed leaves, mixed with an egg and a little flour, were used to make mallow fritters, fried and then cooked in a simple lemon sauce.

in 1944. “They told us these were liver meatballs, but in fact they were made of a lot of onion and squash. Once a week we had chicken, usually sick chickens who could no longer lay eggs.” But in households of Polish origin, chicken soup, made with chicken feet, combs and whatever other scraps were available, was a regular offering—sometimes served with lokshen or egg noodles.

Yemeni families, on the other hand, made meat and bone marrow soup served with pita and fenugreek paste. “A good pita bread, good hilbeh (fenugreek paste) and a good Yemeni soup—I would not replace this meal for anything in the world,” says Pini Amir, whose family moved from Yemen to Tel Aviv in 1930. His father used a cow’s tail for the soup, with special Yemeni spices. “We had a taboun (a traditional Arab portable clay oven) on the roof where my two grandmothers would bake pita for the weekend.” During the week they’d eat Yemeni soup with European rye bread—the beginning of the Israeli mixing bowl.

Around the country, immigrant families from east to west tried to keep their own culinary traditions. For Sephardi Jews in Jerusalem and Safed that meant baking their many pastries—borekitas, boyos, calsonas and pastelikos—stuffed with minced meat and pine nuts.

Starters

European rye bread with a side of bitter olives

Eggplant-based mock chopped liver

Mallow leaf fritters in lemon sauce

Land-of-Israel salad made of tomatoes, cucumbers, pickles, radishes and onions

Choice of Soup

Chicken with lokshen

Yemeni bone marrow

Served with freshly baked pita and fenugreek paste

Meals on kibbutzim were prepared in a communal kitchen and in the early years were often not very tasty, but members used to make their own salad, which would sometimes become the most interesting dish in their culinary desert. The salad always included tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce and, at times, green onions, olives, radishes and carrots. Some claimed that kibbutz members preferred to spend their time making salad rather than working under the glaring sun. Either way, this salad is now the most common one in every Israeli household. It’s dubbed the Land-of-Israel salad in WIZO’s cookbook.

Meat was scarce in the new nation. “We ate meatballs all the time,” recalls Ora Amir, a Holocaust orphan who moved to Kibbutz Ein Shemer in Northern Israel

For Ashkenazi Jews, it was kugel, a dish they originally made with egg noodles, plenty of eggs for binding, and berries for flavor. But with berries nowhere to be found, and eggs in scarce supply, Ashkenazi cooks settled for wheat noodles and caramelized sugar, which resulted in the now-famous Jerusalem kugel.

Dessert was not a common occurrence in the early days of statehood, and while children may have craved sweets, most had to settle for jams made from every fruit available, including oranges, apples and, of course, eggplants.

Today the period of austerity is long over, but these foods remain popular choices among all segments of Israeli society. Seventy-five years after statehood, Israeli national cuisine remains a work in progress.

Main

Pastelikos pastry with meat and pine nuts

Jerusalem kugel *

Dessert

A variety of homemade orange, apple and eggplant jams

back in 1948, such a meal could never have been served. all the dishes were common in israel at the time, but each was prepared by a different community.

literary moment TRAVELING THE LAND, BOOK IN HAND

BY OMER FRIEDLANDER

precious shilling coin, buy a heap of candy with it, and then stash their haul for safekeeping in the garden. I grew up on the next street over, and I remember going to the garden with my twin brother almost every day. We spent entire afternoons sliding down the sloped concrete roof of the bomb shelter.

Some of my favorite reading spots in Tel Aviv are public gardens. A peaceful, out-of-theway place to read is the garden on Arnon Street. The entrance is small and hidden, lined with stocky, gnarled old olive trees. There is a playground with a yellow slide and a blue swing covered by a tarp for shade. Next to it is the neighborhood bomb shelter. The garden was made famous by the poet Leah Goldberg as the setting for her children’s book My Friends from Arnon Street, about a pair of twins who find a

There is a rich tradition of literary cafés in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but some of the most famous are gone by now. In Tel Aviv, for example, Café Kasit, which was frequented by bohemians and poets such as Nathan Alterman and Abraham Shlonsky, no longer exists. There is Bookworm near Rabin Square, with its logo of a bespectacled worm, and The Little Prince on King George with its garden patio and mismatched chairs; both are a combination bookstore and café.

There are also cafés and bookstores that have themselves inspired books. In Jerusalem, one of the most famous literary cafés is Tmol Shilshom (Only Yesterday), named after the novel by Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon. It was patronized by such literary greats as Yehuda Amichai, Amos Oz, David Grossman, Orly Castel-Bloom, Batya Gur and Meir Shalev. David Ehrlich, the owner of the café, who, like

Shalev, recently passed away, wrote a book, Café Shira, that is a collection of character portraits inspired by the café’s patrons and employees. In Tel Aviv, at the end of a small alleyway off Allenby, across the street from the Great Synagogue, wedged between a hardware store and a kiosk, is Halper’s, a secondhand bookshop that became the inspiration and setting for the owner Josef Halper’s The Bibliomaniacs: Tales from a Tel Aviv Bookseller

It is very difficult to come up with a catalog of books for a literary tour of Israel. No matter how long the list, there will always be disagreements and arguments about the canon, what is included and what is left out. Some of the most interesting voices in Israeli literature, in my opinion, are ambivalent and conflicted in their relationship with Israel, Judaism or the Hebrew language. Their work feels like an ongoing argument with themselves, the pull-and-tug of identity and belonging. Here are a handful of writers, then, who are particularly good at observing this strange place and bringing it to life on the page in all of its complexity.

Leah Goldberg at a café in Tel Aviv in 1935.

One of the most original and powerful contemporary voices in Israeli literature is the author Sayed Kashua, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who immigrated to the United States and currently lives in the Midwest. I’d recommend starting with his novels Dancing Arabs and Second Person Singular, which deal with the conflicting duality of Palestinians’ identity in Israel. Kashua’s relationship with the Hebrew language is complicated:

“Struggling with the language, hating it, loving it, trying to make room for myself in it while fighting it, became essential to my writing.” The narrator of Second Person Singular drives through the narrow streets of East Jerusalem, “sunglasses shielding his eyes.” He looks over at the main intersection, “where hundreds of day laborers waited to be picked up… What did they make of Arabs like him, citizens of the state? With their luxury cars and ostentatious lifestyles, the ones like him, who came for college and stayed for financial reasons, immigrants in their own land.”

As an Israeli author writing in English, I have a particular affinity for Ayelet Tsabari’s work. In her excellent short story collection, The Best Place on Earth, Tsabari has a talent for conjuring place vividly. In the story “Casualties,” she describes the Carmel market in Tel Aviv with its “buses and people and cars and sirens and vendors and street cats and taxis and car alarms.” The frantic list evokes much of the chaos of the place, the market with its colorful hills of za’atar, sumac and paprika, tubs of olives and glass jars of pickles floating in brine, knockoff Adidas shorts, fake Zippo lighters, plastic water guns, Coca-Cola-flavored gummy worms and crumbling mountains of halva with pistachios. “Before I moved here,” she writes, “I used to think Tel Aviv was all long beaches and white houses with rounded balconies, but Allenby is lined with crumbling buildings in gray and yellow, leaning against each other like

some of the most interesting voices are ambivalent and conflicted in their relationship with israel, judaism or the hebrew language.

Nathan Alterman with his daughter, Tirza Atar, at Tel Aviv’s Café Kasit in 1960.

a row of crooked yellow teeth.” By the way, for a study of the Tel Aviv of “white houses with rounded balconies,” I’d recommend Nahoum Cohen’s Bauhaus Tel Aviv: An Architectural Guide

Any literary tour of Israel has to include the Jerusalem of Amos Oz. In his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, people in Jerusalem “walked rather like mourners at a funeral, or latecomers at a concert.” They stroll through “leafy Rehavia with its gardens and its strains of piano music” and visit the cafés with gilded chandeliers on Ben Yehuda Street. In the Land of Israel, a record of conversations Oz had with a diversity of people living everywhere from the settlements to periphery towns, reveals the deep fractures of Israeli society that have only grown wider over time. Here he describes the Geulah Quarter of Jerusalem, an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood: “From porch to porch, the entire width of the alleyways, stretch laundry lines with white and colored clothes… pious Jews in black garb, bearded, bespectacled, chattering in Yiddish, tumultuous, in a hurry, scented with the heavy aroma of Eastern European Ashkenazi cooking.” His story collection Between Friends explores life on an invented kibbutz. In the kibbutz, the land is planted with seasonal flowers, rock gardens, cactus and grapevines. At night, “a hot summer moon shone red as it rose above the tall cypress trees.”

For a vital and important report on the occupation, there is David Grossman’s The Yellow Wind. Walking around the Dheisheh refugee camp south of

Bethlehem in early 1987, Grossman observes the density of cement houses piled together, “rusty iron beams spread throughout as sinews, jutting like disconnected fingers.” I would also include Grossman’s novel To the End of the Land as some of the best Israeli literature ever written. The book follows Ora, a mother who is haunted by visions of army officers coming to deliver news that her son Ofer, a soldier, has been killed. Grossman describes a country going to war, with the long convoy twisting along, “a stammering band of civilian cars, jeeps, military ambulances, tanks, and huge

bulldozers on the backs of transporters.” Engaged in a desperate kind of magical thinking to protect her son, Ora refuses to listen to radio broadcasts or read the newspapers and instead goes trekking in the Galilee, wandering “to the end of the land.” Grossman describes the mist as it rises from the warm, fragrant earth and “elongated puddles” and frogs leaping into the stream and “not a human being in sight.”

And to complete the trio, of course, A.B. “Bulli” Yehoshua. I would start with The Lover, which is set in Haifa not long after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. “Four months have passed now since the end of the war and the land is still uneasy, men wandering about in a vague search for something, for some account that remains to be settled.” Yehoshua expertly evokes a particular kind of post-war listlessness, an entire country suffering from insomnia. In one scene, teenagers in the summer are “sinking into drowsiness” on the beach. They are “roasting in the heat, diving into the cold water, swimming, sinking, floating…coming out and lying on the water line, wallowing in the muddy sand, digging holes, then going to buy falafel or ice cream…” There is a flowing, breathless quality to the prose, which captures the “slow rhythm of the sea, sun, and sky.” I feel a particular fondness for Yehoshua’s work, not only because of his incredible storytelling but also because my grandmother would often tell a story about him from her childhood. They were friends, and

Ayelet Tsabari, author of The Best Place on Earth.

sometimes he would hide under her bed and listen to her secret conversations with her cousin. I grew up on stories like this one, stories that make Israel seem even smaller than it is.

Speaking of smallness and brevity, I’d like to reiterate my affection for the short story form. In the absurdist tradition exemplified by Etgar Keret, there is also Jerusalem Beach, a highly recommended debut collection by Iddo Gefen. One of my favorite characters in Gefen’s collection is the 80-year-old Golani recruit in the story “The Geriatric Platoon.” The surreal premise (an elderly man recruited to the army) feels totally believable because

of Gefen’s brilliant details. The old man packed “four undershirts, five pairs of underwear, a flashlight, two cans of sardines, a biography of Moshe Sharett, and anti-chafing cream…then he canceled his subscription to the Lev Cinema.” Deep in the maze of Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv, there is an actual Lev Cinema, with its plush red velvet chairs and its antiquated, kitschy sign with a cartoon heart. The real cinema feels like a bizarre imaginary movie theater conjured up by a short story writer.

I’ll end with perhaps the most celebrated poet in Israel, even two decades after his death: Yehuda Amichai. In his poem “Tourists,”

Amichai writes about the Tower of David, an ancient citadel near the Jaffa Gate entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem. “Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David’s Citadel and put down my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of tourists stood there around their guide, and I became their point of reference. ‘You see that man over there with the baskets? A little to the right of his head there’s an arch from the Roman period.’” Amichai ends the poem by imagining instead a reversal. “I said to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, ‘Do you see that arch over there from the Roman period? It doesn’t matter, but near it, a little to the left and then down a bit, there’s a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables for his family.’”

If you want to ignore this entire list of recommendations, here is an alternate literary tour of Israel: Put a book of poems by Amichai in your back pocket. (Luckily, Amichai was generous to his readers, insisting that all of his poetry books be printed in the same format of 10x18 centimeters so that they could easily fit in a reader’s pocket.) Then wander around until you find a hidden garden or a café, and get into an argument with a stranger about books.

Omer Friedlander was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Tel Aviv. He is the author of the short story collection The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land, the title story of which won the 2020 Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Fiction Contest. He teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

Sayed Kashua, author of Dancing Arabs and Second Person Singular.

AMERICA, JEWS AND ISRAEL— IT’S COMPLICATED S

eventy-five years ago, a few hundred thousand Jews in the Middle East became Israelis, asserting citizenship in an independent Jewish state. Several thousand miles away, a few million American Jews, like their coreligionists in Britain, France, the Soviet Union, Argentina, Morocco and elsewhere, remained “diaspora Jews.” For nearly two millennia, until the moment of Israeli independence, that phrase had been a redundancy. To be a diaspora Jew was to be a Jew. Even those few who had lived in the historic land of Israel had submitted to a distant imperial authority. Jewishness everywhere was a form of political homelessness. Suddenly, the phrase “diaspora Jew” acquired a distinctive meaning by comparison with an alternative identity, one acquired through the return to Zion.

that Britain stand by the promise of the Balfour Declaration and get out; as Jews, they had hoped for, and some had fought for, a British victory, given the nightmarish prospect of an Allied defeat.

So that’s how the stage was set for the story related in these two books with very different emphases and conclusions: In Israel, a revolutionary movement determined to prevent another Shoah and suspicious of diplomatic guarantees of the sort that had failed the Jews of Europe; in the States, a Jewish population broadly supportive of Israel but more deeply engaged in the less revolutionary but very successful process of deepening their identity as Americans, acquiring education and prosperity in the process.

We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel

By Eric Alterman

Basic

Books, 512 pp., $35.00

The story of the interactions between Jews in Israel and the Jewish and gentile supporters of Israel in the United States is complex and colored by the unique conditions that led to Israel’s birth. Until World War II, Zionism was not a cause universally or enthusiastically embraced by American Jews. By war’s end, when the fact of the death camps was documented to the world, massive majorities of Jews in the United States and other Americans came to embrace the idea of a Jewish homeland. Leaders of the American Jewish community were forced to confront their failure before and during the war, despite great success and influence in American society, to make their country prioritize saving European Jews, by granting them asylum or even by bombing the rail lines that transported them to their death. American Jews shared in the victory over Nazism as Americans and shared in the victimhood as Jews.

Through subsequent decades, American Jews remained highly supportive of Israel. The question that both authors address is: Why did the U.S. government, despite many disagreements, also do so? For votes? Campaign contributions? Idealism? Guilt? Both of these books were published last year, before the right-wing, Netanyahu-led government took power, and it is possible that events might yet lead the authors to amend their conclusions, either weakening or strengthening them.

Eric Alterman, in We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, finds the explanation of U.S. support for Israel—undiminished by settlements established contrary to U.S. policy—in the manipulation of American public and political sentiment on behalf of Israel and without regard to the fate of the Palestinians. Alterman, a longtime media columnist for The Nation and a professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College, writes that once the Israelis had won their war for independence, their relationship with Washington took on a familiar, recurring pattern:

The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

By Walter Russell Mead Knopf, 672 pp., $35.00

Israeli leaders likewise confronted the failure of Zionism to save European Jewry. The worst forecasts for the Jews’ European future had come to pass, and Palestine under the British Mandate had been inaccessible as a sanctuary. As Zionists, Jews in Palestine could demand

US diplomats would ask Israel to compromise on something, often having to do with the re-patriation of the Arab refugees who were expelled or had fled during the war. The Israelis would listen patiently and then proceed to do what-

ever they had intended in the first place. The secretary of state would complain to the president, and there the matter would end.

The ending was often not a happy one. Alterman quotes former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Robert Gates recalling that every president he had served at some point got “so pissed off at the Israelis that he couldn’t speak.”

There were also rough spots in the relations between the Israelis and American Jews. Early on, Israeli leaders disparaged Jewish life in the diaspora as exilic and provisional. When it came to Jewish life, the real deal was to be lived in Israel. They were on the playing field; American Jews were in the grandstands, and we ought to join the new Jewish reality. The head of the American Jewish Committee (a group previously very skeptical of Zionism), industrialist Jacob Blaustein, mindful of the implication in Zionist rhetoric that American Jews should owe their real loyalty to Israel, negotiated a remarkable agreement with David Ben-Gurion. As Alterman recounts it, in 1950 Blaustein exacted this statement from Israel’s founding prime minister: “The Jews of the United States, as a community and as individuals, have only one political attachment and that is to the United States of America. They owe no political allegiance to Israel.”

Blaustein observed in response that “American Jews vigorously repudiate any suggestion or implication that they are in exile.” This proved a step too far for Ben-Gurion, who for years was criticized in Israel for the concession he did make. “Establishing a tradition to which future Israel prime ministers would studiously adhere,” Alterman writes, “Ben-Gurion proceeded to ignore whatever the Americans believed they had been promised.”

While the currency of the Ben-Gurion-Blaustein agreement was merely rhetorical, the abduction and trial of Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann by Israel (where his crimes had not been committed) was a more

substantive demonstration of Israel’s self-image as not merely the world’s only country with a Jewish majority, but as the state of the Jews, the rightful venue for adjudication of the Nazis’ crimes against Jews anywhere. An oddly asymmetric relationship was taking shape: Prosperous American Jews whose political and economic support was highly valued were expected to acknowledge the controlling authenticity of their cousins in Israel.

Alterman’s book is deeply researched and written with passion and anger at the tactics that won the hearts and minds of the American public. It tracks the U.S.-Israel relationship through the days when Leon Uris’s novel Exodus and the movie version starring Paul Newman depicted (with much help from Israel in the filming) a nation of suntanned kibbutzniks under assault and willing to defend themselves; not a hint that the people they were displacing might have an argument worth hearing, too. Alterman tracks the shift of power from left to right in the 1960s and 1970s—in Israel, and in international support for the country—as well as the rightward shift of Israel’s American supporters.

Israelis are not the only people Alterman faults. He is scathing on the subject of Yasser Arafat’s inept leadership and penchant for tub-thumping, anti-imperialist orations as opposed to governing. He prefers the Palestinian advocacy of Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Said. He is critical of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s much-debated book The Israel Lobby for blaming too much, the invasion of Iraq for instance, on pro-Israel lobbying.

I find Alterman’s most important observations are about the impact of the relationship with Israel on American Jews. The cause of Israel in peril, he argues, suppressed debate; no violation of Jewish law or practice, he argues, is deemed so outrageous as criticism of Israel. As of ten years ago, an online survey of more than 500 mostly Conservative and Reform rabbis found that nearly half felt very fearful about expressing their views on Israel publicly, afraid of the consequences to their careers or reputations. Among those with dovish views, three-quarters felt very or somewhat fearful of doing so. (Whether the actions of the current Netanyahu government change that dynamic remains

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (right) accompanied by Israel Ambassador to the U.S. Abba Eban (center), with President Harry Truman in 1951.

to be seen.) As Israeli opponents of a two-state solution have increased their leverage over Israeli policy, American Jews are “represented” by presidents of major Jewish organizations whom very few American Jews (a typically educated and politically engaged lot) could name. One might reasonably ask whether these institutional leaders (to say nothing of pro-Israel megadonors such as the late Sheldon Adelson) are representing the American Jewish community or Israel’s Likud Party. Alterman rightly deplores the evolution from a profound and impassioned solidarity engendered by the 1967 Six-Day War to a top-down, money-driven pseudo-solidarity made possible by a deep reluctance to criticize Israel publicly, at least until recently—one that even entailed the demonization of Barack Obama, who was captivated by reading Exodus as a kid.

In fact, as Alterman mentions more than once, American Jews, when polled, tend to support concessions that the Israeli right opposes. He foresees a crisis with the American Jewish community as the unity forged by the Six-Day War fragments. Of course, the cause is not a uniquely Jewish one. Christians United for Israel was founded in 2006 by the San Antonio Pentecostal preacher John Hagee, who “set out to awaken the sleeping giant of Christian Zionism.” The organization now claims ten million members, more than the entire American Jewish population.

That last fact reflects the central observation of Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel and the Fate of the Jewish People, which came out last year. Mead, the “Global View” columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a Hudson Institute fellow and a professor at Bard College, places Jews and American support for Israel in the broader context of the American Protestant imagination. From colonial times, Americans identified strongly with the Jews of the Bible. This identification did not require knowing any real living Jews (only about 2,000 Americans at the dawn of the 19th century were Jewish). Nor did it interfere with an-

tisemitic quotas or restrictive covenants targeting American Jews after their numbers increased. When the United States clamped down on immigration in the 1920s (keeping most Eastern European Jews out), Congress also voted to support Britain’s Balfour Declaration. That combination of policy moves reflected the sentiment of Americans that Jews deserved a homeland, just not a home in their neighborhood. Indeed, in the era of heavy Jewish immigration just before the turn of the 20th century, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan were among those signing a petition in support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, five years before Theodor Herzl published his pamphlet The State of the

pro-Jewish sentiment ran high) and the United Kingdom (whose postwar government had decided to cultivate the Arab oil-producing states).

On the domestic side, progressive Democrats were led by Eleanor Roosevelt, no longer first lady but an influential newspaper columnist, whose faith in the United Nations was absolute and required sticking to the UN partition plan that would surely lead to war. The legacy of Kissinger, Mead argues, was that after the Islamic Revolution in Iran (which under the pro-Western Pahlavi regime had been the biggest regional recipient of U.S. aid) the United States would (profitably) arm the Gulf Arab petro-states, on the condition that Israel would be armed to a level of superiority. Since the Arab states worried more about Iran than about the Israelis (or the Palestinians), Israel’s military might posed no problem. This was the world that gave us the Abraham Accords.

Jews. In Mead’s telling, Israel did not need Paul Newman’s blue eyes or the Israel lobby to win over Americans to its side; the matter was settled in Israel’s favor long ago, deep in the Protestant American psyche.

Mead argues that American support for the Jewish state has conformed to U.S. national interests, not distorted them—from Harry Truman’s recognition of Israel to Henry Kissinger’s refashioning of the superpower politics of the Middle East around Anwar Sadat’s break with Moscow and later his separate peace with Israel. Recognition had less to do with Truman’s Jewish World War I army buddy Eddie Jacobson lobbying him (a popular exaggeration) than with domestic politics and geopolitics. Stalin supported Israel’s creation, Mead writes, in order to drive a wedge between the United States (where

Mead tracks the rightward shift in American support for Israel as part of a shift in American Protestantism. The “old stock,” white mainline Protestant denominations, rooted in the Northeast and Midwest, experienced sharp losses of adherents in the postwar decades. Their empty pews contrasted with the growth of Sun Belt-based evangelical movements for whom Israel’s survival confirmed a belief that a divine hand operated in worldly events (John Hagee’s congregation, according to Alterman, numbered 18,000). According to Mead, the New Right and Reagan Republicans of the 1980s needed the Israel issue as an example of putting God back in American life and foreign policy.

When Israeli and American interests have sharply diverged, it has not been beyond a president confident of his position and willing to take flak in the opinion columns to resist pro-Israel lobbying. Eisenhower’s handling of the Suez Canal crisis, Reagan’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia, George H.W. Bush’s opposition to loan guarantees for West Bank settlements and Obama’s support of the Iran nuclear deal all conflicted with Israeli policy demands—and all prevailed.

In Mead’s telling, Israel did not need Paul Newman’s blue eyes or the Israel lobby to win over Americans to its side.

expect?

Both of these books are insightful and disturbing. Neither holds out much hope for the peaceful coexistence of Jews and Palestinians anytime soon (which is not either author’s main concern). Yes, as Alterman describes it, institutional Jewish supporters of Israel push hard, often treat conscientious critics of Israeli policy (e.g., J Street or Peter Beinart) as apostates rather than dissenters and can place Israeli interests above a decent regard for human rights (as when some groups supported Turkey’s opposition to a congressional declaration that the slaughter of the Armenians was genocide). But, to be fair, solidarity has never been the strong suit of American Jews, who, at various times, have disdained Jews from the other side of Europe, Jews from the other part of Poland, and Jews from the other camp in the Socialist-Communist and Stalinist-Trotskyist splits. Perhaps the title We Are Not One would more accurately conclude What did you expect?

Would U.S. policy on the Middle East really have unfolded as it did even without organized pro-Israel pressure, as Mead argues? Perhaps. But if all that lobbying was for naught, it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. For me, Mead captures something fundamental when he describes a central difference between American Jews and Israeli Jews. The United States has evolved from a country led by its “old stock” Protestant establishment, he argues, into a diverse society where identity can no longer be defined by blood and soil. It is defined by a creed rooted in a liberal democratic order, an optimistic creed to which a great many American Jews feel deeply committed: freedom of expression, minority rights, separation of church and

state. “The single most important thing about Israel that most Americans do not understand,” Mead writes, “is that Israel was founded on a reasonable and historically justified skepticism about the ability of the liberal order to protect Jews.”

Israelis prefer the support of American evangelicals like Hagee, whose eschatology entails a Jewish endgame of conversion or damnation, to the protection of UN peacekeepers (like the ones who failed the Bosnians at Srebrenica), even though the latter are the product of modern, liberal thought and the former smacks of the Middle Ages.

As we have seen in this year’s Israeli political upheaval, there are many Israelis who value a rules-based liberal order and such a fundamental principle as the separation of powers. Perhaps American Jews, even if only from the grandstands, will cheer their support for such principles, and for the imperfect but hopeful political condition that we inhabit.

Robert Siegel is a special literary contributor to Moment.

Perhaps the title We Are Not One would more accurately conclude, What did you

THE ALLEN AND JOAN BILDNER CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF JEWISH LIFE

BOOK REVIEW ERIKA DREIFUS

A WRITER WHOSE STORIES BITE DEEP

tially appeared as a short story in The Atlantic and is included in the new book—was celebrated by some readers and excoriated by others. The tale concerns a father-son duo who run a morally questionable consulting company called “Holocaust Connections, Inc.,” and whose offspring, representing the eponymous third generation, not only converts to Christianity but, as her second-generation father notes, becomes a nun at “that Carmelite convent right by Auschwitz, of all places.” What some considered brilliant satire of Holocaust education and commemoration others found beyond offensive. Matters became so heated that no less eminent a figure than Cynthia Ozick publicly castigated both the then-editor and a writer for New York’s Jewish Week for their vilification. (Ozick’s defense of the book is preserved on the website of Reich’s literary agent.)

example of her style. First published in 2004, the story introduces Reb Pesach Tikkun-Olam Salzman, long-settled in Beijing after being dispatched as an emissary from Brooklyn with his wife, Rebbetzin Frumie. But Reb Tikkun-Olam’s dubious activities, including a mutually beneficial collaboration with Chinese “Bosses” that involves the care and eventual placement for adoption in the United States of the most vulnerable (often disabled) abandoned young Chinese girls, have driven his exasperated wife to leave him. Reich summarizes the rupture with signature style, simultaneously comic and horrifying, while deploying one of her equally characteristic, exquisitely crafted long sentences:

The House of Love and Prayer and Other Stories

By Tova Reich Seven Stories Press, 256 pp., $26.95

American author Tova Reich has been writing fiction for a long time: Mara, the first of her six published novels, was released in 1978. The second, Master of the Return (1988), won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, a prestigious Jewish literary prize, and the most recent, Mother India (2018), was named a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Her books have earned Reich a reputation for deep knowledge of Jewish subjects, among them ritual, history, culture and texts; experiences of Jewish women; varieties of religious (particularly Orthodox) observance; the Holocaust and its repercussions; and Israel.

Her fiction is also associated with sharp narrative bite. Fifteen years ago, My Holocaust—the opening chapter of which, in altered form and under the title “The Third Generation,” ini-

Reich’s trademark subjects and recognizable style fill the pages of The House of Love and Prayer and Other Stories, the publication of which marks the first time her short fiction has been gathered into book form. The volume comprises stories that date as far back as 1995’s “The Lost Girl,” which won a National Magazine Award after publication in Harper’s and canonization in The Norton Anthology of Jewish-American Literature. Some of these stories may already be familiar to readers of literary journals such as Conjunctions or Agni. Two pieces, including the title story, appear to be published here for the first time.

Like Reich’s novels, these stories unfold in settings both common and less so in Jewish-American writing, frequently but not always in Orthodox settings. The sometimes unsympathetic characters often find themselves in extreme situations: In “The Lost Girl,” the principal of an all-girls high school must contend with the disappearance of a student in the woods on a field trip; the title story follows Rabbi Yidel Glatt, so preoccupied with bodily holiness that he eventually dies of anorexia. Other stories take place in Israel, Poland and China.

“Forbidden City” offers an illustrative

But the last straw for Frumie came when he informed her that although all the other discarded girls he would be rescuing as part of his mission to repair the world would be for the purpose of finding them good Jewish homes and adoptive Jewish parents from among the increasing numbers of older overeducated infertile Jewish couples of America with dual incomes who could afford the fees, thereby, as a side benefit of saving the children, also drawing from the demographic plenitude and genetic variation of the Chinese to correct the population shortage and chronic inbreeding among the Jews, throwing in as a bonus the extra service of personally converting the girls in advance through ritual-bath immersion, like pre-koshered chickens, already salted and soaked—this particular girl, this Dolly, his first, he would keep, not for his own sake, God forbid, but for hers, for Frumie’s sake, to raise Dolly to serve as his pilegesh when she came of age so that he would no longer have to bother Frumie with his needs even during the periods when she was not ritually impure, when she was technically available to him, albeit suffering from a terrible migraine.

If you’re encountering pilegesh for the first time (it means “concubine”), rest assured that you’re not alone. Surely, I won’t be unique in valuing the lessons (or refreshers) in Jewish literacy that these stories can provide outside the adult education classroom. The specifics of rituals surrounding death and

burial, for instance, are central to the third story, “The Plot”—in which two women in their eighties build a friend ship through a local chevra kadisha bereavement committee—and recur elsewhere in the volume. Through “The House of Love and Prayer,” one will discover (or be reminded of) an ar ray of details concerning circumcision.

Let’s linger here: Until I picked up this book, I was not aware that there was a real-life House of Love and Prayer cor responding to the fictional one of the story’s (and the volume’s) title. It is in the fictional House of Love and Prayer, in San Francisco in the 1960s, that the story’s main character, the aforementioned charismatic Rabbi Yidel Glatt, meets the woman who becomes his wife (Tahara, née Terry, Birnbaum, “from a bagelsand-lox family on the Upper West Side of Manhattan”). But when I recognized a minor character—Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach—presented as the House of Love and Prayer’s “guru,” I paused. Google confirmed that there was, in fact, a House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco, and that it was Carlebach’s domain. Especially after allegations against the real-life Carlebach resurfaced in the #MeToo era, it seems worth stating plainly that here, as elsewhere, these stories take on material that some may find extremely disturbing. Some of the allegations against the real Carlebach, indeed, date back to the 1960s, when, in the story, before her would-be husband’s arrival, Reich’s Terry/Tahara would spend nights “gathered with the other lost souls at Reb Shlomo’s feet, getting higher and higher on his songs and streaming his stories so that it was nothing less than an honor in those pre-dawn hours when the heart is clamped with dread to be the girl summoned to his chamber…”

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THE GREAT JEWISH SHORT STORIES – PART 2 PALEY, ROTH, BELLOW & OZICK

Four exciting lectures and discussions exploring the best of Jewish short fiction, taught by Dr. Michael Krasny, former host of the award-winning KQED FORUM and professor emeritus of literature at San Francisco State University.

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Every story in this volume is memorable, but perhaps the most striking—especially right now—is “Dead Zone,” which concludes the book. Here, Reich takes us into the future: When Isadore “Izzy” Gam dies in 2040, his great-grandson is only three years old. But as an adult, this great-grandson absorbs and narrates Izzy’s exceptional story largely because of its “peculiar” connection with something that happens not long after Izzy’s demise, something we discover in the story’s very first line: “the decision by the United Nations to officially terminate the existence of Israel as a living entity, an event that occurred about a century after it had voted for the partition of the Holy Land leading to the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948.” (Do you need a minute before continuing? I did, when I first read those words.)

As the younger Gam explains: “How [the UN] so ingeniously eliminated Israel as a state was simply by designating it a UNESCO World Heritage Site— specifically, as the world’s largest Jewish cemetery.” And this, as he narrates, is

indeed linked with his great-grandfather’s atypical burial.

I’ve already noted that death is threaded through the book. This final story raises the stakes exponentially, from individual demise and the Holocaust’s reverberations to something so shocking that it might seem unthinkable. But if we acknowledge our Jewish past, and consider the present, how unthinkable is it? How does Reich intend for readers to respond here, particularly regarding the State—and the state—of Israel? As with each of the preceding stories, the interpretative possibilities are voluminous.

This much seems certain: If Reich’s novels have provoked strong reactions in the past, this collection will fuel vivid conversations, too. Try it in your book club—if you dare.

Erika Dreifus is the author of Birthright: Poems and Quiet Americans: Stories, which was named an American Library Association/Sophie Brody Medal honor title for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature.

These stories take on material that some may find extremely disturbing.

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