Moment Magazine - May/June 2017

VOL. 42. NO. 3

MAY/JUNE 2017

MOMENT MAGAZINE

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O W R G I

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GROWING UP TRUMP

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P TR U U G

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ALAN ALDA •

ISRAEL SINCE 1967 •

YUVAL HARARI

HOW DONALD TRUMP’S YOUTHFUL ENCOUNTERS WITH JEWS SHAPED THE MAN AND PRESIDENT HE IS TODAY

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ISRAEL’S DEFINING MOMENTS SINCE 1967

MAY/JUNE 2017

WITH YAEL DAYAN YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI AARON DAVID MILLER BENNY MORRIS AYELET WALDMAN & MANY OTHERS

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Amy E. Schwartz

Marshall Breger, Marc Fisher, Glenn Frankel, Konstanty Gebert, Ari Goldman, Gershom Gorenberg, Robert S. Greenberger, Nathan Guttman, Clifford May, Joan Nathan, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Sarah Posner, Naomi Ragen, Suzanne F. Singer, Abraham D. Sofaer

ARTS EDITOR

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Dina Gold, Terry E. Grant, Diane Heiman, George E. Johnson, Eileen Lavine, Wesley G. Pippert, Laurence Wolff EUGENE M. GRANT FELLOW

Ellen Wexler RABBI HAROLD S. WHITE FELLOW

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FROM THE EDITOR

Waves of understanding by Nadine Epstein

6 THE CONVERSATION 10 OPINIONS What if the 1967 war had never happened? by Shmuel Rosner When feminism and Zionism clash by Liat Deener-Chodirker Jerusalem’s troubled holy sites by Marshall Breger Are school vouchers good for the Jews? by Jenny Diamond Cheng

18

JEWISH WORD

The evolving semantics of anti-Semitism by Ellen Wexler

19

VISUAL MOMENT

Thrilling treasures from Oxford’s vaults by Diane M. Bolz

20

ASK THE RABBIS

What should Jews know about the Muslim faith?

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POEM

“Borscht” by Myra Shapiro

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68 TALK OF THE TABLE Palestinian haute cuisine heats up by Eetta Prince-Gibson

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BOOKS

The Origin of the Jews:The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age reviewed by Shaye J.D. Cohen The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East reviewed by Tom Segev The Shadow Land reviewed by Anne Roiphe

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Volume 42, Number 3 Moment Magazine (ISSN 0099-0280) is published bimonthly by the Center for Creative Change, a nonprofit corporation, 4115 Wisconsin Avenue NW, Suite LL10, Washington, DC 20016. Subscription price is $23.97 per year in the United States and Canada, $61.70 elsewhere. Back issues may be available; please contact the editorial office for information.

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WIKICOMMONS; AP IMAGES; MATT AIKEN/THE DAHLONEGA NUGGET; COVER BY NAVID MARVI

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INTERVIEW

POLITICS

YUVAL HARARI: OF CYBORGS AND MEN

GROWING UP TRUMP

The medieval military historian became an academic rock star when he predicted humans will become gods, then go extinct. Will robots rule?

by Laurence Wolff

How did Donald Trump’s youthful encounters with Jews help shape the man, and president, he is today?

by Marc Fisher

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A MOMENT SYMPOSIUM

OUR NATION 2017

BOOK INTERVIEW

DEFINING MOMENTS IN ISRAELI HISTORY: 1967–2017

LETTER FROM DAHLONEGA

ALAN ALDA’S UNIVERSE

A Ku Klux Klan banner shocks a small Georgia town—and dredges up memories of deeprooted prejudice.

The M*A*S*H* actor explains how he fell in love with science (and Einstein) and why acting skills are critical to science. Plus, he thinks he might be Jewish.

Moment asks an eclectic group of Americans, Israelis and Palestinians—including Yossi Klein Halevi, Meir Shalev, Ayelet Waldman, Aaron David Miller, Benny Morris and Yael Dayan— to share a personal story.

by Noah Phillips

by Ellen Wexler

Editor: Marilyn Cooper Interviews: Marilyn Cooper, Dina Gold, George E. Johnson, Ellen Wexler and Laurence Wolff MAY/JUNE 2017 / MOMENT

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F ROM THE EDITOR | NADIN E E P S T E I N

WAVES OF UNDERSTANDING

R

Recently I picked up Elie Wiesel’s Somewhere a Master: Hasidic Portraits and Legends from my bookshelf, settled into my reading chair and opened its pages. Elie begins with the story of a young Hasid in great distress and confusion over life. He has tried to study the Hebrew texts and prayers, but they mean nothing to him. A renowned Hasid, Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz, tries to comfort him and tells him that he is not alone in this struggle. It is one that can sometimes be eased by finding a teacher who has experienced the same distress and confusion.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

When I was younger I had interminable spells of similar internal distress. In my anxiety, it was hard to identify what I needed to learn and impossible to extract and absorb the wisdom I sought. I despaired that I never would. Even when I stumbled across wisdom, I often left it untouched, unable to hold on to it or truly grasp it.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten better at learning, and at recognizing teachers. We never know who our teachers will be. Sometimes they are people you would expect to learn from, such as parents, grandparents, rabbis, schoolteachers and professors. Sometimes they are not. As in many Jewish parables, the most humble person may be the one who speaks the truth. Greater understanding can come at

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any moment and from any direction.

Teachers don’t always know that they are our teachers, unless we have the presence of mind to tell them. Only in recent years have I begun to do so, but as Joni Mitchell has written and sung, “Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” You then slowly realize how this person has been one of the teachers of your heart.

I have been blessed with a universe of teachers. Many are still alive—and I need to remember to thank them. But more and more are gone, including my mother, Ruth, who died five years ago this May. Every day I come to have more respect for her love, her spirit, her intuition, her creativity, her inspirational leadership and her reflex to help people of all kinds. On a bulletin board on a wall in my office I have pinned letters and notes from other teachers, among them Leonard Fein and Elie Wiesel, the cofounders of Moment. Most of the other letters are from people you may not know, but who continue to dwell in my heart. In the last months, I lost two more dear teachers, both of whom I became close to in their latter years—Robert Schattner and J. Zel Lurie. Bob, who died at the age of 91, invented a game-changing sore-throat spray and shepherded it to success. I tried to learn from his entrepreneurial example, but it was his modesty and kindness that left their mark. Zel, 103, was a pioneer in Jewish journalism covering the Arab revolt for The Palestine Post (now The Jerusalem Post) from 1934 to 1937. He passed along his sweeping perspective on Israel’s creation, as well as his search for the missing Cairo Codex, which he inspired me to locate and then write about in our January-February 2016 issue.

I am always shocked when someone dies.

Even if they were frail and ill, I still find it hard to imagine that this thing we call life will vanish with their last breath. First, there is that unbearable sense of loss that we all have to make somehow bearable. Then, in the next days and months, even years, come the waves of sadness and memory, alternating with those of new understanding.

You never know when the waves of understanding will hit you. Perhaps when you pick up a book and settle into a reading chair, or reread a letter pinned to a bulletin board, or replay a conversation in your head you will discover something a teacher was trying to tell you but you were not ready to appreciate. Occasionally a wave breaks during a conversation.

For some it may occur during prayer or ritual. More often for me, it’s when I am alone. When I am walking. Or when I wake up at night and there is space to think. Or when I am swimming. The waves can only wash ashore when there is time and space for them to break, and a sturdy shore to break upon.

The always-breaking waves make me, I hope, a fuller and better person, and a wiser steward of Moment. This is easier said than done. Editing and writing are a struggle. In a recent lecture at Connecticut College on Elie’s legacy, I spoke about how hard it is to find thoughtful clarity in a world in which evil sometimes seems a matter of opinion. For clarity to form, we must recognize why we think the way we do. Which wisdom, from which teachers (in person or in book or lyric form), shaped us and how? What are our biases and why? We need this kind of honest accounting to break free of habitual responses and move toward mature critical thinking—and greater understanding.

The wider our circle of teachers, the better. Which brings me back to Moment.

We don’t expect you to agree with everything we publish; we don’t ourselves.

For those of you who send us exasperated letters (see “The Conversation” on page six), please remember that in every issue there will be at least one opinion, perhaps more, expressed in a column or symposium with which you will vehemently disagree! Moment’s contributors are a purposefully diverse group with a wide range of perspectives that we constantly strive to express in ways that are accessible to as many people as possible.

Read as a whole, Moment will make you think. We do our work in the hope that some sentence, some new wave of understanding, will break upon your shore.

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T H E N E X T 5 , 0 0 0 Y E A R S O F C O N V E R S AT I O N B E G I N H E R E THE MANY LEGACIES OF ELIE WIESEL

ELIE WIESEL

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MOMENT TALKS WITH

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2016 ELECTION COVERAGE

+ ELISHA WIESEL REMEMBERS HIS FATHER

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THE CONVERSATION ILL WINDS BLOW WHAT ABOUT JARED AND IVANKA?

DO JARED AND IVANKA THINK THEY ARE IMMUNE TO ANTISEMITISM BECAUSE THEY ARE RICH, YOUNG, ATTRACTIVE AND KNOW THE RIGHT PEOPLE? IF SO, THEY SHOULD READ SOME HISTORY.

In her editorial (“Ill Winds Keep Blowing,” March/April 2017), Nadine Epstein rightly asserts there has been an increase in anti-Semitic activities in this country. And although she does not think Trump “is an anti-Semite or that he is deliberately singling out Jews,” Epstein recognizes that the far right is part of his coalition. Nevertheless, the president has done very little to stem the rising tide of antiSemitism. Epstein mentions Steve Bannon and his connections to the far right, suggesting that he bears some of the responsibility for the upsurge in bigotry. Yet except for describing them as his “loyal court,” she never mentions the president’s daughter, Ivanka, or his son-in-law Jared Kushner. How do they sit in the same room with Bannon?

How does Kushner read what Bannon has promoted and said and remain a colleague on the same team? And what are Jared and Ivanka, so public in their Jewishness, doing to stanch the rise in anti-Semitism? Do they think they are immune to anti-Semitism because they are rich, young, attractive and know the right people? If so, they should read some history. Epstein does a disservice by not pointing to the Kushners’ complicity.

Kenneth Dym Northampton, MA

IS DEMOCRACY BROKEN? TO JOIN THE CONVERSATION: • RESPOND AT MOMENTMAG.COM • TWEET @MOMENTMAGAZINE • COMMENT ON FACEBOOK • EMAIL EDITOR@MOMENTMAG.COM • SEND A LETTER TO THE EDITOR Moment Magazine P.O. Box 5769 Washington, DC 20016 Please include your hometown, state, email and phone number.

Moment reserves the right to edit letters for clarity and space.

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FEELING UNSAFE—AND UNFREE

Thank you for creating this forum (“Is Democracy Broken?” March/April 2017). We live in a scary world right now. We have guards at my synagogue. It began only for high holidays. Now it is for Shabbat, too.

And there are cameras everywhere. I don’t think churches have these concerns. This is no longer feeling like a free country.

Lana Finegold Scottsdale, AZ POLITICAL ALIENATION

Thanks for a very interesting symposium.

While most of the participants agreed democracy was the best system, no one mentioned the deep alienation so many people feel. Only 55 percent of voting-age American citizens cast ballots in 2016. And in the U.S. and many other democracies—includ-

ing Israel—the gap between those who have and those who have not is deepening from one election to the other. Could American democracy learn from the Chinese system, as Daniel Bell advocates, of choosing meritocratic leaders who could make “appropriate policies to benefit all people”?

Pnina Peri Joseph and Alma Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies, University of Maryland College Park, MD POOR LOSERS

Democracy is not broken, but there are a lot of people out there who are poor losers and name-callers. Fortunately, most of these people have very little power other than one measly vote. They don’t even try to persuade, just vent and scream. As a conservative and strong Israel supporter, I was very displeased with Obama, but I am pretty sure I could never accomplish anything by namecalling and hatred.

Harold Dukes via Facebook ISLAM IS UNREFORMABLE

We do not want to read a publication—particularly a Jewish publication—in which Muslim authorities, such as M. Zuhdi Jasser, were selected to join the “conversation.”

While we are not against freedom of expression in the U.S., Dr. Jasser provides a very dishonest perspective of the possibility of reform Islam, thereby misleading the American public about the possibility for peace with the adherents of Islam.

Michael Tom and Chindy Hafer Cherryhomes Odessa, TX AN UNBALANCED BALANCE

I am returning this issue of Moment because I do not feel this is what I want to read. You need to balance the discussion, so we can have a normal conversation about these issues. President Trump was elected by a country that, for more than 250 years, has been fighting for freedom here and around the world. The members of your staff had a right to vote, as every American citizen did.

Unless you feel we need the United Nations to monitor our election process, as it does in other countries, the vote was fair and both sides had equal opportunity for their own machinations. You may not like the

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outcome, but in a democracy we cannot get everything we want. After the election, we have to respect the president, even though we may not agree with his policies.

Melvin Cohen Centerville, MA

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The remarkable group of volunteers from synagogues resettling refugees (“Letter From New Haven,” March/April 2017) is one of more than 60 community groups in Connecticut that have stepped forward to welcome refugees through partnerships between a nonprofit refugee resettlement agency—in this case, Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS) in New Haven—and a community group, often a coalition of synagogues, churches, mosques and colleges. IRIS trains these groups, makes sure all federal requirements are met and ensures refugees are always moving toward self-sufficiency. Forty of these groups have already welcomed refugee families, mostly from Syria.

Thousands of private citizens across the state of Connecticut are gathering donations, setting up apartments, teaching families English, enrolling children in school, helping to find jobs, coordinating healthcare and helping refugees navigate a new culture.

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Sorry, I’m with President Trump on this one. I’ve seen too many stories about what happened with the refugees in Europe—and what happened in San Bernardino and Boston—to think that bringing in 50,000 more Alis and Mayas is a good idea. The Organization of the Islamic Conference has 57 member states. Perhaps one of them could step up to the plate and take these folks.

David via momentmag.com MORE VETTING?

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This family went through a four-year vetting process. I think our State Department did a very good job of vetting them. Realistically, what more could be done in the way of vetting? How much longer should it take?

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I appreciate the emphasis on respectful disagreement, presented by virtually all the esteemed rabbis (“How Do We Balance Civility With Disapproval for Others’ Politics?” March/April 2017). But there is another consideration in rabbinic ethics: the prohibition against humiliating others. Thus, in Pirkei Avot 3:15, Rabbi Elazar teaches us that one who “humiliates a fellow being in public...has no share in the world to come.” And in Bava Metzia 58b, we read that “whoever shames another in public is like one who sheds blood.”

And yet, in so much public debate, we find comments aimed at shaming, disparaging or insulting one’s opponents. As the rabbis point out, we can disagree passionately with our fellow human beings without being insulting or shaming those with whom we disagree.

Ronald W. Pies MD Lexington, MA

SUSAN SULEIMAN A COMPLEX PERSONALITY

I read Irène Némirovsky’s book, Suite Française, and loved it because she writes so beautifully. I was, however, acutely aware that there were no Jews in the book (“Refracted Identities, Mirrored Lives,” March/ April 2017). She came across as filled with self-hatred. True, she had a complex personality, but she was not kind.

Marcia Fine Scottsdale, AZ

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SYNAGOGUE ARCHITECTURE HELPING THE HEARING-IMPAIRED

Ellen Wexler cites the exciting new plans for the synagogue of the future (“Remaking the Modern-Day Synagogue,” January/February 2017), but nowhere— not even in the quotation about making it handicapped-accessible—is there a mention of the Hearing Induction Loop. As any hearing-aid wearer with a T-coil knows, a Loop brings the amplified sound from a microphone directly into one’s ears, and is far more effective than the FM systems now found in most synagogues. Moreover, use of the Loop renders unsightly earphones unnecessary; no one need be aware of hearing loss in his or her neighbor. Please, all of you architects—it’s quite inexpensive when it’s built into the building from the get-go!

One of the best ways to fight terrorism in Israel is to help save its victims.

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OP INION | SHM U EL ROSN ER

Should 1967 be Celebrated or Mourned?

CREATIVE COMMONS

Unfortunately—or fortunately—we can't go back in time and find out.

Fifty years. More than half of them, many more, have been years of acrimony. Was the Six-Day War just a great triumph— or a triumph whose consequence is grave devastation? Was it worth it? Pick the facts that support your viewpoint: The 1967 war resulted in overconfidence that brought about the 1973 war; the 1967 war convinced some Arab leaders that Israel was no longer weak and that removing it by force was not a realistic option; the war enabled Jews to settle the more important regions of its ancient homeland; the war put Israel in charge of territory occupied by Palestinians.

Most anniversary discussions of the 1967 war and its consequences are going to focus on the hot-button item on this list: Israel’s half-century of control over the lives of Palestinians. Indeed, it is a worthy and a thorny issue. Palestinians in the West Bank are less miserable than many of their brethren in neighboring Arab countries. Still, as Israel perpetuates the status quo, it must put forward a convincing case as to why it cannot better their situation and possibly end the era of Israeli control over their lives.

To make things more complicated, such a case exists. Security needs, regional circumstances, Palestinian rejectionism—all make the status quo, with all of its imperfections, an option currently more appealing than other options. But that’s the case for the status quo today, not for—or against—the Six-Day War. The case against that war would be: Had Israel not occupied so much territory in 1967, had it not decided to keep this territory rather than evacuate it, its current situation would be better. The case for it

10

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would be: Had Israel not had such a great victory 50 years ago, its situation today would be worse.

Is this a tough question? It is—because one never knows what could or would have happened had a certain action not taken place. It isn’t—for the same reason.

One never knows what could or would have happened if something else had happened differently. Thus, all we have are the facts before us. Fifty years later there is a morally and operationally troubling ongoing conflict with the Palestinians under Israel’s control. But also: Fifty years later Israel is stronger, economically and militarily; larger in territory and people; has better relations with some of its neighbors, Egypt and Jordan; has tighter relations with its ally, the United States; and has a much higher standard of living.

Would Israel be better off today had it decided to evacuate the West Bank immediately after the war? Maybe, maybe not. It might easily have been worse, or just about the same, or slightly better on one front (no occupation of Palestinians) and slightly worse on another front (no incentive for Jordan to avoid the next war). Would Israel be better off today had its victory not been so decisive and indisputable? Maybe, maybe not. It might have been worse, or just about the same, or slightly better on one front (the Arabs would not have felt a need to launch the 1973 war) and slightly worse on another front (Israel would have had no territory to trade for a peace with Egypt).

There can be no doubt: 2017 Israel is different from 1967 Israel. And the SixDay War was the catalyst. It made Israel more visible on the world’s stage as a pow-

er to be reckoned with. It gave it a shot of confidence. It boosted the connection of Israel with world Jewry. It forced Arab countries to rethink their long-term strategy. It convinced the United States that a bond with Israel would serve its interests. It also had less positive consequences.

There was something about smaller Israel—so I am told, as I was born a year after the war—that was lost. Israel today is less intimate, more materialistic, less naïve, more contentious.

On balance, then, was the victory at war an achievement to celebrate or a result to mourn? As disappointing as it is for those wanting to make the 50th anniversary of the war a time for cheshbon nefesh—Hebrew for spiritual accounting, or an accounting of the soul—this is impossible to know. We can’t always look at the result of a certain action—the war, the victory, the occupation of land—and assume that the result of the opposite action would have been better.

The 50-year mark, then, is not much more than a manufactured opportunity for political activists to lay out their arguments, most of them well-rehearsed in advance. Is post-1967 Israel a country changed for the better or for the worse?

We can have the debate, if we want. But it is not necessarily a very helpful debate, as the alternative post-1967 futures will be ever unknown to us.

Shmuel Rosner is a Tel Aviv-based contributing writer for the International New York Times, the political editor of the LA Jewish Journal and a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute.

MAY/JUNE 2017

5/3/17 12:35 PM

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OP INION | LIAT DEEN ER-CHODI R K E R

Can You Be a Zionist-Feminist?

AP IMAGES

Narrowing definitions on campuses have created a no-win climate.

Ever since mid-March, when organizers of the International Women’s March suggested that Zionism was incompatible with feminism, the same debate has rippled across college campuses, including mine: Can one identify as both a feminist and a Zionist?

On campuses, the critique starts with the narrow state of current feminism. The feminist movement has come under harsh criticism in the past few years for failing to acknowledge the experiences of women of color and for prioritizing the experience of white and cisgendered women (that is, women who are born female). There is a growing awareness that if feminism is to create powerful change, it must be an “intersectional” movement—one that acknowledges different forms of oppression experienced by women of diverse identities.

Why would this conflict with Zionism?

It shouldn’t—except that Zionism, too, suffers from narrow definitions. Today’s mainstream Jewish community often asserts a Zionism that emphasizes unconditional public support of Israeli government policy, refuses to acknowledge or show concern over the immorality of the occupation and does not allow for meaningful engagement with those who hold different, critical views.

As the feminist movement evolves under the influence of a new generation of activists and leaders, it has heightened its emphasis on fighting for the rights of all women, and that includes Palestinian women. If Palestinian women are oppressed by the Israeli occupation, then, logically, standing in solidarity with Palestinian women requires one also to oppose the occupation.

A person identifying as both a feminist and a Zionist must therefore ask challenging questions: Is there room within my Zionism to fight for the rights of Palestinian women alongside those of Israelis? Is there room in my feminism to act in solidarity even with those I disagree with on Israel?

At universities, progressive campus organizations, including feminist groups, increasingly create coalitions to work together in support of each organization’s particular 12

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cause, leveraging their partnerships to create greater positive impact. They include proPalestinian organizations, whose rhetoric and stances may feature fierce criticisms of Israel and Israeli policies. Just as these coalitions work together on campaigns to establish gender-neutral bathrooms on campus and support undocumented students, they also sometimes support the initiatives led by anti-Israel groups such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

While it is true that within these coalitions there are students who are anti-Israel, the vast majority simply care about the human rights of Palestinians. For many students like myself, it’s clear that in that case there is no contradiction between being pro-Israel and caring about Palestinian rights. The Jewish community, however, is sometimes quick to place all of the blame on progressive students for their criticisms of Israeli policy, without considering the genuine issues and values that motivate students to feel that way.

Too often, Jewish communal organizations favor a narrow definition of defending Israel at the expense of all other considerations. Rather than thinking about the content of a program that might be fighting for greater equality for women, supporting LGBTQ rights or standing up against Islamophobia, the Jewish communal institutions on college campuses evaluate such a program based on the answer to a single question: Are there parties who are anti-Israel involved in this event? By using this prism, the campus Jewish community (and its funders) disregard the possibility that greater engagement on issues of mutual concern can lead to stronger relationships and mutual understanding— and even, down the road, a more nuanced conversation about progressive Zionism.

Hillel International’s Standards of Partnership go so far as to ban affiliated Jewish student groups from cosponsoring any event, on any subject, with any organization that supports BDS or is deemed anti-Israel. As a result, pro-Israel Jewish students are forced to make a painful choice between standing with the Jewish community or standing with

the progressive community.

Forcing students to make that choice leads only to disillusion and disengagement.

It gives strength to the false argument that support and love for Israel is somehow inconsistent with support for human rights and dignity for all people.

As long as the Jewish community continues to enforce this litmus test, many progressive groups will be inaccessible to the vast majority of Jewish student groups and Zionist students. As a result, there are too few proudly identifying Zionists in progressive campus spaces, and the social justice work of the Jewish community is done in relative isolation from the larger progressive campus community.

There is a flip side to this as well. Unfortunately, in many progressive spaces on campus, the very word “Zionism” now is understood as connoting a racist and imperialist power that violently oppresses another people. This is a vast oversimplification of the history of Zionism, Jewish trauma and the current conflict. And this oversimplification often results in pro-Israel students feeling the need to hide their Zionism in order to be accepted into progressive spaces.

Progressive spaces that define Zionism and pro-Israel as inherently negative terms fail to recognize that it’s possible to support Israel and also oppose the occupation. This failure, too, is unacceptable.

For feminism and Zionism to coexist without contradiction, we must truly embrace a feminist movement that includes the lived experiences of all women, and we must expand our understanding of Zionism to include supporting the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians. Most important, we must engage in meaningful work with those with whom we may strongly disagree about Israel.

Liat Deener-Chodirker is a senior at the University of Maryland and J Street U Vice President for the Southeast.

MAY/JUNE 2017

5/3/17 12:36 PM

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OP INION | MA RSH ALL BREGER

The Trouble With Holiness

NADINE EPSTEIN

Israel’s half-century of control over its sacred sites has allowed problems to fester.

The “miraculous” victory of 1967 returned major holy places in Jerusalem and the West Bank to Jewish control, including the Temple Mount in the Old City (known as Haram al-Sharif to Muslims), the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem. This unexpected bounty, like other seemingly wondrous developments, actually fueled intense friction between Jews and Muslims. Sadly, the miracle of Israeli control of the holy places over 50 years has reduced the possibility of a peaceful solution to the wider conflict.

The effect on the Jewish world of regaining the holy places was transformative.

Secular kibbutzniks flocked to the Western Wall to put on tefillin they had discarded since their bar mitzvahs. General Moshe Dayan triumphantly proclaimed, “We have returned to all that is holy in our land...never to be parted again.” Army Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren asked that Regional Commander Uzi Narkiss place 100 kilograms of dynamite in the Dome of the Rock so as to clear the way for rebuilding the Third Temple. To which, according to one account, Narkiss responded: “Rabbi, if you don’t stop I will take you from here to prison.”

Pulling back from his statement, Dayan took down the Israeli flag flying on the top of the Dome of the Rock and returned operational control of the Haram to the Muslim religious authority, the waqf, thus separating—in theory at least—Israel’s claim to sovereignty from the practical business of administration and management. Dayan further ordered that Jews could not be forbidden from visiting the Temple Mount but that they could not pray in a Muslim site.

This forestalled immediate practical conflicts, but it stoked tensions.

Over time, both Jews and Muslims have focused more on the sites’ religious aspects.

In part this reflects the increased religiosity of both publics and, on the Jewish side, a tinge of messianism—the idea that a Jewish presence on the Mount brings the Messiah closer.

In the past five years, the trouble has escalated. Muslim leaders have proclaimed the 14

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Haram in danger, while groups of seemingly pious Muslim women, known as murabatat, have harassed Jewish visitors. Right-wing Knesset members have provocatively visited; so did Ayman Odeh, the head of the Joint (Arab) List. Israelis often visit in large groups, fueling Muslim fears of a Jewish takeover.

Government ministers have spoken of their dreams of expanded sovereignty and even of building the Third Temple. At least twice, the U.S. has had to bring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Jordan together to hammer out agreements to reduce outbreaks of violence.

The holy places could have been a bridge for peace. The Camp David summit in 2000 proposed many innovative compromises.

President Bill Clinton wanted to give the top of the Temple Mount (the Haram) to the Palestinians and the bottom (the Western Wall) to the Jews. King Hussein of Jordan urged that the Mount belonged to God and that the issue was one of management, not sovereignty. Others suggested a consortium of Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia and Morocco to manage the site. None of these suggested compromises gained purchase, not least because nobody (i.e. the United States) sought buy-in from other Muslim nations beforehand.

Religion itself could have played a positive role. For centuries, normative Jewish law had forbidden Jews from ascending the Temple Mount, lest they step accidentally into the inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies.

And in 1967 most Jews observed this prohibition. But the ban has slowly eroded. While the Israeli chief rabbinate and the ultraOrthodox still forbid Jews from going up to the Temple Mount, more and more national religious and settler rabbis allow and indeed encourage it. And when an issue of political management slides into a religious conflict, compromise becomes much more difficult. While a few hundred Jews a year ascended the Temple Mount just after 1967, now many thousands do.

Nationalism, of course, plays a role. From a settler perspective, entry onto the Temple

Mount underscores Jewish sovereignty and keeps Muslims from claiming sovereignty for themselves. Possession, to put it bluntly, is nine-tenths of the law. Another problem (and a ticking time bomb) is the Israeli courts. Unwilling to bar Jews from praying at a site holy to Jews, the courts have placed themselves in a bind. They have affirmed the principle of access to prayer—but, at the same time, they routinely accede to every police request to refuse a permit for prayer on grounds of public order. And the police always make such a claim. Intellectually this approach is incoherent (at least to an American). At some point, be it 2 a.m. Thursday or 5 p.m. Sunday, the claim of public order will not stand.

What to do? First, the Netanyahu government must act swiftly to tamp down rightwing rhetoric about the Temple Mount and Jewish sovereignty. Second, Netanyahu must enforce the ban on both right-wing MKs and MKs from the Joint (Arab) List ascending the Mount (something he has unfortunately said he will not do). Third, the Israeli government must bring the Palestinian community into the conversation, even if informally, to reduce tension on the Mount.

Fourth, the problem of the holy places must be set in the context of a real peace process—one with light at the end of the tunnel for Palestinians. Senior (even radical) Muslim clerics have suggested to me that if the political issues could be resolved, they could envision Islamic solutions that would allow Jewish prayer on the Haram.

And finally, we need theological investigation of how the sanctity of one religion’s holy place is changed by the presence of the “other.” From a theological perspective, can such holy places be shared, or are they defiled by the presence of the other, making political compromise impossible? What do the different religions require—sovereignty, control or just freedom of use? These subjects are under-studied, but the answers can tell us much about the possibilities of peace.

Marshall Breger teaches law at Catholic University.

MAY/JUNE 2017

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OP INION | JEN NY DIA MOND C H E NG

The Hidden Costs of School Vouchers

WIKICOMMONS

Jewish schools should weigh the pros and cons before taking government funds.

In the world of Jewish education, government money is the Next Big Thing. Orthodox groups like Agudath Israel and the Orthodox Union have long pushed for state subsidies to private religious schools. Most non-Orthodox Jewish institutions have been against them, fearing that such policies will erode the church-state barrier and divert funds away from public schools.

Recently, though, the opposition seems to be softening a bit. Some progressive Jews are joining the call for school vouchers, which allow parents to use public education funds to pay private school tuition. Voucher proponents argue that a day school education is the most effective way to raise strongly engaged, literate Jews. Making this educational option financially viable for more Jewish parents is essential to the long-term strength of the American Jewish community.

The political climate around vouchers is changing, too. The newly appointed secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, is a passionate advocate of state support for private schools, especially religious schools. President Trump’s full-throated promise to make billions of dollars of funding available to parents to pay for private religious schools is probably far-fetched as a matter of actual policy, but it has energized voucher advocates in statehouses around the country.

For those of us committed to Jewish education—my three children attend a community day school—it is time to look more closely at claims that school vouchers (and their kissing cousins, tax-credit scholarships) are a clear win for our private religious schools. Setting aside for the moment the much bigger public policy questions about whether these programs are good for America’s public schools, are they good for Jewish schools?

They may not be. For starters, government money always comes with strings, and private schools that take vouchers will eventually face increased scrutiny of their admissions policies, curricula, test results and employment practices. There are also administrative costs. A 2015 survey of private school leaders in Florida, Indiana and Louisiana found 16

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that the sheer volume of paperwork required was enough to dissuade many schools from participating in voucher or tax-credit scholarship programs. Public funding may also weaken existing philanthropic support for Jewish education. A recent study of Catholic parishes in Milwaukee found that voucher programs boosted school revenue but also substantially reduced church donations.

Admissions policies are one sticking point for Jewish schools. Unlike many other sectarian schools—notably, Catholic schools— Jewish day schools usually limit enrollment to Jewish children, though their definitions vary. However, for both political and legal reasons, any large-scale voucher program will almost certainly require schools to abandon such religious tests for admission.

Using public money to fund schools that discriminate on the basis of religion could prove politically unpalatable. As it is, public support for school vouchers is relatively weak and declining—charter schools are a far more popular version of “school choice.”

But respondents also tell pollsters that they don’t know much about vouchers. As they learn more, support could fall even further.

In recent years a number of states, including North Carolina and Florida, have quietly passed voucher or tax-credit scholarship schemes that allow participating schools to deny children admission on the basis of religion. So far the discriminatory aspect of these programs has escaped close scrutiny.

In large part, this is due to the goodwill that Catholic parochial schools have built up over decades of educating non-Catholic low-income children in urban areas. As vouchers and tax-credit scholarship programs rise on the political agenda, though, there could be much more pushback against private religious schools that take government money but exclude children who go to the “wrong” church, or whose parents are unwilling to sign a declaration of specific religious belief.

Indeed, the strict anti-LGBTQ policies at some private Christian schools that participate in state voucher programs are already drawing negative attention.

Voucher programs that allow participating schools to discriminate on the basis of religion will also face challenges in court.

In a landmark 2002 case, the Supreme Court upheld a pilot voucher program in Cleveland, Ohio that allowed low-income students to use public tuition aid at private religious schools. However, then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a conservative, emphasized in his majority opinion that all of the voucher-accepting schools had agreed not to discriminate on the basis of race, religion or ethnic background. This nondiscrimination requirement was key to the court’s finding that the Cleveland parents who participated in the program had a “true private choice” about whether to send their children to a religious school, so the program did not violate the Constitution. State schemes that permit schools to turn away voucher-holding children because of their religion are likely to fail this test.

How should Jewish schools weigh the need for autonomy against the lure of state subsidies? Some day schools, mostly nonOrthodox and in smaller Jewish communities, are already happily educating many children who do not identify as Jewish. Hebrew-language charter schools in cities like New York and Los Angeles straddle the boundary between public school and day school, with majority non-Jewish student bodies and a focus on language and culture rather than religion.

This could be an important opportunity to consider what Jewish education has to offer all American children, not only Jewish ones. Other educators may conclude that the freedom to set their own curriculum and maintain a majority-Jewish environment is essential to success in their long standing core mission—that of educating Jewish children for Jewish life. Regardless, there is no avoiding these difficult questions, and we need to ask them now, before the siren song of “free” money becomes irresistible.

Jenny Diamond Cheng is a lecturer in law at Vanderbilt University Law School.

MAY/JUNE 2017

5/3/17 3:04 PM

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“Will almost surely stand as the definitive document about this landmark movie.” —LEONARD MALTIN, FILM CRITIC

“A deeply insightful portrait of the forces in postwar America and in blacklist-era Hollywood that made the film such a powerful product of such a troubled moment.”

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5/2/17 9:03 PM

JEWISH WORD | ANTI-SEMITISM, ANTI-JUDAISM, ANTI-ZIONISM, JUDEOPHOBIA, ZIONOPHOBIA

The Semantics of Anti-Semitism In the late 1800s, a German writer and po- gious prejudice and anti-Semitism as a racial fraught—“Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism?” litical agitator named Wilhelm Marr pub- prejudice. But this framework is conten- headlines ask—and the line between politilished a pamphlet called “The Way to Vic- tious. “The distinction that’s made between cal critique and outright prejudice is hazy. “I tory of Judaism over Germanism.” The idea anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism is a fallacious don’t think the criticism of Israel today is was that Jews and Germans were locked in one,” says Brown University professor David necessarily anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic,” says perpetual conflict, which could only end, Kertzer, who has written extensively on the Nirenberg. But if critiquing Israel becomes Marr worried, with one group’s victory over Vatican’s role in modern anti-Semitism. In “a particularly important part of overcom1987, Pope John Paul II commissioned an in- ing evil in the world,” he adds, “you have to the other. And the Jews were ahead.

Today, Marr is credited with coining the vestigation into this matter. The verdict was ask yourself why.” Jacobson says there’s leterm “anti-Semitism.” Compared to previ- that, while the church had promoted anti- gitimate criticism of Israel, there’s criticism ously existing words, anti-Semitism “was Judaism—or prejudice based in religion—it obviously motivated by prejudice—and then meant to be a kind of technical term,” says had not encouraged anti-Semitism. But “this there’s everything in the middle, where the Ken Jacobson, deputy national director of narrative, while comforting,” says Kertzer, distinctions are harder to parse. The Boycott, the Anti-Defamation League. It described has no basis in reality. The church “had been Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movean attitude based on ideas about Jews as a involved in modern anti-Semitism right from ment sometimes falls into this third category, race, and it was intended to foster a scientific the very beginning,” and Nazi messaging re- he says. “Many people behind BDS are anlied heavily on Christian imagery. basis for hatred. ti-Semitic, but that doesn’t mean everyone But since Marr’s time, the term “antiwho supports BDS is anti-Semitic.”

Semitism” has evolved. As scholarship on Judea Pearl, an Israeli-American computthe subject grew, the available vocabulary er science professor at UCLA, rejects that “ANTI-SEMITISM” expanded. Today, its definition—and its framework. “It is a grave mistake,” he says, boundaries—are uncertain. “Anti-Semitism” “to calibrate the evils of anti-Zionism by the IS BUT ONE is but one of a convoluted, interconnected extent to which it resembles, or leads to, or OF A CONVOLUTED, web of similar words—including “anti-Juencourages anti-Semitism, as if anti-ZionINTERCONNECTED daism,” “anti-Zionism,” “Judeophobia” and ism is the lesser of the two evils.” In recent WEB OF “Zionophobia.” years, Pearl, whose son, Daniel, was murSIMILAR WORDS. What, for instance, is the difference bedered by Pakistani terrorists in 2002, has tween “anti-Semitism” and “anti-Judaism”? been pushing a new term: “Zionophobia,” David Nirenberg, author of Anti-Judaism: which he defines as “the irrational fear of After the Holocaust, the world’s concep- Zionism.” For Pearl, the word describes not The Western Tradition, makes a nuanced distinction: Anti-Semitism takes aim at real tion of anti-Semitism changed. When the just a political stance, but an immoral one: Jews, while anti-Judaism opposes a broader horrors of the Holocaust became known, denying Jewish nationhood and self-detersystem of thought. When the word “Judaize” overt prejudice was no longer publicly ac- mination. “Islamophobia” already holds a first appeared in a conversation between the ceptable. “People refrained for quite awhile,” place in the public discourse, and he hopes New Testament’s Paul and Peter, it referred says Jacobson. “But then along came this that Zionophobia will be seen in a similar to Christians who wanted—mistakenly—to convenient thing, the State of Israel.” With light. It “reminds us that religion does not observe Jewish laws. For early Christians, the new country came a new vocabulary; have a monopoly on human sensitivity, and Judaism became associated with a misguided words like anti-Zionism and anti-Israel en- that Zionism has a moral dimension to it.” set of beliefs: taking something too liter- tered the lexicon. In some cases, these prejuWith the addition of “phobia,” prejudices ally, or placing too much emphasis on the dices drew on older ones: Criticizing the are framed as psychological phenomena. In law. Over the years, anti-Judaism took on young country became “a convenient cover 1882, Russian writer and activist Leon Pina broader meaning: Someone could be ac- for those who had anti-Semitic attitudes but sker used the term “Judeophobia,” which he cused of acting like a Jew for displaying greed didn’t want to be seen that way.” considered a psychological disorder—speStill, “we hardly ever simply say that any cifically, a “psychic aberration”—that could or lending money. “If you read any source about the economy, say, from roughly the criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism,” Jacob- be inherited and could not be cured. Still, for 12th century to the present,” says Nirenberg, son adds. “That’s absurd.” In fact, before Is- the most part, describing prejudice using the “people are constantly talking about certain rael’s founding, many mainstream Jews were language of phobias is a modern phenomforms of relationship to money, certain uses anti-Zionist—some Orthodox Jews feared enon, related to psychology’s cultural domiof money, as being Jewish.” These prejudices Zionism’s secular focus, while some Reform nance in the 20th century, says Jacobson. played out everywhere from Shakespeare to Jews preferred to focus on a worldwide JewThe history of prejudice against Jews is Marx. The hatred of Judaism, and the need ish community—and some Jews, for various complex, and so is the language we use to to fight against it—even in communities reasons, still identify this way. But when con- describe it. Most of the time Jacobson sticks that had never met a Jew—became a con- temporary groups, Jewish or secular, reject with “anti-Semitism.” But even then, he says, Zionism, they are often labeled anti-Semitic. “one has to use it sparingly and appropriately.” stant in Western culture.

Today, debates about anti-Zionism are —Ellen Wexler Some historians see anti-Judaism as a reli18

MAY/JUNE 2017

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5/2/17 10:40 PM

VISUAL MOMENT | 500 YEARS OF TREASURES FROM OXFORD

A Rare Peek Into a Renowned Library's Vault

A page from a 13th-century parchment manuscript of the biblical books of Proverbs and Psalms depicts the start of Psalms in parallel columns of Hebrew and Latin; the marginal notes are in Latin.

says curator Kidd, is from the Library's first century, acquired between 1517 and 1611.

Many of these initial items were obtained from Bishop Fox and from John Claymond, Corpus Christi’s first president.

Among Claymond's contributions is a printed 1497 book of the letters of St. Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin.

In it, a woodcut designed by Albrecht Dürer depicts the 4th-century saint removing a thorn from a lion's paw; behind him are three open books displaying the first words of Genesis in Greek, Hebrew and Latin. (St. Jerome used the original languages, Hebrew

and Greek, in creating his new Latin version of the Bible.) Claymond also gave the college the important collection of Hebrew manuscripts, all of which were written before 1290, when Jews were expelled from England. Curator Kidd says that these manuscripts are “probably culturally the most significant...a unique survival.”

For those who missed the exhibition at the Folger, “500 Years of Treasures from Oxford” will be on view at the Yeshiva University Museum at New York City’s Center for Jewish History (15 West 16th Street) from May 14 to August 6. —Diane M. Bolz MAY/JUNE 2017 / MOMENT

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CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD

Visitors to Washington, D.C.’s Folger Shakespeare Library during the last few months have had the rare opportunity to view a special exhibition of 50 manuscripts and early printed books from the celebrated Library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Organized to mark the college’s 500th anniversary, the show features what has been called “the most important collection of Anglo-Jewish manuscripts in the world.” These works, from the 12th and 13th centuries, include a series of volumes that were apparently commissioned from Jews by Christian scholars to facilitate learning Hebrew and studying biblical texts in their original language. Other volumes in this collection include commentaries by the 11th-century French rabbi known as Rashi and what is believed to be the oldest surviving Ashkenazi prayer book.

The exhibit also features a 15th-century manuscript of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a 14th-century manuscript of the Middle English narrative poem Piers Plowman and a 15th-century manuscript of Homer’s Iliad, in Greek, with unusual red-orange designs attributed to the scribe Ioannes Rhosos of Crete. A final section showcases works of early science, among them a letter from Sir Isaac Newton with observations on what is now known as Halley’s Comet and a printed volume with drawings of Galileo’s first observation of the surface of the moon.

The first Renaissance college at Oxford and one of the oldest of the 38 self-governing colleges at the modern University of Oxford, Corpus Christi was founded in 1517 by Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester and adviser to Henry VII and Henry VIII. Its mission was to pursue humanist ideals of scholarship in three languages—not just Latin, but also Greek and Hebrew—along with such subjects as astronomy, mathematics, medicine and philosophy. When Bishop Fox founded Corpus Christi College, says exhibition curator Peter Kidd, he wanted the college to be “part of the new intellectual current spreading across Europe.”

The Library is not open to the general public. The most delicate items in its collection, in fact, are kept in acid-free boxes in underground vaults, where scholars are allowed access to them under supervision.

The extraordinary works in this exhibition are rarely seen, and this is their first time in America. About 80 to 90 percent of the show,

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ASK THE RABBIS | INTERFAITH RELATIONS

What Should Jews Know About the Muslim Faith?

HUMANIST This question immediately reminds me of the one put to Hillel: to summarize all of Judaism while standing on one foot. And he, mind you, was an insider, talking about his own belief system. Are we non-Muslims possessed of enough chutzpah to summarize all of Islam in 200 words?

Some basics: Islam is defined as acceptance of and obedience to the teachings of God as revealed to the prophet Muhammad.

Islam acknowledges its roots in Judaism and Christianity and affirms that Adam, Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Jesus were prophets before Muhammad.

Just as our Torah has verses about God as gracious and forgiving and also lines that depict God as punitive and vindictive, the Quran is of mixed mind about the Jews.

Some lines express tolerance. Others are hostile. We and Muslims alike make choices about which verses to embrace and which to deemphasize. Islam, like Judaism, affirms that human beings have free will to choose right or wrong. The five essential pillars of Islam also have echoes in our belief system: shahada (the testimony of faith), salat (the ritual prayers performed five times a day), zakat (support for the needy), sawm (fasting in the month of Ramadan) and hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime). Islam also affirms the idea of a Day of Judgment or Resurrection. I know I’ve exceeded my word limit. Now, as Hillel would say, go and study!

Rabbi Peter H. Schweitzer The City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism New York, NY

INDEPENDENT They should know that, not unlike the Christian faith, Islam too plundered our ancient scriptures to invent itself and then endeavored for more than 1,500 years to destroy us through oppression, expulsions, outright massacres and defamatory literature disguised as sacred scripture. In fact, the very first decree that Jews wear a yellow badge originated in the Muslim nation of Iraq in 850 C.E. And though Jews for the most part fared better in Muslim countries than in Christian lands, the tragic history of Muslims against Jews needs to be remembered so that current history may be put into perspective. Islam’s opinion of us was 20

formed long before the Balfour Declaration of 1917. In some sacred writings of Islam, it appears almost as if the life of Islam were dependent upon the death of Jewry. Being nice to Jews, or tolerating them, was considered by some an outright affront to everything that Islam stood for. “Love of the Prophet,” taught the 15th-century scholar Muhammad al-Maghili of Tunisia, “requires hatred of the Jews.” (See The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, ed. Andrew G. Bostom.) Still, the sporadic anti-Jewish slurs in the scriptures of Islam fail to compete with the 450 successive ones that fill the New Testament and that inspired the former.

Rabbi Gershon Winkler Walking Stick Foundation Cedar Glen, CA

RENEWAL Islam and Judaism are kindred religious traditions. Islam’s story of its founding prophet Muhammad recalls some of our stories about Moses. Muhammad, a middle-aged man in difficult circumstances, is suddenly addressed by God. Initially ambivalent, he grows into a gifted spiritual teacher, leading his community to develop social ethics, religious rituals and a successful army.

Islam calls Muhammad the final prophet of human history (as Talmudic rabbis called Zechariah and Malachi). Thus, some say Islam claims to supersede Judaism and Christianity. Others say Islam is inclusive, showcasing in its Quran Jewish and Christian biblical figures and featuring stories from the Jewish midrashic tradition. Like Judaism, Islam birthed a powerful mystical tradition, Sufism, which explores universal divine love through expanded consciousness. Like Jews, Muslims chant their scriptures, encourage daily prayer and practice feasting and fasting.

Muslims connect their religion with politics in various ways, disagreeing over whether it requires pacifism or militarism.

Like Jews, Muslims in North America have been caricatured for political purposes. Yet over the years, these two clans of Abraham’s spiritual descendants have also frequently lived in peace.

Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan Vancouver School of Theology Vancouver, B.C.

RECONSTRUCTIONIST Jews should know that there’s a religion with often bloodthirsty scriptures, known for marginalizing others and quashing dissent, some of whose adherents justify oppression and murder in the name of tradition. And its name is: Judaism. And Christianity. And Islam. Know too of a religion in which God is compassionate and merciful, brilliant ethics are taught, and progressive boundaries are ever pushed from within; most adherents know it only as a religion of love and justice and peace. And its name is: Islam. And Christianity. And Judaism. Know this: Every tradition is both weird and wonderful; each has contradictions and beauty; all can be roundly condemned, or heartily praised, often for the very same traits. Know as well the five pillars (one, zakat, charity, is a cognate of tzedakah). Know Islam’s rich similarities with Judaism. Know key differences—between Islamic and Arab, Sunni and Shia, mainstream and extremist. Know key sacred terms like sura (verse), hadith (traditions), and salat (prayer). Know to say “Eid Mubarak” to your Muslim neighbors at the right times, just as “Chag Sameach” means much from another. Above all, know your Muslim neighbors—and love them as yourself. Our tradition, much like theirs, demands no less.

Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation Bethesda, MD

REFORM For many years, my city of Fresno has faced Islamophobia, ignorance about Islam and hate crimes against the Muslim community.

We found ourselves dealing with this once again in April in the wake of an incident of gun violence in which many assumed that the gunman’s crimes were motivated by his Muslim faith; it turned out they were not.

I used to think I knew what Islam was about. Yet as I came to know more Muslims personally and learned more about their faith, I realized that much of what I knew was either flat-out wrong or grossly misguided. Islam, like Judaism, is not a monolithic faith. As on the pages of this publication, there are differences of opinion.

The Muslim community has many voices and perspectives on what living a Muslim

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TELL US WHAT YOU THINK AT MOMENTMAG.COM/RABBIS life can and should look like today. The essential theme of the Quran is that it is a Muslim’s duty to create justice in the world.

A Muslim is supposed to embody compassion, love and peacefulness and to seek healing and wholeness in the world. This is the Islam I have come to know. I hope others will do what they need to in order to see this Islam as well.

Rabbi Laura Novak Winer Fresno, CA

CONSERVATIVE Jews should learn more about Islam in order to make informed judgments about Jewish-Muslim relations and the role of Islam in the world. I want my congregants to understand the origins of Islam and how it has evolved since Muhammad’s death.

By being exposed to the teachings of Islam, my congregants may recognize the similarities between Judaism and Islam. In addition, I would want my congregants to know the basic teachings of the Quran and to learn about Muhammad, the man and the prophet.

Finally, I think it is important to know more about the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims and the different ways they practice their religion. As Muslims grow in number in this country, we are more and more likely to encounter them as neighbors, classmates and coworkers. We should reach out and get to know one another in the hopes of establishing respectful relationships. We will need each other to work on issues of common concern. For those of us who care deeply about Israel, we may then be able to create opportunities for dialogue.

Rabbi Amy Wallk Katz Temple Beth El Springfield, MA

MODERN ORTHODOX Ideally, they should know as much as possible. Islam is an important world religion with tremendous impact on Jewish life, including past periods of close relationship and religious symbiosis. The more Jews know, the more likely they will be to connect to Muslims and help sustain them against potential demonization or discrimination in the United States.

Jews should also connect with Muslims because there are serious difficulties between us. Islam is in crisis, with a strong fundamentalist Salafi wing that has resisted

or badly handled modernization. This has nurtured the creation of a radical/terrorist/jihadi branch which is expansionist and violent. The Muslim world is rife with antiSemitism, which feeds off and sustains antiZionism and denial of Israel’s right to exist.

We must give positive feedback to moderates who assert themselves and strong moral support for their efforts to regain control.

For two millennia, Christianity demeaned Judaism and persecuted Jews. This degraded the quality of Jewish life. Since the Holocaust, Christianity has repented and made major strides to eliminate antiSemitism and respect Judaism. We need the same inner process from Islam. Otherwise

“

I U S E D TO T H I NK I K NE W WH AT I S L AM WAS ABOU T. YE T AS I C AME TO K NOW MOR E MU S L I MS P E R S O NAL LY AND L E AR NE D MO R E ABOU T T H E I R FAI T H , I R E AL I Z E D T H AT MU C H OF WH AT I K NE W WAS E I T H E R F L AT- OU T WRONG O R G RO S S LY MI S G U I D E D.

” Muslims will degrade the quality of Jewish life and threaten it for the next millennium.

Rabbi Yitzhak Greenberg Riverdale, NY

ORTHODOX I think three areas are vital. The first is to understand the contribution Judaism made to Islam, alongside other monotheistic religions. It’s important to be able to see the Jewish roots in so much of Western religious striving. The second is for Jews to familiarize themselves with the areas of overlap, because those areas can provide an impetus for communities to ease tensions and come together. And the third is to know about the differences that can be sources of Jewish pride.

For instance, all three monotheistic religions have elements or passages in their holy literature that they would prefer not to put up in 100-foot letters in Times Square.

Jews, Christians and Muslims all have different ways of handling them. Traditional Jews have an interpretive tradition: For passages where people might say, “How can you believe that?” we say, “Well, this is in the Torah, but the Talmud says no.” That gives depth and nuance and rationality to what we believe. Muslims had such a tradition historically—ijtihad, the use of rationality to derive laws. But many of the prevailing forms of Islam that we see around us and in the news—the Salafi Mulsims and others like them—are much more focused on the unvarnished text. I do think the way Islam will moderate itself is to rediscover the interpretive tradition it had in the past.

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein Loyola Law School Los Angeles, CA

SEPHARDIC I would like my congregants, who are mostly Sephardic, to know that our culture was deeply influenced by and is intricately woven with that of Islam. I also believe that it is important for all Jews, as well as Muslims and Christians, to know that. My ancestors hail from, among other countries, Iraq, Syria, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey, and I have had congregants who were natives of Bahrain and Indonesia. Our Shabbat songs and liturgy borrow freely from centuries of Islamic, Sufi and secular Arabic music, but the connection runs much deeper.

Judaism, under the rule of Islam, did not experience the same level of hatred, anti-Semitism and persecution common to Christendom. Jews were not accused of deicide and did not have to defend their religion in public disputations. If the term Judeo-Christian sounds legitimate, the term Judeo-Muslim could well describe the moderate and enlightened Islam which nurtured the glory of Andalusia, Cordoba and Granada.

I would like Jews to know that there are many moderate imams and Quran scholars who are willing to accommodate to changing times and that just as there are multiple voices and opinions in Judaism, so there are in Islam.

Rabbi Haim Ovadia Magen David Sephardic Congregation Rockville, MD MAY/JUNE 2017 / MOMENT

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YUVAL HARARI A medieval historian leaps from the past into the future of mankind—and cyborgs.

RICHARD SVTAN

by Laurence Wolff

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U

ntil 2011, Yuval Noah Harari was an obscure professor of medieval military history at Hebrew University. Then he took up the challenge of teaching an introductory course in world history when no other faculty member wanted to teach it.

The result was a book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, published first in Hebrew in 2011 and then in English in 2014, which became a best-seller—with effusive recommendations by Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg—and made him an academic rock star.

In Sapiens, Harari describes the evolution of an ape-like creature 100,000 years ago into the species we are today.

It began with small changes in DNA that led to a capacity for humankind to create, recall and share complex stories and master the world. “Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths,” he writes. “Any large-scale human cooperation—whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe—is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.” Along the way, he argues, our species has been unwilling to recognize the many unintended consequences of its obsessive search for happiness and immortality. The discovery of agriculture 10,000 years ago led to population growth, divisions within society and infectious diseases. Domestication of animals brought intolerable suffering to millions of cows, pigs and

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chickens. Industrialization pollutes and heats up the world, and human expansion crowds out flora and fauna. Harari warns that “humankind is poised to replace natural selection with intelligent design, and to extend life from the organic realm to the inorganic.”

In his new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Harari speculates that humans are on track to become godlike in their power—with both positive and negative consequences.

In medicine, artificial intelligence will replace real doctors. This will be a boon to poor countries, where diagnoses will be made online. On the other hand, technology will increasingly be in the hands of the rich, meaning that economic inequality will be translated into biological inequity. Data and newly invented algorithms will rule our lives and choices. In a more distant future, we will create cyborgs and robots— mechanical beings connected through huge databases that share human characteristics—which may eventually make human beings irrelevant.

Born in Haifa to Eastern European immigrants, Harari now lives with his husband in a moshav outside Jerusalem.

A vegan deeply distressed by the suffering of domesticated animals, Harari meditates daily (plus a 60-day silent retreat each year). He does this, he says, to understand more fully the nature of human consciousness and “human dissatisfaction.” Moment talks with Harari about the role of technology in politics and the rise of big data, as well as topics Harari does not usually discuss, such as Judaism and Israel.

5/3/17 12:51 AM

Harari during his 2015 TED talk “What Explains the Rise of Humans?”

You argue that so many problems must be solved on a global scale, but countries are increasingly turning inward.

What can we do?

How do you explain the current cycle of nationalism, protectionism, authoritarianism, fake news and xenophobia?

As the pace of technological development increases, the political systems we have inherited from the 20th century may become irrelevant. Technological revolutions now move faster than political processes, causing politicians and voters to lose control of events.

The rise of the internet gives us a taste of things to come. Cyberspace is now crucial to our daily lives, our economy and our security, yet the critical choices about the basic shape and features of the internet weren’t made through any

political process, even though they involve traditional political issues such as sovereignty, jobs, privacy and security.

Did you ever vote about the shape of cyberspace? Decisions far from the public limelight have made the internet a free and lawless zone that erodes state sovereignty, ignores borders, revolutionizes the job market, abolishes privacy and poses perhaps the most formidable global security risk. In the coming decades, it is likely that we will see more internet-like revolutions, in which technology will continue to run ahead of politics. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul not just our societies and economies, but our very bodies and minds. Many present-day jobs will be automated, and millions of people may be pushed out of the job market and become part of a new “useless class.”

Present-day democratic structures cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don’t understand biology and cybernetMAY/JUNE 2017 / MOMENT

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TED

We can realize the magnitude of the problems we face, and the fact that no nation can solve them by itself. All our major problems are global in nature: global warming, global inequality and the rise of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence and bioengineering. In order to face these challenges successfully, we need global cooperation. For example, no nation can regulate bioengineering singlehandedly. It won’t help much if the U.S. forbids genetically engineering human babies but China allows it. Similarly, no nation can stop global warming by itself. Can the U.S. build a wall against rising oceans? Because nationalism has no answer to global warming, it tends to simply deny the problem. But the problem is real. Hence, I think the cur-

rent wave of nationalism is a kind of escapism: people refusing to confront the unprecedented problems of the 21st century by closing their eyes and minds and by seeking refuge in the fold of traditional local identities. I hope that people will wake up in time.

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ics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. In short, traditional democratic politics is losing control of events and is failing to present us with meaningful visions of the future. Ordinary voters sense that the democratic mechanism no longer empowers them. The world is changing, and they don’t understand how or why. In Britain, voters imagine that power might have shifted to the European Union, so they vote for Brexit. In the U.S., voters imagine that “the establishment” monopolizes all the power, so they support Donald Trump. The sad truth is that nobody knows where all the power has gone.

Power will definitely not shift back to ordinary voters just because Britain is leaving the EU or Trump has taken over the White House.

How should the education system be reformed to prepare youth for an unknown future?

You need to teach flexibility. Many jobs existing today will disappear by 2040, and we don’t know what new jobs—if any—might replace them.

Consequently, it is likely that most of what kids currently learn at school will be irrelevant by the time they are 40. Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working.

In the first part of life you built a stable identity and acquired personal and professional skills; in the second part of life you relied on your identity and skills to navigate the world, earn a living and contribute to society. By 2040, this traditional model will become obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives, and to reinvent themselves again and again. The world of 2040 will be a very different world from today, and an extremely hectic world. The pace of change is likely to accelerate even further. So people will need the ability to learn all the time and to reinvent themselves repeatedly—even at age 60.

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If studying data can give us all the answers, why does religion continue to have a hold on so many people?

People are afraid of change and of the unknown, and they want to hold on to something stable and eternal. So they

Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul not just our societies and economies, but our very bodies and minds. Many present-day jobs will be automated, and millions of people may be pushed out of the job market and become part of a new “useless class.” turn to religion. Yet traditional religions are losing their relevance, because they have been transformed from a creative force into a reactive force.

Whereas in the past they pioneered changes in economics, politics and technology, now they mostly agonize over the ideas and technologies propagated by other movements. Biologists

invent the contraceptive pill and the Pope doesn’t know what to do about it.

Computer scientists develop the internet and rabbis argue whether Orthodox Jews should be allowed to surf it. Feminist thinkers call upon women to take possession of their bodies, and learned muftis debate how to confront such incendiary ideas. That does not mean, of course, that traditional religions cannot play a positive role in the future. It all depends on what we do with them.

Since religions are made by humans rather than by gods, no religion has a fixed eternal essence.

How do you define Zionism?

We should stop talking about Zionism as a vision. It is a reality. If you define Zionism as the idea of establishing a country for the Jewish people, then instead of believing in Zionism I actually live in it. You could of course define Zionism more abstractly as a set of values, and indeed some of the founders of Zionism saw it in such a way. But I am afraid that, in building and defending the State of Israel, the lofty values of the visionaries were left somewhere by the wayside. I see no evidence that Israel embodies loftier values than Uruguay, Canada, India or any number of other countries. It’s certainly a better country than Syria, North Korea or the Democratic Republic of Congo, but that’s hardly something to be proud of.

I wouldn’t like other countries to follow the Israeli example when it comes to treatment of minorities, refugees or the ecosystem. I would be curious to hear about one ethical field in which Israel excels above all other countries.

What will Israel look like 20 years from now?

Nobody knows. I hope it will be a vibrant part of the global human community. I fear that it might become a selfabsorbed fortress that has little to offer the world except perhaps sophisticated weapons. In particular, I fear that it will become the first total surveillance state.

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That is what you might get when you marry the start-up nation with the villa in the jungle. Israel is the one country in the world that is likely to have both the motivation and the technology to establish a total surveillance regime, beginning in the occupied territories, and spreading from there to the entire country.

You have pointed out that Judaism, as well as the other monotheistic religions, is built on myths and on the “chosenness” of believers. Can Jewish practice and belief be modernized?

BORSCHT Buy a marrowbone for stock, add fresh beets, onion, carrots, throw in lima beans, simmer for three hours, then serve it to your family.

When everyone has eaten, leaving you to eat alone, linger—close your eyes, take the bone into your hands to chew the clinging bits of meat until the bone is smooth as ivory, and, having saved the best for last, rough your lips along its porous edge to suck—deep, precise— a hummingbird’s exacting tongue. The quivering marrow will be yours, earth’s sweet offering: the butcher, the broth, the bone, and solitude.

When I leave this earth I want to be that very bone used up for all I’m worth.

Myra Shapiro’s poems have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies including two editions of The Best American Poetry. Her books of poems are I’ll See You Thursday and 12 Floors Above the Earth, and she is the author of a memoir, Four Sublets: Becoming a Poet in New York.

TK

Judaism is whatever Jews make of it. It has no fixed eternal essence. The Judaism of today is already a completely different religion from the Judaism of biblical times. Biblical Judaism was a typical Iron Age cult, similar to many of its Middle Eastern neighbors. It had no synagogues, yeshivas, rabbis—or even a Bible. Instead, it had elaborate temple rituals, most of which involved sacrificing animals to a jealous sky god so that he would bless his people with seasonal rains and military victories. Its religious elite consisted of priestly families, who owed everything to birth and nothing to intellectual prowess. During the Second Temple period a rival religious elite gradually formed who wrote and interpreted Jewish texts. The clash between the old priestly families and what we now call rabbinical Judaism was inevitable. Fortunately for the rabbis, the Romans torched Jerusalem and its temple in 70 A.D. while suppressing the Great Jewish Revolt. With the Temple in ruins, the priestly families lost their religious authority, their economic power base and their very raison d’être. Traditional Judaism—a Judaism of temples, priests and headsplitting warriors—disappeared. In its place emerged a new Judaism of texts, rabbis and hair-splitting scholars. Judaism has since undergone many other revolutions. There is no reason why it cannot undergo another revolution in the 21st century.

POEMS | MYRA SHAPIRO

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GROWING UP TRUMP HOW DONALD TRUMP’S YOUTHFUL ENCOUNTERS WITH JEWS HELPED SHAPE THE MAN, AND PRESIDENT, HE IS TODAY.

BY MARC FISHER

according to Onish’s accounting based on his old yearbook, “The Blotter.” Not that that mattered: Neither Onish nor several of Trump’s other buddies from those years recalls ever talking about religion with their friend; they were sports fans who loved baseball and soccer, and New Yorkers first and foremost.

Trump was a loud kid, Onish recalls.

He was combative, he was a comedian and sometimes it was hard to tell when he was being serious. He would insult

others, and then he would say that he didn’t mean anything by those nasty comments. “We were cutups,” says Onish, who was one of Trump’s closest friends in middle school. “He knocked lunchboxes out of people’s hands, he liked to tug on girls’ hair, he was a little [bit] of a jokester.” Onish describes himself and Trump as two of the “worst.”

Trump has long resisted attempts to trace the roots of his character, but he does concede that he was very much MAY/JUNE 2017 / MOMENT

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NEW YORK MILITARY ACADEMY

IN 1959, a 12-year-old Donald Trump went to Paul Onish’s bar mitzvah. Posing with five of his buddies at the party, Donald looks a little chubby in his pin-striped sport coat, his blond hair already swept back in what would become his signature look. Donald’s present to Paul was $5; Onish still has his gift list. The two boys were classmates at the Kew-Forest School, a private school in Queens, and in their seventhgrade class of 30 kids, 16 were Jewish,

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KEW-FOREST SCHOOL

In this Kew-Forest School class photo, Donald Trump stands in the top row on the right.

shaped by his childhood. In fact, Trump told me last year in one of a series of interviews for The Washington Post’s biography, Trump Revealed, that he hasn’t really changed since he was about seven. And surely what some people can’t stand about him—and what others find refreshingly direct—is that childlike spunk, or, if you prefer, impulsivity. Trump’s early years turn out to say quite a bit about the way he’s run his business and his presidency so far.

For Jews, Trump poses an especially divisive puzzle. Is the man whose oldest daughter—his barely veiled favorite among his five kids—married an Orthodox Jew and converted to Judaism also someone who lacks qualms about cozying up to anti-Semitic extremists? What are Jews to make of a president who has tweeted anti-Semitic imagery and trafficked in stereotypes, saying, “The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day” or “I’m a negotiator, like you folks”? Does it matter that Trump’s ego wall in his office on the 26th floor 30

of Trump Tower devotes much of its most prominent space to awards, plaques and photos from Jewish and pro-Israel groups? On one day, Trump seems like the best thing to happen to American Jews—the “first Jewish president” as some supporters like to call him—a solid supporter of Israel who has surrounded himself with Jews, both at the Trump Organization and now in the White House.

On another day, he issues perplexing communications such as the Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that made no mention of Jews.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump never made overtly hostile remarks about Jews—nothing as harsh as the comments he made about Mexicans, Muslims, blacks or immigrants. And Trump has always denied having an animus toward any group. Whenever I asked Trump about his insensitivity toward one minority or another, he’d look mystified, hurt and sometimes a little angry. “I am the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered,” he told me once, before launching into a

story about how Don King, the black boxing promoter, had endorsed him.

Similarly, when questions arise about anti-Semitism, Trump’s instinct is to go immediately to the personal—citing his daughter Ivanka’s conversion and marriage to Jared Kushner, or the fact that he now has Jewish grandchildren.

But Trump’s sluggish response to the wave of anti-Semitic vandalism and threats that followed his election has divided opinion within the American Jewish community. Shmuley Boteach, the New Jersey rabbi and best-selling author, says Trump is actually a philoSemite, with a lifelong history of surrounding himself with Jewish executives, employees and social acquaintances, as well as a strong record of support for Jewish causes and for Israel. Boteach agrees with critics of Trump that the president was late and light about speaking out against the spate of threats against Jewish institutions early this year, and about the spasms of anti-Semitism that flared after the election. But he dismisses as “ridiculous” the warn-

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From left, Mark Golding, Donald Trump, Irik Sevin, Peter Brant, Paul Onish and Malcolm Mallory at Onish’s bar mitzvah. All six boys attended Kew-Forest.

as a joke or are just part of the frank, straight-shooting personality that he credits with getting him where he is today. If that defense sounds like what some American Jews say about their own grandparents’ politically incorrect language, that’s no accident. Trump’s vocabulary and style emerged from the birthplace of much of American Jewry—the rough-and-tumble of New York City in the mid-20th century.

IN THEIR stately home in Jamaica Estates, then an affluent, largely Jewish neighborhood in Queens, Fred and Mary Trump raised their five children with little emphasis on religion. Donald and his siblings were brought up as mildly Presbyterian kids who occasionally attended Norman Vincent Peale’s “power of positive thinking” sermons at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. Donald’s attention was more focused on the streets. He grew up playing with his friends, many of them Jewish, going to each other’s houses to

trade baseball cards and play marbles.

The Trumps were among the wealthier families in Jamaica Estates. The 23-room Trump home on Midland Parkway was for some kids the cool place to go—they had a color TV, a cook, a chauffeur, an intercom system and an elaborate model train set that sticks in his classmates’ memories even half a century later. “He had the most amazing trains,” recalled Mark Golding, a childhood friend from ages six to 13, who along with Trump attended Onish’s bar mitzvah. “He had all these special gadgets and gates and switches, more extensive than anything I’d seen. I was very envious.”

The Trump home was also more formal than most in the neighborhood; the other boys knew Fred Trump—a Republican who nonetheless spent most of his weekends schmoozing Brooklyn’s Democratic power elite—as a stickler who didn’t allow any bad language in his house, and who reacted sharply if he heard of any misbehavior at school. But there was plenty of that: Donald loved horseplay. Even six decades ago, friends MAY/JUNE 2017 / MOMENT

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PAUL ONISH

ings of people such as Steven Goldstein of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, who recently said, “Make no mistake: The anti-Semitism coming out of this administration is the worst we have ever seen from any administration.” Even though Trump offered a full-throated denunciation of Holocaust denial in a Holocaust Remembrance Day speech in April, Goldstein has been far from alone: Doubts about Trump’s views on Jews have come from a number of prominent Jewish organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League, and from individuals, such as an ad hoc group of nearly 200 scholars of Jewish history who signed a statement noting that Trump “refused to denounce—and even retweeted—language and images that struck us as manifestly anti-Semitic.

By not doing so, his campaign gave license to haters of Jews.”

Unlike his critics and opponents, Trump doesn’t see a natural connection between his sharp tongue and any underlying antipathies; rather, his insults and barbs are, to his mind, either meant

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Donald Trump with his father, Fred, looking out over Trump Village in Brooklyn in 1973.

say, he had the same impish smile that sweeps across his face now when he’s caught in a mischievous exaggeration.

Donald got into trouble so often that Fred Trump finally had his fill. The last straw was his discovery that Donald and his friend Peter Brant (who also appears in the Onish bar mitzvah photo), had secretly been sneaking across the bridge to Manhattan on Saturdays after soccer. Hungry for autonomy, the boys explored Central Park, watched black men play basketball on outdoor courts near the East River, gawked at Times Square panhandlers, ate hot dogs from street vendors and savored egg creams at diners. They took in West Side Story on Broadway and, inspired by its portrayal of New York street gangs, invented a game they called “Land,” 32

in which they traded turns throwing switchblades into the ground and twisting their bodies to follow the path of the knives. When Fred Trump found out about the knives, he decided his son needed a radical change. He pulled Donald from Kew-Forest in eighth grade and packed him off to New York Military Academy, a boarding school near West Point where discipline was strict and rules were legion.

At military school, Donald’s academic performance was good but not stellar; he didn’t make the class top ten, but he was on the honor roll for four of his five years. He was better known as an avid athlete, captain of the baseball team and a savvy operator in the campus social hierarchy. The military school didn’t attract many Jews, but

there were a few, including Trump’s junior year roommate, Ted Levine. In one infamous incident recounted by Levine and others in the class, Trump was the junior supply sergeant in Company E, and one of his duties was to inspect the dorms. When he found that Levine’s bed was unmade, Trump tore the sheets off and dumped them on the floor. Levine threw one of his combat boots at Trump and hit him with a broomstick. Trump retaliated by grabbing Levine and pushing him toward the window. Witnesses said Levine would have gone out the window if two other cadets hadn’t intervened. But neither Levine nor other schoolmates attributed Donald’s rough behavior to any animus against Jews, and Levine and Trump got along well enough as

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Donald Trump in 1978 with New York City Mayor Ed Koch, New York Governor Hugh Carey and executive vice president of the Urban Development Corp.

Robert T. Dormer. Carey is pointing to an artist’s rendering of the new Hyatt Hotel to be built on the site of the former Commodore Hotel in Manhattan.

him feel different from others.” Trump sometimes complained that “there were too many Italian and Irish students at Fordham,” Fitzgibbon added.

Trump wanted to move up to the Ivy League, and after his sophomore year, he got into the University of Pennsylvania as a transfer student. He never even said goodbye to his teammates on Fordham’s squash squad.

At Penn, where Trump was enrolled in the undergraduate business program in the Wharton School, he found a crowd more to his liking, including the scions of some of the country’s most prominent real estate developers.

Trump told friends that he’d figured out his future—he wanted to be the next Bill Zeckendorf, one of Manhattan’s most successful developers and a major con-

tributor to Jewish charities. Never much of a student, Trump spent much of his time in Philadelphia scouring the neighborhood for apartments he could buy to rent out to students. On weekends, he usually returned home to New York, collecting rents and chatting up tenants with his father as they moved around the mostly Jewish sections of Brooklyn where their properties were clustered.

THROUGHOUT HIS college years and after he graduated, Trump continued his apprenticeship in the family business. His hero, then as now, was his father, a demanding entrepreneur with a knack for selling himself as a brand.

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roomies, even if Levine did later say that Donald would try to “break” anyone who failed to bend to his will.

Trump started college at Fordham University in the Bronx, commuting to the mostly Catholic school from his Queens home. At a time when many young people were rebelling against rules and institutions, Trump often showed up for class in a three-piece suit, carrying a briefcase. One of his friends, Robert Klein, an accounting major who sat next to him in his accounting class, took note of Trump’s doodles. The future developer was drawing buildings—skyscrapers. Trump was unimpressed by his fellow students at Fordham; as one friend, Brian Fitzgibbon, put it, Trump’s “wealth and the fact that he was not Catholic may have made

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ners flown over the beaches of Brooklyn, were a mainstay of the middle-class sections of Brooklyn and Queens that were heavily populated by Jews moving out of crowded Manhattan.

Fred Trump was himself the son of a German immigrant. Donald’s mother came to America as a teenager from Scotland. But through the years, Fred Trump, who died in 1999, often told people that he was actually from Swedish stock, not German. Donald Trump knew the story when I asked him about it. “Some people thought that” his father was from Sweden, and “some people think I’m Swedish,” he said. Trump wouldn’t comment on whether his father had planted that notion to steer clear of any anti-German bias among the Jewish renters who dominated the population at Trump Village, Fred’s 3,800-unit development in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. The sprawling array of apartment towers was a step up for striving middle-class families, many of them Jewish immigrants or their children, who enjoyed the ocean breezes and proximity to Nathan’s hot dog stand and Mrs. Stahl’s Knishes on the beachfront boardwalk. The rationale behind Fred Trump’s tale about being Swedish was clear to his nephew John Walter, the family’s historian: Fred Trump “had a lot of Jewish tenants and it wasn’t a good thing to be German in those days.”

Over the years, Fred Trump grew ever more reticent about his German heritage. Although he was fluent in the language, he denied it in later life and did not teach his children German. The bit about being Swedish was only one piece of his effort to assure that no one would turn away from Trump housing because of the owner’s heritage. Much of the Brooklyn Democratic political establishment, politicos who could make or break his zoning and property deals, were Jewish, and Fred often took Donald with him on his weekend rounds of the Democratic clubs. Fred made such a habit of donating to Jewish charities—he served as treasurer for an early Israel benefit concert at Ebbets Field—that 34

many Jews assumed he was part of the tribe himself. (At Trump Village, where several members of my grandmother’s family lived, it was taken as gospel that the Trumps were secretly Jewish. That was, as the president might say, fake news.)

Fred Trump was careful to try to avoid the ethnic rivalries and confrontations that had turned some New York neighborhoods into battlegrounds. In the

OVER THE YEARS, FRED TRUMP GREW EVER MORE RETICENT ABOUT HIS GERMAN HERITAGE. HE “HAD A LOT OF JEWISH TENANTS AND IT WASN'T A GOOD THING TO BE GERMAN IN THOSE DAYS.”

1950s, after Fred constructed a 2,700unit apartment complex called Beach Haven near Coney Island, he worked to quiet tensions between Jewish teens in his development and Italian kids in nearby Gravesend. Fred built a recreation center—and put out press releases about it—that helped calm the situation.

As Trump family biographer Gwenda Blair reported in her 2001 book, The Trumps, Fred Trump was so deeply embedded in New York’s Jewish social world that he sometimes took the kids

in the family limousine and headed up to the Concord resort, the Borscht Belt hotel in the Catskill mountains, where many of the city’s affluent and influential Jewish families took their summer holidays. While Fred would schmooze with power players from the worlds of politics and real estate, Donald, who spent most of his summers at two expensive Christian camps in the Catskills, would join the other kids playing sports and eating from the Concord’s endless trays of kosher food.

As Donald Trump took on a more active role in his father’s business, he developed a belief that the best way to assure that the company’s finances were honestly and efficiently handled was to entrust the work to Jews. From early on, the Trumps showed a preference for renting to Jews. In the early 1970s, when the family was managing thousands of apartments, a Trump rental agent told federal investigators that the company sought to rent only to “Jews and executives.” Another agent recalled in a court filing that “Trump Management believes that Jewish tenants are the best tenants.”

The Trumps had become the targets of a federal discrimination lawsuit that accused them of systematically denying housing to blacks and Hispanics.

The government’s investigation found that rental agents at the Trump management office would tag applications from minority applicants with a “#9” or with “C” for colored, and those potential customers would either be told that no housing was available or would be steered to less desirable locations.

The Justice Department’s civil rights case against the Trumps was led by a young Jewish lawyer, Elyse Goldweber, who had found out from housing activists and Trump company employees that only one to four percent of Trump tenants were minorities—far below the percentage of the local population. At 26, Goldweber led the investigation and took on one of New York’s biggest developers; as the case dragged on, she was replaced by another Jewish attorney, Donna Gold-

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Donald Trump and his lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn, announce a billion-dollar lawsuit against the National Football League at a news conference in 1984.

for years to come—was Roy Cohn, in many ways the most significant man in Trump’s life after his father.

IN 1973, Trump, then 27, crossed the bridge into Manhattan, starting his own real estate business, outside the safety of his father’s empire and exactly where Fred Trump had warned him not to go—into the city’s most competitive and difficult market. To smooth the way, Trump joined Le Club, a members-only social spot frequented by rich people, social climbers and a mix of political types and business machers. There, one night, Trump

met Cohn. At 46, Cohn, the son of a prominent Jewish judge, had already prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as Soviet spies and had served as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s right-hand man during the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s. He was one of New York’s best-connected fixers, with a long list of boldfaced name clients, including prominent mobsters, politicians and business moguls.

Cohn advised Trump not to cave to the government’s pressure to settle the race discrimination case, but rather to “tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court”—to counterattack with bias accusations against Goldstein and to countersue the Justice Department.

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stein. Her religion was of course irrelevant to the lawsuit, or so it seemed until Trump’s attorney accused Goldstein in court papers of conducting a “Gestapo-like interrogation.” The Trump lawyer asked the court to hold the Justice Department attorney in contempt. The judge didn’t buy it, and Trump eventually had to settle the discrimination case, agreeing to rent to black and Hispanic customers and taking out ads in New York newspapers attesting to that pledge. But scorchedearth legal tactics like the attack on Goldstein would become a trademark of Trump’s litigious way of doing business. His attorney in that case—and his mentor in business and politics

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1 967 1 968 1 969 1 970 1 97 1 1972 1 973 1 974 1 975 1 976 1 977 1 978 1 979 1 980 1 981 1 982 1 983 1 984 1 985 1 986 1 987 1 988 1 989 1 9 90 1 9 9 1

DEFINING MOMENTS IN ISRAELI

H I S TO R Y: 1 9 6 7– 2 0 1 7 A MOMENT SYMPOSIUM

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SIX FATEFUL DAYS IN 1967 FUNDAMENTALLY ALTERED THE MAP OF TH E MIDDLE E AST AND SHAPED THE COURSE OF HISTORY I N T H E R E G I O N F O R D E C A D E S TO C O M E . O N T H E 5 0 T H ANNIVERSARY OF THE SIX-DAY WAR, MOMENT RE ACHED OUT TO AN ECLECTIC GROUP TO ASK: WHICH EVENT MOST DEFINED T H E L A S T H A L F - C E N T U RY O F T H E I S R A E L I E X P E R I E N C E ?

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MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI AVRAHAM BURG YAEL DAYAN MATTI FRIEDMAN YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI DANIEL C. KURTZER DOV LIPMAN SHERRI MANDELL EILAT MAZAR YISRAEL MEDAD AARON DAVID MILLER BENNY MORRIS MARK PODWAL DORIT RABINYAN MEIR SHALEV RAJA SHEHADEH KSENIA SVETLOVA AYELET WALDMAN PLUS ADDITIONAL INTERVIEWS AT MOMENTMAG.COM/ISRAEL-MOMENTS

SYMPOSIUM EDITOR MARI LYN CO O P E R INTERVIEWS BY MARI LYN CO O P E R DI NA G O LD GEO RGE E . JO H N SO N E LLE N W E XLE R LAU R E N CE WO LF F

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MEIR SHALEV ME I R SHALEV IS AN IS RAEL I AU THO R AND J O U R N A LI ST. H E W R I T E S A COLU M N FOR T H E DA I LY N EWSPA P E R YEDIOT AHRONOT . H IS NOVELS INC LU DE A PIGEON AND A BOY A N D, M OST R EC E N T LY, TWO SHE-BEARS.

suddenly abroad came to us. Everyone admired Israel. Young people came from around the world and they brought us two new toys, the Pill and grass. We had not known them before; suddenly Jerusalem became very happy! This was only for a few years, and slowly it went back to what it used to be. Today Jerusalem is a vulgar city with religious fanatics, the way it has been for most of its history.

My father, the right-wing poet Yitzchak Shalev, was in a state of complete euphoria after the war. About a month and a half after it ended, I spent a weekend leave from the army with my family. My father and I got into a big fight, I told him that with this victory Israel had taken a bite that we would suffocate on; he kicked me out of the house. I wasn’t speaking from political or ideological reasons but practical ones. I thought that a nation of three million people couldn’t rule a nation of one million people. It’s impossible unless you dedicate all your resources to it. That’s what’s happened for the last 50 years.

It’s a tragedy for the State of Israel.

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I was recruited into the Israeli army in 1966; I was dismissed from service in 1968 because of an injury. I always felt I was recruited into the army of one country and left the army of a completely different country. I fought in the Six-Day War in the Golan Heights in an elite group, the reconnaissance unit of the Golani Brigade. We fought in fierce battles over the Golan Heights. We were very eager to fight. The fighting itself was very intense; I lost some good friends in it. Back then I felt like a victorious soldier; now I look at it with very different eyes.

Before 1967, Jerusalem was a wounded city; it was divided in two halves. Jerusalem had a frightened and reserved feeling. People on the west side felt disconnected from the Mount of Olives and the Temple Mount. It was a very cultured city with the only university in Israel and the seat of the government. The first years after the Six-Day War were the most beautiful years in Jerusalem. Young people came from Europe and the United States. We didn’t have television or internet and very few people could afford to go abroad, but

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YA E L D AYA N

CREATIVE COMMONS

YAE L DAYAN I S AN IS RAEL I P O L ITIC IAN AND AU T H OR . SH E SE RV E D A S A M E M B E R OF T H E K N E SSE T B E T W E E N 1992 AN D 2 003, AND FRO M 2 008 TO 2 013 WAS THE C HA I R OF T H E T E L AV I V C I T Y CO U N C I L .

I got married the July after the 1967 war; I had been a reserve officer in the war, a lieutenant in the unit under the command of General Ariel Sharon. I married a colonel I had met during the war; he was Ariel Sharon’s right-hand man, Sharon was my husband’s best man. My father, Moshe Dayan, was minister of defense, and the wedding was in my parents’ house in the Tzahala neighborhood of Tel Aviv. We invited family and friends, and my father added as invitees all the mayors of the West Bank and the Gaza cities. They all came to the wedding; this was prePalestinian Authority. It was a marvelous feeling, like a promo for peace. Here we were, the bride and groom, the chief rabbi of the army, David Ben-Gurion, and all the big Palestinian West Bank and Gazan families. It was an unforgettable event coming immediately after the war; it showed our belief that we were now on the road to peace.

I remember when my father declared the reunification of Jerusalem. People my age and older had a tremendous feeling at that time that this was the war that would end all wars.

We believed that the extent of this tremendous victory would mean a ticket to peace. There was a huge difference between 40

one month after the war, one year after the war, ten years after the war, the 1973 war and this current landmark—all of which were a series of disappointments as a result of all that was not achieved by the 1967 war. Today, we are at the peak of the disappointment. Rather than planting a seed leading to a peaceful coexistence and a solution to the conflict, the war sowed a seed which has grown into a great catastrophe that is endangering the existence of the State of Israel: the rise of extreme religious elements, the rise of the far right and a kind of imperialism which has come to endanger our democracy.

Instead of Israel meaning a homeland for the Jews, we Israelis have become an occupier of another people’s homeland.

It’s unbelievable after 50 years not to have found a solution for such a minor problem as the little Palestinian-Israeli conflict; it’s really very small when you think of huge global problems. But then we have become some kind of monster. I say this as a patriot—don’t misunderstand me. I live here; I have children, grandchildren here. My father and mother fought for peace, they believed in the importance of cooperation and coexistence. Their hopes have been disappointed.

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RAJA SHEHADEH RAJA SHE HADEH IS A PAL ESTINIAN AU THO R A N D LAW Y E R LI V I N G I N T H E W E ST BA N K . H E FO U N D E D T H E H UM AN R IG H TS ORGANI ZATI O N AL- HAQ. HIS MOST REC ENT B OO K I S WHERE THE LINE IS DRAWN: A TALE OF CROSSINGS, FRIENDSHIP AND FIF T Y YEARS OF OCCUPATION IN ISRAEL-PALESTINE .

and could have changed the course of the history of Israel, Palestine and the Middle East region as a whole. Had this plan been seriously considered by the Israeli government, we Palestinians would have been spared 50 years of suffering under a brutal occupation, and the Israelis would have been rid of what Gideon Levy, the Haaretz columnist, has recently described as “the greatest Jewish disaster since the Holocaust.”

It was only years later, after reading The Bride and the Dowry

by Avi Raz, that I learned that the Israeli government did not even bother to discuss the plan. Israeli leaders were so drunk with victory that the then Israeli minister of defense, Moshe Dayan, declared soon after the end of the war: “We are now an empire.” I was then a 16-year-old who had little interest in politics, yet I could see how disappointed my father felt when, three weeks after the occupation, he learned that “the empire” passed a law on June 27, 1967, annexing East Jerusalem, which he had proposed should be the capital of the Palestinian state.

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For me, the most pivotal moment for the State of Israel in the past 50 years took place very soon after the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. On Saturday, June 10, 1967—literally the last day of the 1967 war—my father, Aziz Shehadeh, approached the Israeli government with a written plan for peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The core of the plan was the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip alongside Israel with its capital in East Jerusalem and an equitable solution for the Palestinian refugees. It had the support of some 50 Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

I helped my father by typing the plan on my manual typewriter.

Over the past 50 years there were a number of other opportunities for peace that Israel squandered. But perhaps that first one, which took place before the occupation had become entrenched and a large number of Israelis were moved into Jewish settlements in the West Bank, was the most decisive

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YISRAEL MEDAD

AP IMAGES

YI SRAE L ME DAD IS AN AMERICAN- BO RN IS RAE LI J O U R N A LI ST. H E WA S T H E E D I TOR O F COUNTERPOINT A N D TH E FOUNDI NG E DITO R O F YESHA REPORT . HE IS CU R R E N T LY T H E D I R ECTO R OF E D U CAT I ON A L P R OG RA M M I N G AN D I NFORMATI ON RESO U RC ES AT THE MENAC HE M B EG I N H E R I TAG E C E N T E R I N J E RU SA LE M .

The reunification of Jerusalem was a key moment in the continuing battle for the soul of Jewish national identity. The official decision for reunification on June 27, 1967 by the Knesset came after 19 years in which most of the world had been very critical of Israel for moving its capital to Jerusalem. The reunification created a strong connection between Jewish history, Jewish culture, the Jewish religion and Zionism. Jerusalem is at the heart of who we are as Jews and Zionists. I remember crossing over the Green Line with friends and celebrating the reunification at the Western Wall. I felt I was a foot and a half off the ground. It was an exuberant time.

Today, I live in Shiloh and consider myself to be an unofficial spokesperson for the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. The settlements are all suburbs of Israel, but Shiloh is a special case because that is where the Tabernacle was erected; for hundreds of years Jews came from all over to worship here. When I greet visitors at Tel Shiloh I tell them, “Remember that to get to Jerusalem, you have to come through Shiloh first.” Archeological digs at Shiloh have 42

proven that Jews lived there in biblical times and much later.

This refutes the notion that Jews were physically exiled. We only lost political and military power; we always continued to be in this land and the idea of Jerusalem kept us alive and sustained us for centuries.

There has been an Arab usurpation of the Jewish patrimony of Jerusalem. The framework of this argument, what I call Palestinianism, is basically, “Who cares that you were here 2,000 years ago, we’ve been here for 1,300 years.” Arab political propaganda claims that Jerusalem is an “Arab city” and that it has been a holy Islamic city for centuries. This is false, Jerusalem as a city has no significance for Islam; it is not mentioned even once in the Quran.

After 1967, the poet Natan Alterman wrote, “This victory effectively obliterated the difference between the State of Israel and the Land of Israel. It is the first time since the Second Temple’s destruction that the Land of Israel is in our hands.” Shiloh and other communities in Judea and Samaria are part of that return to the land.

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DANIEL C. KURTZER DANIEL C. KURTZER IS THE S. DANIEL ABRAHAM PROFESSOR OF MIDDLE EAST POLICY STUDIES AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY’S WOODROW WILSON SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS. FROM 2001 TO 2005 HE SERVED AS THE UNITED STATES AMBASSADOR TO ISRAEL AND FROM 1997 TO 2001 AS THE UNITED STATES AMBASSADOR TO EGYPT.

vited by IDF officers to join a three-day bus excursion into the Sinai, where the remains of war were still in plain view. I recall meeting my relatives—Holocaust survivors—for the first time and experiencing vicariously the relief they felt in contrast to the fears that had built up in the weeks before the war. I remember the crowds that poured into the Old City of Jerusalem, curious to experience the Western Wall; and I recall the faces of the Palestinians who watched these crowds pass by with a mixture of anxiety, anger, animosity and depression.

Years later, my parents told me that the letters I wrote home that summer (before email was invented and when the price of an international phone call still broke the bank) told of my belief that the euphoria would not last and that the reality of dealing with an unhappy population under occupation would necessitate a peacemaking effort. I don’t recall those letters, and they are now nowhere to be found; however, the feeling that my parents say I expressed in July and August 1967 clearly motivated me to try to do my part to bring peace to Israelis and Arabs. So far, little success, but I have not lost hope.

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Israel’s victory in the 1967 war changed everything. Israeli power was on display, in sharp contrast to the weakness of surrounding Arab states. The idea of pan-Arabism died, and Palestinians assumed responsibility for their own fate. Relations between the United States and Israel blossomed, ultimately becoming strategic assets for both countries. And Israel’s occupation began amidst indecision on the part of the Israeli government and nascent messianic fervor among segments of the population.

I spent eight weeks in Israel that summer, first as a volunteer helping to clean up the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University and later as a tourist. That visit, and the mixture of unbounded exhilaration felt by the Israeli population and numbing depression in the West Bank and Gaza, stimulated my interest in working toward peace between Israel and its neighbors, something I have pursued professionally and academically for the past 50 years.

Even though the war had ended only ten days before my arrival in Israel in June 1967, the country was wide open. I recall hitchhiking to Gaza, wandering around the town and being in-

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AY E L E T WA L D M A N

CREATIVE COMMONS

AY E LE T WALDM AN IS AN IS RAEL I-AMERICAN AU T H OR O F F I CT I O N A N D N ON F I CT I ON . M OST R EC E N T LY, SH E AN D MI CHAE L CHABO N EDITED KINGDOM OF OLIVES AND ASH: WRITERS CONFRONT THE OCCUPATION.

The Six-Day War plays a critical role in my personal history, despite the fact that I was a very small child at the time. I was born in December of 1964. In 1967 my family was living in Jerusalem. The very first memory I have, a hazy one that I’m not sure is even real, is of being in either a basement or bomb shelter with my mother. My siblings were not there, and my understanding is that my mother didn’t know where they were. We left Israel right after the war. My parents had already planned to leave—my father was back in Canada looking for work when the war broke out—but the war was the last straw.

The Six-Day War catalyzed so much of what has happened since. It allowed not just Israelis but also the Jews of the diaspora to see themselves as heroes rather than merely victims of the Holocaust. And of course, it was the beginning of this period of occupation and colonization. The occupation itself, not enemies on its borders, is the greatest threat Israel faces.

I believe that the act of colonization, of being an occupying force, could well lead to the destruction of the State of Israel.

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As an adult I’ve traveled in the occupied territories. One of the most horrible and compelling places I visited was the two villages of Susya, the Palestinian village and the Israeli settlement. For decades, perhaps even as long ago as the early 19th century or before, there had been a Palestinian village there, a community living in caves and caverns. The Israeli government used the excuse of the archeological importance of the site to remove the residents. However, once they were gone, a settlement was built. I stood on the barren hill outside the settlement, amidst the hovels to which the Palestinian families have been reduced, without any of the basic human necessities such as running water and electricity. They live in abject poverty. Periodically their shanties are bulldozed and their wells are despoiled as the Israeli military seeks to drive them from their homes. In the distance you can see the pretty little settlement, with its gardens and irrigation, its synagogue and kindergarten. The contrast is nauseating. That’s the legacy of the 1967 war.

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E I L AT M A Z A R E I LAT MAZAR IS A THIRD - GENERATIO N IS RA E LI A R C H EOLO G I ST. SH E SP EC I A LI Z E S I N J E RU SA LE M A N D P HO E N IC IAN ARCHEOLOGY AND HAS WO RKED O N THE T E M P LE M OU N T A N D C I T Y OF DAV I D E XCAVAT I ON S.

first and foremost, it is a Jewish city—that is unquestionable.

I first went to east Jerusalem in 1968 to see my grandfather Benjamin Mazar’s excavation at the foot of the Temple Mount; I was 11 years old (photo above). The western part of Jerusalem was already very developed and beautiful, but until then the eastern part was disgustingly unkempt. It was very dirty and messy, the roads were poor and the whole area had been horribly neglected. You had to tour the site quietly because it was also dangerous. There was worldwide interest in the excavation. Changes were already taking place, people were eager to develop it. Archeology was part of the work of developing east Jerusalem; we made it so you could appreciate and enjoy the heritage of east Jerusalem.

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CREATIVE COMMONS

After the Six-Day War, Jerusalem was united again. It was obvious to me that Jerusalem should be one city and the capital of Israel. It is a city that Jews own by historical right. Separating east and west Jerusalem is like cutting off the legs of a person. Ancient Jerusalem started in a place we now call the City of David in the eastern part of the city, which I helped excavate. This is where Jerusalem began and then it developed towards the Temple Mount; that is the heart of the city.

Archeology definitely proves that Jews were the first to be in Jerusalem. The most ancient parts revealed by our excavations contained Hebrew. Other languages only appeared much later. Jerusalem later came to be important to Christians and Muslims; they should be part of the city and respected. But

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YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI

IDF SPOKESPERSON’S UNIT

YOSSI K LE I N HA L EVI IS A S ENIO R FEL LOW AT T H E SH A LO M H A RT M A N I N ST I T U T E I N J E RU SA LE M . H I S M OST R EC E N T B OOK , LIKE DREAMERS , TO O K THE TO P P RIZE AT T H E 2 013 N AT I ON A L J EW I SH B O OK AWA R DS.

The first time I visited Israel was as a 14-year-old boy in the summer of 1967, a few weeks after the war. I was on a one-year program at Hebrew University in 1973 when the Yom Kippur War broke out. I moved to Israel in 1982 at the beginning of the Lebanon War. I was drafted during the first intifada. I feel like my life has been on a trajectory with Israel’s wars.

Encountering Israel for the first time in the summer of 1967 was meeting Israel at its most euphoric moment. It was the happy ending of Jewish history. Everyone you spoke to that summer said, “That’s it, it’s over, no more wars.” There was a feeling of completion. Everything was magical; everything was whole. There was the sense that Israel was compensating for everything that we’d lost. My father was a Holocaust survivor, and he came out of the Second World War angry at God. And in the summer of 1967, standing at the Wall, he made his peace with God, and he said to me, “Now I can forgive God.” Six years later, I returned to Israel as an overseas student and the Yom Kippur War broke out. The experience of being in Israel during the country’s most devastating moment was the exact opposite of how I had first encountered Israel. When I watched my Israeli friends and cousins go off to war while I stayed behind on the home front, I felt ashamed. My generation 46

of Israelis was defending the country, defending the Jewish people, and my American privilege had bought me an exemption from this part of Jewish history. I realized I didn’t understand Israel. I was a well-wisher looking in from the outside.

One incident haunted me for years. I was walking on the streets in Jerusalem when a jeep passed with some soldiers in it and one of them called out to me, “Can I have your scarf?”

And I said no, because what I had learned about Israel before the war was, “Don’t be a freier, don’t be a sucker.” What I didn’t realize was that “don’t be a freier” applies only to Israel when it’s not in a state of emergency. When it’s in a state of emergency, everyone is expected to give everything. Afterward, I realized that guy wasn’t trying to rip me off. He was a soldier, and he was reaching out to me because he assumed that I was a fellow Israeli and that I knew the code and that of course, I would give him my scarf—he asked for it. He needed it, and he was going back to the front, and I wasn’t on the front.

That was the moment when I decided that I wasn’t going to be an outsider to this story. Experiencing Israel in 1967 made me want to be a part of Israel, but experiencing Israel in 1973 made it essential for me to be a part of Israel. In retrospect, that was the moment when I decided to make aliyah.

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M A R K P O D WA L

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text. The gate in my drawing represented both a finish line and the gate to heaven. Instead of the Hebrew inscription on a title page gate, which reads, “This is the gate the righteous shall enter,” I wrote the first Hebrew words of the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. On the athlete’s chest a blot of dripping ink indicated blood spilt. The cartoon struck a nerve for many people; it helped people identify with this great tragedy.

Mark Podwal is an artist, and a dermatologist at the New York University School of Medicine. His drawings have appeared on The New York Times Op-Ed page and his art has been displayed in museums around the world.

COURTESY OF MARK PODWAL

I remember watching the coverage of the September 4, 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics on television and the indelible image of the terrorist in a mask on the balcony. It was a horrifying event that showed the dangers Israelis faced no matter where they went in the world, even when they were supposed to be protected. Distressed by the appalling tragedy, I expressed my feelings through a drawing that was later published on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. The black and white ink drawing portrayed an athlete crossing a gate resembling the gate on the title page of a Hebrew book.

In Hebrew, the title page of a book is called sha’ar (gate), the portal through which one enters the holy

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AV R A H A M B U R G

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AVRAHAM BURG WAS CHAIRMAN OF THE JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL FROM 1995 TO 1999 AND SPEAKER OF THE KNESSET FOR THE LABOR PARTY FROM 1999 TO 2003. IN JANUARY OF 2015, HE JOINED THE JEWISH-ARAB HADASH PARTY.

The visit of President Anwar Sadat to Israel in November 1977 was a pivotal moment. His initiative brought with it the whole package of peace with Egypt. It was the first time that Israel had the opportunity to change the language from the vocabulary of war and conflict to that of peace and reconciliation. After the trauma of the 1973 war, this offered Israel a new direction with so many different possibilities. I was recruited into the army in the middle of the 1973 war, and I found myself, by the end of that war, on the other side of the Suez Canal defending myself from Egyptian commandos. The 1973 war crushed Israeli arrogance and was the worst period for the country’s feeling of military insecurity.

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When Sadat arrived in Jerusalem, I had already been released from my army service and I ran behind his convoy with my colleagues and friends chanting loudly, “No more war, no more bloodshed.” There is no doubt that in Israel then there was an energetic transformation from feelings of fear to hope and euphoria. In April 1982, Israel finalized the withdrawal from Sinai and immediately after, in June, invaded Lebanon. This first war with Lebanon put an end to the five years of Sadat’s offer of a new language. I found myself, as a young officer in 1982, commanding my troops in Lebanon. The same Menachem Begin government that had made peace embarked on a war of folly and deceived the people and the government into this endless cycle of violence.

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DOV LIPMAN DOV LI PMAN IS AN AMERICAN- BO RN O RTHO D OX RA B B I A N D I SRA E LI P O LI T I C I A N . H E SE RV E D A S A M E M BE R O F TH E K NE SSE T FOR THE YES H ATID PART Y BETW E E N 2 013 A N D 2 01 5. H E CU R R E N T LY SE RV E S A S D I R ECTO R OF PUB L IC DI PLOMACY AT THE WO RL D ZIO NIST O RGAN I Z AT I ON .

with Ethiopians housed at the Diplomat Hotel in Jerusalem and played with their kids. They had nothing to do. They were in this hotel as Israel was trying to figure out where they should live. I would talk to the adults through translators. They had a gleam in their eyes because their dream had come true. One of them said to me, “When do we get to see the big house?” I said, “What are you talking about?” Through the conversation, we discovered that they were expecting to go see the Temple. They did not even know of the destruction of the Temple.

The State of Israel brought them here with incredible determination and sacrifice, but there wasn’t much thought about what to do with them after they arrived. So they have struggled, but it’s not because of some kind of ingrained or systemic racism in Israel. There are opportunities for them here, just as there are for Arab-Israelis. Privately many ArabIsraelis have told me that despite the difficulties they would rather live in Israel than any other country in the Middle East and that they appreciate the rights they have here. Israel is a work in progress, and part of re-establishing the Jewish homeland is making sure that all those living in our midst—including non-Jews—feel completely comfortable.

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WIKI COMMONS

When Israelis evacuated Ethiopians from Sudan in Operations Moses (1984-1985) and from Ethiopia in Operation Solomon (1991) the country fulfilled part of its intended role. Because of the Holocaust, we often talk about Israel as a place of refuge, but the real reason for the establishment of the State of Israel is the return of the Jewish people to their home. I’m not criticizing anyone for living in the diaspora, but that’s not our natural place to be. Our natural home is the land of Israel, and this is where we can become a great nation. The Ethiopians were Jewish but they were not connected to the Jewish people, and while they weren’t facing specific persecution their lives were very difficult. The State of Israel intervened and went in to get them out. These Jews walked in deserts for months, with significant numbers dying, in order to come back to their homeland. They were coming because, for thousands of years, they had this dream of returning to their home. This, I believe, reminds us of what’s ultimately important here. This is the land that God gave to us, as a people, and this is where we can reach our potential as a nation, and best impact the world.

I wanted to support the new immigrants, so I volunteered

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ZION OZERI

KSE NI A SVE TLOVA IS A RU S S IAN- BO RN IS RAEL I P O LI T I C I A N , J O U R N A LI ST A N D ACA D E M I C . SH E SE RV E S A S A M E M B E R OF THE K NE SSE T FO R THE ZIO NIST U NIO N.

I may sound overly idealistic, but the 1993 Oslo I Peace Accord was a very important moment in Israeli history. Today, many people think that it was a tragic moment that resulted in many deaths without producing peace. But I believe it showed everyone that if there is a will, there is a way. Something that had seemed utterly impossible before the accord suddenly became a possibility. The first steps on the road to peace were taken. Unfortunately, the next elected leader after the slain Yitzhak Rabin, Benjamin Netanyahu, chose not to take the path of peace.

In 1993 I had only been in Israel for a few years; my family had recently made aliyah from the USSR. I enrolled in a school that could most accurately be described as a settler’s school. Most of my friends and classmates lived in the 50

Israeli settlements, and I heard few positive comments or accountings of the Oslo Accords. They were all extremely negative about the peace process and cursed Yitzhak Rabin.

They said that the Oslo Accords would result in tragedies and that you could not trust Arabs. I was raised in Moscow in an enormously different political climate. There is a lot of nationalism there now, but that was not the case in the 1980s.

It was very disturbing and upsetting to me to hear Israelis say derogatory things about Arabs. Some of what they said reminded me of anti-Semitic phrases I heard people say to my family back in the USSR—like “you cannot do business with the Jews” or “you cannot trust the Jews.” I was so sad to hear Jews speak that way.

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M U S TA FA B A R G H O U T I

I was most hopeful for peace in the region when the first intifada started. I felt that the popular uprising would challenge the Israeli occupation and that it would not continue. The moment I remember most was in 1989 when, after months of organizing, we came together, Israeli peace activists and Palestinian peace activists, and created a human chain for peace around the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem. We stood hand in hand, Palestinian and Israeli civilians, forming a huge circle of people for miles all around Jerusalem. We waved olive branches and danced and sang together; we talked with one another. It was a great moment. I felt very hopeful. Other people from all over the world—Americans, Europeans, nuns and monks—perhaps 15,000 of us in total,

participated in this peace chain. There were people who walked for many miles to be there. Later the Israeli army attacked us. I remember an Italian woman lost her eye to a tear gas bomb, and one of my colleagues was hurt and lost his hearing. But even so, this was a moment of friendship when I felt peace was possible.

Mustafa Barghouti is a Palestinian physician, activist and politician currently serving as general secretary of the Palestine National Initiative, also known as al Mubadara. He has been a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council since 2006 and is also a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization Central Council. He was the minister of information in the Palestinian unity government.

BENNY MORRIS

SHERRI MANDELL

Benny Morris is an Israeli historian and journalist. He is a professor in the Middle East studies department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He was formerly a correspondent for The Jerusalem Post. His most recent book is One State, Two States.

Sherri Mandell and her husband founded the Koby Mandell Foundation. Mandell wrote The Blessing of a Broken Heart about the murder of her son Koby.

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin was symbolic of the ascendance of the Israeli right; it marked the end of the peace regime. I distinctly remember where I was when it happened.

My wife and I had been at the peace rally at Kings of Israel Square in central Tel Aviv. Rabin was shot, assassinated, at the end of the rally. Wanting to avoid the heavy traffic that was expected at the end of the rally, we had left a few minutes early. As we approached our friend’s house in northern Tel Aviv, a neighbor shouted to us from her balcony that Rabin had been shot. This was just a few minutes after we had left the site. It was truly shocking news. We had a clear sense at the time that this was a devastating blow to the left and to the peace process.

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The most pivotal moment was the 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the subsequent exhumation of the Gush Katif cemetery. Gush Katif was a series of 17 settlements. 8,600 people lived there; it was a mixture of religious and non-religious people founded in 1968. In 2005 the Israeli army forcibly removed Jews from this land as part of the disengagement from Gaza. In a violation of Jewish religious law, later 46 bodies were exhumed from the graveyard and moved to Jerusalem. Some had died in the military, others from terror or illness. A procession of hundreds of people marched behind the coffins through the Old City to the Mount of Olives. I was there, I walked with them and it was shattering. Almost all the people watching were religious. That was also devastating because I felt that the entire nation should have been there to witness this moment.

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D O R I T R A B I N YA N

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DORI T RAB I NYAN IS AN IS RAEL I AU THO R . HER M OST RECE NT B OOK IS ALL THE RIVERS W HIC H WO N T H E B E RNSTE I N PR IZE .

It was 1995, I had been released from the army and I wrote and published my first novel. I was 22. This was a very prosperous time for Israel and for me. The first time I voted for prime minister was for Yitzhak Rabin. I felt I had beginner’s luck. I was drunk with the success of my vote because he was such an inspirational and responsible leader. When he negotiated the Oslo Accords (Oslo II was signed in 1995) I thought he was omnipotent. It made me believe that anything was possible.

The Oslo Accords were innovative; they showed that dialogue was a real option and that we didn’t have to rely upon the old methods of military force and occupation. As Israelis, we were choosing to relate to our neighbors as equals, as our partners, and acting with the belief that we all could and should feel hope for future generations.

The signing of the Oslo Peace Accords formed my political point of view and shaped me as a human, as a writer and as a woman. My parents emigrated from Iran to Israel. Had they not, I could easily have been the next in a long chain of women to struggle with life under a patriarchal, domineering and very repressive regime. I credit Zionism and Israeli democracy with redeeming me from that destiny. I see myself as a product of Rabin’s brand of Zionism; so much of who I am, of my liberty as a woman, my freedom of thought and speech relates to that philosophy. The Oslo Accords were a promise to me and to my generation from Rabin as our leader that the world was going to be a different place. In Israel, unlike Iran, as a woman, I could vote safely. Rabin’s actions with the Oslo Accords made me believe that my vote could change the world; as an individual I could help shape my destiny.

Twenty-two years later, I feel that the Oslo Accords and the subsequent failure of the peace movement show both the strengths of Israel and its weaknesses. I still believe in the potential for peace. Once you have tasted a drop of the possibility of peace you cannot forget how empowering and magical it is. Ever since, I have been thirsty to taste it again.

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A A R O N D AV I D M I L L E R

ALAMI

A ARON DAVI D M IL L ER IS THE VIC E P RES IDENT FO R N EW I N I T I AT I V E S A N D A D I ST I N G U I SH E D F E LLOW AT T H E WOODROW WI LSO N INTERNATIO NAL C ENTER FOR SC H O LA RS. H E H A S SE RV E D A S A N A DV I SE R TO R E P U B LICAN AN D DE MOCRATI C SEC RETARIES O F STATE , MOST R EC E N T LY A S T H E SE N I OR A DV I SE R FO R A RA B - I SRA E LI N EG OTIATIO N S .

On a rainy Saturday morning, November 4, 1995, I was driving to the dry cleaners in Washington, DC, glued to the local all-news radio, when I heard a sketchy report that Israeli Prime Minister Rabin had been shot while exiting a peace rally in Tel Aviv. I immediately called the State Department Operations Center; they confirmed the report and later that Rabin had died. If you asked me to identify one event in the past 50 years of Israel’s history that was both truly consequential and personal, for me it would be Rabin’s assassination.

Men, Karl Marx wrote, make history, but rarely as they please. Yitzhak Rabin made history throughout his extraordinary life, but most heroically and tragically as a would-be peacemaker—a transformed hawk who gradually came to understand that the Palestinian problem threatened Israel’s security and values and that, because there was no military solution, Israel had to embrace, however cautiously, a political one.

The result, the Oslo process, defied history, but it later collapsed under the weight of huge differences between Israelis and Palestinians and fundamental disagreement over process, substance and deep-seated suspicions and fears.

Rabin’s death was also a personal and not just a professional matter for me. He was close to both of my parents and I had gotten to know him years before I worked as a State Department analyst and negotiator. At the funeral in Jerusalem, the 54

memories flooded over me: the Passover seder at Rabin’s apartment in April 1974 shortly before he became prime minister, where in his gruff but wonderful manner he told me I knew nothing about the Middle East. My wife Lindsay and I had been in Jerusalem the preceding year during the October 1973 war. And almost 20 years later, I recalled being with Rabin for another Jewish ritual—this time as part of Secretary Warren Christopher’s first visit to Israel and a Shabbat dinner Rabin held in his honor. I remember Rabin asking me to do the Shabbat Kiddush, and how surprised the secretary was to see Rabin turn to me to do the honors.

I miss Rabin. He was neither a saint nor a water walker. He had flaws and imperfections. But he had authenticity as a leader and the pragmatism and vision so rare in Israel, let alone in the Middle East today, but so critical to wise and effective leadership. There are no rewind buttons on history. But I have said many times that, if I could alter two things, Rabin would not have been murdered and George H.W. Bush and his eminently talented Secretary of State James Baker would have gotten another term—then we might have been able to achieve an agreement. I often question that judgment now as the Middle East continues to melt down. But with respect to Rabin, of this I am certain. Israel, the Middle East and the world are so much poorer and emptier without him.

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A Palestinian aims a slingshot at Israeli soldiers during a riot October 3, 2000 in the West Bank city of Hebron, Jerusalem. Clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinian security forces continue after a week of protests that began..

M AT T I F R I E D M A N MATTI FRI E D MAN IS A CANADIAN- BO RN IS RA E LI AU T H OR A N D J O U R N A LI ST. H E W R OT E THE ALEPPO CODEX , WI NNE R OF THE 2 014 SAMI RO HR P RIZE FO R J EW I SH LI T E RAT U R E , A N D PUMPKINFLOWERS : A SOLDIER’S STORY OF A FORGOTTEN WAR .

something else—the enemy was a very ideological, religious, radical Islamist group committed to a fundamentally different idea of the world from that which we understood beforehand.

What we encountered in Hezbollah in the 1990s really ended up as being the defining idea of the Middle East post-2000.

I remember the hopes people had in the 1990s that peace was nigh and, of course, I miss that hope; I was party to those hopes and I regret their demise.

Israel, since that moment, is in some ways a reduced place.

It no longer has those same utopian dreams. People understand that there isn’t going to be a military knockout as we once imagined, there isn’t going to be a 1967 moment and there isn’t going to be some regional signing of a piece of paper that is going to revolutionize Israel’s position in the region and bring about the advent of a new Middle East. None of that is going to happen. It all came crashing down in 2000.

But while it’s become increasingly dark on the political front, right now for Israel the outlook on the economic and cultural fronts has become much brighter. It’s interesting that in this way, since 2000, Israel has never been in better shape.

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The year 2000 was a pivotal moment for Israel and for the Middle East, specifically the time between spring, when Israel pulled out of South Lebanon, and fall, when the peace process collapsed and the second intifada began. We saw the idea of a peaceful, negotiated settlement to the conflict basically evaporate, the old Israeli left collapse—and it hasn’t been as influential since then—the demise of the kibbutz movement as an important political player and the dawn of a new type of war.

Not the sort of war between states, but a very long kind of chaotic war against armed organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. This period ushered in the birth of a new Israel with few utopian dreams left—a very small and tough little place with different ideas about itself than it had before the year 2000.

I fought in the little guerrilla war in South Lebanon that ended in the spring of 2000 and saw the birth of this new kind of warfare. It was not the Six-Day War; it was not the Yom Kippur War. It didn’t end in six days, or in three weeks as the war in ’73 did. It was a long, drawn-out war with very muddled goals. It didn’t seem to be about land. The enemy didn’t appear to be trying to conquer territory. It was about

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LETTER FROM DAHLONEGA

A Ku Klux Klan banner shocks a small town—and brings back memories of deeply rooted prejudices. BY NOAH PHILLIPS Georgia4.indd 56

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THE THIRD IN MOMENT’S “OUR NATION” 2017 SERIES EXPLORING THE AMERICAN JEWISH EXPERIENCE. Go to momentmag.com to read the previous stories.

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uh-ga), a town of about 6,000 nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, for Friday night services at Shalom B’Harim. Shalom B’Harim is a small nondenominational congregation serving the handful of Jews scattered throughout the mountains of North Georgia and some who work at or attend the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega. There are 3,500 Jews in the 20 northernmost counties in Georgia, comprising just 0.41 percent of the total population, according to the Steinhardt Social Research Institute at Brandeis University. Shalom B’Harim, which literally means Peace in the Mountains, serves as a haven for some of these isolated Jews. “I’m not very observant at all. I’m culturally Jewish,” says Jacobs.

“But at the same time, I need an outlet.”

The congregation started as informal monthly Shabbat dinners in 2001, when two area Jewish mothers decided to create a Jewish environment for their children closer than Atlanta, more than 70 miles away, where about 92 percent of Georgia’s Jews live. Now, 16 years later, Shalom B’Harim has about 70 members, a space in the Dahlonega Presbyterian Church, a part-time rabbi and a Torah, complete with a handcrafted traveling case built by Stanley Applebaum, the president of the board.

Dahlonega came to brief national attention this year on February 16, when a sign suddenly appeared on a building in the center of town displaying a white

CREATIVE COMMONS

s far as Gary Jacobs* knows, he is the only Jew in his unincorporated community of fewer than 20 people near Georgia’s Tallulah River. This northeastern Georgia region is an area where expressions such as “Jew ’em down” are casually bandied about, and the nearby Jewish sleepaway camp, Ramah Darom, is referred to as “that Jew camp” or even, improbably, “Camp Ramadan.” “They don’t like outsiders,” says Jacobs, a high school teacher in his 50s, who asked us not to use his real name. “They’re very religious, at least they claim to be, and, not placing fault on anybody, but they don’t understand what being a non-Christian means.”

So once a month Jacobs drives 56 miles southwest to Dahlonega (Duh-LAWN-

*Not his real name.

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Residents protested the Ku Klux Klan banner which was hung on a vacant building downtown in Dahlonega on February 16.

hooded figure with a raised fist and the words “Historic Ku Klux Klan meeting hall,” accompanied by Confederate and Ku Klux Klan flags. The shocking sight led to immediate protest in front of the building. “The reaction to that banner, in my opinion, was a gut instinct by people that the town should be proud of,” says Matt Aiken, publisher of the local newspaper The Dahlonega Nugget. “The banner went up and people were pulling U-turns.”

Aiken estimates that 30 to 40 people attended an impromptu demonstration that morning, and more than 200 attended the more formal one organized the next day. The sign itself, which violated building codes, was soon removed, but the city was initially unable to reach the building’s owner, Roberta Green-Garrett, who was in Florida at the time. “At one point I actually got through to her, and said, ‘Hey, uh, you got KKK flags on your building,’” says Aiken. “And she said, ‘Oh, okay,’ being kind of coy about it. And I said, ‘So, want me to tell the city that you said they can take ’em down?’ And she said, ‘I’m gonna need more information about it.’ I was like ‘Okay, more infor58

mation: There’s a protest forming in the street in front of your building.’”

It turned out that Green-Garrett, 83, had the sign and flags put up as an attentiongetting stunt to pressure the city into granting her approval to demolish a neighboring historic building so that she could build a hotel in its place. And while the sign—and flags—came down, the incident revealed the tensions that exist in a county that voted for Trump by a 78 percent margin, although Dahlonega itself is more liberal with a longstanding black neighborhood.

“A certain number of people up here get nervous about White Aryans or skinheads,” says Applebaum, a native of Charleston who speaks with a lustrous drawl. There are 32 hate groups based in Georgia, including six chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, two neoConfederate groups, two neo-Nazi groups, three racist skinhead groups, and two white nationalist groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Two Klan groups are located within 50 miles of Dahlonega, in East Ellijay and Canton.

But while Applebaum knows anti-Semitism exists in the South, he doesn’t encounter much of it personally. “There are pockets

out there, you don’t know where they are, and there are enough stories [to know] that you need to be a little cautious when you get into unknown territory.”

It was only six decades ago that the bombing of Georgia’s largest synagogue rocked the state’s Jewish community. On October 12, 1958, 50 sticks of dynamite exploded at the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, destroying the historic building’s school but, thankfully, killing or injuring no one.

Years earlier, in 1915, Georgia was also the setting for the notorious Leo Frank case. Frank, a Jewish factory manager, was wrongfully accused of raping and killing a 13-year-old girl, and a former state senator turned newspaper publisher named Tom Watson whipped Atlanta into an anti-Semitic frenzy that resulted in Frank being lynched in his cell. “It was so bad that after the Frank trial people actually left Atlanta,” says Janice Rothschild Blumberg, whose family has lived in Georgia for many generations and whose husband was the rabbi of the temple that was bombed.

“A lot of businesses boarded up for the time being, and men sent their wives and

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City officials took down the Ku Klux Klan banner the next day.

Jewish motorcycle club called the Sabra Riders. The Sabra Riders, whose insignia is a winged Magen David, have more than 50 active members. (According to Green, “you don’t have to be Jewish to join, but you probably won’t get the jokes.”) “The whole group rode their motorcycles up to North Carolina to [the speaker’s] house, escorted him down here personally, walked him to the door,” says Applebaum.

“And when it was all over with, they escorted him all the way back.”

Green himself says that even in his conservative circles, he rarely finds antiJewish sentiments. “Nobody is overtly anti-Semitic to me,” says Green, patting his holster. “They know I carry; and they’re not going to come onto me like that. Most of the people I hang with at the cigar shop, at the liquor store, all the good places, you know? They know I’m Jewish, and they support Israel. They’re friends of Israel.

They’re my friends. And they don’t tolerate that stuff.”

Much more prevalent than overt antiSemitism is ignorance. “We’re isolated here, in a very Christian environment.

They’re kind people, but totally clueless

about Jewish life and Jewish identity,” says Rosemary Levy Zumwalt, a retired anthropologist. Deborah Arnold, a retired lawyer, agrees. “There’s ignorance that exists in small towns everywhere, that I didn’t experience growing up in Pennsylvania,” adds Arnold. She is especially concerned that the election of Donald Trump has reinvigorated bigotry, particularly in the South. The number of hate groups has risen nationally over the last two years— the total number in 2016 was 917, up from 892 in 2015, according to SPLC. “I think that people feel emboldened, and that it’s okay to show nastiness and ugliness and prejudice.” But for now, the abiding sense at Shalom B’Harim is one of closeness within the community and harmony without. “What was nice about [the sign] was the concern that the community showed, even by people that would not have been affected,” says Arnold. “The people who came [to the protests] were not necessarily Jewish, were not necessarily black, were not necessarily Hispanic. But to see the people who showed up with signs saying ‘Not here,’ that was very heartening to me in this small little town.”

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children out of town. There were people yelling ‘Kill the Jew, kill the Jew!’” Blumberg thinks the temple bombing of 1958 was a seminal moment. “That was the beginning of the end of that kind of antiSemitism,” she says. “What they did that day blew a hole not just in the wall of the Temple, but in the wall of anti-Semitism” that had persisted since the Frank case.

Still, over the years, there have been other incidents of prejudice. In 2014, Shalom B’Harim and the Dahlonega Presbyterian Church joined the Daffodil Project, an Atlanta-based initiative to plant daffodil bulbs in memory of the 1.5 million children who perished in the Holocaust. Jaap Groen, an Auschwitz survivor, was scheduled to speak at their event. “Somebody found out who our main speaker was, and called him up and said, ‘You will not speak.’

And basically threatened to kill him,” remembers Applebaum. “We sent out an email to all of our congregants about the threat, just to let them know, saying, ‘We will have security there, we will be cautious, but we are going on with this.’”

One of those congregants is Leslie Green, who belongs to an Atlanta-based

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Trump continued from page 35

Trump came to depend on Cohn not only for legal advice, but for the core tactics that would define Trump’s approach to doing business: Never admit fault. Never express regret. When you’re criticized, hit back ten times harder. And use the news media to attack and to build your personal brand.

During this period, Trump would talk to Cohn several times a day. They then would spend evenings at Studio 54, where Cohn introduced Trump to celebrities and politicians. They worked together on deals, and Cohn aggressively pursued Trump’s interests with the National Football League, the government and competing businesses.

For many years, Trump kept a framed photo of Cohn on his office desk, not so much as an homage to his most important adviser, but as a weapon to be wielded against any contractor or vendor who was pushing too hard to be paid—an implicit threat that if things didn’t go as Trump wanted them to, someone might have to face the fearsome Cohn. At a roast of Cohn at Studio 54, Trump once said that when disputes arose in his business, “we just tell the opposition Roy Cohn is representing me and they get scared. He never actually does anything.”

With Cohn on speed dial, Trump built his own empire, starting with his renovation of the Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt in 1980. In 1983, with Cohn still at his side, Trump opened his crowning achievement, the 58-story Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.

But in 1984, when Cohn was diagnosed with AIDS, Trump distanced himself from his longtime friend. “I can’t believe he’s doing this to me,” Cohn said, according to Wayne Barrett’s biography, Trump: The Deals and The Downfall.

“Donald pisses ice water.” When Cohn died in 1986, Trump came to the funeral but stood in the rear of the chapel.

Through most of the following three decades, no single adviser played as vital a role as Cohn had, but Trump entrusted his operations to a tight, loyal group of executives and attorneys, many of them Jewish: Jason Green60

blatt, an Orthodox graduate of Yeshiva University, has been Trump’s real estate attorney for two decades (and is now a Trump adviser on Israel); David Friedman, whom Trump has named as ambassador to Israel, did bankruptcy work for Trump at a rough time in the company’s history; Trump’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, served the Trump organization in prominent positions for many years and is now a

ATTORNEY ROY COHN— DONALD TRUMP’S MENTOR IN BUSINESS AND POLITICS— WAS IN MANY WAYS THE MOST SIGNIFICANT MAN IN HIS LIFE AFTER HIS FATHER.

deputy national finance chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Trump sometimes averred that Jews made better accountants and attorneys, according to friends and longtime employees, but his affinity for Jewish employees was not limited to particular skills he had stereotyped the Jews as excelling in. He liked to be surrounded by guys, Jewish or not, from the outer boroughs—men who, like him, felt snubbed by the wealthy Manhattan social elite. Whether he

was eagerly courting the respect of The New York Times or trying to beat Manhattan’s old-line real estate families to control top-shelf properties, he always saw himself as the underdog trying to make it in the big city. “I was a kid from Queens who worked in Brooklyn,” he wrote in Trump: The Art of the Deal.

Then, when he moved to Manhattan, “suddenly I had an apartment on the Upper East Side. I became a city guy instead of a kid from the boroughs.”

Trump’s executives describe him as caring, generous and respectful, even if he did yell a lot and call them at all hours to handle minor issues. Trump was so loyal to his top executives that “we always felt that if you were close enough to Donald that he would have to be the one to let you go, you had a job for life,” said Barbara Res, who was head of construction on Trump Tower and worked for Trump for more than ten years. In turn, Trump says the attribute he values most in employees is loyalty. Those who’ve worked for Trump for decades say he doesn’t talk about the fact that so many people around him are Jewish, but he often attended their children’s bar and bat mitzvahs, made sure they could get away from work for Jewish holidays, and participated in Jewish charity events that they supported.

A Trump Organization executive who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the press said that the key to understanding his boss’s relationship with Jews was Trump’s lifelong sense that he must work harder than anyone else because the people born to power had never accepted his family. “Donald has always seen himself as an outsider,” the executive said. “That’s why he can connect with middle Americans who you wouldn’t think of as connecting to a billionaire. He wouldn’t say it this way, but for him, Jews are kind of like him—on the outside, always working to get in.”

Marc Fisher, a senior editor at The Washington Post, is co-author, with Michael Kranish, of Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power.

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2017

A SPECIAL ADVERTORIAL SECTION

T H E B E S T O F J E W I S H M U S I C , E N T E R TA I N M E N T A N D C R E AT I V I T Y

“L’Orfeo” performed at the Opera La Scala, Milan, Italy.

SALAMONE ROSSI:

OPERA’S JEWISH HERO

by James David Jacobs

tra—around 30 musicians—gave him a pivotal role in this watershed event in musical history. As Matthew Lazar, a musician and composer who once organized a Rossi festival in 2002, told The New York Times, “The British have Purcell. Everyone has Bach. Who do Jewish musicians have? Rossi is really our first hero.”

At the time, Mantua was one of the best places to be a Jew in Europe. Ruled

by the unusually enlightened Gonzaga family, Mantua allowed Jews to (mostly) intermingle with the general population—as long as they wore their yellow badges—and (mostly) practice their chosen professions, including careers in the performing arts. Still, it is remarkable that a Jewish musician was able to gain such a secure position at a time when both physical movement

WIKICOMMONS

n the early 1600s, Salamone Rossi, a resident of Italy’s Mantua ghetto, led the orchestra at the premiere of Claudio Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo, Favola in Musica.”

“L’Orfeo” was not the first opera, but it was the first operatic masterpiece, paving the way for opera’s future and four centuries of uninterrupted development. The unprecedented size of Rossi’s orches-

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CANTOR SHIRA L ISSEK Cantor Shira Lissek’s recent release, Ani Maamin, I Believe—A Voice for Humanity, serves as a prayerful and reflective love poem to the human spirit. “I created the album for our Yom HaShoah commemoration at Park Avenue Synagogue,” says Lissek. “This year, I wanted to share a second generation musical response to the Holocaust that reflects my deep pride and love for my heritage and family, combined with my overwhelming gratitude to upstanding bystanders who saved my grandmother, father and two uncles.” Jewish Rock Radio’s Joe Buchanan writes, “I just finished interviewing the incredible Cantor Shira Lissek for the next Emerging Artist Showcase. I cannot wait for you to hear it! She has created a truly beautiful album that lifts spirit and prayer right up... this is music we need.”

Please visit shiralissek.com, shiralissek@gmail.com

I S RA EL FESTIVA L CA LEN DA R 56th Israel Festival “Israel’s premiere multi-disciplinary international festival.”

June 1-17, 2017 / israel-festival.org

Jerusalem International Book Fair The Jerusalem International Book Fair is a biennial literary festival that has been taking place since 1963.

June 11 – 15, 2017 / jbookfair.com/en

NATION AL YID D I SH T H E AT R E FO LKS B I E N E AT THE M U SEU M OF JE W I S H H E R I TAGE As this country grapples with questions related to immigration, assimilation and social freedoms, Amerike—The Golden Land brings to life the accounts of the men, women and children whose shared experiences met and overcame adversity to ultimately help shape the land of the free. In Yiddish with English and Russian supertitles.

National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage presents Amerike—The Golden Land July 4, 2017 - August 6, 2017 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage Edmond J. Safra Plaza, 36 Battery Pl. NY, NY 10280 Tickets $35 – $60 Visit NYTF.org or call (212) 213-2120 Ext. 206

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and commercial opportunities were extremely restricted for European Jews.

And while Rossi is frequently cited as one of the most important Jewish composers, the qualifier “Jewish” (much like the moniker “Ebreo”—Hebrew— he was forced to attach to his name) underestimates his significance in music history.

Rossi’s birth and death dates are unknown, but we know that he worked for the Gonzaga dukes, who ruled Mantua, from 1587 to 1628. It’s likely that he was a teenager (albeit one who already had a wealth of professional experience) when he was hired. Rossi began his career as the composer for Università Israelitica, a well-regarded Jewish theater troupe which performed frequently at the court and toured in other cities. The troupe was renowned for its integration of drama, music and dance, and its popularity may have primed Mantua for opera— the new kind of music-theater hybrid being developed in Florence.

Rossi’s immediate supervisor was Monteverdi, the court’s music director. They were roughly the same age, and they both started publishing music while they were teenagers, though Rossi’s earliest works were far more advanced. Tracking their progress as composers, one gets the impression that they were learning from each other’s work. They are known to have collaborated on several projects; the only one that survives, incidental music to a play called “La Maddalena,” also includes music by other composers, but the prominent positions that Monteverdi and Rossi’s contributions occupy within the work indicate that the two of them were considered almost equal in stature. Rossi was held in such high regard at the court that there were times he was permitted to appear without his yellow badge.

Rossi’s individual compositions were also revolutionary. He is credited with inventing the trio sonata, which became the defining genre of Baroque instrumental music, paving the way for the 18th-century string quartet. He was also the first composer to set Hebrew texts with Western musical notation, in a 1623 collection he cheekily called Songs of Solomon—referring not to the biblical Song

Illustrations by Gregory Ferrand

Continued from page 61

Winner of Israel Theater Prize’s

BEST ORIGINAL PLAY —2012—

VOICES FROM A CHANGING MIDDLE EAST FESTIVAL May 18-June 11, GILAD EVRON’S

June 7-July 2, HANNA EADY & EDWARD MAST’S

Translated by EVAN FALLENBERG Directed by SERGE SEIDEN

Directed by JOHN VREEKE

ULYSSES ON BOTTLES THE RETURN

Plus, Rick Foucheux & Holly Twyford in Anat Gov’s OH,

GOD (June 26 & 27))

MosaicTheater.org | 202-399-7993 ext 2 | 1333 H St NE

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LOS A N G EL ES J EW ISH SY M PH O N Y Andrea Clearfield’s brilliant oratorio, Women of Valor, is a celebration of women from the Old Testament, inspired by biblical commentary where each line of text represents a strong, resourceful woman. These ancient texts, combined with writings by contemporary women, serve as penetrating verbal portraits of 10 biblical women: Sarah, Leah, Rachel, Miriam and more. Clearfield’s soaring, evocative melodies and sparkling orchestrations bring these women to life as never before!

Performed by the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony Dr. Noreen Green, Conductor Hila Plitmann, Soprano Rinat Shaham, Mezzo-Soprano Tovah Feldshuh, Narrator

On the Albany label and available through Amazon, iTunes and LAJS.org/spotlight

I S RA EL FESTIVA L CA LEN DA R Jerusalem Opera Festival Giuseppe Verdi June 21-June 22, 2017 / israel-opera.co.il/eng

9th International Festival of Lights in Jerusalem’s Old City Walk along the specially lit paths and enjoy the Old City.

June 28-July 6, 2017 / lightinjerusalem.org.il

34th Jerusalem Film Festival July 13-23, 2017 / jff.org.il

KLE Z KAN ADA Every year, over 400 people gather in the beautiful Laurentian Mountains for KlezKanada, the internationally acclaimed festival of Jewish arts and culture. For over 20 years, KlezKanada has focused on tradition, innovation and continuity, connecting Jews of all ages with culture, history and community.

The faculty and speakers are international leaders of Ashkenazic Jewish music, culture, language and beyond. The extensive program includes workshops in klezmer music and Yiddish song, traditional Yiddish dance, Yiddish language and theater. KlezKanada also features North America’s only Jewish Poetry Retreat, an extensive series of talks and discussions, and a rich program for children. Intergenerational, interdenominational and interdisciplinary, KlezKanada has grown into North American’s largest retreat for the study of Jewish arts and culture.

For more info and registration, visit klezkanada.org 64

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Continued from page 63

of Songs, but to his own first name.

Rossi’s sister, who got her start in the Università, also holds a prominent place in operatic history. The only professional Jewish female singer of her time, she became one of the first bona fide opera divas, and she even had a stage name: Madame Europa. She performed all over Europe and appeared in Monteverdi’s later operas. Monteverdi likely heard her sing and may have visited one of Mantua’s synagogues to hear the cantors. In the florid vocal lines Monteverdi

wrote for “L’Orfeo,” there is a level of expressivity which sounds like cantorial krekhtsn (sobbing) catching in the singer’s throat, implying a parallel with that other legendary bard, King David.

Monteverdi moved to Venice in 1613.

While Rossi kept his position at the court, conditions for Jews gradually deteriorated, and it is thought that our lack of information about either Rossi or his sister after 1630 indicates that they perished in the Austrian sack of the Mantuan ghetto that occurred that year.

Rossi’s 1623 Songs of Solomon manuscript.

I SRA EL FESTIVA L CA LEN DA R Akko Opera Festival Giulio Cesare in Egitto August 3-5, 2017 / israel-opera.co.il/eng

26th International Puppet Festival Sponsored by the Train Theater with programs for both children and adults throughout the week.

August 6-10, 2017 / raintheater.co.il/en

J E WI SH P EOP L E’ S P H I LH A R M O N I C C H O R U S

Be part of the Yiddish renaissance! Hear the Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus—the only chorus in New York with an all-Yiddish repertoire—in Symphony Space (95th and Broadway) at 4:30 p.m. on June 11. English translations are provided for “Yiddish and British on Broadway,” a concert featuring new arrangements of Gebirtig standards, a surprising take on Gilbert and Sullivan hits, and beautiful Yiddish theater tunes including the tango “Ikh Hob Dikh Tsu Til Lib” (I Love You Much Too Much), popularized

by Dean Martin, Neil Sedaka and other American pop singers. The JPPC, a vibrant intergenerational ensemble, has been praised by The Jewish Week for its “upbeat Broadway bounce.”

For tickets, visit symphonyspace.org MOMENT MAGAZINE 2017 GUIDE TO CULTURAL ARTS / SPECIAL ADVERTORIAL SECTION

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GIVING A SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

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The organization spearheads extensive Hebrew University alumni outreach throughout the U.S. For 90 years, AFHU has been The Hebrew University’s partner-in-progress, helping to ensure that The Hebrew University serves as an engine of growth for Israel and a research engine for the world. AFHU and its thousands of supporters enable the university to recruit and retain outstanding new faculty, build state-of-the-art facilities, provide scholarships and fellowships to students at every level of academic study, and advance research and R&D activities in globally vital fields.

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Palestinian Haute Cuisine Heats Up

TT

o find Magdalena, first head toward the back of a nondescript shopping mall near Tiberias, on a slow road along the Sea of Galilee. A sleek, paneled elevator will take you two floors up to one of Israel’s most wellregarded restaurants. Named after Mary Magdalene, Magdalena is the brainchild of Yousef “Zozo” Hanna, a Christian Palestinian who grew up in the nearby village of Rama. On any given night Hanna can be found smoothing out a wrinkle on one of the precisely starched linen tablecloths, rearranging an imperfectly plated dish or talking to customers who made reservations well in advance for a seat at the restaurant with stunning views of the Sea of Galilee to the East and the Arbel mountain to the West.

“In Magdalena, I cook my life, my village, my home, my heritage,” says Hanna.

For him, this translates into a menu offering dishes such as shish barak, a classic

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home-style Palestinian dish of dumplings stuffed with lamb and pine nuts, cooked in goat’s milk yogurt, accompanied by a salad of wild chicory with garlic confit and caramelized onions.

Hanna is one of a new generation of Israeli-born Palestinian chefs who are using their talents to express their identity as Arabs and Palestinians while creating fine dining experiences for all Israelis. While this decade has seen the rise of the international superstar Israeli chef—think cookbook writing phenomenon Yotam Ottolenghi or James Beard Award-winning Michael Solomonov—only in the past few years have Israeli Palestinians joined the roster, despite the fact that Arabs make up 20 percent of Israel’s population.

It is difficult to pinpoint and define Palestinian cuisine. “We refer to this area as a-Shams—the Levant—which stretches from Lebanon through Jordan and Palestine,” says Moyin Halabi, chef and owner of

the successful Rula in Haifa. “There are, of course, local variations—for example, areas closer to the sea emphasize fish and seafood more than inland areas.” Referring to the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between Great Britain and France which carved up Arab territories in the Middle East, Halabi adds, “They might have divided the region into countries, but food doesn’t observe political boundaries.”

“I call the Arab cuisine that I cook ‘food from the Levant,’” says Nof Atamna-Ismael, one of the few female chefs in this up-andcoming group. “It’s characterized by lots of greens and fresh, seasonal produce, olive oil, with less meat and fat than Western diets.”

With a doctorate in microbiology, AtamnaIsmael made cooking her profession only after she won Israel’s Master Chef television program in 2014—the sole Palestinian to have won since the show began in 2010.

“To this day, most Israeli Jews think of Arab food as cheap ‘hummus-chips (french

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Nof Atamna-Ismael and Yousef “Zozo” Hanna are two of Israel’s top Palestinian chefs.

difficult to get in on the weekends without a reservation—his landlord recently decided not to renew his lease and the restaurant will be closing.

Like everything in Israel, food can get political. “Food is always about culture, identity and conflict,” says Atamna-Ismael.

“Food is connection and personal. Whatever I create and give you goes into your body, your blood, your being.” She invests much of her time in finding and preserving local recipes that are in danger of extinction. “We’re at a critical time for preservation. The generation that mastered the preparation of these dishes is disappearing,” she says. “These Arab dishes that are becoming extinct have great historical significance, and preserving them is no less important than preserving historical sites and artifacts.”

Others have a different political concern: what they refer to as Israel’s cultural

appropriation. Laila el-Haddad, who wrote the popular cookbook, The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey, warns that, “By appropriating Arab food—and hummus is just one example—Israel has tried to erase the memory and origins of the Palestinians.”

Atamna-Ismael disagrees. “I am proud to share Palestinian recipes, because it affirms my identity, and I am proud when another culture cooks our food. But yes, it does anger me when Jewish Israelis pretend that some of our most beloved recipes are historically Jewish.”

In the end, though, the chef says discussions of who “owns” which food miss the point: “It is the land that owns us, and the land owns the food we eat. So even if the Eskimos came here to live, after a while, they’d be eating hummus, harvesting greens and using olive oil.”

—Eetta Prince-Gibson MAY/JUNE 2017 / MOMENT

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MAGDALENA; ALE GEFEN, FACEBOOK

fries)-salad-kebab’—all said as a single word. But it isn’t really Arab food at all,” says Hanna. This is in part because in the 1960s and 1970s, Palestinian cooks opened cheap, no-frills restaurants with food designed to appeal to a multiethnic Jewish society: carrot salad with spicy sauce from the Moroccan kitchen, salads with mayonnaise for the Russians, some tabbouleh thrown in to seem authentic. “Believe me, my mother never served me Moroccan carrots or mushrooms in mayonnaise,” says Omar Elwan, who runs the upscale Ale Gefen (Grape Leaf) restaurant in Kiryat Ata, northeast of Haifa. “Sometimes people come into my restaurant and demand that I serve hummus and chips.”

Instead, Elwan’s gourmet dishes include local favorites such as deep fried kibbeh maklieh (balls made of a finely ground paste of bulgur and seasonings and filled with meat, onions and pinenuts) with an al dente salad of lentils with sprinkles of vegetables; seafood sujuk (a sausage-like slice), and goose breast on the grill with freekeh (toasted green wheat) and mushrooms in beef broth. The signature dish is a creamy lamb neck for two, cooked at a steady temperature sous vide for 72 hours. It represents what Elwan wants to achieve: traditional food with modern technique, “to create something new yet familiar.”

Pointing to the fields turning green in the early spring near his restaurant, Hanna says, “I pick the greens that I serve here, or I buy them in local markets. Olesh (chicory), chubeza (mallow), wild asparagus and mustard greens are in season now, and that is what I will cook. I know that there’s a world trend of cooking from field to table. But I cook like grandmother.”

Today there are a handful of these Palestinian haute cuisine restaurants throughout Israel, and their clientele is primarily Jewish. “Eating out isn’t very developed among Palestinians,” says Elwan. “It just doesn’t seem to make sense to eat their mothers’ cooking” at a restaurant. Relying on a Jewish clientele has its drawbacks, however. According to food critic Ronit Vered, who writes for Israel’s Haaretz, “on the one hand, increasing numbers of Israelis, Jews and Arabs are opening up to new forms of cooking, while also appreciating traditional recipes and especially fresh, local produce.

But on the other hand, many Jewish Israelis who observe kashrut won’t eat many of the Palestinian foods.” Indeed, Elwan reports that, despite his restaurant’s success—it’s

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BOOK REVIEW | SHAYE J.D. COHEN

What Defines Us?

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

THE ORIGIN OF THE JEWS: THE QUEST FOR ROOTS IN A ROOTLESS AGE Steven Weitzman Princeton University Press 2017, 408 pp., $35

In a sermon delivered during Passover in 2001, David Wolpe, a distinguished Conservative rabbi in Los Angeles, told his congregation that there was no reliable evidence that the Exodus from Egypt ever took place, and that even if it did, it almost certainly did not take place the way the Bible recounts it.

An uproar ensued. If the Exodus story is not true, his congregants replied, why should we celebrate Passover? What is the basis of our claim to the land of Israel? What are our foundations? Are we truly a people? In response, Wolpe tried to reassure his congregants that the historicity of the Passover story did not much matter, because the truth of the story lay not in its facts but in its message. That is, the Torah’s story should not be judged as if the narrator were a reporter, whose only responsibility was to get the facts straight. No, the Torah’s story belongs to a different genre entirely, what modern scholars call a myth, a story expressing a society’s core values and beliefs. In this case, the Exodus story, as told by the Israelites of old, shows us what the Israelites believed (and, Wolpe went on to explain, what we should believe too): that we are to hope and pray for God’s redemption, that we are to trust in 70

God’s protective concern for his people and that we are to believe that historical events are not random but purposeful. These are the truths that the story articulates; as to the facts of the Exodus, the story teaches nothing. (I hasten to add that Wolpe, as far as I know, did not use the word “myth.”)

This is the perspective of The Origins of the Jews by Steven Weitzman, a professor of Jewish studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

He critically reviews various theories and suggestions, some ancient, some modern, for these origins. He finds all of the proposed theories wanting, either because of the insufficiency of data or, more commonly, because of methodological imprecision. Many of the proposed explanations tell us more about the beliefs and perspectives of the storytellers than about the alleged origins of the Jews. In every case Weitzman tries to penetrate the façade of the story. Why do these scholars and storytellers want us to believe their tale of Jewish origins? What do their tales reveal about themselves and about their beliefs?

Weitzman begins his survey with the biblical narrators and genealogists who would like us to believe that the Israelites, the presumed progenitors of the Jews, descend from a single set of ancestors, namely the 12 sons of Jacob. These same narrators would like us to believe that the Israelites were strangers to the land of Canaan twice over— their progenitor Abraham emigrated there from Mesopotamia, and they themselves emigrated there from Egypt. But these genealogists and narrators have ulterior motives. They wanted the Israelites to believe that they constituted a coherent group, held together by blood ties, and they wanted the Israelites to believe that they had no connection with the Canaanites. In reality, modern scholars argue, the Israelite nation began its life as a collection of groups and tribes, including Canaanites.

Weitzman closes his survey with mod-

ern genealogists who are searching for the elusive, probably nonexistent “Jewish gene.”

The key question is whether, genetically speaking, Jews have more in common with their fellow Jews than with the non-Jewish populations among whom they have lived.

In the first part of the 20th century, with the rise of racial conceptions and anti-Jewish politics, Jewish scholars were eager to deny that the Jews constituted a descent group— after all, did not Polish Jews look Polish, Yemenite Jews look Yemenite and Hungarian Jews look Hungarian? But with the growing sophistication of genetic science and, not coincidentally, the growing impact of Zionism on Jewish thinking, geneticists have looked for—and found—genetic markers that set off Jewish populations from their gentile neighbors. Most famously, statistically significant percentages of Cohanim (male Jews of putative priestly descent) from Jewish populations around the world share a genetic marker known as the Cohen Modal Haplotype. Traditionalists argue that this fact “proves” the truth of the biblical account that all Cohanim derive from a single male ancestor, namely, Aaron the High Priest, brother of Moses. Weitzman sensibly objects that the presence of the Cohen Modal Haplotype among non-Jewish populations too suggests that the marker is not exclusively Jewish at all. Genetic science has not yet given us a firm basis on which to build our notions of Jewish origins.

But between the biblical genealogies and the genetics, Weitzman takes us on a journey that covers the crypto-Jews of New Mexico, Aryans (Aryanism) and Semites (Semitism), the Habiru of ancient Egypt and their alleged connections with the Hebrews, the documentary hypothesis and the theory of evolution, the archaeology of ancient Israel, Sigmund Freud and the origins of monotheism, the Khazars and the “invention of the Jewish people.” Weitzman has done his homework; he has read widely and writes well. He has done an excellent job at presenting technical material in an accessible manner. He freely acknowledges his lack of expertise in genetics, but otherwise writes with authority and expertise.

Chapter six happens to be devoted largely to a critique of an essay of mine that appeared in my 1999 book The Beginnings

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of Jewishness. There, I argued that Judaism (or “Jewishness,” as I called it) emerged in the Hasmonean (Maccabean) period (mid1st or 2nd century BCE). Confronted by Hellenism, a trans-ethnic portable culture, which was open to all those who were willing to embrace its tenets and its language, the Jews created Judaism, a competing trans-ethnic portable culture, open to all those who were willing to embrace its tenets and its rituals (notably circumcision).

Evidence for this transformation is the institution of formal conversion to Judaism, which is unknown to the Hebrew Bible and is attested for the first time in the Hasmonean period. So, I concluded, the Jewish self-definition as it emerged in the 2nd century BCE was inspired by, perhaps even copied from, the self-definition of the Greeks. Weitzman observes that my understanding of Judaism as portable culture may mirror the notion of Bildung, character formation through education, an idea that was popular among German-Jewish writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and that I may have been inspired by the work of my teacher Elias Bickerman, a great scholar of Hellenistic period Judaism. Weitzman may or may not be correct in his analysis; I can only say that if there was any influence it was not conscious—but I have not found anything in his argument to convince me to change mine. In any event, Weitzman is a well-mannered gentleman, and I am grateful to him for treating his subjects politely and respectfully.

My main complaint is that Weitzman has stitched together two queries which would have been better kept separate. One is the origin of the Jews. This is a quest for the origins of an ethnos, a people, a nation, and is irretrievably bound up with modern concerns: Who are these people who once populated eastern Europe—and elsewhere—by the millions, who went on to establish a state of their own in the land of their ancestors (alleged ancestors, some would say), many of whom went on to fame and fortune in the United States? Who are they, where do they come from, do the “facts” buttress or call into question the national myths that they tell about themselves? Are these people European or non-European, Middle Eastern or non-Middle Eastern? Since historical inquiry seems unequal to the task of answering these questions, we pin our hopes on the science of genetics, which until now at least has been unable to give an unambiguous answer.

A second and separate question is the history

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of Judaism, for which the science of genetics is irrelevant. Scholars will argue about what makes Judaism, and will then set out to investigate the key moments in the development from biblical Israel to post-biblical Judaism, from temple to synagogue, from priest to rabbi, from homeland to text, from ethnos to religion. Who the Jews are and whence they come are questions irrelevant to this inquiry. Most chapters of Weitzman’s book deal with the origins of Jews, but some, notably chapter six, deal with the history of Judaism. I know that without Jews there is no Judaism, but still the questions are not the same, and Weitzman has muddied the waters by combining them.

As the subtitle of the book says, we live in a rootless age. People everywhere, not just Jews, seek their roots, their ancestry, their genetic makeup. We yearn to discover who we are; alas, our tools are not always up to the task. But there is pleasure in the pursuit, and we should be grateful to Weitzman for being a reliable guide.

Shaye J.D. Cohen is a professor of Hebrew literature and philosophy and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He is currently coediting a new translation of the Mishnah.

“Sweeping and sophisticated . . . Judaisms weaves a new narrative, which embraces difference, multiplicity, and contestation.”

—Reza Aslan, author of No god but God

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BOOK REVIEW | TOM SEGEV

How Much Did Nasser Know?

THE SIX-DAY WAR: THE BREAKING OF THE MIDDLE EAST Guy Laron Yale University Press 2017, 384 pp., $28

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The 1967 Six-Day War is most accurately viewed as another round in the 100 years’ war for Palestine that started with the antiZionist riots in 1920. Since then a series of armed conflicts between Jews and Arabs has shaped the history of this country; the Six-Day War was neither the first nor the last of them. Having grown up in refugee camps following 1948, Palestinian guerrillas launched a series of terror attacks against Israel, often operating out of Syrian and Jordanian territory. Israel repeatedly struck at these countries, including with air strikes and bombings. Syria appealed to Egypt for help. The Egyptians turned against Israel, closing the waterway to Eilat. In the war that broke out, Israel came to control substantial Arab territories, including East Jerusalem and the West Bank. That control turned into occupation, which is the main reason the war still warrants significant attention today.

Guy Laron’s challenging new book, The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East, is well worth reading even though Laron, a lecturer in international relations at Hebrew University, focuses too much on the war’s international context and, at times, relies too heavily upon unsubstantiated speculation.

For example, Laron recounts that on June 2,

1967, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser convened a meeting of all the senior commanders of the Egyptian army and told them that Israel would attack Egypt on the 4th or the 5th. According to Laron, Nasser later became more precise and stated that Israel’s opening offensive would be an aerial attack on June 5. It was. In spite of this alleged forewarning, almost the entire Egyptian air force was annihilated on that morning, thus guaranteeing Israel’s victory in the war.

Laron cites two sources for Nasser’s statement to Egypt’s senior military staff. One is Reconstructing a Shattered Egyptian Army, a memoir by General Mohamed Fawzi, the Egyptian chief of staff; the other is a speech made immediately after the war by the Soviet Communist Party leader, Leonid Brezhnev.

There is no particular reason to trust either of the two. Laron offers no verbatim record of Nasser’s statement. Indeed, Arab official records are hard to obtain and are not all reliably trustworthy. While the memoirs of a former Egyptian politician can be relied upon for his personal experiences and feelings, a direct quote from Nasser needs a stronger source. Brezhnev’s speech is obviously not a reliable source on this point, and Laron does not offer a good reason to accept it.

In what he hopes will be the major exposé of his book, Laron tries to find out how Nasser achieved this extraordinary scoop: Nasser’s information, he argues, came from Washington, and he traces it to Meir Amit, chief of Israel’s Mossad, who had spent the week preceding the war in Washington. Details of this trip are available because Israeli records about Amit’s mission are accessible. Amit was dispatched there to obtain a green light for Israel’s strike against Egypt. In his talks with CIA officials and with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Amit stressed the urgency of Israel’s action and promised that if allowed to strike immediately, Israel would win swiftly and would not have to ask for U.S. intervention. Laron speculates that someone

at CIA HQ may have leaked the Cairo information “gleaned from Amit’s loose talk.”

“Of course,” he adds, “without further documentation it is hard to know for certain, but what the sequence of events confirms is that information on the timing of the Israeli assault started leaking in the two days that preceded the Six-Day War.” There is nothing we investigative historians and journalists hate more than scoops which remain scoops, and Laron’s does not even pass muster as speculation. Amit could not have mentioned the date of Israel’s forthcoming attack while in America because it had not yet been determined by the Israeli cabinet. In fact, the cabinet delayed its decision pending the results of Amit’s talks in Washington. Upon returning to Israel, Amit’s recommendations were to delay the attack for another week in order to give the Americans more time to defuse tensions in the region.

The official record of that cabinet meeting shows that the main objection to any further delay came from the minister of defense, Moshe Dayan, and the chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin. Thus the record appears to substantiate one of Laron’s other major arguments, that the heads of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) drove Israel into the war despite the fact that in June 1967 Nasser did not intend to have a military confrontation.

The available documentation does not sufficiently demonstrate what Nasser’s actual intentions were, but what matters is what Israel assumed to be the case.

According to Laron, the IDF anticipated no existential danger but regarded the crisis as an opportunity to expand Israel’s borders.

In order to achieve that goal, the army disregarded the weak prime minister, Levi Eshkol. Laron points out that similar tensions between the military and political branches of government existed in Egypt, Syria, the Soviet Union and the United States. All four countries, he contends, had their own reasons to incite war in the Middle East.

Militarists naturally tend to believe in their power and often demand action. The IDF is no exception. In a previous book about the 1956 Suez crisis, Laron presented convincing evidence that Dayan and the IDF, in cooperation with France and Great Britain, pushed Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion into war against Egypt. In the ensuing years, the IDF Continues on page 78

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BOOK RE VIEW | ANNE ROIPHE

Unraveling Bulgaria’s Dark Past THE SHADOW LAND Elizabeth Kostova Ballantine Books 2017, 496 pp., $28

BALLANTINE BOOKS

Bulgaria. How little thought I had ever given to Bulgaria, but here it is in the vivid, fastpaced, fascinating new novel The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova. Author of the best-selling novel The Historian, Kostova is a writer who knows how to keep you in suspense, to frighten and amaze you, all while building characters whose fate will matter to you more and more as she reveals a whole country, its history, its tragedy, its politics, its scenery and its sad beauty.

The novel opens in contemporary Bulgaria, where Alexandra, a young American who has arrived in the country’s capital of Sofia to teach English, is dropped off at her hotel from the airport. Immediately the adventure that will change her life forever begins. Three people—an older woman, a man in a wheelchair and their son—are coming down the steps to get into a taxi. She offers to hold their bags as they settle in and as the taxi drives off, she realizes that one of the bags has been left in her hand. She opens it to find a burial urn and immediately jumps into a taxi to return the ashes. The driver, Bobby, becomes her guide through a country with a strange and troubled past. The more we know of it, the more we fear for our heroine and the more we understand the

darkness that lurks behind the most civilized of cultures, a place where citizens can listen to Vivaldi one night and perish in labor camps the next.

Alexandra has experienced her own trauma: Her brother disappeared while on a family hike in the mountains when he was 15. Grief is her constant companion as she and Bobby travel to small sea towns and villages high in the mountains across the country looking for the urn’s owners. Gradually, the duo learns the urn contains the ashes of a deceased musician named Stoyan Lazarov.

And as the story of his life unfolds, so too does a tale of state terror and the cruelty of the petty rulers of a communist system rife with corruption and viciousness.

There is love in this novel, and the characters grow and bind together in wonderful ways. There are old people and young ones and a loyal dog who knits the generations together; there are acts of kindness and moments of sweet gentleness that surround the most painful revelations. Descriptions of Bulgaria hold your attention, and the plot pulls you along from page to page, kindling a desire to see the characters home safely and the mystery unraveled. The police and others pursue the ashes of the violinist, and ominous authorities lurk in the shadows as the story moves from place to place, each stop revealing a little more about the past and the political and personal events that shaped the violinist’s life.

Kostova has a complicated tale to tell, and as she weaves the threads of the story together in a precise and compelling manner, an important breadth of history is covered. The musician Stoyan’s story begins in Vienna with him on the verge of becoming one of Europe’s major violinists. Soon after, we see him trapped in Bulgaria during World War II, having lost his opportunity to become a star. After the war, when the communists take over and the Cold War begins, we witness Bulgaria becoming as ugly inside

as it is beautiful outside.

Kostova juggles several parts of her story without losing our interest, or becoming so complex that we give up hope of unraveling events as they increase in intensity and potential threat. She weaves several time periods in and out of her tale as Alexandra and Bobby, with the help of Stoyan’s aunt and friends, try to find the missing members of the family and avoid the threats of violence that follow them.

Interspersed throughout are chapters that take us back to communist Bulgaria and its labor camps. Stoyan, for no apparent reason, is sent for three years to such a camp where he writes a diary that documents the starvation and cruel destruction of the men who live and work at the quarry with little food and in filthy conditions. They know that they can be shot for no reason or beaten at any time.

Many simply lose hope and die.

Stoyan survives by living in the shadows of his own mind. He replays the music he so loves again and again and imagines himself raising a son. His fantasy life allows him to endure illness and abuse that seem beyond bearing. His violinist’s hands are almost crippled, and he never completely recovers from the soul-crushing experience. His diary of the events in the camp and the viciousness of the selection system that resulted in so many men being killed at random, his record of starvation and the brutality of the place become an important part of what we know about the dark times of this dictatorship.

It is a historical fact that Bulgaria from 1945 on had 70 labor camps and that men and women were punished, banished and murdered in these camps just as they were in Stalin’s gulags, perhaps as methodically as those who suffered and perished in the more famous Nazi camps. But there are few personal or literary accountings of the tragedies of Bulgaria. Kostova has leapt into that void, creating a fictional narrative that heavily borrows the tropes, language and images familiar to us from Holocaust literature, transplanting them to a Bulgarian setting.

As a Jewish reader, I at first resisted giving myself to the full horror of the Bulgarian camps because the author seemed to be blatantly appropriating so many of her details from our Holocaust literature and simply repeating what we have so painfully learned from Primo Levi, Imre Kertész, Elie Wiesel Continues on page 78 MAY/JUNE 2017 / MOMENT

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AUTHOR INTERVIEW

alan alda

and his scientific universe by ellen wexler

AP IMAGES

Alan Alda loves to dig to the root of things.

He has no patience for jargon, for flimsy logic, for impenetrable lectures. He wants to know: What is time? How do clocks work? What are the processes that govern the universe?

Alda, now 81, is best known for playing Captain Hawkeye Pierce, the quick-witted and kind-hearted surgeon, on M*A*S*H. These days, in addition to acting, he teaches scientists how to make their work accessible, so anyone can understand—really understand—the universe, what makes it work, how the pieces fit together. He asks a lot of questions, and he keeps asking until he grasps the answers.

What’s inside a flame? It’s oxidation. What’s oxidation?

When did you first become interested in science? How did it become such a big part of your life?

When I was six years old, I’d make experiments around the house, mixing my mother’s face powder with toothpaste to see if I could get it to blow up. Fortunately, I couldn’t reach the ingredients found around the house that might actually blow up. In my early 20s, I started reading science avidly. It was like learning a new language. I loved learning how scientists were 74

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He is a champion of scrutiny, an evangelist of uncertainty. He says he’s not a believer—he doesn’t like the word “agnostic”—but he is insatiably curious about religion. He grew up Catholic, raised by an Irish-English mother and an Italian father, and he has a theory that he’s descended from exiled Spanish Jews. His wife, Arlene, is Jewish, and he’s learned a lot over 60 years of marriage. (Once, curious about Passover’s history, he wrote his own Haggadah.)

Alda’s new book, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?, comes out this summer. He speaks with Moment about his work, his relationship with religion and his devotion to scientific understanding.

able to discover so many things about the universe—things that we see in everyday life, but they could see inside them. It’s a fascinating detective story.

When I was finished with M*A*S*H, I was asked if I wanted to host Scientific American Frontiers. I realized that they probably wanted me just to introduce the show on camera and then disappear and read a narration. I said I’d be interested in doing it if I could interview the scientists, because I wanted to spend the day with them and learn about

their work. That was the beginning of a revelatory experience: I didn’t come in with a list of questions. I just came in with curiosity—and a whole lot of natural ignorance.

I knew that I didn’t know things. I tried to understand what they were telling me and I wouldn’t let them go until I understood it.

That put their focus on me, rather than on giving a lecture to the camera, and things happened between us that were human and natural and lifelike.

As a result, their science became more ac-

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cessible—not only for people like me, but for the people in the audience. And I thought: Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach them how to achieve that without somebody like me standing next to them? And so I started experimenting with a group of engineering students, taught them a little improv. The way they talked about their work before the improv was so different from the way they talked about it after three hours of work.

Then we started teaching classes, and you could see a real transformation take place.

So we started the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. Since we began in 2009, we’ve taught 8,000 scientists and doctors.

Why is it important for everyone to understand science?

If scientists can’t communicate with us, we’re going to miss the most beautiful, most entertaining thing that the human mind can come up with—which is an understanding of the universe. Not just what we see of it, but what’s underneath it, what makes it work. What’s a clock like when you open up the back?

It’s fascinating. To really understand the way it all fits together, and what the processes are that govern it—that’s beautiful. I don’t want to miss that, and I don’t want other people to miss it.

Basic knowledge is beautiful. There’s a wonderful quote by a great physicist named Robert Wilson. A couple of decades ago, Congress was trying to decide if it wanted to spend a few more million dollars on a collider in Texas.

And the chairman of the committee said to Robert Wilson (and I’m paraphrasing), “Will this collider help us defend our country?” And Wilson said, “Well, it will give us a picture of the universe that will be so extraordinary, it’s equivalent to the art and music and literature that make up our culture. And it won’t help us defend our country—but it will make our country worth defending.” That’s so true—and to me, so beautiful. Didn’t convince the senator. They killed the bill. The collider was half finished. There were tunnels underground. Now, instead of sending particles through the tunnel, it’s being used to store computer records. It became a storage facility instead of a way to understand nature, which is a shame.

Carl Sagan is arguably one of the most famous science communicators. Didn’t he face prejudice because of his popularity? Are scientists who try to make their work more accessible stigmatized?

Alda as Captain Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H.

A lot of people refer to it as the Sagan effect. The more popular a scientist was, the more successful he was at communicating with the public, the more some other scientists felt he wasn’t a true scientist.

But I think that’s changing. When we started the Center for Communicating Science, it wasn’t always easy to convince department heads that they should let their graduate students spend time learning communication. Now we’re overbooked. Some departments mandate it.

That was unheard of when we started. So I think we’ve helped change the view of the importance of communication.

In a climate where science—and facts themselves—can be met with skepticism and hostility, why is communication important today?

With better science communication, I hope people will begin to think more like scientists. We all have to operate to a certain extent on trust, but if we don’t determine whether a source is trustworthy, we could make poor decisions that affect our lives.

The debate about vaccines is an example of that. If not enough people get vaccinated, people could die from the disease. People need to examine the evidence. Our lives depend on that more and more.

Do you think today’s climate welcomes facts and evidence? On a scale of welcoming to hostile, where do you think we are right now?

I’m not a social scientist. I don’t know how to measure it. All my life, I’ve observed people who didn’t think rationally—and at times in my life, I haven’t thought rationally. I know how easy it is not to. Some people feel they can talk to the dead. People have their palms read, they’ll read the astrology column.

They’re not accustomed to challenging that thinking with what’s known through observation, experimentation, studies and peer review.

I don’t know if it’s worse than it ever was. But it’s always been a good idea to get better at relying on evidence.

And it’s not just evidence: Studies say that just showing people the facts isn’t enough. They have to trust you. It has to be related to their experience. You tell them what the speed of light is, but what difference does it make unless they can relate it to their experience?

You tell them that vaccines don’t cause autism, but telling them that fact—or even showing them the evidence—doesn’t always do a good job. There has to be person-to-person trust.

What do you think of the Trump administration’s approach to subjects like climate change?

Climate change needs to be understood for what it is. We can’t keep poisoning the air and the people who breathe it. We can’t keep giving them skin cancers. Rejecting real science is not a good idea. We stand the chance of hurting ourselves seriously—and hurting everything else that’s alive. There’s nothing lost by listening to real, good, solid MAY/JUNE 2017 / MOMENT

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WIKICOMMONS

Your new book is all about the importance of explaining science clearly. Can

you give us a few tips?

You have to know your audience. If you’re talking to them, you’re looking at them, you’re able to read on their faces if they’re getting it. Even if you’re writing for them, you’re imagining the way they’re processing what you’re telling them. In a way, you’re reading their minds in the moment. The person trying to communicate has to listen even better than the person who’s listening.

They’re listening to find out what they need to say, and how they need to say it.

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science. The chances of losing something valuable by ignoring it or denigrating it are much greater.

Are you worried about the upsurge in religious fundamentalism?

I long for the good old days of cognitive dissonance, where you could believe whatever you believed and you respected scientific inquiry. You realized that facts are facts and faith is faith, and what’s the difference if they seem to contradict each other? I say that in a lighthearted way—cognitive dissonance has a bad reputation. But if it allows you to believe one thing on the one hand and believe another thing on the other hand, and you don’t kill anybody in the process, maybe it’s not so bad.

Do science and religion conflict? How do you—and how should we—resolve this tension?

I don’t think they necessarily conflict. It depends on how much you feel you have to give up one for the other. I don’t personally happen to be a believer, but I don’t resent anybody’s believing what they believe, as long as they don’t feel it’s necessary to deny the validity of reason and experimentation and evidence. It’s not necessary to make yourself ignorant in order to believe. Too many smart people were believers.

You explored Albert Einstein’s life in your play, “Dear Albert,” which is based on Einstein’s letters. What drew you to Einstein?

I wanted to do a dramatic evening at the World Science Festival, and I knew that Einstein’s letters had some wonderful dramatic moments in them. You had one of the smartest people in the world, and here were his letters to his two wives and friends. He revealed himself to be a very human person, at times all too human—with flaws, the kinds of flaws most of us have, thinking more about himself than the other person.

And at the same time, he arrived at a view of the universe that was groundbreaking, just cracked open what we thought about the way things worked. It’s an exciting story, to see these amazing ideas and revelations occur to him at the same time that he’s being mean-spirited to one wife so he can move on to the next.

I didn’t want to put down Einstein. I wanted to share his humanity, to show that he was a person like us. I wrote a play about Marie Curie, too, called “Radiance.” The 76

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same thing was at work there. I want to see the messy, three-dimensional humans, so that we recognize that they’re flesh and blood like us—they’re just very smart. But they’re not a different species. There are a lot of reasons to recognize that. People can be drawn to science who wouldn’t otherwise think they were suited to it. They can become more interested in these stories because they’re human stories, and in the process become interested in the science.

We once published a story about the public figures most often misidentified as Jews—and you made the list.

Why do you think you’re mistaken for being Jewish?

What might surprise you is I think I am Jewish. The reason I think so is I had an

If scientists can’t communicate with us, we’re going to miss the most beautiful, most entertaining thing that the human mind can come up with—which is an understanding of the universe.

Irish-English mother and an Italian father.

My grandfather told me that the Italian family left Spain 450 years ago, which would have put it around 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain. My guess is that the family left Spain and went to Naples, where many Jews went. Some went to Sicily, some went to other places, but a lot of them went to Naples because Naples was controlled by Spain at that time, but they didn’t have the edict to get out yet. About two years later, they had to get out. Then my guess is they moved north to the Abruzzo region. And then when things calmed down, they came back down to near Naples, where the family is now 30 kilometers outside of Naples in a town called Sant’Agata de’ Goti. And their name is D’Abruzzo, which means they had

come from Abruzzo, but here they were in Naples. So that’s, in my imagination, the trajectory that they were on. But I’m not sure. I’ve taken some DNA tests, and I seem to be 4 percent Jewish. But I’m also 2 percent Neanderthal—so maybe that was just the Jewish Neanderthals.

Your wife, Arlene, is Jewish. Describe your relationship to Judaism.

We’re both very much interested in Jewishness. But I’m not a believer, so even if I find out that I’m genetically Jewish—it’s possible, but probably unlikely—I think it’s easier to be Jewish and not be a believer than it is to become Jewish and not be a believer.

When Arlene studied Yiddish, I tried to take lessons from her. Sometimes we’d sit at a concert hall waiting for the concert to begin, and we’d write notes to each other in transliterated Yiddish. At her 60th birthday, I sang to her in Yiddish. We’re both obsessed with watching movies about World War II. We could stay up all night watching blackand-white Nazis, because we want to see them lose over and over again.

Have you raised your children Jewish?

No. I wanted to make sure they knew they were Jewish, but nobody in our family is religious. Although one of our daughters got bat mitzvahed at the age of 40, and her daughter was there, singing along. But there’s more of a sense of solidarity and cultural connection than belief.

What’s your favorite Jewish holiday?

Passover. Passover’s like Thanksgiving. People sit around and eat and drink and tell stories, are glad to be alive. I like that.

Do you celebrate Passover?

We often do, though not every single year. A few years ago, I was at a seder, and I said to the host, “How do you think the seder has evolved over the years?” And he said, “What do you mean, ‘evolved?’” I said, “Well, it must have started out one way and grown over the years. Don’t you think?” He said, “The seder is the seder. It didn’t evolve.”

We were reading from the Manischewitz Haggadah, and I thought: Before it got to Manischewitz, I think it must have been something else over the years.

I did research, and at the next seder, I had written a Haggadah that we all worked from. It didn’t necessarily go through the order of the seder, but it talked about the origin of each of those events, and how

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A NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD WINNER much of it goes back to the Greek occupation of what’s now Israel, and why there’s a pillow, and why they recline, and what the Afikoman once was and what it became.

It’s very interesting. The Jews who were often at our seders who hadn’t been to seders in a long time were really interested in this, because it connected them to the evolution of the holiday.

“A DIFFERENT SPECIES OF SUSPENSE TALE...EVOCATIVE, DEEPLY RESEARCHED...

MANAGE[S] TO DAZZLE WHILE DELVING INTO DARK PLACES.” — Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air —

Do you still use that Haggadah?

No, we haven’t used it in a few years. Lately, our daughters have their own Passover dinners, so we let them run it.

Do you have a favorite Passover food?

The thing is, there’s hardly any dish in the Jewish recipe book that I don’t love. So it’s hard to pick a favorite. Sometimes, to pass the time on M*A*S*H, we’d say: “Okay, what’s your favorite ethnic food? Italian?

Irish? Jewish? How many dishes can you identify that you love the most?” And the Jewish foods always came out ahead. There were more things that you could love. Kasha varnishkes, I’m crazy about. I don’t like chopped liver, I’m sorry to say—I hope that doesn’t get me off the list of supposed Jews.

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spondence in the period leading up to the war, Israelis expressed feelings of complete helplessness, repeatedly referring to Arab threats to “exterminate Israel.” These words, broadcast by Arab radio stations, indicated, for many Israelis, the possibility of a second Holocaust. Nasser was compared to Hitler; municipal rabbis went through public parks sanctifying them to serve as cemeteries. This was a major factor in the decision to strike at Egypt, and Egypt’s almost immediate defeat became a major factor in the decision to take East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which resulted in an instantaneous transition for Israelis from the depths of despair to the heights of national and religious elation. Thus the Six-Day War was mainly a result of panic and euphoria in Israel rather than of the rational policy interests of Moscow, Washington or Tel Aviv (or even of the U.S. and the USSR acting out Cold War dynamics in the Middle East). Regardless of the reasons, taking East Jerusalem and the West Bank proved to be a fatal decision: Fifty years later, it still prevents any progress towards peace.

and Anne Frank, as well as the Nuremberg trials and the many other documented histories of the time. Here, a contemporary novelist who has not experienced this firsthand gives us a plausible version of these horrors, effective but not as deep or cutting as the real thing. How could it be?

Yes, I told myself, Bulgaria was bad, but not as bad as the extermination camps of Nazi Germany. I felt the author was raiding our tragedy. But as I read on, I realized that this Bulgarian evil also happened and was equally tragic. These labor camps, this communist horror that destroyed lives, flourished because a government enabled sadistic and barbaric souls to crush all that we hold valuable in civilization. The Holocaust, the gulags of Stalin and the camps in Bulgaria each possess their own horrifying particularities, but Kostova’s use of Holocaust tropes gives rise to an important question: Just how universal are the horrors of the Holocaust?

For those versed in Holocaust literature, few of the details in the chapters devoted to Stoyan’s time in a labor camp will be surprising, and all of those chapters seem somewhat flat or stale in the face of all we know about such places. But the overall narrative is a powerful one. Kostova reminds us of what inevitably happens when civilization, education, humanity are divorced from political power.

The novel also shows us how fragile human civilization remains. Between Rwanda and Pol Pot, between ISIS and Putin and the assassination of journalists and dissidents and the jails of dictatorships all over the globe, human dignity is always threatened and can so easily be discarded.

I am embarrassed to admit that I was ignorant of Bulgaria’s particular horrific history before reading this book; I will not forget that fact ever. The love story, the chases, the travel tales are all well done, but the heart of the matter lies in the portrait of a society gone mad as unchecked power is given to the most vile and uncaring people among us. Today, in America, as anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant groups revel in their new strength, I read this book with anxiety, an anxiety that still haunts.

In the end, I welcome this novel as a valuable contribution to our understanding not just of our immediate past, but of the human capacity to rip worlds apart and let monsters rule.

Tom Segev is the author of 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. He has just completed a biography of David Ben-Gurion.

Anne Roiphe is the author of 21 books of fiction and nonfiction. She is currently writing a series of essays on Jewish short stories for The Forward.

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To subscribe: www.jewishreviewofbooks.com or 1-877-753-0337 Six-Day War continued from page 72

designed more plans for territorial expansion, but Ben-Gurion repeatedly rejected those plans.

The situation in 1967 was more complex.

Prime Minister Eshkol’s political weakness played a role in the course of events leading to the war; indeed, some generals put brutal pressure on him. However, Eshkol also emerges as a statesman with nerves of steel who withstood all pressure until he could obtain the green light from Washington.

Like the IDF, he probably did not fear for Israel’s very existence, but he agreed with Dayan and the army that a war might improve Israel’s strategic situation.

For the most part, Laron ignores the social and psychological fragility of the Israelis at the time. Nine out of every ten Jews living in Israel in 1967 had not been born there.

Nearly one out of every five had lived in Israel for less than a decade. Many of them were Holocaust survivors or newcomers from Arab countries. Most Israelis had not yet mastered the Hebrew language. Egypt’s threats to exterminate Israel caused widespread and growing panic which the cabinet could not ignore.

Some militarists and politicians manipulated the public’s apprehensions, but there is ample evidence to show that most of it was authentic Holocaust panic. In their private corre78

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