Moment Magazine, November December 2021

A MOMENT BIG QUESTION

What should the role of American Jews

be with respect to Israel today?

NOV/DEC 2021

the ties are evolv ing...

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GRANDMA TEXAS vs

FABULOUS JUDY CHICAGO the

A HAUNTED CASTLE ottoman

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

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E S S AY

The Ghosts of the Khan of Ajjur A journalist moves into an Ottoman-era castle in Israel’s Elah Valley that has stood witness to centuries of turmoil. He harvests olives, greets unexpected visitors and discovers the complexities—and impermanence—of land ownership in Israel.

by Arieh O’Sullivan

THE BIG QUESTION PROJECT

What Should the Role of American Jews Be With Respect to Israel Today?

There’s no pretending there’s one easy answer. So Moment curates a broad spectrum of opinions in order to open up the conversation—and promote understanding. Voices include Susie Linfield, Michael Oren, Aaron David Miller, Peter Beinart, Ruth K. Westheimer and more. interviews by Moment staff

48

M O M E N T- K A R M A F I C T I O N

Polonaise The music of Chopin brings together a mysterious young Hungarian Holocaust survivor and an American music student. But just when romance is in the air, he vanishes.

by Rona Arato

VISIT MOMENTMAG.COM TO READ • • • •

Israel’s Entry to the Oscars Biden and Bennett’s First Skirmish ‘Paddington Bear’ and the Kindertransport And much more!

From the Editor-in-Chief

“The place where we are right”

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6 10

The Conversation Opinion

Remembering the lessons of 1942

by Gershom Gorenberg “Replacement theory” reemerges on the right

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Moment Debate

Talk of the Table

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A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism review by Robert Siegel

Our Country Friends review by Carlin Romano

71

Caption Contest

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Spice Box

Cartoon by Ben Schwartz

Ask the Rabbis

How do you deal with people in your community who don’t want to get vaccinated?

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Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Controversial City review by Ori Z. Soltes

Is the filibuster good for democracy?

Sarah A. Binder vs. Richard Arenberg interviews by Amy E. Schwartz

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Visual Moment

Judy Chicago’s feminist revolution

by Diane M. Bolz

Grandma- or Texas-style brisket: Which is more delectable?

by Dan Freedman

The iron grip of Israel’s rabbinate is weakening

by Shmuel Rosner

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Poem

“Portrait of the Poet’s Grandmother (Lighting Candles)”

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NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 | MOMENT

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COURTESY OF THE FINE ARTS MUSEUMS OF SAN FRANCISCO, © JUDY CHICAGO/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS); PHOTOS © DONALD WOODMAN/ARS / ARIEH O’SULLIVAN / MARISSA VONESH

features

from the editor-in-chief

THE PLACE WHERE WE ARE RIGHT From the place where we are right flowers will never grow in the spring.

The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard.

But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plow.

And a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood.

CAROL GUZY

—Yehuda Amichai

I have been editing Moment for so long now that I can close my eyes before a story is published and see the letters to the editor and comments that we are going to receive. Come to think of it, as a lifelong member of the tribe and the daughter of a (female) JCC executive director (a job not for the fainthearted), there has never been a time when I have not been able to hear the arguments gushing from all directions and feel them running through me.

By now, the diverse opinions and beliefs of the American Jewish community are rivers etched into my soul.

So please bear with me as I prophesy about some of the comments that we are going to get in response to this issue (some, I’m sure, from people I admire and love). Our “Big Question” for this issue, “What should the role of American Jews be with respect to Israel today?” promises to be a lightning rod. Even the wording of 4

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021

the question will be parsed and criticized; indeed, that wording was subject to much internal debate among our staff.

This new iteration of a longtime question was inspired by my conversations with young American Jews during last May’s outbreak of fighting between Israel and Hamas, yet another eruption in a long chain of unsettling moments between Israelis and Palestinians. Some of the people I spoke with viewed the conflict in terms of social justice for the Palestinians, while others were more focused on the existential threats they saw facing Israel and were upset that the Jewish state bore the brunt of the blame. All of them longed for answers and solutions even though there are no easy ones to be found. Most wanted to take action: to help in some way, and to figure out what their role should be, if any, in shaping Israel’s direction and future. Of course, young people are not the only ones grappling with these questions. American Jews of all ages and inclinations are, even if they are less vocal about it.

So, inspired by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai’s 1965 poem, “The Place Where We Are Right,” we have plowed the ground.

Some of the voices we have brought to light are young, some are old, some are established, some less so. Some of them might be disturbing to you and evoke outraged comments such as: How dare you include opinions from Jews who fight on behalf of BDS? How dare you include opinions from Jews who don’t believe Israel should be a Jewish state?

How dare you include opinions from Jews who believe that Israel has a historical right to the West Bank and Jerusalem’s Temple Mount?

How dare you include opinions from Jews who think we should disentangle ourselves from Israel’s future?

Yes, these are among the views you will encounter, and it behooves you to give them a hearing. Why? It is extreme views that often end up leading the conversation and twisting the arc of history. Recognizing them helps clarify where the center is. This is important because most of us are born with “center-of-the-universe syndrome”— we think that wherever we stand is the

BY NADINE EPSTEIN center. Broadening the conversation makes it possible for us to recognize where we fit on the spectrum and, hopefully, to question what we think and why. We need to ask ourselves: Where does common sense end and zealotry begin?

The “Big Question” on Israel is not the only provocative piece in this issue. In “The Ghosts of the Khan of Ajjur,” Arieh O’Sullivan introduces us to some of the specters of Israel’s past—in particular, to the ghosts of an Elah Valley Ottoman-era castle where he once lived. An Israeli TV broadcaster, tour guide and adventurer with an irreverent sense of humor, O’Sullivan explores the meaning of Zionism and the complexities—and impermanence—of land ownership in Israel.

Robert Siegel’s book review of A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism gives astounding insight into the complexities of conservatism in this country. To me, it’s a reminder of how the battle over FDR’s New Deal remains central to politics in America.

Sarah Posner’s column picks up the story with the worrying reemergence of one form of seemingly vanished right-wing extremism, “replacement theory.” In his column, Shmuel Rosner traces how the iron grip of Israel’s rabbinate may finally be weakening. “Ask the Rabbis” explores how Jewish communities should deal with unvaccinated members, while “Moment Debate” shines light on the pros and cons of the filibuster. There are tensions in the tunnels beneath Jerusalem and a Muslim diplomat leading the charge against antisemitism at the UN. We include lighter fare as well: new fiction, the groundbreaking art of Judy Chicago, the meaning of the word “Talmudic,” recommendations for your holiday book-giving, the cartoon contest, Spice Box and a delightful paean to brisket, just in time for Hanukkah. I don’t eat meat anymore, but I got a kick out of reading about the history of brisket and learning the difference between the Ashkenazi Jewish “Grandma” version and Texas Barbecue.

I am so much wiser now!

Enjoy—and a happy and safe Hanukkah to all!

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RECOGNIZING THE SUFFERING OF OUR FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS DOES NOT DETRACT FROM THE MEANING OF OUR OWN SUFFERING, BUT RATHER CAN SERVE AS A BRIDGE FOR HEALING.

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A LESSON UNLEARNED Thanks to Tom Gjelten for this informative and powerful piece (“An Inconvenient Genocide,” September/ October 2021). Some of the most chilling parts of this excellent article are when Gjelten points out the deeply disturbing parallels between the outside world’s conciliatory approach to China today and how the Nazis were appeased in similar fashion. He shows how American bankers, companies and politicians, including even Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself, went out of their way to avoid confronting Hitler, despite the information they had about what was already happening in Germany.

China’s attacks on the cultural vanguard of the Uyghurs, and on Uyghur intellectuals, recalls what Hitler and Stalin did when targeting people and nations that they wanted to eliminate.

They sought to silence those peoples, to rob them of their voices and destroy their sense of community in one stroke. It is deeply disturbing that China’s leaders in the 21st century are repeating this tactic: The disappearance of intellectuals, writers, musicians and the like means they are seizing people not just because they are Uyghurs but also because they are Uyghurs with a voice.

It’s horrifying to think that this is once again playing out today, with United States companies lobbying behind the scenes to weaken or scuttle the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. This has already significantly delayed the law, by which the United States would deny an export market for products made in the Uyghur region. That is, the United States would actually do something beyond just protest—something that could help to halt the Chinese genocide. So, have we not learned from history? Apparently not.

Magnus Fiskesjö former Cultural Attaché at Sweden’s Embassy in Beijing Ithaca, NY

THE REAL REASON FOR WAR Your article comparing the outrages China is perpetrating against the Uyghurs to those of the Nazis against the Jews was informative and well-written. I must disagree with its statement that the U.S. went to war against Nazi Germany “because of Nazi victories throughout Europe and the threat of Axis world domination.” In fact, Hitler declared war on the U.S. four days after Pearl Harbor, and only then did we add Germany to the declaration of war Congress had issued against Japan the day after the attack. If Hitler had not dragged America into the European war on December 11, 1941, it’s quite possible we never would have entered it.

Alan Rosenberg Warwick, RI TOO MUCH, TOO DARK It may be that I am living in a happy bubble, but it seems to me that things are never quite as dark as depicted in Moment: 18 pages and a cover dedicated to the Uyghurs goes well beyond covering the issue. Please balance the dark stories with some bright, even exhilarating ones. I’d like to leave Moment feeling good about something.

Art Rosen Newbury, NH

LYNCHING MEMORIAL A VOICE FOR JUSTICE I want to applaud Nadine Epstein for the thoughtful article (“In the Shadow of the Lynching Memorial,” September/ October 2021) describing her moving journey to memorials and landmarks commemorating the tragic history of slavery and racism in our country.

As a son of Holocaust heroes, I completely agree with Epstein’s assertion that the horrific persecution faced by Black people throughout America’s history deserves as much attention as the atrocities suffered by our own people.

Recognizing the suffering of our fellow

human beings does not detract from the meaning of our own suffering, but rather can serve as a bridge for healing.

Please keep raising your voice in the name of justice.

Jack Y. Edelstein Ann Arbor, MI

No charitable gift has a greater impact on the lives of Israelis.

DON’T RAKE HER OVER THE COALS Bravo to Nadine Epstein for this article. Not only should Epstein not be “raked over the coals” for her suggestion that “American slavery, the failure of Reconstruction and the centuries of racial injustice they wreaked, including murders and persecution, deserve as much discussion in the American Jewish community as killings and persecution of Jews,” her proposal should be implemented. And founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative Bryan Stevenson is a national treasure.

I would put him on the Supreme Court if I could, but I’m afraid in today’s world he is doing more good with his initiatives on the Black American experience.

Ira Wagner Besthesda, MD

MEIR KAHANE HE WAS NOT A RACIST Shaul Magid, and certainly Robert Siegel, are either both self-hating Jews, ignorant of Jewish exegesis or ignorant of the Jewish experience during the 20th century in America and Russia (“America’s Homegrown Jewish Terrorist,” September/October 2021). I was a personal witness to the hundreds of Jewish lives Rabbi Kahane and the Jewish Defense League (JDL) saved in America and the Soviet Union. As a member of the JDL, I was one of four people with Kahane on the corner of First Avenue and 45th Street the night before he was brutally murdered after a lecture. He recited a Bible passage to us, which underscored, as always, his positions on antisemitism and anti-Zionism. He was a Torah scholar, an ardent Zionist and Jewish to the core.

Including Rabbi Kahane in the same breath as the racist, antisemitic, anti-white, anti-American hatemon-

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gers who led the Black Panthers and preached devastating anti-Zionist rhetoric during the 20th century is outrageous. Rabbi Kahane did not hate Arabs or non-Jews. He was not a racist. He wanted Israel to remain the Jewish homeland that it always was and always will be—politically, historically and religiously.

Alan B. Rosenthal Riverdale, NY

CRITICAL RACE THEORY FACTS ARE FACTS I was shocked and horrified to read Thane Rosenbaum’s essay (“Is Critical Race Theory a Threat to Education?”

September/October 2021) claiming that critical race theory (CRT) is a threat to education. Not teaching it is a threat to our country. He is in total denial of the history of intentional repression and discrimination of non-Caucasians throughout this country’s history. It is ironic that he states that Holocaust denial should not be 8

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021

debated, and, therefore, critical race theory should not be either. That the Holocaust happened is a fact. The racism in this country is also a fact. Facts need to be taught in our schools.

The entire essay is riddled with errors. No, CRT does not claim that “race explains everything.” No, “the legacy of slavery” is not being taught in schools already. To claim that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, etc. demonstrate that there is no systemic discrimination is a complete denial of the most recent efforts of various states to restrict people of color from voting and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court. To say that several people of color being elected or appointed to powerful positions in the federal government means there is no racism ignores an inconvenient fact: A man who prominently displayed his racist and sexist opinions was elected as president immediately after Obama’s second term.

Rosenbaum concludes by trying to tie

the prominent role that Jews played in the civil rights movement to why CRT should not be taught. There is no connection.

Systemic racism in this county is a fact.

We as a country need to face this ugly truth and start to educate the next generation in order to move ahead, and to attempt to achieve the principles that are supposed to be the foundation of the U.S. Bob Rosenbaum Chilmark, MA OY, VEY! If this is a defense of critical race theory, oy, vey! Mia Brett confines her explanation of CRT to telling us that it is a lens and an academic framework. One of the few concrete statements in her article is about the disparity between sentencing for crack and cocaine, something that many of us realized a couple of decades before we’d ever heard of CRT. Despite a whole page to say something concrete, we don’t learn much.

Michael L. Fine Punta Gorda, FL

RESULTS OF A TWITTER POLL

­— MOMENT POLL — Is critical race theory a threat to education? yes

23.7% no

76.3%

We asked Moment’s Twitter followers to weigh in. The No’s won.

AN INFLAMMATORY, TOXIC WORD DON’T USE “APARTHEID” I am writing regarding Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s recent column (“We Know It When We See It,” September/ October). For someone who employs words for a living, she appears naive to the major impact behind certain words, such as “apartheid.” I do not think she is naive. The word is inflammatory, and she knows it. The word “apartheid” is toxic and has nothing to do with Israel.

She apparently prides herself in being a “responsible historian and truthteller” when she expresses empathy for the Palestinians with respect to Israel’s rebirth. I have no problem showing concern for another people, but if she were a true historian and understood the dangers Israel faces today, one would hope that she would refrain from publicly criticizing it.

I understand her point—that one should be able to criticize the homeland without being labeled an antisemite. But we, as Jewish Americans, do not have the luxury of publicly judging or reproving this little gem of a nation.

When it comes from a person of the Jewish community, it merely makes our enemies rejoice. If you must express your feelings, write to an Israeli government official.

Susan J. Friedman Alachua, FL Join the conversation! Send a letter to the editor at editor@momentmag.com or comment online at momentmag.com

Bennett Center for Judaic Studies LECTURES AND EVENTS: Fall 2021 A Semester of Free Virtual Learning 24th Jacoby-Lunin Humanitarian Lecture

“Black Voters Matter: Our Obligation to Democracy and Equality” LaTosha Brown, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Black Voters Matter, social activist, political strategist, and jazz singer.

Tuesday, November 9 at 7:30 p.m.

- free webinar

In collaboration with Open Visions Forum

Lecture marking the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials

“A History of Holocaust Trials: From Nuremberg to Demjanjuk and Back Again” Lawrence R. Douglas, J.D., author, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (2001), The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (2016).

Thursday, November 18 at 7:30 p.m.

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1073 NORTH BENSON ROAD, FAIRFIELD, CT 06824

perspectives OPINION SHMUEL ROSNER

A SMALL RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION Israel’s new religious affairs minister may be taming the rabbinate.

WIKIPEDIA

I

t is easy to list the many things that the relatively new and highly diverse Israeli government cannot do. Example: It cannot advance a peace process with the Palestinians, nor an annexation in the West Bank. Ideological differences among members of the coalition would not allow it.

It is not so easy to list the substantive or ambitious things the coalition can do.

Still, one comes to mind: It can seek to tame ultra-Orthodox power. Unlike most recent coalitions, this one is notably lacking in ultra-Orthodox influence. The Haredi parties are not members; the guardian of Haredi interests, Likud, is in the opposition; some of the coalition’s dominant parties, namely Yesh Atid and Israel Beiteinu, ran on an explicit anti-Haredi agenda, and the prime minister represents a constituency that supports reining in Haredi power.

Thus, the minister most active in reforming his jurisdiction so far is Religious Affairs Minister Matan Kahana. And while his recent actions don’t necessarily rock the world of most Israelis, they do rock the small world of religious wheelers and dealers, who are experts in the power games played by the factions that manage Israel’s unholy infrastructure of religious affairs.

Kahana started his small revolution by proposing a reform in the way the state handles kosher certificates. Its details are complicated. But its essence is simple: to give local rabbis the power to bestow such certificates, thus shifting power away from the chief rabbinate.

Why would Kahana, himself religious, and a representative of a somewhat religious party, Yamina, do such a thing? Why would a member of this faction, which used to support the state rabbinate’s power, work to weaken it? There are two possible answers.

Pick the one you find more convincing.

Answer 1: Because Kahana and his advisors realize that this is the right thing to do 10

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021

and that a somewhat more pluralized system (albeit still Orthodox and rabbinate-approved) would make for better kashrut services. Kahana argues that the reform will make the service simpler, more efficient, less corrupt and less expensive. (Not everyone agrees with the analysis on which he relies for these convenient predictions.)

Answer 2: Because Kahana realizes that the rabbinate that was once the darling of the Religious Zionists has fallen under the influence of the ultra-Orthodox establishment. The only way to shift the power back to his own faction is to weaken the rabbinate overall and disseminate its power among local rabbis, many of whom are closer to his own outlook and ideology.

I suspect both answers are correct. That is, Kahana has ideological reasons for his actions, and those actions also serve his factional interests. The general public won’t oppose any reform that damages the rabbinate, which, ironically, is one of the least revered and most disliked public institutions in Israel. Fighting its influence is always popular, except among the voters of the religious parties, who are currently on the sidelines.

Next in line is a more ambitious reform, dealing with the procedures that govern conversions. Again, the details are complicated, but the principle is simply to let local Orthodox rabbis, in cities and municipalities, handle conversions as they see fit, thus allowing conversions to take place in a more relaxed and welcoming (though still Orthodox) way. Why? Again, there are at least two lines of reasoning. One is about taking power away from the rabbinate. The other, more interesting, is substantive: to give the system of Orthodox state-approved conversion more widespread appeal. (Note that neither motive has anything to do with American Jewish concerns about the validity of non-Orthodox conversions.)

The rabbinate is strict and inflexible on conversions. The result is that not many

Religious Affairs Minister Matan Kahana.

Israelis convert—even though many immigrants from places such as the former Soviet Union aren’t considered Jewish by halachic standards. They can immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return as relatives of Jews, but here their status is somewhat vague.

Some see themselves as Jews even without the rabbinate’s approval; some prefer to be citizens of no religion. This creates legal complications (they cannot get married in Israel, where all marriages are by religious authorities) and raises questions concerning the nature of their connection to this place (since Israel was formed to be a Jewish state).

Will this change when more liberal Orthodox rabbis have the power to offer their own versions of a state-mandated path to conversion? No one knows. The optimists believe that many thousands of immigrants are going to walk this more hospitable road to Judaism. The pessimists—I’m one of them—suspect that those who don’t convert don’t want to convert, even if it’s made easier. And yet, even many pessimists don’t see much harm in trying.

Maybe it isn’t going to make conversions more widespread; yet if it weakens the rabbinate, that’s good enough for us. Even if Kahana’s reforms are only about power, they are still worthy of support.

Shmuel Rosner is a Tel Aviv-based editor and columnist, founder of themadad.com and a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute.

OPINION GERSHOM GORENBERG

THE SUMMER OF 1942

The lessons Israel’s pre-state leaders learned are worth remembering.

O

back the Axis forces. This, along with an espionage coup that remained secret for decades, ended the Nazi threat to the Middle East.

In Israel’s early years, legends overstated the role of the Palmach at the time. The some 30,000 Palestinian Jews who joined the British army played a more direct part in the victory, but as a small contingent in the vast forces of a great power.

Another piece of Israeli memory was more accurate. The Jewish homeland in fact served as a refuge for its population of 500,000 or more Jews. (Egypt was also a refuge, for the same reason: The British won at El Alamein.) Yet Palestine was less of a refuge than it could have been, because Britain decided its strategic interest required cutting Jewish immigration to a trickle.

Try a thought experiment: If a Jewish state had been created in less than a fifth of Palestine, as Britain’s Peel Commission recommended in 1937, its fate would still have depended on Britain’s defense of the Middle East. Yet that state could have taken in Jews who were instead trapped in Europe for lack of a destination.

Read the Yishuv’s wartime support for Britain in this light. Despite their fury at British immigration policy, Zionist leaders knew who the greater enemy was. They had no illusions that there was “no daylight” between their goals and Britain’s. But they knew they had to maneuver in a world dominated by great powers. They were pragmatists.

The very different choices made in Egypt and in the Yishuv had unexpected consequences soon after. In 1948, the Egyptian army invaded the newly declared State of Israel. Memoirs of Egyptian officers testify that they expected an easy victory—their army was fighting “volunteer groups... Zionist gangs.” Instead, they discovered they were facing “an experienced enemy.” They did not, however, acknowledge the reason for the experience gap: They’d opted out of the harsh schooling of World War II; the

German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel with his staff in North Africa, 1942.

Jews of Palestine had not. This was one reason Israel won—and survived.

Since then a lifetime has passed. Israel is now a regional military power, a U.S. ally— and the longtime occupier of the West Bank. For some Jews, especially on the hard right, Jewish political independence means that Israel can and should do exactly what it wants. And for some Jews, especially on the hard left, Jewish political independence is obsolete—too laden with moral challenges to be worth sustaining.

History is an ambiguous teacher, especially after so much change. Still, I suggest we can take two lessons from the forgotten chapter of 1942. On one hand, there’s no substitute for a sovereign Jewish state. No other country will give the same priority to Jewish lives or needs. On the other hand, we are still a small nation. We can’t ignore the interests of great powers, or even of another people subject to our rule. It’s self-delusion to expect “no daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem, or, for that matter, to think Palestinians will abandon their aspirations. History should help us avoid the twin delusions of national megalomania and national self-abnegation.

Gershom Gorenberg is the author most recently of War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 | MOMENT

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BUNDESWEHR ARCHIVES

n July 1,1942, Cairo was about to fall to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s German and Italian forces.

The British 8th Army defending Egypt had retreated 350 miles in 10 days.

Waiters in Cairo cafés painted welcome signs in German.

Would-be refugees mobbed the railway station, trying to board trains south toward Sudan or east to Palestine. Jews besieged the Turkish embassy, seeking visas, and were turned down. The British military drew up a list of 1,600 civilians—irreplaceable technicians, agents, anti-Fascist Italians—to evacuate by night train to Jerusalem. British officials in Palestine vetoed the hundred or so Jews on the list, as the 1939 White Paper drastically limited Jewish immigration. Jews’ fears were even more justified than they knew: The SS had already created an Einsatzkommando—a special command for mass murder—targeting the Jews of Egypt, and of Palestine, which was expected to fall next.

Despite the invasion, Egypt had yet to declare war on Germany and Italy—in part because its army’s junior officers couldn’t be counted on. Sixty years of direct or indirect rule from London had made them intensely anti-British, and many falsely believed that their enemy’s enemy would liberate them.

In Palestine, by contrast, a secret British agency had trained the Palmach—the yearold military force of the Yishuv, the Jewish community—for partisan warfare against German occupiers. The Yishuv’s leadership meanwhile continued its recruitment campaign for the British army.

This chapter of history is almost absent from both American and Jewish memory of World War II. Yet it’s essential for understanding Israel’s birth, the need for Jewish independence and the limits of Jewish power.

First, to complete the story: Rommel never got to Cairo in 1942. At the battleground known as El Alamein, the 8th Army drove

PERSPECTIVES OPINION SARAH POSNER

‘REPLACEMENT THEORY,’ MAINSTREAMED Tucker Carlson and other right-wing voices continue to tout this old antisemitic trope.

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hite replacement theory, the repugnant racist trope that claims America’s white population is being displaced by people of color, is once again receiving a wide audience among those feeling malnourished by Donald Trump’s absence from their social media feeds. Filling the void is Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host who years ago fooled the media world into thinking he was a cerebral bow-tiewearing partisan rather than a conspiracy-spewing white nationalist. In a September broadcast, the culmination of months of racist rants, Carlson accused President Joe Biden of cultivating the “great replacement” by enacting immigration policies “to reduce the political power of the people whose ancestors lived here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the Third World.”

This “replacement” claim, which frequently includes the accusation that Jews in particular are masterminding non-white immigration, has its roots in 20th-century French nationalism. It was cited by the Tree of Life Synagogue gunman as a motive for his massacre. After the broadcast, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) renewed its previous calls for Fox to fire Carlson; his response was, “Fuck them.”

If it is difficult to imagine one of the most prominent American conservatives saying this to the leading watchdog of antisemitism without consequences, the exchange shows clearly where the mainstream conservative movement stands in 2021. Politicians and activists may claim to love Israel and the Jewish people, but when they look at antisemitism in the mirror, they push back with whataboutism. Matt Gaetz, the Republican Congressman from Florida, defended Carlson by tweeting that the ADL “is a racist organization.”

It’s not just Carlson’s execrable dismissal of the ADL, though, that shows how closely right-wing nativist rhetoric is intertwined 12

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021

with antisemitism. The false claim that George Soros finances caravans of migrant “invaders” has received saturation coverage in right-wing media, which depict the Jewish Soros as a wealthy and conniving mastermind of the “replacement.” It’s all part of the racist conspiracy theory that white people are the real victims of any social change that seeks to combat racism and xenophobia. Such theories are frighteningly effective with a base energized and enraged in the Trump era.

Carlson is not the first seemingly respectable conservative media figure to propagate white nationalist ideology—with its unmistakable antisemitic undertones—to broad audiences. In the 1970s and 1980s, William Rusher, the politically connected publisher of William F. Buckley’s National Review, helped promote the careers of writers who similarly peddled these “great replacement” conspiracies. He befriended Peter Brimelow, an openly xenophobic writer who had praised French writer Jean Raspail’s racist 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, which glorifies a violent race war arising out of “invasions” of non-white immigrants. (The book later became a must-read of the Trumpist right, promoted heavily by Steve Bannon at Breitbart.) Rusher helped Brimelow to a perch at National Review, where he contributed nativist dispatches in the 1980s and 1990s. Throughout a “mainstream” career at National Review, Forbes and elsewhere, Brimelow, who had immigrated to the U.S. from England, issued dire warnings about U.S. immigration policies that “opened the Third World floodgates” and would cause “the proportion of whites” in the U.S. to fall.

By 1997, Buckley, finding Brimelow politically inconvenient, let him go. Brimelow resurfaced in the Trump-era alt-right, founding the virulently anti-immigrant website VDare and promoting alt-right ideologies. Buckley’s efforts to expel extremists like Brimelow were only episodic—as when he famously denounced the extremist John Birch Society—and ultimately fell short of eliminating the contagion of racism and white nation-

alism that was revitalized in the Trump era.

Rusher also mentored a young activist named Robert Whitaker, helping him publish his 1976 book A Plague on Both Your

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EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN—AND WITH A CABLE NEWS MEGAPHONE, EVEN MORE OMINOUSLY TOXIC. Houses, a screed against liberalism and a conservative movement that Whitaker deemed too cowed by it. He defended anti-busing activists, lauded eugenicists, fretted that “white concern with racial survival” was considered “taboo” and held up Raspail’s book as a warning that whites were “doomed to extinction through racial mixture.” Whitaker went on to work on Capitol Hill and in the Reagan administration. Many years later, he also reemerged as a hero to the alt-right, after he authored a “mantra,” widely circulated online, claiming that white people in the United States were victims of genocide (the word choice suggests persistent preoccupation with one-upping Jewish discourse about the Holocaust). “If I tell that obvious truth,” Whitaker wrote, “liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.”

Everything old is new again—and with a cable news megaphone, even more ominously toxic. A “respectable” middle of the American right, capable of reining in this rising extremism, has all but disappeared, ensuring that what used to be the fringe—with all its baggage—is increasingly mainstreamed in the conservatism of the 21st century.

Sarah Posner is the author of Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind.

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moment debate

NO

Is the filibuster good for democracy?

No. The core problem is that, by requiring the Senate to reach 60 votes to end debate on a bill, it prevents the majority from proceeding to a vote. Whether the majority has the votes or not to pass a measure, we never get to a substantive vote, because a minority can block both the motion to bring it to the floor for debate—which also requires 60 votes to pass—and the motion to end that debate.

It can prolong debate indefinitely, either by talking on and on or, more often in recent years, merely by threatening to do so. The crux of accountability in a democratic system is knowing where our legislators stand on substantive issues.

Without votes, we often don’t, even on the most salient issues of the day.

I coauthored a book about the filibuster 25 years ago, when there was a Republican Senate and a Democratic president, long before the Mitch McConnells of the world—or, if you’re a Republican, you’d say the Harry Reids—had weaponized the filibuster to obstruct the majority party’s agenda.

Even then, it was clear to us that the filibuster should go.

Most democratic bodies have majority rule; requirements for a supermajority are few and far between. There are isolated cases in state legislatures: California used to have a two-thirds rule for adopting a budget. The Constitution sets forth different thresholds for different issues—for instance, treaties require two-thirds. But the filibuster doesn’t have any such noble origins. The Framers didn’t call for it or write it into the rules. They had all lived under supermajority rule under the Articles of Confederation, which often led to deadlock, and they didn’t like it.

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The crux of accountability in a democracy is knowing where our legislators stand. Without votes, we often don’t.

SARAH A. BINDER Does the filibuster’s history matter?

Historically, the filibuster has often been used for immoral ends, including almost a century of efforts to block civil rights laws.

The history that defenders cite on the other side is mostly myth. In the mid-20th century, opponents of filibuster reform said, “Look, it doesn’t do any harm; eventually a majority will get what it wants if there’s support out there.” They argue that the filibuster has never really killed anything for which there was broad public support. But there’s ample evidence that that’s not true. There was majority support for civil rights for decades, but no action; Southern senators used the filibuster to block anti-lynching bills, open-housing bills, all sorts of things. It’s hard to say that blocking an anti-lynching bill didn’t harm anyone. How many people lost their lives because of the lack of that and other civil rights laws? More recently, if you consider the environment a moral issue, we’ve seen many instances of environmental legislation filibustered over the years.

Is it true that the filibuster was created by accident? That’s my reading of early Senate history. The Senate had a form of the rule the House uses today to cut off debate, the so-called “previous question” rule, but it hadn’t used it for that purpose.

When Aaron Burr stepped down as vice president, he suggested senators clean up the rule book, and it disappeared. These were very small chambers, 26 senators, and they were experimenting, using a rule one way and then the other. Out of that murky soup came a procedural change that has had lasting consequences.

Can reforms to the filibuster make democracy work better? I’d be in favor of either abolishing it or of making

incremental reforms—since there are always unanticipated consequences—to address the more egregious cases, when it’s being used not to build larger coalitions (as supposedly intended) but to block action altogether. I’d certainly favor lowering the threshold from 60 votes, which is arbitrary to begin with.

Minority parties often argue they need a chance to be heard, to make their case or rally the public to their side. To address that, I like the idea of “ratcheting down” the number of votes needed to cut off debate. You’d start with the current 60-vote threshold, but if the majority didn’t get it, the threshold would drop to 57, then 54, then finally 51. You could stretch out the debate time, but eventually, the bill would come to a vote.

Do you think any reforms will happen? Not really. The closest we might get is a carve-out for certain types of legislation, like measures to raise the debt limit, so they could be brought up and passed with a simple majority. But I don’t see an appetite for it.

Does the filibuster provide any protection for minority groups, such as Jews? The filibuster is defended as protecting the rights and interests of the minority, but I don’t see any evidence that it has advanced the rights of minority groups, such as religious minorities, or other minority identities.

Sarah A. Binder is a professor of political science at The George Washington University, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and the author or coauthor of several books about Congress, including Politics or Principle?: Filibustering in the U.S. Senate.

Is the Filibuster Good for Democracy?

YES

Is the filibuster good for democracy?

Yes. Democracy entails more than merely majority rule. It implies concern about minority rights. There’s an old expression that democracy is something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. I subtitled my book defending the filibuster Soul of the Senate, because it’s that fundamental.

In the House of Representatives, as long as the Speaker can hold her majority together, she can do pretty much what she wants, and that’s fine. The Senate is very different; the minority can almost always influence legislative outcomes. That difference has played a very important role in fostering bipartisanship, negotiation and moderation.

We don’t resolve crises in our country very quickly, but when we do, the Senate is usually the cradle of the compromise.

That’s because merely to operate the Senate from day to day requires majority-minority cooperation. As toxic as things are right now, even though Majority Leader Chuck Schumer doesn’t talk to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell much, their staffs are in constant communication; they have to be.

To me, the 60-vote threshold is critical to the foundation of the Senate—part of its DNA. Every senator understands that to get legislation through, they’ll need some degree of buy-in from the minority.

I worked on Capitol Hill for 34 years, for three different Democratic senators, and whenever I brought any of them anything, the first question was “Who’s my Republican co-sponsor?” We’d often negotiate with several Republicans before the bill was even proposed.

The filibuster is not a partisan issue.

People get that superficial impression because right now many Democrats want to eliminate it and Republicans are largely defending it. But if in the next election the

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Every senator understands that to get legislation through, they’ll need some degree of buy-in from the minority.

RICHARD ARENBERG Republicans take control of the Senate, I’m fairly certain that the Democrats currently calling for the elimination of the filibuster won’t continue to do so.

Is the history of the filibuster important?

I would never say history isn’t important.

But I don’t think evil or immoral use of a rule, like the filibuster during the civil rights movement, means that the rule itself is bad. The filibuster is often blamed for the partisan gridlock in the Senate, but the underlying disease is hyper-partisan polarization, not only in the Senate but across our political terrain. I call it the weaponization of procedure: When you carry rules to their logical extreme and abuse them, then you don’t have good democratic debate or good outcomes. But that’s largely a question of members’ behavior. Changing the rules rarely solves the problem. Abolishing the filibuster will only exacerbate polarization.

Is it true that the filibuster was created by accident? It’s often framed that way, but if so, that was in 1806. If it was a mistake, it’s ceased being one because the Senate has protected, supported and kept it for more than 200 years. That doesn’t sound very accidental to me.

Can reforms to the filibuster make democracy work better? There are some reforms that might reduce the filibuster’s frequency. Right now, any bill can be filibustered at two points: the majority leader’s motion to proceed—to bring the bill to the floor—and then during consideration of the bill itself. That’s two bites at the apple.

It used to be very unusual to filibuster the motion to proceed, but now the minority often does this. The majority leader should have the power to bring a bill to the floor so it’s open to amendment and debate and

the public can put pressure on the minority.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. We got there eventually on civil rights.

I also support more use of what’s called the “talking filibuster”—the one people remember Jimmy Stewart using in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Do you think any reforms will happen?

It’s not likely. Some want a “cutout”—to ban filibusters for one type of legislation, such as voting rights, or lifting the debt ceiling.

But mostly those who want to do this want to pass things in the Biden agenda that don’t have any bipartisan support. I don’t mean to be pejorative—I personally support all the bills the progressives are trying to get through. But if you eliminate the filibuster to pass, say, a voting rights bill, what happens in three years if we have a Republican president, House and Senate? They might have all kinds of ideas to restrict the vote.

Democrats also have frequently used the filibuster to block things a Republican Senate wanted to do, such as defunding Planned Parenthood and restricting abortion.

Does the filibuster provide any protection for minority groups, such as Jews?

It makes it harder for a majority to seize control and move toward more authoritarian government. You can see how that works out by looking at Jewish history. John Adams said, “Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots.”

Richard Arenberg is a visiting professor of political science at Brown University. His books include Congressional Procedure: A Practical Guide to the Legislative Process in the U.S. Congress and Defending the Filibuster: Soul of the Senate, coauthored with former Senate parliamentarian Robert Dove.

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ask the rabbis How Do You Deal With People in Your Community Who Don’t Want to Get Vaccinated?

ILLUSTRATION COMPOSITE MADE FROM IWAT1929

independent I don’t. It is not my place to nudge people to get or not to get vaccinated. We have lost all arguments pro or con due to (1) the confusion around facts, scientific and otherwise, (2) the growing mistrust of government, let alone its mandates, and (3) confusion and dueling accounts of what’s happening at the border. The resultant social, political and scientific turmoil has confounded and made anxious many otherwise critically thinking individuals who less than two years earlier had no qualms about getting vaccinated against the annual flu.

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So—no. I am not joining the bandwagon on this one. I hope that not only every individual but every one of the equally confused “scientists” makes the best-informed choice.

Rabbi Gershon Winkler Walking Stick Foundation Monument, CO

humanist Although vaccination rates in Jewish communities are high, and documented Jewish support for vaccines goes back centuries, I will address only what Humanistic Jews are doing. Like all Humanists,

we make ethical decisions in the light of both reason and empathy. Reason has led us to trust the scientific method as humanity’s best way to explain everything about the universe. Whether we’re talking about cosmology or biology, it just works (as does the vaccine). Empathy helps us to determine our responsibilities to one another. We can certainly value personal autonomy, but we must act on the basis of our mutual obligations. Surveys of Humanists show close to 100 percent support for vaccines, including strong backing for mandates and for ending religious exemptions. My own congregation has

imposed a vaccine mandate for anyone to enter our building.

I understand that Jewish support for vaccines, though high, is still not unanimous.

But in my community I have not encountered even a single refuser. And if I did, I would tell them that given Humanism’s teachings about our ethical mandates, if they’re refusing the vaccine they’re probably in the wrong community.

Rabbi Jeffrey L. Falick Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Metro Detroit Birmingham Hills, MI

renewal In my congregation or in the classes I teach, I sometimes meet or talk to people who resist getting vaccinated. I ask them to help me understand their reasons. This allows me to ask questions respectfully: Whatever reason they give me, I usually say, “Wow. I hear you saying that you are concerned about [their reason],” look at them and wait for them to look back at me.

Then I ask what they would say to someone who asked them about these issues, offering some sample questions. By asking the question this way, I am not challenging them directly but inviting them to think about their statements.

I also ask if they feel any connection or responsibility to the temple or the larger community—thus suggesting that that might be a reason to reconsider their stance. Then I might pose a hypothetical: Suppose two drunk drivers both run red lights, but only one of them hits a pedestrian in the road—are they both guilty of being reckless, and what is the difference, if any? The discussion may wander onto other similar examples, leaving them to ponder a number of things and perhaps find a way to reshape their decision.

Rabbi Shafir Lobb Congregation Eitz Hayim Port St. Lucie, FL

reconstructionist At our Shabbat services, we take time to share what we feel grateful for. Nine

months ago, as our older members, and later all adults, became eligible for the vaccine, they excitedly and sometimes tearfully shared with the community how grateful they were. We have a very high vaccination rate in both the synagogue and the surrounding community. I believe this embrace of the vaccine is the expression of the Jewish value to “choose life,” as it says in Deuteronomy. This value is behind our requirement to provide proof of vaccination (for those eligible) in order to attend our services and programs. If someone who is eligible elects not to be vaccinated, they are welcome to join our services and programs via Zoom.

How would I deal with a member of the community who does not want to be vaccinated? That is their choice, as it is the community’s choice to require vaccinations for those present. For those who are hesitant and seek counsel, I would welcome conversation and listen closely to their concerns. I would offer help by being a respectful listener, by providing medical referrals or reliable sources of information when asked, and by sharing my understanding of the Jewish values that prioritize life, health and community.

Rabbi Caryn Broitman Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center Vineyard Haven, MA

reform One of my mantras when it comes to hot-button issues like vaccination is to get curious, not furious. Nobody is a villain in their own story, so shame and anger are ultimately unproductive strategies. Instead, it’s often more effective to use questions from a community organizing playbook: What keeps you up at night? And what gets you out of bed in the morning? Perhaps the fear of vaccination is a lack of knowledge and understanding of the medicine; perhaps it’s a perception that vaccines are an encroachment on freedom; perhaps it’s a feeling that the risk of vaccination is greater than the risk of COVID itself; perhaps it is primarily lack of access.

Different reasons for vaccine hesitancy

require different strategies, and the best way to move the needle on vaccine acceptance is to understand both people’s fears and their hopes. We all want to be together in person, we all want a level of autonomy for our choices, and we all want to make the best decisions for ourselves, our families and our communities.

Too often, we talk about people without talking to them. If we can build relationships first, we’re much more likely to be able to create a safe and healthy community for everyone.

Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman Sinai and Synapses New York, NY

conservative Joshua ben Perahiah taught, “When you judge someone, tip the scale in his/her favor” (Pirkei Avot 1:6).

This teaching has been remarkably difficult for me to uphold in light of those who choose not to get vaccinated. Jewish teaching leans toward saving a life so strongly that it is very easy to justify the vaccine.

The “Torah” (teaching) of a recent podcast with journalist Bari Weiss reminded me to slow down and listen. Her guest, Dr. Vinay Prasad, an epidemiologist and a strong advocate of vaccines, suggested that shaming, blaming or censoring the unvaccinated is a losing strategy and that we would do better to realize that vaccine hesitancy is not about information or data. Its roots are generally sociological.

Recognizing that we are living in a time where there is little room for discussion or nuance, Dr. Prasad urged us to listen to what vaccine-hesitant individuals are saying. He warned that demonizing the unvaccinated individual is counterproductive. He may as well have been quoting Joshua ben Perahiah.

While facts are not negotiable, it’s just as important for citizens to understand the variants of opinions and feelings as it is for scientists and doctors to understand the variants of the virus.

Rabbi Amy S. Wallk (Katz) Temple Beth El Springfield, MA NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 | MOMENT

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ONE OF MY MANTRAS WHEN IT COMES TO HOT-BUTTON ISSUES LIKE VACCINATION IS TO GET CURIOUS, NOT FURIOUS. modern orthodox The central teaching of the Jewish religion is the preciousness—the infinite value—of human life. The central command of the Torah is “Choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19). This means that in every action—eating, speaking, exercising, sleeping, interacting with people, working—we must act to maximize life and minimize death. Thus we are commanded to eat healthy, to exercise, to ensure safety in the workplace—and to override any or all of 610 of our 613 commandments, if necessary, to save a life.

This, I would say to those in my community, is why I urge you to get vaccinated. The murderous pandemic prowling the world has already killed more than 5 million people. Getting vaccinated is your ticket to saving your life from this scourge. In Israel, where I am writing, the vast majority of those who died from COVID were unvaccinated, as were the vast majority of those hospitalized with serious disease.

To an observant Jew, I would add the following: “You would not eat pork or violate the Sabbath. Endangering your life is a far graver sin, as the Talmud puts it: ‘Putting oneself in danger is a far more grave violation than eating/doing the prohibited’” (Hullin 10a). To all, I would say: “In our Orthodox synagogue, we welcome observant and non-observant Jews equally; we do not invade privacy or shame any individual. However, COVID-19 is a danger to the lives of all people; therefore, we require proof of vaccination (or certificate of recovery) to enter.”

I would conclude this way: “I beg of you—if I were in your presence, I would fall to my knees—to protect your life and others’ lives. Please put aside your qualms and get inoculated. I love you as myself, and I would be heartbroken if you sicken or die. God, who desires life and loves God’s creatures—and I—beg you to vaccinate.

Please join me in fulfilling the ultimate 18

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command of the Torah: Choose life.”

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life/Hadar Riverdale, NY

orthodox In the traditionally observant community, we have one tool that gives us a bit of an edge: halacha. Halacha is not a set of recommendations; it’s law. People can grumble, but if they buy into the system, they have to respect the law. And halacha has everything to say about which experts to listen to when authorities are divided, and about what to do when your personal decisions will put others in harm’s way, or create economic havoc, or put an entire community at risk. The vast majority of experts believe that the vaccine is safer than possibly coming down with COVID. Halacha as I understand it is totally unambiguous on this. There is a Torah viewpoint, and it points to getting vaccinated.

The tool of halacha would work perfectly if it were not for Humpty Dumpty, who famously said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” There always will be people in the community who will deconstruct language, even halachic language, and turn it into gobbledygook.

They will escape even clear and unambiguous halachic conclusions; they’ll say, “No way, it’s my personal autonomy, the truth is being suppressed,” or whatever.

But many people listen to both sides and are confused about what to do. For them, halacha is a very strong tool and argument.

If I can’t convince every conspiracy theorist, I can at least convince those in the middle to come to their senses.

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein Cross-Currents Los Angeles, CA

neo-sephardic My first step in talking to people who do

not want to get vaccinated is trying to understand their perspective, rather than label them immediately as anti-vax. If they say they would like to get the vaccine but have a specific medical concern, I ask if they have consulted an expert. If they say that they do not need to consult anyone because they know what is best for them, I usually walk away, because someone capable of ignoring all the data and considering oneself an expert on matters one never studied would not listen to my voice or the voice of reason.

I personally believe that vaccination for COVID should be mandatory unless one has an official medical exemption.

But until that happens, I cannot convince others to vaccinate against their will. The vaccine has become an ideological matter, and those against it for ideological reasons are entrenched in their position and unwilling to have a conversation. I actually had to turn down a rabbinic ordination applicant who wrote a “halachic” responsum against the vaccine, and a conversion candidate who wanted to convert but only on the condition that he would never have to vaccinate for COVID. Some of my congregants are not vaccinated for medical reasons, and they join the services, but if I had a congregant who would not vaccinate for ideological reasons, he would not be allowed to join services. If that congregant argued that I had no right to stop him, then I would leave the service.

Rabbi Haim Ovadia Torah VeAhava Potomac, MD

chabad The way to encourage any positive behavior is not through rejection and shunning but through love and gentle guidance. Embrace the individuals, knowing that each is endowed by their Creator with a Divine spark. This acceptance transcends mistaken ideas and practices.

With a dose of love and, occasionally, a bit of logic, most people will choose to do the right thing.

Rabbi Hershey Novack Rohr Chabad House of Washington University St. Louis, MO

moment(s)

Ahmed Shaheed at the United Nations in 2016.

A MUSLIM VOICE AGAINST ANTISEMITISM AT THE UN

A

by religious intolerance and disregard for human rights,” he says.

Shaheed has watched his own country struggle with corruption and intolerance.

In addition to his mother, he credits his father, uncle and family friends, all judges, for raising him with a respect for right and wrong, always with a basis in fact.

He also highlights his unfettered access to news and an education that encouraged critical thinking. “Growing up with judges, you’re fed a diet of justice and a high regard for fairness, equality and the rule of law,” he says. “You’re raised looking for the truth.”

But that balanced approach is difficult to explain to anyone growing up in the Maldives today, he explains. In the 1980s, negative attitudes and conspiracies about Jews infiltrated the nation’s predominantly Muslim society, colored by the Middle East conflict. Antisemitism became deeply embedded in the society, both culturally and linguistically, he says. “I found this very disturbing. Without learning about people, it was outright prejudice.”

By that time, Shaheed had begun to pursue a career in diplomacy, serving as an intern for the Maldives UN delegation. In the fall of 1983, other Maldives diplomats joined those who were boycotting speeches by the Israeli delegation. Shaheed stayed

BY MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 | MOMENT

19

JEAN-MARC FERRE / UN FLICKR

hmed Shaheed knew no Jews growing up in the predominantly Muslim South Asian islands of the Maldives. But he knew books and newspapers and read voraciously.

One particular book, given to him by his mother when he was still a child, shaped his views on antisemitism: Titled The Bad Man, it told the story of how Adolf Hitler perpetrated the Holocaust.

“At a very early age, I was very open to learning about European history and global history,” says Shaheed, who has been the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief since 2016.

“That contributed to my being immune from the kind of [antisemitic] language and discourse that is so deeply pervasive in my country.”

In 2019, Shaheed, who is Muslim, led the charge on the United Nations’ first-ever stand-alone human rights report dedicated solely to antisemitism. Since then, he has pushed—with limited success—for statements condemning violence and conspiracies against Jews.

Before his appointment, Shaheed served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran from 2011 to 2016. “Iran is possibly the clearest example of how a country with great promise can be ruined

and listened. “You’ve got to hear them at least,” he says. “You’ve got to listen to what they’re saying.”

Two decades later, Shaheed became the key driver of democratic reform within the government, and was appointed foreign minister. He led the Maldives to embrace universal human rights standards, including a moratorium on the death penalty. During his first week in office, the U.S. Embassy asked Shaheed to support the UN’s creation of an International Holocaust Remembrance Day. He did so without hesitation.

Later, when the government began to backtrack on reforms, Shaheed resigned and demanded that the first multiparty elections be held as previously planned.

In 2008, Mohamed Nasheed became the first democratically elected leader of the Maldives and re-appointed Shaheed as foreign minister. Announcing a policy of friendship toward all UN members, Shaheed renewed the Maldives’ ties with Israel, which had been originally established in 1967. This move infuriated certain politicians, who painted him as a Zionist, “which is equated in the Maldives to being the enemy,” he says.

In 2012, a coup forced out Nasheed, and Islamists rose to power. Knowing his family faced danger, Shaheed sought refuge outside the country. He has lived in self-imposed exile ever since.

“This work isn’t academic for him. Nor is it purely an exercise in shaping international human rights law and standards,” says Rose Parris Richter, who has worked with Shaheed for the past 12 years.

“Rather, his commitment…is driven by a sincere and unwavering belief that a human rights approach is key to addressing much of the development and security challenges facing the international community today.”

“It’s not an intellectual lesson,” she adds, “but one that finely tunes the moral compass.”

Read more at momentmag.com/ shaheed-fighting-antisemitism

POEM DAVID BIESPIEL

WILL BIDEN BUILD ON THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS?

ABOUT THIS ISSUE’S POEM: In many Jewish homes, lighting candles at dusk marks a shift to sacred time, the moment when the Sabbath starts—or a holiday, a yahrzeit. The ritual calls on us to turn from day-to-day concerns toward a more reverent relationship to time. This poem by David Biespiel offers another kind of illumination, suggesting years of life and loss within a candlelit glimpse. —Jody Bolz, poetry editor

portrait of the poet’s grandmother (lighting candles)

MARISSA VONESH

I

s it time for President Joe Biden, the Washington Middle East establishment and members of the self-described “peace camp” to come out and admit they were wrong? That despite their disdain for Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, and despite the fact that Jared Kushner treated the Abraham Accords process more as a real estate deal than as a geopolitical minefield, their effort actually produced positive effects?

In practice, that has already happened.

The Trump-Kushner-Netanyahu Abraham Accords (and yes, once again, these are not peace accords) are now part of any future U.S. policy toward the Middle East.

Whatever shape the region takes in the future, and whichever solution actually leads to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Trump and Kushner will deserve credit for adding a valuable brick to its foundation.

They reached this point by taking all the wrong roads, by willfully ignoring the Palestinians and by upending decades of bipartisan American policy toward the region. But somehow, it worked. And if Biden succeeds in making use of this success to advance the two-state solution, Trump and Kushner may deserve even greater credit, of a kind they had never sought to get.

Read more at momentmag.com/ abraham-accords/

BY NATHAN GUTTMAN

Lately she doesn’t listen too well, So that when she’s covering her eyes She’s really hearing her own thoughts.

And the feeling of her hands, tender, Fluttering, is not quite soft— Though when she feels the heat Lathed by the ecstatic flame, She can sense her own warm blood When—summer, autumn, winter, spring— The dead come round, and of late, Each one, name them as you Will, is a pointillist ghost, Figure of impossible, hundredPointed light. I need to look, with Tactile clarity, close, to Touch their everythingStill-on-fire scarlet, sun-rinsed skin, Depending on the angle of The memory, or on the height and Scale of the day’s weather, blown And scored. Here, she stoops over the Candlesticks. Meaning, toward Evening, she’s always Disappearing. Like a fragrance.

Like sprinkled water on a garden.

Or, she’s upright, face to the day’s Last rouge of light, thin enough to Pass through. She’s given up Talking, and I’m mystified, weighted Down, and feel a new patience For winnowing desire. Is this Fire enough to pinch, or hold onto, Like the meadow near the house Within a walking mile, a Taste of peaches in the air?

David Biespiel is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, the poetry collection Republic Café and the memoir A Place of Exodus, which tells the story of the rise and fall of his Jewish boyhood in Texas.

jewish word

M

The Hairsplitting Complexity of ‘Talmudic’

ore often than not, the word “Talmudic” isn’t about the Talmud.

It’s a word that politicians and diplomats, in particular, love brandishing to make a point. In the 1970s, it was a go-to word for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, known to opine that “we need a Talmudic student” to understand a particular policy. In 2016, a State Department spokesperson joked, “I have greatly enjoyed our exegetical and Talmudic efforts to understand American foreign policy.” Beyond politics, the word can be applied to almost anything. A baseball game might devolve into “those Talmudic debates that enthrall hardball devotees and mystify everyone else,” according to The New York Times. Or, as Wired put it, fans can analyze a favorite television show “with the dedication of Talmudic scholars.”

When deployed like this—in contexts unrelated to Jewish tradition—“Talmudic” is used to convey complexity. A Talmudic discussion, in present-day parlance, is one in which the smallest details are scrupulously parsed. Each question spawns new questions; debate continues ad infinitum.

Nevertheless, using “Talmudic” as a synonym for “complicated” is incorrect, argued William Safire, the late wordsmith, writing in The New York Times in the 1970s. In reality, the Talmud is one of the foundational Jewish texts and the basis of much of rabbinic Judaism (the form practiced in exile after the fall of the Temple). The definition of “Talmudic” is simply “of or pertaining to the Talmud,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Sometimes, “Talmudic” functions as a criticism—an accusation not only of complexity, but of unnecessary or meaningless complexity. “In English, the word ‘Talmudic’ is usually pejorative,” says Adam Kirsch, author of Come and Hear: What I Saw in My Seven-and-a-Half-Year Journey through the Talmud, which details his experience studying one page of Talmud every day until he reached the end. But Kirsch

never uses “Talmudic” derisively. “I think it contributes to a view—not just among the public at large, but among American Jews, as well—that the Talmud is this outmoded, extinct text that is silly, and that is a waste of time.”

Kirsch believes that studying the Talmud is anything but a waste of time. At first glance, the Talmud’s most outlandish debates may seem “completely impractical,” with lines of questioning that get increasingly absurd, such as: When you build a sukkah, can one of the walls be an elephant? If you use an elephant, would there be gaps between the legs? Can the gaps be filled in with vegetation? What if the elephant runs away? Can you use a dead elephant? “No one has ever built a sukkah using an elephant as one of the walls,” Kirsch says. But digging deeper, it’s important to remember that these are thought experiments, not meant to be taken literally. Kirsch says they are more along the lines of the “trolley problem,” a modern-day philosophical thought experiment: A trolley is about to collide with five people, but you could move it to a different track, where it would collide with one person; should you act?

The trolley problem is meant to investigate our moral intuitions, Kirsch says.

“Obviously, none of us are ever going to be in that situation.” Similarly, nobody actually wants to use an elephant to build a sukkah: “What it’s really about is, what constitutes a wall? What are the properties of a wall that make it a wall and not something else?” he adds. “There’s a sort of conceptual rigor to that discussion, even though if you think about it in purely practical terms, it’s silly.”

Of course, even within the text of the Talmud, sometimes the rabbis get fed up with other rabbis who raise hairsplitting questions. (One was even removed from the study hall, the Talmud tells us, “as he was apparently wasting the Sages’ time.”)

But danger can ensue when critiques of the Talmud are used to misconstrue the Jewish faith. There have been periods when Christian polemicists accused rabbinic

Judaism of being “too legalistic,” says Elana Stein Hain, director of faculty and a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. Kirsch agrees that this critique is concerning: “It draws on a very basic idea that Judaism is a religion of laws and the mind, while Christianity is a religion of ethics and the heart.” Throughout history, willful distortion of the Talmudic approach has fed antisemitism.

Hain, who values the Talmud’s dedication to “detailed back and forth” and “getting at

WHEN YOU BUILD A SUKKAH, CAN ONE OF THE WALLS BE AN ELEPHANT? the truth,” would herself use “Talmudic” in a positive way. Aaron Alexander, co-senior rabbi at Adas Israel in Washington, DC, who has spent many years studying and teaching the Talmud, agrees. Calling something “Talmudic,” he says, should be “an expression of humility”—an acknowledgment that someone is out of their depth, and needs to work harder to understand— or an outright compliment.

Examples of the word being used in this vein are less abundant, but they’re there.

John McCain’s brother, Joe, once said the dinner-table debates of his youth were “like Talmudic scholars arguing about a single word or an adjective in the Testament.”

A few years ago, a flattering book review praised writer Rebecca Solnit for her “Talmudic rigor and curiosity.” In these cases, the subtext is that the Talmud’s complexity is not a nuisance, but an asset; that the act of parsing complexity is valuable.

This is why, says Alexander, the Talmud is his favorite work within the Jewish canon.

He can always count on it to stretch his mind in unexpected directions.

“I’m a lover; I’m a lover of the Talmud,” he says. “An often frustrated lover.”

BY ELLEN WEXLER NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 | MOMENT

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visual moment Judy Chicago’s Revolutionary Art

BY DIANE M. BOLZ

J

udy Chicago always wanted to be an artist. “From the time I was a child,” she writes in her 2021 autobiography, The Flowering, “I had a burning desire to make art.” By her own account, she started to draw when she was barely talking. A preschool teacher praised her as gifted and at the age of five, the future artist started riding a bus across town on her own to take lessons at the Chicago Art Institute.

One of the key forces behind the 1970s feminist art movement, the colorful and often controversial Chicago, a self-styled “troublemaker,” was thrust into the spotlight with her landmark 1979 installation “The Dinner Party,” a tribute to women’s contributions to history using vulval and butterfly imagery as its motif. Though lambasted by critics and marginalized for years by the male-dominated art establishment, Chicago persisted.

Now San Francisco’s de Young Museum is celebrating the groundbreaking artist by mounting the first retrospective of her work. On view through January 9, 2022, the exhibition presents an ambitious overview of Chicago’s six-decade career, tracking the artist’s evolution and charting her unique creative process, sometimes working alone, other times in collaboration with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, colleagues or volunteers. Featuring more than 125 paintings, drawings, ceramic sculptures and prints, as well as several films, the exhibition brings together a representative selection drawn from every phase of her diverse oeuvre—from her early work with the California Light and Space Movement in the 1960s to her most recent body of work, an intense look at mortality, extinction and environmental devastation. Highlights include works or studies from “The Dinner Party,” “The Birth Project,” “The Holocaust Project” 22

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021

and “Atmospheres”—the artist’s site-specific smoke performances that produce ephemeral airborne fields of color.

The show includes sketchbooks, journals and preparatory drawings that document the extensive research behind her work.

It also brings attention to the surprising range of mediums she employs, often ones such as embroidery, needlework and china painting that were viewed as women’s crafts and therefore traditionally excluded from the official canon of art history.

Early in her career, Chicago enrolled in an auto-body school, the only woman among some 250 men, to learn how to spray acrylic paint on metal. Employing this new skill, she created a bold series of painted car hoods in the 1960s that merged this macho technique with biomorphic forms replete with sexual innuendo.

Born Judith Sylvia Cohen in 1939, the artist grew up in a liberal, politically conscious, secular Jewish home in Chicago, Illinois. Her father, whom she adored and who died when she was 13, was a labor organizer and Marxist who was investigated in the early days of McCarthyism for his political beliefs. Her mother, a former dancer, worked as an administrative assistant and later as a medical secretary.

A brother, Ben, was born when Judy was five-and-a-half years old. When she was 17, Judy took off for California to attend UCLA, where she majored in art and minored in philosophy. She struggled with the then-male-dominated art scene in LA, but graduated with an MFA in 1964.

“The Birth Project” was Chicago’s direct response to the absence of imagery related to birthing, one of the most fundamental female experiences. As with “The Dinner Party,” she relied on the help of collaborators, creating the 80-plus works in the series with the assistance of female volunteers from all over the United States, Canada and New Zealand. The painted

and needleworked images vividly illustrate creation and the process of giving birth.

Chicago first became interested in the subject when she was working on a piece for “The Dinner Party” commemorating English writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote a revolutionary book on the rights of women in 1792, only to die from a postpartum infection after giving birth.

“I’ve always believed that art can educate, inspire and empower,” says Chicago in an interview for the show. “Decade after decade, I intervened. I intervened in masculinist, domineering land art with my ‘smoke’ pieces, I intervened in the absence of information about women’s history. And I intervened in the absence of imagery about birth.”

Although Chicago’s father was descended from generations of rabbis, he had, according to Chicago, “a very complicated relationship with his Jewish history.” Growing up in a secular home, the artist knew little about her religion or the Holocaust, but after her 1985 marriage to Woodman, who is also Jewish, she became interested in exploring her heritage.

During the eight years of research for their first collaboration, “The Holocaust Project: From Darkness to Light,” the couple traveled through Europe, searched archives, viewed videotaped histories of survivors and connected with leaders of Jewish groups, ultimately creating a haunting and powerful body of art. In the retrospective, the project is represented by “The Fall,” an 18-foot-wide modified Aubusson tapestry, and “Rainbow Shabbat,” a monumental work of stained glass.

Based on the Friday night Jewish Sabbath dinner, “Rainbow Shabbat” bears the following inscription in both English and Yiddish: “Heal those broken souls who have no peace and lead us all from darkness into light.” Chicago studied the complex method of working in stained glass to prepare for this project.“In ‘Rainbow Shabbat,’ which is an image of diversity—a table of people of the world,” she explains on the show’s audio tour, “all heads turn to the woman, because I believe women represent an untapped

IN ‘RAINBOW SHABBAT,’ “ALL HEADS TURN TO THE WOMAN, BECAUSE I BELIEVE WOMEN REPRESENT AN UNTAPPED RESERVOIR OF HOPE, ACTION, THE ABILITY TO COLLABORATE AND EMPATHIZE.”

reservoir of hope, action, the ability to collaborate and empathize—a number of qualities that we desperately need at this moment in history.”

Chicago has always had a firm belief in art’s power to change the world. “But whether art can change the course we’re on as human beings,” she says,“I don’t know. I don’t know if we can change course before it’s too late, but the Jewish mandate is: ‘Choose hope.’ And so I choose hope.”

Back in October 1970, Judy Gerowitz (the artist was then using her first husband’s last name) took out a full-page ad in Artforum to announce that she was divesting herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance. Henceforth, she would be Judy Chicago. That same year she founded the first feminist art education program in the United States at California State University, Fresno, followed by the program’s second iteration at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita.

To this day, Judy Chicago’s art is activist in its foundations, says exhibition orga-

nizer Claudia Schmuckli. “It is driven by the need and desire for social justice…Today, the aspects of her work that once relegated her to the sidelines of critical and scholarly appreciation appear visionary.”

After “The Dinner Party,” says Chicago, “I basically had the whole art world arrayed against me. So what did I have? I had nothing but the power of my art, and my belief in art history that, eventually, my work would emerge.”

Clockwise from top left: “Virginia Woolf Test Plate 2,” bisque porcelain, created for the artist’s groundbreaking feminist installation “The Dinner Party” (1975-79). Judy Chicago caught “On Fire at 80” in 2019 in one of her “smoke” performances. The central panel of stained-glass “Rainbow Shabbat” (1992), part of Chicago and husband Donald Woodman’s joint “Holocaust Project.” “Through the Flower 2” (1973), sprayed acrylic on canvas.

CREDITS: All images courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, © Judy Chicago/ Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photos © Donald Woodman/ARS, New York and Gary Sexton

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the

Ghosts

Khan Ajjur of the

of

H

aunted houses don’t really exist. Even my dog knew that. But that didn’t stop him from barking when the winds blew in and rattled the heavy metal shutters on the first day I moved into the Khan of Ajjur, a 250-year-old Ottoman-era castle rising from the Elah Valley in central Israel’s Judean Hills.

Being originally from New Orleans, I understood ghosts and reckoned they only appear in distress.

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So I calmly laid down my broom and, with open palms, asked, “May I help you?” Shortly after, I decided to conduct a ghost-cleansing ceremony and summoned friends to help. We burned sage in a tin atop the green-carpeted floor of the spacious second-story salon and sprinkled seawater in the corners. I stuck pins in voodoo dolls as friends played a guitar, Jew’s harp and harmonica. Others chanted biblical verses, an ancient Assyrian text and an Irish-Catholic poem—all praying for this house

zionism and a haunted castle

by arieh o’sullivan

foot-thick walls and arched windows with deep sills inside. Two pillars support three massive arches that rise above vaulted rooms on the first floor of the asymmetrical but striking structure. In between the arches are intricately carved florets. An exterior staircase leads to a large veranda off the second floor, which has multiple rooms, including a salon with 18-foot-high ceilings—perfect for an indoor swing—and huge walls for art. The rooms on the first level are mysteriously sealed off with iron shutters and doors welded shut.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 | MOMENT

ARIEH O’SULLIVAN

to be protected. We then took turns sipping from a kiddush cup that had been salvaged from a New Orleans synagogue gutted by Hurricane Katrina.

None of it worked. The ghosts continued to make noises. Footsteps. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, they’d kill the electricity on the north side of the house, or blow the shutters closed on a windless day, darkening a sunny room.

Built around 1770 with Roman-era stone obviously pilfered from ancient sites, the castle has three-

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Above, from left: Elah Valley landscape, 1950s. The “Khan of Ajjur” castle and surrounding countryside, modern-day.

Legend had it that at least four people had been murdered in the castle. And there were bullet scars, too, from battles the structure had endured. Intrigued after I came to stay in 2014, I began researching the castle’s history.

As I was to learn, it had stood as a silent witness to the crumbling Ottoman Empire—to the stories of warlords, peasant rebellions and 19th-century colonial explorers; to the time of the great Arab revolt against the British in the 1930s; and to the founding of the State of Israel. Peoples had come and gone, but the house had remained, like a postcard from history. The ghosts of the Khan of Ajjur, it turned out, were both more numerous and more powerful than I could have imagined.

COURTESY ARIEH O’SULLIVAN; PALESTINE OPEN MAPS; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

T

castle is located just south of agur , a rundown moshav (cooperative agricultural settlement) about 20 miles west of Jerusalem and not too far from the market town of Beit Shemesh. Despite Agur’s proximity to Jerusalem, it’s an out-of-the-way place in modern Israel. Built next to the Arab village of Ajjur that once existed here, the moshav is mostly inhabited by Jews of Kurdish origin whose families were settled here after the State of Israel was declared in 1948. The settlement appears to be stuck in a time warp, somewhere around 1955. There are no sidewalks, and livestock and barefoot children roam the streets. People live in tiny three-room shacks and cling to farming small plots of land.

The surrounding Elah Valley region of Adullam in the Judean foothills is serene, mostly forested countryside, peppered with kibbutzim and moshavim. The area is off the beaten path for most tourists, even though there is a genuine Roman amphitheater where gladiators once fought and died down the road at Kibbutz Beit Guvrin. Across the valley are the colossal caves of Luzit (where the movies Jesus Christ Superstar and Rambo III were filmed). On weekends, the hills do fill up with picnickers, who seem oblivious to the mounds of rubble and fungus-draped collections of gray stones that poke out of the weeds—remains of the dozens of Palestinian villages that once existed in this district.

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Occasionally, vans filled with Palestinians turn up, often accompanied by European film crews to document their return to their villages. So I wasn’t really surprised when, one Friday afternoon about a year after I’d moved into the castle, a fancy jeep drove roughly into the yard. A dark-haired, middle-aged man got out, along with a woman and two teenage girls.

I went up to them and asked in as friendly a tone as I could: “Shalom, who are you?”

The man turned to me and said: “Who are you?”

“I live here,” I replied.

“This is my house!” he retorted.

Ah, and so here it was. I immediately understood that I was being confronted, face-to-face, with the uncomfortable scenario that hangs over every Israeli who today lives in a formerly Arab-owned house—or any person anywhere who lives in a home taken by war or force—of the previous owners or their descendants knocking on the door.

“So,” I said, “you must be from the al-Azza clan.

Yes?” “Yes, my name is Mohammed al-Azza. We have never been to the house before.”

I invited them in.

“My mother, Hilma, was born here,” Mohammed said as he looked around. “She told me how she used to play on the windowsills as a child.”

His daughters, dressed in tight jeans and blouses, explored a bit but seemed to be more interested in their phones than in their ancestors’ castle. His wife, Naima, who wore her black hair uncovered—unusual for Muslim women in Israel—listened closely. Her mother-in-law, she explained, had told her that in 1948, as the Israeli soldiers were approaching, the family had gathered their gold and jewelry and buried

Above, right: Yellow dot marks the location of the Arab village of Ajjur on a 1946 map.

it in the caves around the house. (Not just ghosts, but treasure too, I thought. This house was starting to give up its secrets.)

Mohammed, I learned, was a schoolteacher and a member of a wealthy landowning family in the district. After a while, I ventured to mention the elephant in the room. I asked Mohammed if he wanted the house back.

“Sure, why not?” he said. And suddenly we laughed.

We both understood that his chances were pretty much nil. The State of Israel had taken possession of all abandoned or conquered Arab property in 1948.

Since then, the Israeli Supreme Court has rejected all claims to such property on the grounds that doing otherwise would pave the way for the return of masses of Palestinian refugees, presenting an existential threat to the Jewish state. The philosophy is that the Land of Israel belongs to all the Jews of the world. Thus, in Israel, 93 percent of the land is owned by the state, and people, even farmers—Jewish farmers—lease land for 49 years; they don’t own it.

The ice broken, I showed Mohammed some of the 1940s Mandate-era British army maps I had in my possession. His visit that day was the start of an ongoing friendship.

T

he al-azza clan originated from egypt

hundreds of years ago and settled in three villages—Ajjur, Beit Jibrin and Tell es-Safi.

Members of the clan grew powerful, eventually controlling huge tracts of land and aligning themselves with the Ottomans. But in the 1830s, the powerful Egyptian viceroy, Muhammad Ali, conquered the area and sent his son Ibrahim Pasha to enforce his

rule (i.e., collect taxes). A revolt broke out, and the leaders of the rebellion, including the al-Azza mukhtars (clan leaders) of Ajjur, were beheaded (possibly even in this house?).

Europeans, too, found their way to Ajjur. Around this time, British explorer Edward Robinson mentioned the village in his travelogue, Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petra: A Journal of Travels in the Year 1838, vividly describing the flocks of goats, cattle and camels gathered around the village’s ancient well—and generous inhabitants who shared the water with travelers. And in 1863, the French explorer Victor Guerin passed through. He was impressed by the arched house built with ancient stones. A half-century or so later, Ajjur also figured in World War I, when the British wrested Palestine from the Turks and Germans and became the administrators of what was called Mandatory Palestine.

The ghosts of the Khan of Ajjur, it turned out, were both more numerous and more powerful than I could have imagined.

The year 1936 brought more change. There was the Arab revolt against the British, which resulted in the arrest and exile of collaborators in Ajjur. The following year, the British Peel Commission first recommended partitioning the land between the Jews and the Arabs. The proposal was barely approved by the Zionist leadership and unanimously condemned by the Arabs, so with no partition plan on the table, pre-state Jewish authorties set about buying up as much land as possible. Agents of the Jewish Agency arrived in Ajjur in 1946 and approached Mohammed’s great-grandfather Yusef al-Azza, who was the village mukhtar and lived in the castle.

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I immediately understood that I was being confronted, face-to-face, with the uncomfortable scenario that hangs over every Israeli who today lives in a formerly Arab-owned house.

COURTESY ARIEH O’SULLIVAN; GPO; OMAR GHOBARIYA FROM PALESTINE REMEMBERED

A man from the village of Ajjur surrenders during the 1948 Arab Israeli War.

on the condition that Jews not live there as long as he was alive.

However, on Yom Kippur that year, the Jewish Agency set up 11 settlements on the Mandate’s frontiers to establish “facts on the ground” to ensure that the land would become part of the future Jewish state.

This included the lands of nearby Kibbutz Galon, which Yusef had sold to the Jews. A short while later, Yusef was murdered (possibly even in this house?) for selling the land, say locals and family members. His son Abdel Hamid al-Azza inherited the property and lived in the castle.

It was a turbulent time for Ajjur. The village had existed in relative isolation under the Ottomans and British, but history was closing in.

When Israel declared statehood in May 1948, the Arabs declared war.

In October, a platoon of Egyptian troops led by a Yugoslav officer entered Ajjur, armed the men of the village and prepared barricades.

But, as the Israeli army approached, the platoon disappeared, leaving the villagers to fend for themselves. Israeli troops took over the al-Azza castle and started shooting into the air, causing flight and panic. Abdel Hamid fled with his family to a refugee camp near Jericho, where he died shortly afterward, leaving his daughter Hilma, Mohammed’s mother, a teenage orphan.

In the first months after the war, the Arabs tried to return to the area—first to attempt to harvest the wheat and other crops, but as the years passed, to search the abandoned villages for gold and other trea28

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sures left behind. Some came to murder. The early 1950s were perilous years for the new State of Israel.

Many Israelis, most of them civilians from among the boatloads that were arriving each month from Europe, North Africa and Arab countries, were killed by Arab terrorists between 1949 and 1956.

In 1953, truckloads of Kurdish Jews were sent to the new moshav, which took the name Agur instead of Ajjur. But the newcomers weren’t farmers, and they struggled to scratch out a living. So in January 1955, the Jewish Agency sent two young Jewish tractor drivers, Hector “Tzvi” Eidman and Eliezer Katz, to help the villagers plough their fields. The two camped out in the castle. On January 17, marauders sneaked into the house and slit their throats. The bodies weren’t found until the next morning. According to news accounts, Eidman was found lying on his belly “like a slaughtered animal” and Katz on his back in a pool of blood. The perpetrators were never found, but tracks led over the fields the tractor drivers had just ploughed in the direction of the Hebron hills, in what was then Jordan.

After that, the Agur moshav used the castle as a school for a while, but in the early 1960s, it was abandoned and thus officially came to belong to the Israel Lands Authority. It remained empty until 1994.

T

hat was the year my friend itzhak taragan,

who had fought in all of Israel’s wars and had friends in high places, retired from Israel Radio as chief technician. Itzhak was a larger-than-life character with a gift for endearing people to his wild ideas, and he convinced the Israel Lands Authority to give him the castle for cultural events. He transformed the structure, which had no electricity or plumbing and no glass in its windows, into a magnificent villa.

He and his wife, Kochava, called it the “Khan of Ajjur,” creating a myth that the old building was a Khan, a Turkish inn or caravanserai. In the 1990s and 2000s, the couple opened its doors to musicians, mostly

from the former Soviet Union, and hosted concerts on weekends.

To the displeasure of the Israel Lands Authority, Itzhak also made the castle his home, and was engaged in a constant battle to stay. He won. He lived out his life in his Khan, dying at age 87 in October 2014. Tired of living “in the middle of nowhere,” his widow offered to rent the house to me cheaply, and I, recently divorced and seeking a home, quickly agreed.

I moved in immediately and dove into maintaining the property. I dealt with the rats, the porcupines, the jackals and the occasional hyena—as well as a venomous viper that slithered up the fig tree and found a comfortable spot on the veranda. I hacked away at the overgrowth near the ancient olive trees surrounding the house and groomed them so they would bear more fruit. I farmed them for oil and uncovered an ancient gat, or olive press, carved into the limestone just below the house. I brought the grapevines back to life and with the harvest turned their juice into terrible wine, but ultimately magnificent brandy. I drank it with friends and family who helped with the harvests, and with whom I feasted on the veranda after a hard day’s work.

I also had a lot of time to ponder the Jewish relationship to this land.

Roman-era carved details adorn the castle’s pillars.

And God appeared before Abraham and said: “I give to you and all of your descendants this land in which you are now a foreigner. The whole land of Canaan will belong to your descendants as an everlasting possession.” (Genesis 17:8)

Throughout our history as a Jewish nation we have been, as the Bible often notes, aware of the fact that we were not indigenous here. The father of the Israelites, Abraham, was not born here, and the Torah—which defined the moral and religious character of the Jewish nation—was given on Mount Sinai, which was, the last time I looked, outside the Promised Land.

The ancient Greeks, like many cultures, believed they came from the land and were therefore part of it. This autochthonous philosophy connects a native people to the land from which they are believed to have been born. The Bible, however, generally rejected this paganistic “motherland” view of the human relationship to the earth. God, not Earth, stood above all. In traditional Jewish thinking, the Land belonged to God, to be allocated according to divine will. And God promised it to the Jews.

If you believed in the Bible, then the land was the Jews’. The problem is that throughout history it also has belonged to others. The long journey from original nation-building, exile, and 2,000 years of longing for the Land of Israel to statehood clashed headlong with the indigenous population that was living here.

Author Arieh O’Sullivan works on a project while living at the castle.

Ruins of one of the remaining houses from the village of Ajjur.

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Above: The Ottoman-era castle today (top) and in the past. The mysterious sealed rooms lie behind the three stone arches.

To the early Zionists, the Bible was a sort of “birth certificate.” The narrative was that their historical right to the land was not based on the fact that once, in the distant past, the forefathers of the Jewish people had dwelt here, but rather that this connection had never been terminated.

It wasn’t a question of Zionists loving the homeland more than the Palestinians. It wasn’t a question that necessarily had an answer.

I

found

myself

thinking

about

a

palestinian

civil engineer and reseacher named Salman Abu Sitta, who has devoted his life to mapping 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century Palestine.

Palestinian nationalists seek to build a state in what was once Palestine and to return to it the millions of descendants of the refugees who have been in exile since 1948. Abu Sitta has proposed a plan to achieve this, which is well-known in the Palestinian world, and which on the surface sounds reasonable. According to his calculations, presented in his 1997 essay The Feasibility of the Right of Return, the vast majority of the villages abandoned in 1948 remain empty pastureland. Since Israel no longer uses them for living, or even farming or ranching, he claims that Arab refugees could return to their ruined homes and empty fields without displacing any Jews. “The return of the refugees is possible with no appreciable dislocation of Jewish residents,” Abu Sitta writes. “The original villages can be rebuilt on the same spot.”

That’s true. Most of the moshavim and kibbutzim were built next to, and not on top of, the Arab villages. This contradicted common practice throughout history, where the conqueror settled on top of the 30

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vanquished. What were the early state builders thinking? That one day the Palestinians would come back?

Some years ago, before he died, I sought out Aryeh “Lova” Eliav, one of the granddaddies of the Israeli left. He was once the secretary general of the Israeli Labor Party and a presidential candidate in 1993. Back in the 1950s, he was a wunderkind who filled Israel’s empty hinterland with farming villages and frontier towns to absorb the waves of Jewish immigrants.

“We had to settle them,” Eliav told me. “Remember, this wasn’t the same state that absorbed one million Russian immigrants in the 1990s and had cities like Ashdod and Ashkelon and Upper Nazareth. We were a small and poor country. We had to absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees from Morocco and Iraq and Poland and Hungary.”

He explained that the crowded Arab villages were not suitable for the vision of the earthy and closeto-nature, “new-Jew” farming communities designed with fields rolling out behind houses. “All there were, were mud huts,” he added. “They weren’t worth anything. We didn’t need them, so we made forests out of them and built new houses.”

“But Lova,” I argued. “The Palestinians are saying that no one is living today on the rubble where their villages once stood. They claim they can come back

Above: Eviction notice posted at castle gate. Right: Author Arieh O’Sullivan with Mohammed al-Azza (left), whose ancestors once owned the castle.

and rebuild them, and not put out any Israelis.”

“This is feigning simplicity. It’s disingenuous. But there’s cunning in this approach,” replied Lova, who was eventually ousted from the Labor Party when he opposed Jewish settlements in the territories. “You know I am a peacenik. According to my conception, they don’t have any right of return and they never will. It would be the end of the Jewish state.”

M

habitation, the Authority maintained, only for “agricultural use.” While my predecessor had kept the authorities at bay for decades, I didn’t have his resources, contacts or ineffable charm—and had to leave.

The castle had never been intended for habitation, the Lands Authority maintained, only for “agricultural use.”

ohammed got back in touch with me a

Today the castle lies sealed and crumbling, its many mysteries unsolved. (At one time, I unsuccessfully tried to enlist two officers of one of the Israeli Defense Force’s commando units to blast their way into the strange locked rooms on the first floor.) But I visit it often and, like Mohammed, pine to return. I have told him that if he ever succeeds in getting the castle back, I’ll be his first tenant.

Eariler this fall, as I checked out the olive trees that I had cared for on the castle grounds, I realized that sometimes we leave postcards to the future. The Romans left their millstones. The Palestinians, their village rubble. Me, the reborn olive trees.

Israel is in the midst of its eighth decade. And as we celebrate our precarious Zionist revolution, our roots certainly grow thick. But best we remember that we are ephemeral mortals inhabiting this eternal land. What will remain when we are gone are the stones of the Khan and the haunting beauty and depth of these hills. M NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 | MOMENT

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COURTESY ARIEH O’SULLIVAN; DR WALID KHALID;

few months ago because he wanted to enlist my help in trying to finally take possession of the castle. I knew it was a fantasy—and even if it wasn’t, I had no more power than he did.

I had lived in the Khan of Ajjur for more than two years. When I wasn’t harvesting olives, I was working as a journalist and tour guide. I also held magnificent parties with dancing on the veranda and musicians jamming away in the salon, always with loads of food and the whiskey and brandy I made in my still, which I called my moonshine. Mohammed would often visit, too.

Then one day an eviction notice was pinned to my front gate. Alas, the Lands Authority had caught up with me. The castle had never been intended for

WHAT SHOULD F O E L O R THEAM ERICAN JEWS H T I W E B RESPECT TO ISRAEL TODAY?

A MOMENT BIG QUESTION

W

hat should the role of American Jews be with respect to Israel today? What, if any, obligations do we have toward Israel? Amid seismic shifts in geopolitical alliances and the widespread concern that many American Jews are drifting away from the Jewish homeland, this question continues to trouble the American Jewish community.

Based on the principle that it is better to know what others think than to be in the dark, we have gathered a variety of voices: old and young, known and lesser-known, American and Israeli.

Be forewarned: wherever you stand on this issue, you may find some responses unsettling or even objectionable. Honest and open communication, despite its difficulties, is fundamental to understanding one another and building trust, both between American and Israeli Jews and within the American Jewish community itself.

FEATURING THE OPINIONS OF:

ARIELLE ANGEL, PETER BEINART, ELLIE COHANIM, BLAKE FLAYTON, CORA GALPERN, SUSIE GELMAN, YEHUDA GLICK, DONNIEL HARTMAN, ALIDA JACOBS, SUSIE LINFIELD, ERIC R. MANDEL, AARON DAVID MILLER, AVRAM MLOTEK, ETAN NECHIN, MICHAEL OREN, LORI PALATNIK, JUDEA PEARL, JONAH PLATT, AVI SHAFRAN, NATAN SHARANSKY AND RUTH K. WESTHEIMER Read more responses at momentmag.com/american-jews-israel

SUSIE LINFIELD American Jews—like all Americans—often overestimate our importance. Israel isn’t just a replica of the United States, with the only difference being that in Israel the Jews have guns. Israelis created a new nation, a new culture, a new language, a new identity—which was precisely the aim of the original Zionists. Too often, Americans— on both the right and the left—project our fantasies and obsessions onto Israel and Israelis. We assume, wrongly, that “they” are really “us.” And too often, American Jews view Israel simply as a cause rather than as a country.

For me, the most distressing development—which has been a long time in coming, but was most evident in the recent Israel-Hamas war—is the abandonment by the American left, and particularly the Jewish-American left, of the democratic forces in Israel (both Jewish and Arab). A tsunami of rage (often based on historically ludicrous assertions and metaphors) washed across position papers, petitions and demonstrations. Israel is (take your pick) a settler-colonialist, colonialist (those aren’t the same), racist, imperialist, 34

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capitalist, inherently violent, apartheid state. The hundreds of thousands of Israelis working to end the occupation, to oppose the nation-state law, to equalize the status of Arab citizens, to strengthen the terribly weakened democratic institutions: All have been erased. Manichean thinking and lazy metaphors—“Ferguson is Palestine!”—substitute for politics.

Too often, we Americans project our fantasies and obsessions onto Israel and Israelis.

At the same time, Israelis—or, rather, some Israelis—expect diaspora Jews to be what Haaretz writer Anshel Pfeffer called “slavishly loyal” to Israel. Just as the left tries to blackmail so-called progressives into advocating disastrous positions that would undermine Israeli sovereignty (the return of millions of diaspora Palestinians, the establishment of one state, etc.), the

right tries to blackmail diaspora Jews into conflating support for Israeli sovereignty with endorsement of, or at least silence about, disastrous and immoral Israeli policies (the occupation, settler violence, etc.).

In my view, diaspora Jews should resist both tendencies—or, rather, that is how this diaspora Jew sees her role.

Susie Linfield teaches cultural journalism at New York University and is the author of The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky.

AARON DAVID MILLER American Jews should speak their mind on Israel—fairly. Israel’s continuing reliance on the United States does provide a certain margin for American citizens, Jews and non-Jews, to express criticism of Israel when they believe that Israeli policies are crossing lines that fundamentally erode American values and interests. The notion

that speaking out will only weaken Israel and provide ammunition to its enemies has never been very compelling to me. Israel isn’t some piece of driftwood floating aimlessly and passively on a turbulent sea without agency to act. It can handle informed, fair, well-meaning criticism. If the United States and Israel are truly allies, then it would seem incumbent on both to be honest with each other.

American Jews should speak their mind on Israel—fairly.

But the frame of that criticism is important. America and Israel do not have the same kinds of problems. Each country is screwed up in its own unique way. Two points here. First: Effective criticism should take into account that the IsraeliPalestinian conflict is not pitting the forces of goodness against those of evil. Both sides bear their share of responsibility for the current impasse as well as responsibility for helping to end it. Second: Unlike the United States, which has non-predatory neighbors to its north and south and fish to its east and west (what one historian called our liquid assets), Israel has legitimate security challenges that require understanding and often provide context for some of its actions.

The other important point is that the American Jewish community isn’t a monolith when it comes to Israel. Take a look at the diversity of Jewish organizations espousing views on Israel—from the Israel-right-or-wrong crowd to those whose sole organizing principle is lobbying for a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship, to those who support a two-state solution but are wary of slamming Israel’s occupation policies, to those who seem to have made that criticism their reason for being. It’s probably safe to assume that the majority of the 7.6 million Jews in America believe in the necessity of a Jewish state and want to see it live in peace and security. But I

can ask three different Jews I know about their opinions on Israel and get three different or highly nuanced views on the subject. This is particularly the case among a younger generation, whose views seem to range from indifference to unwavering support to skepticism and hostility.

Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, focusing on U.S. foreign policy. He has served as State Department historian, intelligence analyst and negotiator in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

ELLIE COHANIM American Jews need to understand that Israel is part and parcel of Jewish identity. The Jewish story begins with Abraham, who is considered the founder of the Jewish religion and of monotheism, being commanded to leave what would be present-day Iraq and go live in what is now Israel. These are the foundational principles of the Jewish story—Israel and monotheism.

What is disturbing to see now in the United States is that American Jewry has failed to educate its children and grandchildren in Judaism, so that young

American Jews need to understand that Israel is part and parcel of Jewish identity.

Jews today don’t really know what the Jewish connection is to the land of Israel.

Whether in high school or in college, young Americans don’t know how to respond to the anti-Zionist hatred that greets them. It behooves American Jewry to start educating our children on the foundational Jewish connection to Israel.

Once a young Jew understands the Jewish people’s relationship to the Jewish land, everything else flows from that understanding. Certainly, American Jewry should support the government of Israel, the State of Israel and the people of Israel.

We’re in a situation right now where half of the world’s Jewish population lives in Israel and half is scattered throughout the world. At the same time, we’re seeing Jews fleeing countries such as France, Sweden and Germany because of the rise in antisemitism. And where do they go for refuge? Israel. How can we not support the country that is the refuge for Jews?

There has been a narrative shift on

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Israel. With every Israeli military success, American Jews have bought more into the narrative that Israel is no longer David battling Goliath and question whether they should continue to support Israel. To my mind this is unfathomable: Israel is still a small country that is fighting for her survival and facing an existential threat from the Iranian regime as well as the relentless threat of terrorism from Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, etc.

It is mind-boggling to me that American Jewry would question its support of Israel merely because the Israelis have succeeded in surviving.

Ellie Cohanim served as Deputy Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism at the State Department in the Trump administration. She is currently a senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy.

ARIELLE ANGEL The role of American Jews should be to put pressure on Jewish institutions and the American government to push the Israeli government to end the occupation.

If people care about the future of what it might mean to have a Jewish state, they have to contend with the actions of the Jewish state as it is presently constituted.

Am I saying every American Jewish person needs to care about this? No. But if you are engaged in Jewish life, I don’t think that you can put Israel off to the side. I have seen people try to do that, but it’s impossible because these issues are rooted deeply in all of our institutions. Even if you want to have a program unrelated to Israeli politics, focused on diaspora, cultural figures or learning, the politics of Israel are already in the room because of who funded the program, what the speakers in that program can and can’t say and who is selected to be a part of that program. There is no part

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of the Jewish community, as it is presently constituted in the United States, that is free of the politics of Israel-Palestine. It’s the root of a broader moral and discursive degradation in the Jewish community, here and in Israel, to decide to accommodate the injustice of the occupation.

institutions are not actually representative of the range of public opinion in the Jewish community. Still, I think that there’s a lot of social and communal pressure to stay out of it or to stay within “accepted bounds.”

I’ve often wondered why I’ve invested so heavily in work regarding Israel-Palestine.

Why not devote my time to, say, climate justice instead? In the end, there is no issue in which my voice is as important as it is in this one, because this is something that is being done in the name of, and with the support of, the Jewish community in the United States.

The role of American Jews should be to put pressure on Jewish Arielle Angel is the editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents, a quarterly magazine and daily institutions and news site covering the Jewish left. the American government to push the Israeli MICHAEL OREN government to end The first thing that American Jews have to do is educate themselves. If a foreigner the occupation. or an Israeli came to the United States and It is the responsibility of the Jewish community in the United States to hold Israel accountable. That means potentially divesting from the Jewish organizations that uphold the status quo. I think that there’s a sense of belonging that people get from participating in, for example, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), or giving to the Jewish National Fund (JNF) or to various regional Jewish Federations. But some of these organizations are not transparent about where that money goes and whether any of it ends up over the Green Line and in settlements, or are engaged in Israel advocacy that prevents Israel from being held accountable for human rights for Palestinians. Jews need to make it clear that these organizations do not represent them, and put their money and resources behind organizations and initiatives that do. ​​In the National Survey of Jewish Voters for 2021 by the Jewish Electorate Institute, 25 percent agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state.” The results show that young Jews especially are extremely concerned about human rights violations and that our

made far-reaching pronouncements about American security issues or domestic policy without speaking English, without knowing any American history, without understanding the Constitution or even having read the Constitution, most Americans would take umbrage. Yet large numbers of American Jews do precisely that. They don’t necessarily speak Hebrew, or Arabic for that matter; know little about the country’s history and geography; know little about our politics and security issues, which are immensely complex, and yet make far-reaching pronouncements about how Israeli policy should be formulated. So the first thing that American Jews have to do is learn, and I think that’s not too much to ask.

The second task is to appreciate and respect Israel’s democracy. We don’t necessarily have to like the choices made

by Israelis at the polls, but know that these choices are very often made from a place of existential fears. It’s been my experience, both while ambassador and subsequently, that there is little understanding in the United States of the choices Israelis make at the polls.

The third thing would be to understand the nature of antisemitism and the shapes it has taken in the United States. One of perhaps the greatest difficulties American Jews are having in fighting antisemitism is their inability to define it. The New York Times can run a whole front-page display of pictures of Palestinian children who were allegedly killed by Israel during the recent conflict in Gaza. They’re not running pictures of the numerous civilian children killed by American forces in the world.

That, to me, is antisemitic. It’s a blood libel.

But a part of the American Jewish community says that’s a great front-page article.

American Jews should uphold the alliance between the United States and Israel.

It’s the deepest and most multifaceted strategic alliance the United States has had with any foreign country in the postWorld War II period. It is in the profound interest of America to support that alliance, and American Jews should educate themselves about the nature of that alliance and the great benefits that it provides, not just for Israel, but for the American people.

American Jews should uphold the alliance between the United States and Israel.

American Jews should let their voices be heard about issues that are Israeli issues that impact them, whether it be pluralism at the Kotel and other holy sites, or issues related to conversion—who’s a Jew— or issues related to marriage. On other issues—for example, whether the IDF should remain a citizens’ army or should become a professional army—I don’t think American Jews should have much to say.

But there are issues about which American Jews not only should have their voices heard, but must have their voices heard, and compel Israel to live up to the definition that we have set for ourselves, which is that we are the nation-state of the Jewish people, irrespective of where those Jews

live, or how they practice or choose not to practice their Judaism. We are a nationstate, we are not a theocracy. That bestows a responsibility not only on Israel, but on American Jews as well to stand up for those issues that impact their identity as Jews, as members of the Jewish people.

Michael B. Oren, an American-born Israeli historian and author, has served as the Israeli ambassador to the United States, a member of the Knesset for the Kulanu party and deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s Office.

DONNIEL HARTMAN The vast majority of North American Jews are committed to Israel but troubled by some of the things Israel does; they’re troubled by issues of state and religion, by some of the Israeli army’s actions and by what’s happening in the West Bank and in Gaza. It’s like a family. I love you, I’m committed to you, but I’m not

always happy with what you do. What’s been changing in the last few years is that being troubled and being uncommitted is becoming more mainstream within the American Jewish community.

The more you’re on the right, the more you’re “committed,” and the more you’re on the left, the more you’re “troubled.”

What I’ve discovered is that what we identify as problematic in young Jews already exists in their parents, but the parents just don’t want to admit it. They know that there is a disconnect between American Jews and Israel. It’s like a couple who are not getting divorced, but they don’t know why they’re married anymore.

In the past, Israelis had to have a relationship with North American Jews because they needed them, and so the need required them to couch their feelings in more politically correct language. Israel doesn’t need North American Jews, or thinks it doesn’t need them, as it used to. Today, Israelis are much more powerful. American and American Jewish aid is not as significant, and there are other groups to whom Israel can turn.

Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people belongs to all of the Jewish people.

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And that means if we Israelis want North American Jews to care about Israel, we have to embrace their involvement with Israel.

We have to develop a much more sophisticated ethic of involvement. Israelis say, “If you Americans want a role, your job is to make aliyah.” But that’s not going to happen. If North American Jews can only be involved in Israel by making aliyah, most will simply walk away from Israel.

So what should the role of American Jews be? If you are a liberal American Jew, the first thing you have to do is to develop the language to talk about Israel. And the second thing you have to do is ask, how do I deal with my liberal Zionist values and what’s my relationship with the history?

North American Jews have to support institutions in Israel that fight for the Israel they want.

There is a difference between telling Israel what you think and telling Israel what to do. North American Jews have to be much more proactive in developing vibrant avenues to support institutions in Israel that fight for the Israel they want. If your issue is occupation and Palestinian rights, if your issue is the environment and refugees, if your issue is Israeli Arabs, social justice, women’s rights—there are partners you can work with in Israel. North American Jews have plenty of avenues that don’t involve coercing Israel. They involve creating a framework within Israel in which your voices are heard with Israelis who are willing to be your representatives. Once you develop your voice and develop Israeli partners who will be your voice, then you’re a player in the building of Israel.

Donniel Hartman is a Modern Orthodox rabbi and president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish research and education institution based in Jerusalem and New York City.

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SUSIE GELMAN American Jews feel connected to Israel and invested in its future. But that can lead to problems in the Israel-diaspora relationship, because our preferences are not always, or even often, the same. We’re not the same people. I’ve got really long and strong ties and I feel passionate about Israel—its right to exist as a sovereign state, its future as Jewish and democratic and secure. That’s my guidepost. But having said that, the idea that American Jews are just going to blindly support Israel, right or wrong, is gone for good.

Israel is not only the Jewish state for Israelis, it’s the nation-state for all Jews.

That fact gives Israel added responsibilities and challenges. If Israel wants American Jews to feel invested in and embraced

by Israel, it also needs to acknowledge American Jewish concerns. We’re seeing some movement on that front from the new Israeli government, certainly from what Foreign Affairs Minister Yair Lapid is saying, as well as Minister of Diaspora Affairs Nachman Shai. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is also signaling the importance of that relationship and understands that there needs to be a reset after the Bibi years, when things tilted so firmly to one side of the equation—meaning Republican or evangelical—not taking into account the opinions of the majority of American Jews.

At the same time, we as American Jews need to understand and acknowledge that we’re not Israeli. We don’t live with the direct consequences of Israeli policy choices. And although my son made aliyah and served in the army, generally American Jews don’t send our kids to serve in the Israeli army. We don’t pay taxes in Israel. We don’t deal with whatever the threats are, whether they be rockets coming from Gaza, violence in the West Bank, or other dangers. And therefore, Israel may sometimes do things we don’t like or necessarily approve of. That doesn’t mean, and cannot mean, that we reject or disconnect from Israel. It just means that we’re not always going to agree.

In terms of what we should be doing, certainly one of the key things is supporting the idea of Israel’s right to be a

sovereign nation. We also need to work to promote our interests inside of Israel, and fight for our role as Jews with a stake in the Jewish state—particularly on issues that impact Jews as Jews, such as religion and state, conversion, the Law of Return, etc.

American Jews need to promote our interests inside of Israel, and fight for our role as Jews with a stake in the Jewish state— particularly on issues that impact Jews as Jews.

AVI SHAFRAN

American Jews need to strongly advocate for the two-state solution: It is ultimately the only way to resolve the conflict and preserve Israel as secure, Jewish and democratic. It’s not going to happen anytime soon—the stars are not currently in alignment—but at the same time, taking actions that make a two-state solution more elusive, such as continuing to build settlements in areas that would eventually be part of a Palestinian state, and retroactively recognizing illegal outposts as settlements, is counterproductive.

The alternative is one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea into which 2.9 million West Bank Palestinians would be absorbed. In that case, Israel would have to choose between being Jewish or being democratic, because it could no longer be both.

Susie Gelman serves as the board chair of the Israel Policy Forum. She was the inaugural chair of the Birthright Israel Foundation and cochair of what was then the UJC (now the JFNA) Israel.

American Jews are, first and foremost, American citizens, and owe no political allegiance to Israel as a country. But, of course, all Jews feel—or at least should feel—connected to all of their fellow Jews, by their faith (to whatever degree, if any, they may observe it) and their collective history. And so it is only natural and proper for Jewish Americans to be deeply concerned with happenings in Israel.

In the end, Israel’s citizens, through their duly elected leaders, will have the final say about the political and military issues their country faces. But American Jews, particularly those of us with family members and close friends in Israel, do have a right and a responsibility to offer our opinions about domestic or foreign policy issues Israel faces.

That can be a fraught proposition, since misinformation and disinformation abound.

Before taking stands on Israel-related issues, American Jews must objectively explore them in depth, with an understanding of Israel’s special nature as a self-defined Jewish state—many of whose neighbors are committed to its annihilation.

The establishment of a Palestinian state is something about which reasonable American Jews may disagree. But taking a stand in favor of such a state without considering the result of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and the state of the current Palestinian leadership is a mistake—as is not thinking about what effects the lack of such a state will have on Israel’s future.

There are places where American Jewish advocates should not go.

Criticizing Israeli military responses to attacks or second-guessing Israeli security measures are things that American Jews would best avoid, unless they have professional military or security credentials. And seeking to promote an Israel reconstituted in our own country’s image, complete with the separation between religion and state, in effect would negate the very idea of Israel as a Jewish state.

Similarly, trying to foster an Americanstyle “multi-winged” model of Judaism in Israel, with the accompanying multiple standards in religious matters, will only result in a crippled bird. As much as some

American Jews seeking to promote an Israel reconstituted in their own country’s image, complete with the separation between religion and state, negates the very idea of Israel as a Jewish state.

American Jews would like to see a reflection of their own pluralistic world in Israel, the fact is that would foster severe societal disunity in a state that identifies as Jewish.

Above all, what American Jews most need to do to express and solidify their relationship with Israel is not to give her advice, but to visit her, support her security needs and pray for the welfare of her citizens.

Avi Shafran, an Orthodox rabbi, serves as director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.

PETER BEINART Our obligation is to show our commitment to the welfare of Jews who live in Israel, because Jews wherever they are have an obligation to look out for one another, and simultaneously to respond to what I consider to be the very grave and profound injustice that Israel is doing—injustice that is not just the product of one particular government or political party but that is built NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 | MOMENT

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into the fabric of the state, and into the way it functions as a state that is built on Jewish supremacy over Palestinians. Many people, if they even accepted the latter premise, would see those two imperatives in deep conflict with one another. I don’t see them in as much conflict as others might. There is tension between them—between our legitimate particularist obligation to our fellow Jews and our universalist obligation toward justice—in this instance, justice toward Palestinians. But I also believe, and I’m in a minority in this view, that in the long run the safety and well-being of Israeli Jews would be better served in a state that provides equality under the law to Palestinians—by which I mean a state that did not privilege Jews over Palestinians, one that was not constituted as a Jewish state.

Our obligation is to show our commitment to the welfare of Jews who live in Israel and simultaneously to respond to the very grave and profound injustice that Israel is doing.

That’s not today a widely held view, but I start from the premise that now there is in reality one state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River that includes two nations, a Jewish nation and a Palestinian nation, and that almost certainly isn’t going to be partitioned, even if it could be done justly, which I doubt. So 40

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the question for me becomes, is it better for Palestinians in that one state to not be citizens, as most of them are not—and I’m talking here about Palestinians mostly in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, but also even those who are in Israel, who are very much second-class citizens—and then a whole population of Palestinians who are not even in Israel/Palestine because they were expelled.

It seems to me inarguable that Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza deserve the right to be equal citizens of the country in which they live. This is a universal principle of any country, but I also believe what political science tells us, which is that in deeply divided societies, which Israel/Palestine is, things long-term tend to be more stable if all citizens have a voice in the government that controls them.

(When I say Israel controls Gaza, I mean that it is Israel that fundamentally makes decisions as to who can come and go.) So excluding one population, the Palestinian one, is in the long run going to be a driver of violence. And though Palestinians have suffered more violence than Israeli Jews in recent years, that violence will ultimately have a severe impact on the lives of Israeli Jews as well. So I don’t see a contradiction between my special commitment as a Jew toward the Jews of Israel and my commitment to the rule of law.

Peter Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic, is the author of three books, including The Crisis of Zionism.

ERIC R. MANDEL Although surveys show that America’s Jews still sympathize with the Jewish

state, the youngest cohort are the loudest and angriest and have become its fulltime critics. They increasingly believe they know better than Israelis what is best, they are ignorant of the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and some have crossed the Rubicon, advocating to end the Jewish state through binationality.

American Jews’ primary role concerning Israel will continue to be advocating for the U.S.-Israel relationship, which is indispensable for American and Israeli national security interests. However, the strength of the connection to Israel is as much about our survival as it is about Israel’s. That is in part due to the multi-generational consequences of a more than 60 percent intermarriage rate. American Judaism is in decline, so we need to get our own house in order regarding our role in the survival of the Jewish state.

The core disaffection toward Israel is routinely attributed to the IsraeliPalestinian conflict and settlements. But the actual problem is ignorance, social media echo chambers and a lack of willingness to look beyond false narratives and binary solutions. Whenever I give a talk and show evidence of the multiple offers Israel has made for a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, those who are still open-minded but unaware of the history are astonished.

American Jews who care about Israel’s survival have never shied away from joining the conversation about the state’s future direction. But it is not the role of American Jews to lobby against the democratically elected government of Israel, claiming to know better than Israelis what is best for them. American Jews need Israel, and Israel needs American Jews, but it is Israelis who place their children and homes in harm’s way to ultimately decide their fate.

Unfortunately, the only prism many young American Jews view Israel through is colored by a simplistic understanding of a conflict. It is a distorted “intersectional” lens that sees Israel as a colonialist, victimizing exploiter of an indigenous people. We have sent our children to the best universities, where they have met an uncompromising administrative and academic elite of anti-Zionists. Students are made to feel ashamed of their Jewish particularism. Antisemitism is described to them as emanating from the far right, while a crusade to defame, delegitimize and disarm Israel is portrayed as something completely other than antisemitism.

archaeological evidence. A true two-state solution would guarantee not only Israel’s security needs in those territories but would guarantee a Palestinian obligation to allow safe Jewish access to its historical holy sites such the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron.

Our role is to see Israel in all its wonder and tumult, an imperfect but extraordinary nation that is the life jacket for the survival of “the Jews,” whatever that expression means to each of us—a people, a nation, a civilization, a religion, an idea, a tradition or a culture.

Should American Jews have a say in the future of Israel? Absolutely. Cultivating an appreciation for the vitality of the Jewish state, warts and all, is a crucial role for American Jewry. American Jewry should be part-time critics but full-time loving cousins—for the sake of all Jews, the security of the United States, the rights of minorities and the betterment of the world in general.

It is not the role of American Jews to lobby against the democratically Eric Mandel is the director of the Middle Political Information Network and elected government East the senior security editor for the Jerusalem of Israel, claiming Report/Post. to know better than Israelis what is best ETAN NECHIN for them.

Most American Jews are unaware how much Jewish history is centered in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, and not in Tel Aviv, which is just over 100 years old. Even some advocates of the two-states-for-two-peoples solution are pained about giving up the birthplace of Jewish history, especially knowing that the Palestinian Authority has repeatedly denied the Jewish historical connection to the West Bank despite the overwhelming

The times when American Jews would defend Israel no matter what are over.

And this is a welcome change to all Israelis and Palestinians who strive for peace and civil normalcy. However, it seems that despite this vital shift in public opinion, the old paradigm in relation to Israel is still there: Instead of critiquing Israel as a rogue nation-state, many American Jews, especially on the left, are lambasting it for going against their Jewish values. Here lies the paradox:

They have simply replaced their parents’ adulation of Israel with general disdain.

Their Jewish identity is still centered on Israel and its actions. In essence, they are the other side of the same coin.

This is not entirely the American Jewish community’s fault. When Israeli prime ministers speak on behalf of the Jewish people on the podium of the United Nations General Assembly or in front of Congress, it puts the community in a bind. Whenever this happens, there needs to be a denunciation from Jewish groups and an insistence on Judaism as a religion with many communal and historical manifestations rather than a singular nation-state entity.

Leaning in on a Jewish-values-based critique of Israel does a disservice to Jews and Israelis and Palestinians because it reinforces the notion of Israel as the center of Jewish existence. The zealousness of some seems to be spurred by the fact that the American Jewish community hasn’t been part of a meaningful political struggle since the civil rights movement. This latching on to the conflict is an attempt to find meaning in one of the most consequential political arenas in history.

The debate around Zionism and its discontents is at the center of discourse about Israel. Many writers and historians, especially on the left, peg Zionism as a settler-colonial project. Some offer critiques of Zionism in its relation to white and Jewish supremacy. These discussions not only do nothing to improve the lives of Israelis and Palestinians, but ignore internal sociological, historical, cultural and religious aspects of Israeli society.

Israel isn’t a monolith, nor is it inherently right or left. Like any nation-state, it is what the public makes of it. ​​In the end, American Jews should realize that they aren’t impacted by this conflict in the same way Israelis and Palestinians are. This will give them the NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 | MOMENT

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American Jews do not turn their backs on Israel because of what they know, but because of what they don’t know.

Leaning in on a Jewish-valuesbased critique of Israel does a disservice to Jews and Israelis and Palestinians: It reinforces the notion of Israel as the center of Jewish existence. freedom and moral weight to offer solidarity without appropriation.

Etan Nechin is an Israeli journalist based in New York. He is currently the online editor of The Bare Life Review, a journal of immigrant and refugee writers.

LORI PALATNIK If I opened up an atlas and asked my sisters-in-law in Chicago to show me where Israel is on a map, I promise you they could 42

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not. They would not know the difference between Bibi, Bougie [Israeli President Isaac Herzog] or Bennett [Prime Minister Naftali Bennett]. The Kotel issue? Who is a Jew? It does not take up even a fraction of a centimeter of their minds. They and the vast majority of American Jews do not know and do not care. And yet, somehow, we have managed to convince ourselves and one another that these issues are the most pressing, and demand immediate funding and political action.

One of the best things about 2020 for me was the lack of in-person gatherings of American Jewry to discuss their relationship with Israel—the subject of the multitude of Jewish events that we used to feel obliged to attend. It was hard for me to listen at such events, knowing that 85 percent of the Jewish people were not in the room, not because they couldn’t make it or afford the price of admission, but because it meant nothing to them.

Jews do not turn their backs on Israel because of what they know, but because of what they don’t know. Malcolm Hoenlein, a prominent leader in the Jewish world, has pointed out that this is the first time in history that all Jews are free—no Jew is imprisoned behind any geographical border. The Iron Curtain fell. No longer is it “Let My People Go.” Now it is “Let My People Know.” This should be the number one issue that is discussed, solutioned, actioned and funded.

Recent studies have shown that Israelis have little knowledge about Jews in the

diaspora. Historically, American Jews who visit Israel often meet few Israelis other than the tour bus driver or the hotel concierge. Solving the Israel-diaspora divide is not rocket science: It is simply a matter of meeting, connecting and sharing a meaningful experience, focusing on what unites us and not what divides us. That means we have to leave politics at the door and focus on our commonality. For Jewish mothers, whose lives are driven by relationship and connection, that is easy.

Lori Palatnik is the founding director of Momentum (formerly Jewish Women’s Renaissance Project), an initiative that brings women to Israel to learn about their Jewish heritage and connect with Israel.

JONAH PLATT The role of American Jews is very simple and has been made overcomplicated. The role of American Jews—and all Jews around the world—is to treat Israel as family, for it is the homeland of our people. It is our home, and we should simply treat it as such.

What does that mean? Well, how do you treat your own home, your own family? You reserve the right to criticize them, call them out. But first and foremost you love them, you have their back, you feel a responsibility—an obligation, a blood bond—to stick up for your family, to love them unconditionally. We must never forget what family we belong to, even as we demand better behavior from them. To condemn, to abandon, to turn against—these are the actions of those who, due to their insecurities at

The role of American Jews— and all Jews around the world— is to treat Israel as family. how they are perceived by the rest of the world (or their peers, or community, etc.), forget themselves and the family that has loved them since before they were born.

Jonah Platt is an actor known for starring in Broadway’s Wicked. He is a 2020 Israel Policy Forum Bronfman Fellow and a current member of the advisory board for the Miller Intro to Judaism Program at American Jewish University.

JUDEA PEARL The future of American Jewry rests critically on its connection to Israel and its embrace of Israel as the spiritual compass of Jewish identity. Religion used to be the cement that glued us together, but we have given up that cement. Most Jews today are secular, living in different countries and speaking different languages. The one glue that binds us together is our collective memory of our common history. Israel is both the culmination of that history and its custodian, holding and nurturing our precious trust-deeds: holidays, language, sites, landscapes, lore, heroes and miraculous revival. Sadly, half of American Jewry seems to have given up on this last remaining glue and is starting to see Israel as a liability as opposed to an inspiration.

I predict American Jewry will soon undergo a profound, painful and irreparable split. I cannot think of another period in Jewish history where the schism was so deep, and growing deeper

so rapidly. I see the split in every aspect of life and on many levels. Zionist families who have lost a member to Jewish Voices for Peace cease to function as a family. The split is even deeper in academia. The animosity between Jewish professors who support BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) and those who fight for the good name of Israel has reached frightful intensity. On the surface, most of our faculty and students are still sitting on the fence, true, but the polarization is growing; the Zionist group is becoming more assertive and is closing ranks rapidly, while the Zionophobic group is becoming louder, more organized and more aggressive.

Today’s attitude toward Israel is really the most critical personal decision for

every Jew concerned with the future of our people: Do I want to be part of the Jewish people in the next generation or not? While surveys indicate that most American Jews do not consider Israel their first priority, deep in their heart they know that the time for the inevitable decision is rapidly approaching. This is why the conversation is so intense, so fierce and so loud, ready for its final eruption. The eruption may actually be healthy, resulting in two barely communicating communities: Israel-inspired forward-looking Jews on the one hand and Israel-bashing yesterday-Jews on the other. A “two fate solution” for what once was one people.

Judea Pearl is professor emeritus of computer science and statistics, director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA and author of The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect.

The future of American Jewry rests on its connection to Israel CORA GALPERN and its embrace Given that Israel is currently a Jewish of Israel as the state, and American Jewish institutions are proud of that fact, we have spiritual compass a responsibility to make sure that it is of Jewish identity. upholding our Jewish values. Before

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we have a responsibility to the State of Israel, we have a responsibility to Jewish values of justice and tikkun olam. If a state that claims to be upholding our religion isn’t upholding our values, we have a responsibility to put pressure on that state to change so that it is reflective of the things that we are taught as American Jews.

Before we have a responsibility to the State of Israel, we have a responsibility to Jewish values of justice and tikkun olam.

A critical component of this role includes centering Palestinian voices and understanding Palestinian narratives.

While our power mostly lies in pushing Israel to uphold Jewish values, we also have to acknowledge that in this situation, there is an entire population and culture that is being occupied illegally.

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The first thing to do when someone is experiencing an injustice is to center the voices of those people. Abuses such as home demolitions, violent checkpoints and brutality by the IDF need to be condemned. It’s also important to have conversations about what Jewish safety actually means to us and how we can feel safe and respected in a way that doesn’t delegitimize or harm another group in the process.

Cora Galpern is the vice president of J Street U at the University of Michigan.

AVRAM MLOTEK Israel is the eternal homeland of the Jewish people. Religiously, it is the permanent rental property of the Jewish people, as bestowed on them by God (so long as we keep up our covenant). Jews have but one tiny slice of land, roughly the size of New Jersey, that is finally under Jewish control after thousands of years of exile and persecution.

The role of American Jews regarding Israel today varies from supporter to staunch critic. American Jews are as diverse as the Israeli parliament. As a rabbi, I hope Jews invest in Jewish literacy. Engaging with Israel is an integral part of Jewish history and identity. I encourage all Jews to form their own unique relationship with Judaism and, in turn, with Israel. Often one’s relationship with Judaism will dictate the passion or dispassion one feels toward Israel. So, what does it mean to be an engaged Jew? Are the far-right Haredi and far-left Jews any less “engaged” because of their biting critique of Israel? Personally, I think it is a profound oversight and mistake to live a Judaism without a robust support of

and engagement with the modern State of Israel, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe there are other ways of expressing or engaging in Judaism.

It is a profound mistake to live a Judaism without a robust support of and engagement with the modern State of Israel.

We’re living at a unique moment in Jewish history where, after thousands of years of exile and persecution, Jews have returned to their historic homeland with sovereignty. With that comes the opportunity and potential to live out our prophetic mission of serving as a light unto the nations.

So the question becomes for all Jews, those living in and outside of Israel: How do we want to be a part of our people’s unfolding story? I think Jews everywhere ought to rush to celebrate, support and be invested in their Jewish homeland so that it lives up to its Jewish ideals.

Politics isn’t religion and religion isn’t politics. The world has a responsibility to fight those who oppress Jews and who denounce Israel’s right to exist. American Jews and all people of conscience ought to discern when a defense of Palestinian rights becomes an assault against Jews, as often happens in some progressive circles.

Avram Mlotek is founder of Base Hillel, a home-focused rabbinic ministry now in ten cities worldwide. He is the author of Why Jews Do That or 30 Questions Your Rabbi Never Answered.

NATAN SHARANSKY American Jewry today is not doing Israel a favor by supporting it—American Jews are fighting for a very important part of their own identity. We are not in the beginning of the 20th century, when Zionism was an idea shared by a very small fraction of the Jewish people. We are not in 1948, when Israel was a poor and weak state. Israel is a strong country, which is going to continue to build itself up and develop itself as a Jewish state, whether American Jews agree or not.

But at the same time, there’s no doubt that it is very important for the future of Israel as a Jewish state to be connected to every Jew in the world. For the future of American Jewry and all diaspora Jews, it’s very important that Israel exists.

What we saw during the last military operation in Gaza was that some among our community—rabbis, Jewish community leaders, heads of Israel studies programs at universities—said that Zionism is a white, racist, colonial philosophy and that they don’t want to continue to support the ideology of Zionism. They were calling for a world without Zionism—more or less what

American Jews must support Israel’s right to exist and fight against the ideology that Israel is a kind of Jewish white supremacist state.

Iran is calling for. I have termed these people un-Jews, as they are undoing big parts of Jewish identity.

Some years ago, I was in an Israel delegation meeting with some liberal American Jews. A rabbi in Boston told us, “The fact that Israel decided to kill 2,000 Palestinians after three Jewish boys were kidnapped and killed—as a result of this, you’re losing us American Jews.” Everyone from the delegation, from both the right and the left, was shocked. Then one of the members replied, “You know what? If I have to choose between losing you or losing more and more Israeli citizens, I have to choose to lose you.”

American Jews must support Israel’s right to exist and fight against this ideology that Israel is a kind of Jewish white supremacist state. There is a feeling among Israelis that often criticism of Israel by American Jews is simply meant to show that we are not like “them” [Israelis], that we are part of this woke movement and these progressive liberal Jews, not with those who are oppressing poor Palestinians. In the end, Israelis don’t even hear this criticism, because it’s not about them. So the more specific you are and the more understanding you show about the challenges of Israel, the greater the chance that you’ll be heard.

We are one family. So people in the family know one another, understand one another. They disagree, but they know where it comes from.

It is very important that during the sharpest criticism on both sides, everybody can feel that you’re speaking from the position of pain and concern for your family—not from the position of claiming the moral high ground.

Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident and Israeli government minister, was the chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel from 2009-2018. His latest book is Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People, written with Gil Troy.

BLAKE FLAYTON American Jews should support the existence of Israel, full stop, bottom line.

American Jews should remain Zionists, and we should continue to fight for and believe in a Jewish and democratic state, which means we should continue to push for and believe in a two-state solution.

That does not mean that we should refrain from criticizing Israel when it is necessary. But at the same time, we need to unify against the campaign to undo Israel completely. We need to accept that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. We need to understand that Israel is the only homeland, only refuge, only place in the world where Jews call the shots.

And that’s precious. We need to unify in combating those who seek to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, whether they say it outright or call it other things, like a binational solution, which is a very naive geopolitical stance. And we need to make sure that idea does not make inroads into the Democratic Party, because that would mean a catastrophe, as we saw in the United Kingdom leading up to Jeremy Corbyn’s loss in 2019.

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of young grassroots anti-Zionist organizations that are making a significant impact on younger people, especially younger Jews, and I believe them to be a threat to American Jewish safety and security.

And this is the most important thing: We need to be able to call out antisemitism regardless of where it comes from on the political spectrum, regardless of who it comes from, regardless of race, gender, ideology, religion, etc. When it’s necessary, we also need to call our members of Congress and speak out against Israeli policies like home demolition, annexation or laws passed in the Knesset that favor one ethnic group in Israel over another. We need to make sure to speak out so that both the wider Jewish community and non-Jews in the United States know that we are able to see the nuance of this situation.

Blake Flayton is cofounder of the New Zionist Congress, a student group that believes in Zionism’s mission and its continuity today.

which is sanctified to all believers in God, has the potential of becoming the world center of peace and a house of prayer for all nations.

American Jews should speak up for all people to be able to pray and worship God peacefully on the Temple Mount.

I call upon American Jewry to join the call, to turn the Temple Mount into a place that represents inclusiveness, diversity and the ability to serve Hashem and to respect all people and the way they serve Hashem.

Yehuda Glick, an Orthodox rabbi and former member of Knesset, is president of the Shalom Jerusalem Foundation, which campaigns for expanding Jewish access to the Temple Mount.

American Jews need to unify in YEHUDA GLICK The way I understand the word of the combating those Torah, the essence or the mission of the who seek to wipe Jewish people is to actually live in Israel.

ALIDA JACOBS And therefore, I’d say that the first role of Israel off the face American Jewry, just like that of all other There is a moral responsibility for Jews, Jews, is to move to Israel and fulfill the as beneficiaries of the colonization of of the earth— destiny of the people of Israel to serve as Palestine, to reject the terms and revisionism of Zionism and to advocate a light unto the nations. whether they say Taking into consideration that most for Palestinian liberation. I think every are probably not going to be mov- person is responsible for everyone else, it outright or call it Jews ing to Israel in the near future, I would globally, but if a particular ethno-state other things, like a be very happy if American Jewry, which weaponizes one’s identity to commit heispeaks up very strongly and justly for nous crimes against humanity, one has a binational solution. allowing all Jews to pray at the Western greater responsibility to reject and obstruct American Jews should get into the business of “primarying” members of Congress who think that Zionism is racism and that Israel does not have the right to be a Jewish and democratic state, and work so that widely accepted definitions of antisemitism are adopted everywhere. American Jews also need to support young grassroots Zionist organizations. There are a handful 46

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Wall, would speak up similarly for permission for all people to be able to pray and worship God peacefully on the Temple Mount. It seems quite strange to me that American Jewry speaks loud and clear about allowing all Jews to be able to pray at the Western Wall, and at the same time criticizes people who want to encourage religious pluralism on the Temple Mount. The Temple Mount,

that. It’s common to find Jewish people in Palestinian-led organizing.

A big way young American Jews can exercise solidarity with Palestinians is by refusing to go on Birthright. It falsely presents Israel’s past and present in a bid to gain our material and political support, and frames American Jews as having a sole claim to the land. To be consistent, I don’t think I should visit Morocco, India,

Jews should respect the call from within Palestine for outsiders not to come to Israel/ Palestine at all. the Gulf states, or many other countries with gross human rights records and/ or instances of ongoing occupation or ethnocracy, especially given that tourist industries are often extremely exploitative of the environment and of local labor. So yes, I do hold other countries to the same standard as I hold Israel.

But there’s a specific call from within Palestine for outsiders not to come to Israel/Palestine at all, as part of BDS. That should be respected. Talking to family members is definitely another important undertaking for American Jews, because many of us have relatives who are Zionists. Changing the minds of people around us is one of our main responsibilities. We have to clarify Israel’s history and its current role in the world, and position the Palestinian cause in conjunction with other causes, like feminism and environmentalism, and alongside the many other instances of occupation and colonialism around the world, past and present.

Alida Jacobs founded the Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) chapter at the University of California, Davis. This past year, the group worked to pass a BDS resolution calling on their school to divest from Raytheon, Viola Environments and Caterpillar.

RUTH K. WESTHEIMER I never talk about politics, but I do believe that all of us Jews, and especially

those of us who live a wonderful life in the United States, have an obligation to make sure that Israel is safe and at least supported. My two feet are very much in the Jewish world, and every day I think about Israel. I never forget that Israel accepted me in 1945, no questions asked, no money. I lived on a kibbutz.

Any Jew who comes to Israel is accepted with open arms. Today, with the influx of refugees around the world, this is an important lesson for other countries. We also have an obligation to raise money for scholarships for universities there.

We are obligated because we live in a country where we can raise money rather easily.

Young people should go to Israel on a program like Birthright Israel and hopefully find someone to marry.

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My advice to young people is to go to Israel on a program like Birthright Israel, because it is an experience they’ll never forget. It’s important for young people to have that connection with Judaism in general and with Israel in particular. You have to say to them the Hanukkah phrase, Nes gadol haya sham, a great miracle occurred in 1948. I was there in Jerusalem when Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv declared the State of Israel. And one more thing, I hope that people who go on Birthright find somebody to get married to. I want to see more marriages and more babies. It’s a wonderful way for single people to find partners.

Ruth K. Westheimer is a sex therapist, author and TV personality. A Holocaust survivor sent on the Kindertransport to Switzerland, she served in the Haganah in Palestine in 1948. ​​ NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 | MOMENT

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t the Houston Street café where he waited on tables, the patrons anglicized his name from Andor to Andrew and had him repeat their orders so they could listen to his Hungarian accent. He responded to their friendly bantering with a shrug of his shoulders and a shy smile. New York was a good place for a 24-year-old man in the summer of 1960. The café was filled with pretty girls who flirted when he served them coffee, but he was too self-conscious about his broken English and unfashionable clothes to return their attention. Back in the one-room apartment he rented in an aging building off Washington Square, he brooded about his foreignness, lack of confidence and the crippling depression that would descend on him without warning.

I’d noticed Andrew several times since moving in across the hall at the beginning of the school year, but we’d never spoken.

Then one rainy afternoon, I was practicing Chopin’s “Polonaise” on my piano and looked up to see him in the open doorway, silhouetted in a wash of yellow light from the hallway. He was standing very still, head tilted to one side, eyes closed. For a moment, I thought he’d come to complain about the noise, but then I sensed the power of his concentration. When he realized I had stopped playing and was watching him, he straightened, nodded and backed away.

o t ra aA

n Ro by

I didn’t see him again for several weeks. My music classes, practice for my fall recital and my job at a Greenwich Village bookstore kept me busy, and I didn’t have much time for a social life.

I’d come to Manhattan from Rochester on a music scholarship, but the talent that blazed so brightly in upstate New York soon paled in the stiff competition of the big city. At the age of 21, I was struggling to accept that I’d always be a good, rather than a great, musician. Three days before my recital, Andrew knocked on my door and handed me a long-stemmed red rose.

“To thank you for your very wonderful music,” he said, in a halting, formal voice. My cheeks flamed.

He smiled, and his face softened from world-weary man to pleased boy. “I have not heard Chopin for many years.”

I looked at him. He had thick black hair that curled low on his forehead, gray eyes, about five ten with broad shoulders and strong arms. He wore rumpled blue pants, a baggy fisherman’s sweater and scuffed leather shoes.

“I’m Emily Feldman.” I held out my hand. He hesitated and then took it.

“Andrew Weiss.”

When I invited him in, he backed off with a muttered excuse, but several days later, I caught him listening at my door and drew him inside with promises of more music and hot coffee. As I came to know him, he puzzled me. His moods rose and fell like the tide. He spent a great deal of time alone, yet it was obvious that he craved company, so we fell into the habit of meeting in my apartment, beside the piano. Always, it was the same. He’d sit on my sagging sofa, lean back, close his eyes and then drift to another time and place. It was many months before I learned where he went on those journeys.

andor weiss was born in budapest in 1935. His father was a prom-

inent physician, his mother, Esther, a renowned beauty who had died in childbirth. To Dr. Weiss, Andor was the constant reminder of a loss he couldn’t accept. As he grew, Andor chafed at his father’s NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 | MOMENT

49

resentment and endured the ministrations of his stepmother, Marta, a stern woman, devoid of humor or warmth. Marta never accepted that she’d been brought into the elegant Weiss home to tend to Andor and provide a respectable outlet for Dr. Weiss’s sexual needs. She chose instead to believe that she would have been loved, if only Andor hadn’t stood between herself and her husband.

be who you are,” he almost shouted as he hammered the mezuzah into place.

I stared at him, surprised at his vehemence. “You are lucky, you were born here,” he said in a softer voice. Lifting my hand, he kissed my fingertips, then guided them to the mezuzah; brought my hand back to his lips and kissed it again. “Now your home is kosher.”

1940, hungary joined the axis powers.

Dr. Weiss was drafted into the army, leaving four-year-old Andor with Marta. Dr. Weiss was discharged after two years, then six months later, re-drafted, only this time he was sent to a labor camp. After he left, Andor’s life fell into a cheerless routine marked by Marta’s dutiful care. His only joy came each summer when his stepmother took him on a 60-mile train ride east to visit his mother’s family in Szolnok. In June 1943, Marta told Andor that she wasn’t taking him to Szolnok that year and, for the first time in his life, he rebelled. Throwing himself on the floor of his room, he kicked his heels and sobbed, refusing to eat until Marta threw up her hands and shouted that it was worth the discomfort of the trip to be rid of him for two months.

During the two-hour train ride, Andor sat on the hard seat, staring through soot-encrusted windows at the passing countryside and dreaming of the wonderful days ahead. When the train reached Szolnok, he bolted onto the platform and ran into his grandmother’s arms, laughing and chattering with excitement while she covered his face with kisses.

“Let me look at you,” she cried, tears streaming down her wrinkled cheeks. “Such a big boy. But too thin.” She fixed Marta with an accusing gaze. “You don’t feed him.”

“I feed him, when he does me the favor of eating.” Marta handed a battered leather valise to his grandmother, tucked a strand of faded brown hair into the bun at the nape of her neck, and sat on a bench to wait for the train back to Budapest.

Andor’s grandparents lived in a rambling house with his aunt, uncle and in

in rochester, i was acutely aware of

being Jewish. My parents had immigrated to the United States from Poland in 1932, and I was embarrassed by their accents and their old-fashioned ideas. There were only a few Jewish children in our school, and we all belonged to the same small synagogue, where we celebrated Sabbaths and holidays. But it was Christmas that I coveted, resenting my parents for not having a tree and jumping with joy when my Protestant friend Laurel invited me to help decorate hers.

I loved spending time at Laurel’s house.

The Crawfords ate thinly sliced roast beef, pink and moist in the center, soft white bread and fluffy mashed potatoes.

My family liked rye bread, cabbage soup and garlicky sausage. And clothes. Laurel dressed in pleated wool skirts and matching sweater sets, while I wore homemade dresses and hand-knit sweaters. Once I was in New York, I was determined to be like Laurel. I tried new foods and spent hours in Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s searching out skirts and sweaters on sale. I hung out with other music students and refused to join Hillel, the Jewish student organization, because it reminded me of the youth group back home. When Andrew discovered that I was Jewish, he bought me a blue enameled mezuzah, a metal tube containing a scroll with the biblical commandment to “write the words of God on the gates and doorposts of your house.”

“Because every Jewish home must have one on its doorpost,” he answered in response to my protests. I tried to explain that I didn’t want to announce my religion, and he became angry. “Be grateful you can 50

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021

“BE GRATEFUL YOU CAN BE WHO YOU ARE,” HE ALMOST SHOUTED AS HE HAMMERED THE MEZUZAH INTO PLACE. four cousins—an emotional brood who shouted when they spoke, laughed often and stuffed him with delicacies like goose liver and apple strudel. Watching his grandmother light the Sabbath candles, her face wreathed in candlelight, sitting beside his grandfather in the synagogue or playing with his cousins in his grandparents’ flower-filled garden, he felt loved and protected. When Marta reappeared in August, he had to be dragged from his grandmother’s arms.

“Why can’t I stay with Bubbe?” he pleaded, as the train rumbled between golden fields of ripened wheat.

“Because your father wants you to go to school in Budapest.” Marta folded her hands in her lap. Andor gazed out the window, resigning himself to another barren year.

andrew and i had become friends these

past months, although I was still uncomfortable with his moodiness and awkward mannerisms. He was saving every penny to complete his studies, which had been interrupted in 1956 by the Hungarian Revolution, so we’d meet for walks or he’d drop by my room to see the news on my television. He wanted to be a teacher, he said, to work with young people and help

MOMENT FICTION

form their lives. So I was stunned when, on the day of my winter recital, he brought me a dozen long-stemmed red roses that must have cost him many meals.

“Why do you bring me roses?” I asked as we walked through Central Park on a gray Sunday afternoon in December. A light dusting of snow frosted the ground, and bare tree branches formed a skeletal canopy over our heads.

“Because music and flowers belong together like one soul.” Andrew stuffed his hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders against the wind. His hair was powdery with snow, and the tips of his ears and nose glowed red from the cold.

I stopped and faced him. “You’re a romantic, Andrew Weiss. You must have learned it at an early age.” I placed a hand on his arm and, for a moment, I thought he was going to kiss me. I was surprised at the wave of disappointment that washed over me when he didn’t.

crystal vase on the grand piano in the parlor.

After her death, her husband emptied the vase, enshrouded the silent instrument in a yellowing lace shawl and locked the door.

One night in March 1944, Andor awoke to loud voices. Slipping from bed, he crept down the hall and crouched outside the parlor. Marta was sitting on the sofa with her sister Agnes, Agnes’s husband Tibor and Tibor’s sister Edith. Edith’s husband Karl sat facing them across a low mahogany table set with the Weiss family’s antique silver tea service. Tibor was speaking.

“You’re not to take the boy to Szolnok.

Things are not good in the east. I hear the authorities are putting the Jews into ghettos. It is safer in Budapest.”

“Only until the Germans come.” Marta

slammed her fist on the table. “Then we’ll all be in the ghetto.”

Agnes took Marta’s hand. “Marta, my dear. It won’t come to that. In the villages, the Jews live like they’re already in a ghetto. All the police have to do is put a fence around them. In Budapest, we’re Hungarians.” She waved at the sparkling crystal prisms dripping from a chandelier over the piano. “We are a distinguished family with Austrian roots. Tibor and Karl are Christian. Your husband is a doctor. You need not worry, Marta. We will be safe.”

“I don’t look Jewish.” Marta raised her small, pinched nose into the air. “But the boy. The dark hair and skin. And with a boy how can you hide....?” She lowered her eyes and blushed. “The circumcision,” she whispered. “It will give us all away.”

Tibor walked around the table and stood over her. “Marta, stop worrying. Regent Horthy will honor the Axis alliance and keep the Germans out of Hungary. The brown shirts will do their mischief in the villages, and someday this war will end and we will all get on with our lives.”

They continued talking while Andor tiptoed back to his room, crept into bed and pulled the soft eiderdown quilt over his head. Lying on his back, he cupped his hand around his penis, feeling the smooth place where the foreskin had been cut away when he was a tiny baby. At school last week, a group of boys had tormented him, pulling down his pants and calling him a dirty Jew. And now his stepmother said his circumcision would give them all away.

Andor wasn’t sure what she meant, but he could tell it was something bad. Curling into a ball, he clamped his hands over the terrible thing between his legs and cried himself to sleep.

Marta had been especially irritable while walking him to school the next morning.

The streets were crowded; big trucks filled with soldiers rattled over the cobblestones;

A WINNER OF THE 2020 MOMENT MAGAZINE-KARMA FOUNDATION SHORT FICTION CONTEST

Founded in 2000, the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction contest was created to recognize authors of Jewish short fiction. The 2020 stories were judged by Israeli-American author Ruby Namdar. Moment Magazine and the Karma Foundation are grateful to all of the writers who took the time to submit their stories. Visit momentmag.com/ fiction to learn more about the contest.

esther weiss kept fresh roses in a

people scurried in and out of buildings. In class, his teacher looked frightened and her hand shook as she wrote the date on the blackboard: March 14, 1944. When the final bell rang at three o’clock, she almost pushed the students out the door. Andor waited on the front steps, as he always did, but his stepmother didn’t come, so after an hour he tucked his school books under his arm and walked home alone.

When he reached the apartment, the door was open; the rooms strangely silent.

Andor walked down the hall and into the kitchen. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink.

That was unusual because Marta was an immaculate housekeeper. He called her name, but no one answered. She must be out looking for me, he thought, his heart pounding as he walked towards his stepmother’s bedroom. The doors to her bureau were open and clothes were strewn all over the floor. Andor peered into the wardrobe. Her dresses, shoes and fur coat were gone. So was the leather valise.

Andor crossed the hall to his room. The bed hadn’t been made, so he slipped under the quilt and curled up very tight.

He awoke to cold darkness and a hollow ache in his stomach. In the kitchen, he found half a loaf of bread hardening on the counter. He stood on a chair to reach it, tore it into pieces and ate the whole thing, then slid down to the floor and sat, his arms wrapped around his legs, chin resting on his knees, staring at the hallway, waiting for someone to come and find him.

By morning, it was obvious that Marta wasn’t coming back. He looked up from where he’d fallen asleep on the floor and saw Mrs. Levy, the Weiss’s neighbor, staring at him from the open doorway. She wore a brown wool dress that made her round body look like a water barrel, and her black hair billowed around her face like a puff of smoke.

“Oy, she left you!” she cried pulling him to his feet and clamping him to her chest.

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MOMENT FICTION

“That brother-in-law, the goy, Karl, he came and she left with him, to escape the Germans.” Andor’s face was pressed into her bosom and he couldn’t breathe. He wriggled out of her grasp.

“Why didn’t she wait for me and take me with her? Is it because of my thing?” he sobbed, pointing to his pants.

Mrs. Levy wrapped him in her arms and led him to her apartment, calling down curses on Marta’s head, while assuring him that his father’s parents would soon come for him. The following morning, German troops stormed the building.

during the second semester, andrew

increased his hours at the café, and I spent more time preparing for my spring recital, but we still met for coffee once or twice a week. Beth and Carla, my closest friends, called him my sexy Hungarian boyfriend, but the more they questioned our relationship, the more defensive I became.

In March, Andrew took me to see the movie West Side Story for my birthday.

Afterward, we came back to my room.

I made omelets, we sipped the wine he’d brought and watched the Ed Sullivan Show.

Bob Hope was on, and when he told a story about entertaining troops in France during the war, I commented that it must have been very exciting and I wished I’d been there. Andrew’s reaction stunned me.

“How can you be so stupid!” he shouted, jumping to his feet. “You think, maybe, the war, it was a picnic? Like this?” He pointed contemptuously at the food spread out on the coffee table.

I lashed back. “People here suffered too.

We had rationing. Sometimes we couldn’t get butter or meat,” I said, parroting a comment I’d heard from my parents and their friends. “And my mother had to use makeup on her legs because she couldn’t get stockings.”

“Stockings!” Andrew’s face twisted into an expression of contempt. “You’re like all the rest. You think the war was a John Wayne movie. You ask about Hungary but don’t want to know what really happened and even when you hear the truth, you 52

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021

never understand,” he shouted. Then he turned abruptly and stalked out of the room.

andor hugged his arms to his chest.

It was freezing in the attic. His clothes were the lightweight shirt and pants he’d been wearing that morning, when Mrs. Levy pushed him through the trapdoor in her bedroom ceiling and slammed it shut with a warning to be very quiet and stay hidden, no matter what he heard downstairs. He’d lain on the floor, his ear pinned to a crack in the boards listening to angry voices, shouts, then gunshots and screams. When Mrs. Levy cried out, he crawled toward the opening, wanting to climb down and help her. Then, recalling her instructions, he backed up, holding his breath lest the sound of his breathing give him away. The sticky threads of a cobweb brushed his face and he gasped, clamping his hand over his mouth to muffle the sound. After a while, it became quiet, but he stayed where he was.

To keep up his spirits, he played memory games: recalling the stories his bubbe had told him and writing silent letters to his father, begging him to come home and find him. Hours passed and he fell asleep, waking in terror as something soft and furry scampered over his arm. After that he sat upright, sleepless, peering into the musty darkness, forcing himself not to cry.

After a few awkward moments, we chatted lightly, as if nothing had happened, but I was careful not to mention the war.

“did someone in your family play the piano?” I was practicing the “Polonaise” in preparation for the spring concert, and my hands ached with the effort. The window was open and the soft May breeze, rich with the spicy aroma of new grass and budding trees, mixed with the city smells of gasoline and garbage. Andrew leaned over my shoulder and gently massaged my fingers. I blushed and pulled my hand away.

Andrew gave me a puzzled look, and then he started playing a snippet of the Chopin.

I stared at him in surprise. “I didn’t know you could play.”

He slid beside me on the bench and picked out a few more notes. “My mother played,” he informed me in a gruff voice.

“Did she teach you?”

“She died when I was born.” He looked so sad I ached to hold him.

“Then who played for you, Andrew?”

“A friend.”

“A girlfriend?” I teased.

“No,” he whispered, staring at his hands.

“A woman. A good, kind woman.”

he stayed in the attic two days until

i didn’t see andrew for two weeks

after our fight. I was furious at him for ruining my birthday and he, in turn, avoided me. Then one evening, I came home to find him in the hallway, slouched against the wall opposite my door.

“Hi.” I gave him a hesitant smile as my resentment evaporated. “The news is almost on.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and studied his shoes. “I’m practicing a new piece. I need someone to listen and tell me how it sounds.” I smiled again, and this time he responded. He followed me inside and sat in his usual corner of the couch while I made coffee.

hunger forced him from his hiding place.

He waited until night, and then crept through the dark narrow space that housed the pipes that connected the apartments until he found a second trap door leading to his father’s apartment. Marta kept extra food in a pantry beside the kitchen.

Rummaging through the shelves, he found salami, crackers and a jar of pickles. He cut off a hunk of the salami and ate it with the crackers. Then, still hungry, he pried open the pickle jar and jumped in terror when it slipped from his hands and crashed to the floor. There were footsteps, the doorknob rattled, then a wedge of light cracked the darkness and he was staring at a woman wrapped in a pink chenille bathrobe. She

was about Marta’s age, short and plump with light blue eyes and a hunk of pale blonde hair twisted into a coil on top of her head.

“Mein Gott!” The woman’s hands flew to her heart. Andor shrank into the shadows, but she grasped his arm and drew him into the light. Kneeling down, she studied his face. Her eyes were kind and she smelled like flowers. Andor started crying.

“Shh, I won’t hurt you,” she said in German-accented Hungarian. The compassion in her voice calmed him. “Where have you been hiding?”

Andor pointed to the ceiling. The woman looked up and nodded, then glared at the broken pickle jar. “We must clean this and get you food.” She wiped his tears with a lace handkerchief. “I did not want to live here,” she insisted, as she swept the broken glass into a dustpan. “But the Jews are gone and we were assigned this apartment.” Her voice quavered. “Now you must go back to the attic before my Hans comes home. We will work out a signal between us so you will know when it is safe to come down.”

Her name was Ilsa, and her husband was a German officer. She hid Andor in the attic where he waited until the notes of Chopin’s “Polonaise” signaled him to descend. She warned him that Jews were being rounded up and made him understand that the merest creak of a floorboard could spell his doom. She gave him an old sweater and some blankets and he spent hours wrapped in them, lying absolutely still until his bladder felt like it would explode and his legs went numb. When Ilsa signaled, he’d crawl to the trap door on his hands and knees, and then drop down into the apartment, where she fed him, combed his hair and told him how brave he was. Then Andor would follow her to the living room and sit beside her at the grand piano. The lace cover was folded back, and his mother’s vase was filled with roses. Ilsa taught him scales and a few simple pieces, and Andor almost believed that life was normal, until the sound of booted feet sent him scurrying back to the attic.

in june, i left for rochester. i didn’t

“IN THE VILLAGES, THE JEWS LIVE LIKE THEY’RE ALREADY IN A GHETTO. ALL THE POLICE HAVE TO DO IS PUT A FENCE AROUND THEM. IN BUDAPEST, WE ARE HUNGARIANS.” want to go, but my parents insisted I come home for the summer. Andrew encouraged me, saying that family was the most important thing in life. I’d pieced most of his story together by then, carefully pulling it from him, one fact at a time. His father died in a slave labor camp in Russia, his Weiss grandparents in the Budapest ghetto and the entire Szolnok clan in Auschwitz. Only Marta returned, claiming the apartment and, reluctantly, the stepson she’d abandoned to the Nazis. When the Communists took over Hungary in 1948, the apartment was appropriated by a party official. Marta placed Andor in a high school dormitory and moved in with her sister. I asked about Ilsa and was startled to see his eyes fill with tears. Hans found out that she was hiding him and turned them both over to the Gestapo.

“What happened?” I asked, fear tightening my voice. I watched him and waited for an answer. When he finally spoke, his

eyes remained moist but his voice was firm.

“I was sent to the ghetto and never saw Ilsa again.” He cupped my face in his hands and kissed me gently on the forehead. “Go home, Emily. Go to your family and enjoy them.”

that summer was the first time in

my life I questioned my parents about their lives in Europe. They’d grown up in Krakow and immigrated to the United States a year after they were married, leaving both their families behind. When I asked about their relatives, I was met with silence. I asked again and my father took me aside and, in a quavering voice, told me that the entire family had been murdered by the Nazis. “It is only luck that we weren’t with them,” he said, his eyes glistening as he drew me close. A shiver snaked up my Continue on page 58

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spine. I was born in 1939, the year Germany invaded Poland.

I spent the long train ride back to Manhattan thinking about my parents and the burden they’d carried all these years.

And I thought of Andrew and his terrible, hidden past. I closed my eyes and pictured him sitting next to me on the piano bench, felt my heart pounding as he massaged my fingers and guided my hands over the keys. And suddenly I knew. I loved him and I wanted to be with him. But when I knocked on his door, a young female student answered. Andrew had left and she was subletting the room. No, she didn’t know where he’d gone, only that he’d left in a great hurry.

Andrew and I had exchanged a few postcards over the summer, but he’d never mentioned leaving New York. I was furious that he’d disappeared without a word. What did I expect? I scolded myself. He was inconsiderate and self-centered. By the end of the school year, when my parents came for my final recital, I’d almost convinced myself that Andrew wasn’t worth my heartache.

I’d bought a new dress for the recital, white taffeta with a long skirt that swished around my ankles and a crimson sash that fastened at my waist with a red velvet rose.

Music has always been my passion and I immersed myself in it that night. I’d never played better and as I stood to take my bow, I realized the audience knew it too.

I searched for my parents but instead, my gaze was drawn to an elderly woman with a thin, wrinkled face and silver hair wound in a coil on top of her head. The dark-haired man sitting beside her smiled awkwardly, and I was engulfed by a wave of dizziness so strong that I had to lean against the piano for support.

There were three performances after mine but I didn’t hear a note. When the house lights finally came on, I pushed through the crowd to where the man and woman were standing. “Andrew.”

Forgetting my anger, I threw my arms around him, almost knocking him off balance as he awkwardly returned my embrace.

Then I turned to the woman. “Ilsa?”

“Ja,” she nodded.

I gave Andrew a questioning look.

“I have been trying to find her since I left

Meet the

Hungary,” he explained, in an apologetic voice. “I had almost given up, and then in August, the Red Cross notified me that she was in a hospital in Hamburg.”

“And you went to Germany to get her.

Why didn’t you write?” People stared at me and I lowered my voice. “How could you just disappear like that? Without a word.” I blinked back tears.

“I thought you would not understand.”

“Understand what, Andrew? That you wanted to help the woman who saved your life? Did you think I wouldn’t appreciate what she means to you?”

“No. That helping her had to come first.

Before my studies,” he paused, “and, at that time, even before you.”

“And now? What about now, Andrew?”

He took my hand and suddenly I was crying and he was holding me. My head was against his chest, and I felt his heartbeat through the fabric of his shirt.

“I’m sorry, Emily,” he whispered. “You can forgive me?”

“I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t even speak to you.”

“Please, do not be angry with me. I promise I will not disappear again.”

He sounded so contrite, I started laughing.

“In that case, I forgive you.” I glanced over his shoulder. My parents had followed me and were standing in the aisle, watching us while they talked to Ilsa. I was surprised to hear my mother speaking German, amused by the hand gestures she used in place of the words she didn’t know. My father stood beside her, interjecting a phrase here and there, his hand resting lightly on her shoulder. Suddenly, I was filled with pride. I looked from my parents to Andrew and a rush of warmth flooded over me.

“Andrew, come and meet my family,” I said, taking his hand.

“I would like that. And then, Emily,” he said, with a fond look at Ilsa, “I will introduce you to mine.” M Rona Arato is an award-winning author of more than 20 children’s books including The Last Train, a Holocaust Story. Her latest book, AntiSemitism and the MS St. Louis, deals with Canada’s apology for turning away Jewish refugees in July 1939. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.

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talk of the table

A Tale of Two Briskets

BY DAN FREEDMAN

I

f you grew up in an Ashkenazi Jewish home, you might remember the delicious oven-baked brisket your mom served up for holidays. Maybe it was based on your grandmother’s—or great-grandmother’s—recipe, and you can picture it emerging from a low-temperature oven, steamy and bubbling, with the carrots and potatoes bobbing up and down in a sea of brownish-red gravy, the meat forming an irregular coastline of beefy tenderness.

But years later, you may have discovered another kind of brisket: Texas-style, bathed in spice rub and smoked with mesquite wood for 12 hours or more. The smoke permeated the meat, forming a thin red circle around the circumference. So juicy and 60

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moist—and smoky—you couldn’t believe what you were tasting. Was this the same meat as Grandma’s oven recipe? What sort of alchemy produces two such different results from the same cut?

Therein lies the enigmatic beauty of brisket. That a slab of beef from the tougher, less-desired cattle forequarter could travel two such widely divergent paths is a true “only-in-America” parable. And with apologies to Doc Watson, you can indeed love two and still be true.

In Jewish tradition, the front half of the steer is kosher; the back half is not. Where the line of demarcation runs is open to interpretation, but the absence of Jewish steakhouses serving sirloin is not surprising. The brisket comes from the front-end

chest of the bull—the animal’s “six pack,” says culinary historian and knife specialist Peter Hertzmann. Steers have a brisket adjacent to each of their front legs. With no collarbones, they rely instead on their strong pectoral muscles to hold up their front ends. The predictable result: a tough, grainy piece of meat. Once separated from the sternum and rib cage, a full brisket slab weighs 10 to 15 pounds. And here is the first of several forks in the road for Texas-style and “Grandma” briskets.

Each individual brisket typically is divided into two pieces, with a layer of fat running between them. The “first cut”—which butchers call the “flat”—is lean, with less interstitial fat. This is the basis of the traditional Ashkenazi recipe. It turns fork-tender after hours of percolating in gravy made from chili sauce, red wine or tomato puree.

The “second cut”—known to butchers as the “point”—is just the opposite: lots of fat, yielding proportionally less meat. But the meat is melt-in-your-mouth tender.

In the shtetls of the Old Country, keeping cattle over the lean winter months was costly, writes Gil Marks in The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. Instead, those not needed for milk, reproduction or labor were slaughtered. The brisket fell into the category of “Gedempte Fleysch” (well-stewed meat), according to cookbook author Joan Nathan.

The recipe for that well-stewed meat survived the trip across the Atlantic intact, and brisket became a special-occasion splurge.

Its succulent mass assured there would be plenty for everyone, a particularly potent symbol of abundance in the New World.

And there was plenty of variety: The Settlement Cookbook, the circa 1901 go-to recipe source for American Jews, contained several brisket recipes. Among them: “Brisket of beef with carrots” and “Brisket of beef with celery sauce.”

New products soon entered the American brisket repertoire: After Heinz got its kosher designation in 1927, ketchup and chili sauce were thrown in for flavor. And when Atlanta-based Coca-Cola got its kosher certification in 1935, brisket with Coke became popular among Southern Jews, who called the combination “Atlanta brisket.” Its sharp sweetness offset the tra-

And let’s not forget that American brisket begat two other Jewish meat delicacies: pastrami and corned beef. Pastrami has Romanian and Turkish roots but became a hit among Jews on this side of the ocean. It is from the “plate”—a fattier slab underneath the steer and adjacent to the brisket.

Corned beef was the Irish version of brisket, popularly paired with cabbage on St.

“

WHAT SORT OF ALCHEMY PRODUCES TWO SUCH DIFFERENT RESULTS FROM THE SAME CUT? Patrick’s Day. It, too, became part of the Jewish mainstream in melting-pot America.

But Texas-style and oven-baked Jewish-style remain the nation’s most popular brisket centerpieces. Their unlikely convergence may well be The Wandering Que, a kosher barbecue pop-up based in Hackensack, NJ. Founder Ari White grew up in El Paso, TX, and when he moved to New York, he couldn’t stop thinking about the delicious smoked meat back home— such as the glatt kosher brisket served at his bar mitzvah reception. He and his wife became the owners of a Washington Heights deli, and White started smoking kosher Texas-style brisket in a back alley.

Soon, the deli evolved into a catering business, which now serves brisket through the Northeast. In White’s opinion, traditional brisket doesn’t compare to Texas style. “It’s not even close,” he says. “They’re not even in the same league.”

But as a practical matter, the Grandma style may be a better bet if you live in the Northeast or Midwest. A home-style barrel smoker has to work twice as hard in frigid temperatures, climate change notwithstanding. Your Texas-style brisket might take much longer than 12 hours to reach perfection. I know this from bitter experience.

But whichever style you choose, it’s impossible to go wrong, insists Joan Nathan: “Nobody doesn’t love brisket.”

GRANDMA’S BRISKET Serves 8

ingredients

1 2 1 1 1 1/2 1 1 1 1

1/4 2 6-8 6-8 2

4-5 pound brisket garlic cloves, peeled and chopped Spanish or yellow onion, sliced cup red wine cup chili sauce cup chipotle ketchup (or chili sauce or regular ketchup) can of crushed tomatoes (10 or 15 ounces) bay leaf sprig fresh rosemary (or dried) sprig fresh thyme (or dried) cup parsley, chopped stalks of celery, chopped carrots, peeled and sliced small potatoes, skins on tablespoons vegetable oil Salt and pepper to taste

instructions

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Sprinkle the brisket with salt and pepper and heat the oil. Put the garlic in the hot oil for a few seconds before adding the brisket. Sear for two minutes a side.

2. Spread onions in the bottom of a large casserole and place the brisket (with the garlic, if you like, on top) fat side up. Cover with crushed tomato, chili sauce, chipotle ketchup (if using), wine, celery, bay leaf, thyme and rosemary.

3. Cover and bake for three hours, basting occasionally. Add parsley, carrots and potatoes, then immerse in the gravy. Cook uncovered 30 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender.

4. Take the casserole out of the oven and put a fork in the brisket. If it feels tender and the fork comes out of the meat with a light pull, it is “fork tender,” as Joan Nathan puts it.

5. Brisket is ready to serve. It is best when you take out most of the gravy, slice the meat, put the slices back in the casserole and cover it all with the gravy.

Recipe by Dan Freedman, adapted from grandmother Rose B. Kohl (1899-1998).

THERMOPRO/UNSPLASH; WIKIMEDIA; JACOB STONE/UNSPLASH; KEEPING IT SIMPLE BLOG

ditional brisket’s savory qualities, including salt, pepper and onions. Condensed mushroom soup and onion-soup mix also became popular brisket flavorings.

But down in Texas, the burgeoning cattle industry viewed brisket as an undifferentiated part of the less-desirable beef forequarter. The preferred sirloins, ribeyes and rib roasts were put on rail cars to Kansas and Chicago, while the lesser cuts became the basis for local barbecue.

There are competing barbecue origin stories. The most accepted is that German and Czech immigrants simply adapted their native-land methods for smoking pork to readily available inexpensive cuts of beef cattle. Another is that butchers smoked forequarter meats as take-out food primarily for Mexican farmworkers, who wanted beef to eat on the spot, says barbecue writer and historian Robb Walsh. But Daniel Vaughn, barbecue editor of Texas Monthly, has found intriguing evidence suggesting that “smoked brisket” in the early 20th century came about, in part, when Texas butchers started offering it to Jewish customers.

Whatever origin story you choose to believe, by the 1960s the once undesirable forequarter was the dish of choice at Lyndon B. Johnson’s ranch barbecues. The president’s caterer, Walter Jetton, singled out brisket as his preferred cut. Walsh’s Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook contains Jetton’s “Barbecued beef for 250,” which calls for 35 briskets, about 10 pounds each.

And the meat industry got the message: They were soon boxing up individual cuts of beef such as brisket, replacing the shipment of half-carcasses in refrigerated boxcars. “Making these inexpensive cuts of beef delicious,” says Walsh, “is what made Texas barbecue famous.”

Brisket is by no means unique to U.S. culinary culture. Vietnamese pho soup has a brisket version. And brisket is a favorite in Chinese stewed or braised beef recipes.

Mexican-born Pati Jinich, host of “Pati’s Mexican Table” on PBS, has a recipe for “beef brisket in pasilla and tomatillo sauce” in her cookbook, Pati’s Mexican Table. Jinich is Jewish, and she suggests trying her version “in place of your favorite brisket for the Jewish High Holidays.”

literary moment BOOK REVIEW ROBERT SIEGEL

THE POLITICS OF PARANOIA, THEN AND NOW

A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism

By Edward H. Miller University of Chicago Press, 464 pp., $30.00

WIKIPEDIA

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lmost a half-century before Donald Trump signed on to the fraudulent notion that President Barack Obama’s American citizenship and constitutional legitimacy were suspect, Robert Welch (18991985) reached an equally alarming conclusion about the president of his day, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. Unable to imagine any other explanation for what he saw as the globalist and insufficiently militant policies of the general who had commanded D-Day, whose patriotism was unquestioned by most Americans, he reasoned that Eisenhower was, in fact, a knowing agent of the Soviet Union and international Communism. To Welch, that explained why the United States 62

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was, in his view, losing the Cold War so badly. In 1954, he wrote a long letter that evolved into a book, The Politician, that argued as much. As Welch wrote in a later introduction to the book, it was “not possible to lose so much ground, so rapidly to an enemy so inferior by chance or by stupidity.” It had to be purposeful.

It is commonly said that Welch, who founded the far-right John Birch Society and epitomized a hyper-suspicious, conspiratorial view of Communism, was purged from the ranks of respectable American conservatism by the likes of William F. Buckley, founder of the National Review, who read The Politician when it was still in letter form and told Welch of his strong disagreement. The Eisenhower accusation was just too much.

But the John Birch Society survived, its membership eventually rising to the tens of thousands, though never much higher.

Edward H. Miller’s eye-opener of a biography claims that reports of Welch’s banishment have been greatly exaggerated—at least when measured by the enduring influence of his thinking.

Miller argues that today’s politics of factfree conspiracies owe much to Welch, an interesting character who (paranoid conspiracy theories aside) was a serious player in conservative politics from the 1950s through to the 1980s. He emerges from Miller’s telling as an example of the symbiosis of anti-tax, anti-regulation Main Street businessmen, anti-Communist ideologues and social conservatives who helped shape the modern GOP. Born in 1899 to a North Carolina farming family, Robert Welch, Jr. was tutored by his adoring mother and displayed unusual intellectual gifts. He entered the University of North Carolina at age 12 and went on to attend the U.S. Naval Academy and Harvard Law School. He and his brother founded a prosperous candy company, which led him to decades of activism and pamphleteering for the National Association of Manufacturers.

Welch had a personal library of 5,000 books, and whether or not it was true, as he claimed, that he had read them all, he was certainly erudite. When he argued

against the continuation of wartime price controls in the postwar 1940s, his examples of rulers who erred by intervening in their economies included Hammurabi and the third-century Roman emperor Diocletian.

The fault in this hardcore paleoconservative’s intellect was his inability to reconcile his sense of what he deemed rational and patriotic with realities that flew in the face of it. For Welch, FDR’s New Deal was a catastrophic descent into collectivization and regimentation, as dangerous as Nazism and Stalinism.

He saw the United Nations as an embryonic world government into which the United States was to be incorporated and demoted to a mere province.

When the United States went to war in Korea under U.N. auspices, Welch’s anger was mollified only by the fact that the commander of the “U.N. police action” was General Douglas MacArthur, who was, in Welch’s view, a modern-day George Washington. Truman’s dismissal of MacArthur, Miller writes, “revolutionized Robert’s thinking.” He quotes Welch from his unsuccessful 1950 campaign for the Republican nomination for Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts explaining that, until that moment, he had not been running as an anti-Communist but as an anti-Socialist, fearful of the United States following, not a Soviet model, but that of Britain’s postwar Labour Party government: It was not until the firing of MacArthur... that I became convinced that the danger from the Communist conspiracy was far more important, urgent, and immediate than the parallel, interlocking, but far less rigidly organized efforts of the ADA and the

For Welch, FDR’s New Deal was a catastrophic descent into collectivization and regimentation, as dangerous as Nazism and Stalinism.

ILO [Americans for Democratic Action and the International Labor Organization] and similar groups—always with Communist backing, to carry socialism in our country as far as possible by Fabian procedures.

As Miller notes, many other Republicans were also appalled by Truman’s firing of MacArthur. It marked for them a giant step in the steady surrender of Asia to the Communists. What, then, to make of Washington policymakers—Truman, Gen. George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson—who were directing or abetting this policy of surrender? What to make of the Republicans’ 1952 rejection of the presidential ambitions of Ohio Senator Robert Taft, leader of the party’s midwestern Main Street right wing, in favor of Eisenhower, whom Truman would have gladly seen as his Democratic successor? Eisenhower was a favorite of the party’s more centrist Wall Street wing, and he brought an old soldier’s wariness of battle to the notion of a shooting war with China. Like many Republicans (and many Catholic Democratic voters, too) Welch greatly admired Senator Joseph McCarthy. But the nascent medium of television made him and others witnesses to McCarthy’s undoing.

The Eisenhower years would bring further developments that Welch found inexplicable and alarming. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, and then Sputnik II, with a dog named Laika aboard. By that time, political realities ran counter to all that Welch held dear. He could only understand them as being the spurious work product of traitors.

As Miller writes: Welch never believed that the Soviets had a space program at all; he thought both incidents hoaxes. Welch concluded that the Soviets either stole the technology from Americans or treasonous conspirators in the United States launched the satellites for them.

Welch would later blame the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

John Birch Society advertisement in New Jersey in the 1980s.

on Communists. In his view, the civil rights movement was a Communist plot designed to provoke a race war that would debilitate the United States.

Over the years, Welch would soften the accusations that he had made in the 1954 letter. His allegation that Eisenhower had led an undercover life as a Soviet agent gave way to a broader assault on the perfidy of Insiders, epitomized by members of the Council on Foreign Relations. Richard Nixon, he believed, was part of it all—a self-seeking faux conservative who took his orders from Nelson Rockefeller, the leader of the GOP’s moderate Eastern wing. Throw in those favorites of conspiracy theorists left and right, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, and you had an early version of the Deep State.

In 1959, Welch proposed the idea of an organization devoted to fighting Communism to 11 businessmen at a meeting in Indianapolis (among them Fred Koch, father of the conservative Koch brothers). It was the founding meeting of the John Birch Society, named for a Protestant missionary killed by Chinese Communists and politically beatified as the Cold War’s first victim.

In the last years of Welch’s life and

activism, he seized upon social issues, opposing the Equal Rights Amendment, loosened sexual mores and the growing tolerance for homosexuality. He saw the last as reflecting a Communist plot to promote gay people to positions of authority so as to then blackmail them. The openly gay John Maynard Keynes, he claimed, was accorded influence precisely because of his sexual orientation.

Several lessons from Miller’s biography of Welch are worth remembering. First: The politics of paranoia and wingnut conspiracy theories are alive and well in the age of the alleged theft of the 2020 election.

Whatever purging may have been done by more respectable conservatives, such politics have a natural constituency among those who feel baffled and betrayed by history, who have mastered the challenges of their times only to be told that times have changed and their mastery is obsolete. The allure of such ideas is not confined to the unlettered and underemployed. Welch’s 1954 letter that grew into his accusation of treason was written at the suggestion of a fellow attendee at a National Association of Manufacturers meeting, the MIT-educated Howard Pew, president of the Sun Oil Company. And for years, the John Birch Society was kept afloat financially by Texas NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 | MOMENT

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Columbia University School of the Arts Congratulates

Annette Insdorf brilliant writer, educator, colleague and Moment Magazine’s 2021 Creativity Award Winner

billionaire oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt.

Second, if you take away the loony conspiracies, Welch’s politics were common on the Republican right wing, if not at its center. McCarthy was the most popular Republican of his day. Even today, the notion that all that the American economy really needs is less regulation and lower taxes on business is conservative boilerplate. Leaders of the CIA and the FBI took the threat of Communist infiltration seriously for decades. As attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy (a onetime McCarthy aide) approved wiretapping Martin Luther King Jr. because of King’s suspected Communist ties.

Third, secrecy feeds conspiracy theories.

As Miller points out, it was hard to rebut Welch’s belief that Washington was tanking the Cold War when much of the U.S. policy of containment was covert. By the 1970s, when Congress exposed the Cold War excesses of the CIA, and the Pentagon Papers detailed previously secret U.S. actions in Vietnam, the claim that Truman and Eisenhower had been insufficiently 64

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anti-Communist became unsustainable. In their place, left-wing critiques asserting that both postwar Democrats and Republicans had been excessively militant Cold Warriors took on greater credibility. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in a book on secrecy, if only the Army had tipped off Truman that it had the goods on the diplomat Alger Hiss—that it could prove Hiss was, in fact, a Soviet agent—American liberals would not have spent decades deploring an alleged injustice that Welch’s crowd had gotten right. The army valued the secrecy of the decrypted Venona Cables, wartime communications between Moscow and its Washington embassy that showed Hiss’s guilt, over informing the sitting president.

If one approaches Robert Welch’s life expecting a sociopath, a narcissist, a con artist or a compulsive liar, Miller’s estimable book will disappoint. Nor should one expect an antisemite. He rejected the notorious antisemite Gerald L.K. Smith for missing the point: It was about opposing Communists, not Jews. He did not want his organization to be associated

with antisemitism: He broke off with the palindromically named Revilo Oliver, a white supremacist, antisemitic professor of philology at the University of Illinois— although Miller rightly observes that he should not have been traveling in Oliver’s orbit in the first place. But while the John Birch Society was lampooned as paranoid, its founder does not emerge as a madman in his private life. He was a loving and faithful husband who read widely and wrote poetry.

As adults, his sons recalled the formality of family dinners: suit and tie required, along with intelligent conversation, if not Spanish lessons. There is no hint that he embraced conspiratorial whoppers with tactical cynicism and insincerity; he believed it all, crazy as it was. The portrait that emerges is antique but neither hateful nor deranged.

The scariest lesson of Welch’s life is that the attachment to paranoid conspiracies as a way to explain the successes of disliked candidates and policies is still with us.

Robert Siegel is Moment’s special literary contributor.

LITERARY MOMENT

BOOK REVIEW ORI Z. SOLTES

BENEATH THE CITY OF GOD

Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Controversial City

By Andrew Lawler Penguin Random House, 464 pp., $32.50

T

he rabbinic tradition speaks of a Jerusalem above and a Jerusalem below. It imagines the earthbound city as a reflection of a heavenly one—the latter perfect and the former aspiring to perfection. The earthbound metropolis itself also has a dual personality: It is a sacred city, but one in which the profane, often ugly realities of everyday life play out. It is a city focused on a universal God of love that consistently yields expressions of schism and violence. Religion and politics have for two millennia found a particularly intense interplay in this city of contradictions, in which the shifting of a brick in an obscure neighborhood can yield cataclysmic consequences.

Andrew Lawler’s magisterial Under Jerusalem contributes a unique addition to the copious literature focused on the eternal city. He introduces another split in Jerusalem’s personality: the city above

ground, which drags the past into the present and sometimes glimpses the future; and its buried history, the Jerusalem below the ground, honeycombed with tunnels and chambers that attract spiritual and material archaeologists.

Lawler has plunged beneath the surface to the hidden under-city, searching for hints of Jerusalem above within Jerusalem below. In so doing, he has also translated its incessant politics into poetry. He weaves his narrative threads into a tight tapestry of historical and contemporary events, at once comic and tragic, viewed through the lens of the archaeological enterprise that began in the middle of the 19th century.

That story features a series of Christian European personalities who arrived with varied agendas, both religious and secular.

Some of those digging were determined to prove or disprove passages from the Bible or to locate the key paraphernalia from the destroyed Temple, whether they meant Solomon’s Temple, torched by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, or the Second Temple amplified by Herod and burned to the ground by the Romans in 70 CE. Sought-after objects included the “shew tables” that held Temple offerings, the menorah, the curtain hanging before the Holy of Holies, and the Ark of the Covenant with or without its stone tablets. Some sought the sepulcher of Christ; others engaged in a new crusade to wrest the Temple Mount—Noble Sanctuary, in Arabic—from the minds of the Muslims; others simply hoped to establish a definitive material chronology of civilizations that had held hegemony over Jerusalem.

Part I of Lawler’s narrative follows the vertical digging and horizontal tunneling, boldly by day or stealthily by night, of the intrepid explorers who burrowed within Jerusalem’s belly for a century, ranging from the French Louis-Felicien Joseph de Saulcy (1807-1880) to the British Kathleen Kenyon (1906-1978).

From the 1860s to the 1960s, these and many other individuals pushed their Sisyphean ambitions uphill as humanity expanded and imploded—experiencing industrial and scientific greatness, fin de siècle malaise and a horrifying taste for increasingly brutal wars. Meanwhile, the

old walled city of Jerusalem itself moved from Ottoman to British to Jordanian to Israeli political control.

Lawler’s fast-paced adventure-story account of what they did, what they found—and, more often, what they failed to find—yields to more recent stories of equally colorful characters. Israeli archaeologists, right-wing Israeli politicians and American entrepreneurs are among those who have broadened and deepened—pun intended—the topographical parameters of this enterprise. Complications included the more-than-occasional crises that arose from interaction with the local MuslimArab population, fearful and suspicious since 1863 as to what exactly these outsiders are really up to down there, digging around, potentially tunneling under the vast platform of the Noble Sanctuary.

Part II, accordingly, takes up the politics of religion and the religion of politics, the topography of history and the history of topography, and another, even longer list of professional and amateur archaeologists. After the Six-Day War in 1967, the former Temple platform and what lies beneath its surface became central to the larger discussion of Israel’s relations with its Arab neighbors, in particular the Palestinians. Lawler recounts how at one point—as negotiators after the 1993 Oslo Accords struggled to push past the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin and to birth a positive conclusion before the Clinton presidency ended—Dennis Ross, the lead U.S. negotiator, floated a proposal to offer the PLO authority for the surface structures on the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary (most notably, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque) while

Lawler introduces a split in Jerusalem’s personality: the city above ground, which drags the past into the present and sometimes the future; and its buried history.

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LITERARY MOMENT

LOC / MATSON PHOTO; WIKIMEDIA; LOC / ALFRED S. CAMPBELL

Clockwise from top: Some of Jerusalem’s underground sites: Solomon’s Stables, Siloam Pool and a tunnel along the Western Wall.

granting Israelis authority beneath its surface, so that further archaeological exploration might proceed. (Alas, this suggestion yielded no result.)

The life-and-death struggle for a lasting peace for earthbound Jerusalem (and its extended environs) transpires against the backdrop of persistent underground transformation. The Israelis extend the tunnel along the Western Wall of the Temple platform to exit along the Via 66

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Dolorosa; the Palestinians semi-clandestinely reshape “Solomon’s Stables” near the southeast corner of the platform as a mosque. Most notably, the murkily funded Elad organization sponsors the digging of a complex south of the platform—deep into areas thought to include the site of David’s small capital city and of the Siloam Pool, where Jesus supposedly healed a blind man—transforming it into an underground biblical Disneyland.

Throughout the book, public dramas intertwine with the private ones for which Jerusalem is renowned. An owner casually excavates the basement in his house or the back wall of his shop, which then yields some unpredictable archaeological, religious, legal or political complication— most often, all four. Lawler sees a deeper layer of meaning in another feature for which aboveground Jerusalem is renowned: “Jerusalem syndrome,” the local form of madness, in which an individual, usually a tourist, imagines himself a biblical prophet. The syndrome increased in frequency as the millennium approached; Lawler puts the surge into context, locating it within the larger madness of 160 years of lusting to possess and redirect the rivers of history flowing through this small hill town. Whatever their aim, seekers must wrestle with gravel and sludge, finding the occasional gold coins and the inevitable sewage.

I do have two minor complaints. One: In an otherwise nuanced and even-handed narrative, I think that the appropriately painful account of the destruction by the Israelis of the Mughrabi Quarter after 1967 should be preceded by a more than merely passing reference to the wholesale destruction of synagogues in the Jewish quarter by the Jordanians in 1949-67. Two: Given an Author’s Note in which Lawler demonstrates his awareness of language and its importance, it is distressing that he is not more careful to distinguish “Israelite” from “Judaean” from “Jew(ish)” and “Arab” from “Muslim”—both of which failures help perpetuate misconceptions regarding history and religion. But these complaints are minor compared to the overall power of his narrative. This is a spellbinding book— and a reminder that, just when one might have imagined that nothing new could be written about Jerusalem, there is still more to be found beneath its surface.

Ori Z. Soltes teaches across disciplines in the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University. He is the author of Untangling the Middle East: A Guide to the Past, Present and Future of the World’s Most Chaotic Region and teaches a course on “Jerusalem: City and Symbol.”

Books to Give—and Read

BY AMY E. SCHWARTZ resulting short essays are sparkling excursions into an alien, often wacky world where ancient rabbis debate when it becomes permissible for the priests in the Temple to eat the sacred offerings and whether a fetus is still the “firstborn” if it is swallowed in the womb by a weasel.

THE GOLEM AND THE JINNI, THE HIDDEN PALACE

by Helene Wecker Harper Perennial

These 2021 releases justify their shelf space.

COMING TO TERMS WITH AMERICA: ESSAYS ON JEWISH HISTORY, RELIGION AND CULTURE

by Jonathan D. Sarna

Jewish Publication Society

COME AND HEAR: WHAT I SAW IN MY SEVEN-ANDA-HALF-YEAR JOURNEY THROUGH THE TALMUD

by Adam Kirsch

Brandeis University Press

Literary critic Adam Kirsch knew he wasn’t going to be the average Talmud student when, in 2012, he embarked on the worldwide communal study tradition of Daf Yomi, in which students tackle a page of the Babylonian Talmud every day, finishing in seven and a half years. He wasn’t a yeshiva graduate or an Aramaic scholar, and he was reading alone, in English translation, and writing about it for the online magazine Tablet. But as a critic, Kirsch was on a quest to discover the “textual homeland” of Ashkenazi Jews. The

THE OTTOMANS: KHANS, CAESARS AND CALIPHS

by Marc David Baer Basic Books

If you prefer historical journeys for your adventures, there’s no better destination than Ottoman Istanbul. New histories of the Ottoman Empire appear regularly, and why not?

Its 600-year reign offers exotic

MOSHKELE THE THIEF: A REDISCOVERED NOVEL

by Sholom Aleichem. Translated from the Yiddish with an introduction by Curt Leviant Jewish Publication Society

Who’d have thought that the old master, whose Tevye the Dairyman stories famously form the basis for Fiddler on the Roof, had any more surprises for us after a century of rapt popular and scholarly attention to his work? Leviant, the translator, explains that the novella-length story, serialized in Yiddish in a Warsaw newspaper in 1903, was inexplicably never translated into English until now. And yet this 55-page gem is no trivial product, but a fully realized work, both heartrending and hilarious.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 | MOMENT

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MARISSA VONESH

The acclaimed historian Jonathan Sarna has pursued his investigations of the continuing encounter between Jews and the American experiment through nearly 30 books, and he keeps coming up with new insights.

This career-spanning collection of 12 of his most influential essays will illuminate things you half-knew about American Jewry, while filling in context you didn’t even know you were missing—from the contradictory and ambivalent views held about Jews by 18th- and 19th-century American thinkers to the much-contested addition of “prayers for the

government” to American Jewish prayer books.

Everyone’s heard of the golem, but not a golem like this—a gutsy, alluring female creature who, by a fluke during a sea voyage, escapes both the rabbi who created her and the “husband” for whom she was designed. And no folklorist ever thought of pairing her with a very different and yet compatible mythic figure from Arabic culture, a jinni of the desert. The first in this enchanting historical fantasy series came out in 2013; The Hidden Palace, just out, is the sequel, and it’s even better than the first. The golem and the jinni, who take the names Chava and Ahmed, are drawn together in turn-of-the-20thcentury New York City, where they're entangled with immigrants, scalawags and socialites, getting more human as their adventures progress.

landscape, political intrigue and events of enormous historical importance. Baer, a historian at the London School of Economics, shifts the focus from the traditional picture of the Ottomans as Christian Europe’s “Other,” painting a picture of a vast multilingual, multiethnic, multireligious conglomerate. Though not billed as Jewish history per se, that focus yields many fascinating chapters on the shifting fortunes of the Turkish Jewish community after the pivotal year of 1492, when the Sultan sent ships to retrieve Jews fleeing the Iberian Peninsula.

Baer’s tales include the destruction of Jewish neighborhoods under Selim I during a 16th-century religious revival, the lynching of a female Jewish lady-in-waiting who had corresponded with Elizabeth I of England, the rise and fall of the false messiah Shabbatai Zevi, and more.

LITERARY MOMENT

BOOK REVIEW CARLIN ROMANO

THE FIRST COVID COMEDY

Our Country Friends

By Gary Shteyngart Random House, 336 pp., $28

Three snippets of dialogue from an autumn novel: So Masha told me to tell everyone, no smoking in the car. In fact, no smoking on the property either. She says it can make the virus worse if you get it….Also, she told me that no one should sit in the front seat. For distancing purposes.

“Oh, the hell with that,” said Ed, opening the front passenger door. “People are really going overboard with this thing.”...

He followed his crying wife into the bedroom. “Mashen’ka,” he said.

“Don’t touch me. You might give it to me.”

“But we sleep in the same bed,” he said, in Russian.

“I’m not even sure that’s a good idea,” she answered, in English...

“So,” she said, “how many of us have to die for your personal reenactment of The Big Chill?”

Final Jeopardy question: How do they talk in the first big-budget pandemic 68

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021

novel, courtesy of Gary Shteyngart?

Someone had to do it. As Jonathan Safran Foer pioneered the 9/11 novel, so Shteyngart does for COVID. Our Country Friends arrives as the author’s most adulatory nod yet to Chekhov, who pops up regularly in Shteyngart’s books. Both overtly and allusively tied to Uncle Vanya, with the spirit of Boccaccio’s Decameron piped in, it’s the densely plotted tale of an extended pandemic sleepover at the country estate of one successful city-based culture star—Alexander (Sasha) Borisovich Senderovsky (see Chekhov’s Alexander Vladimirovich Serebrakoff)—a get-together likely to cause problems for everyone as the plague of 2020 evolves.

Senderovsky, the novelist protagonist of Our Country Friends, invites his best friends to escape “the infected city” and stay for a spell at bungalows on his estate. Karen Cho, a divorced pal since their days at an elite New York City high school, struck it rich by inventing a dating app that triggers love when participants look into each other’s eyes.

Vinod Mehta, a health-impaired high school friend of both of theirs, has been more of a ne’er-do-well, gravitating between adjunct-professoring and stints as a short-order cook. Ed Kim, Korean American like Karen and scion of a South Korean conglomerate, met Sasha when they were in their 20s. Rounding out the main cast are a world-famous “Actor” (identified only as such) who’s working with Sasha on a TV script; Dee Cameron, an alumna of Sasha’s “drunken car wreck of a writing workshop,” who’s published a successful first book of caustic essays, and Masha, Senderovsky’s psychiatrist wife.

Like each of Shteyngart’s earlier four novels, Our Country Friends draws partly on the author’s own life. Senderovsky owns a Hudson Valley country house.

Like Shteyngart, he’s a drinker and super foodie. Like Shteyngart, he’s married with a young child.

But there’s also what MFA-land might call “fiction distancing.” Masha is a Russian-American Jew, unlike Shteyngart’s Korean-American wife.

Masha and Sasha’s daughter is adopted from China and crazy about the South Korean boy band BTS. Sasha’s property is much larger than Shteyngart’s. (Hey, what’s the fun of being a novelist if you can’t upscale yourself as you water down your semi-roman à clef?)

Read simply as a stab at the Great American Pandemic Novel, Our Country Friends takes the gold (at least so far, until more writers enter the contest). It teems with familiar Shteyngart virtues: wry dialogue, self-deprecation, sharp notice of up-to-the-minute American concerns (brain fog, quarantining, intubation), show-offy words and phrases in Russian, Hebrew, Danish and, especially, Korean. Lots of romantic entanglements and sexual subplots follow at the “House on the Hill.” (You’ll have to buy the book to enjoy them.)

But here’s where things get intriguing for Shteyngart’s status as the anointed successor to Philip Roth as Jewish-American literature’s bigfoot male comic. Short version: He’s inching away from burlesque scenarios and toward the wry realism of Saul Bellow, and even the quiet moralism of Bernard Malamud. He’s still funny when it befits a pandemic novel, but not slapstick funny. More than any previous Shteyngart novel, Our Country Friends eliminates caricatures and offers real characters who resist simplification.

In his first three novels—The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002), Absurdistan (2006) and Super Sad True Love Story (2010)—Shteyngart compartmentalized

Our Country Friends teems with familiar Shteyngart virtues: wry dialogue, selfdeprecation, sharp notice of up-to-the-minute American concerns and show-offy words and phrases.

his resentments. He made space to insult Russia, the country he left at age 7. He took time to wail about the tough times faced by immigrants to the United States. And he made time for the Jews, lacerating the Orthodox and mocking Soviet émigrés clueless about their own religion. Then Shteyngart confessed to his parents that he’d be working on what became Little Failure (2014), an evocative memoir. “Just don’t write like a self-hating Jew,” his father warned him.

That book detailed the Shteyngart family’s emigration from Leningrad to Queens in 1979, followed by 7-year-old Igor Semonovich’s struggle to fathom a triangulated Russian-American-Jewish life. An asthmatic immigrant kid bullied by fellow students at his Jewish day school, “Gary” Shteyngart moved on to prestigious Stuyvesant High, a druggy undergraduate stint at Oberlin, literary aspiration in Manhattan in his 20s and then the big breakthrough when The Russian Debutante’s Handbook took off.

Shteyngart did heed his father’s wishes—the sarcastic attitude toward religious Judaism in the novels grew less fierce in Little Failure. The star of his fourth novel, Lake Success (2018), hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen, became Shteyngart’s first protagonist not to be a Russian Jew. Now, in Our Country Friends, Shteyngart largely leaves Jewish matters alone. The story, thanks to Karen, Ed and Vinod, features Korean and Indian culture more prominently. Yes, Masha says Lehadlik ner shel Shabbat over her Friday night candles, the conservative Soviet Jews of his parents’ generation still live among “the usual schmear of menorahs and provincial lacquer boxes,” and Shteyngart can’t resist describing a New York City night “passing the rows of Hasidic station wagons, their occupants being pleasured by transgender goddesses.” But that’s about it, at a house with “the contradictory smells of bacon in the mornings and Sabbath candles on Friday night.”

Perhaps the clue to Our Country Friends’ new Jewish-lite style, to

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Jewish Culture. Cover to Cover.

Shteyngart feeling more self-erasing than self-hating these days, is the bitter piece he published in The New Yorker just weeks before Our Country Friends appeared, titled “A Botched Circumcision and Its Aftermath.” It chronicled in blunt detail his procedure at the very late age of 7, one demanded of his newly arrived immigrant father

by Lubavitcher rabbis. The article, in solemn un-Shteyngart-like prose, described the extreme pain and horrible complications it recently caused him in middle age: 12 doctors, failed corrective procedures and more. But while some authors foreshadow an oncoming book with an op-ed, Our Country Friends ignores the trauma Shteyngart suffered while writing the book, aside from one inside joke—Masha notes that the TV script worked on by the Actor and Sasha involves “an oligarch’s son with a bad circumcision” and cracks, “Who on

earth would watch that?”

In the New Yorker article, Shteyngart refers to “the faith in which I was brought up,” as if it were a neighborhood. His wife tells him that for the first time in the 15 years she’s known him, “your humor is gone.” Shteyngart informs the reader, “I doubt I will ever be completely right again.” Life chastens novelists as it does everyone else.

Shteyngart at 49 is neither self-hating nor completely self-erasing. Rather, he’s elegiac. Much like Bellow when he wrote The Adventures of Augie March, Shteyngart appears to be announcing in Our Country Friends that he’s now, inevitable tinctures of Russianness aside, an American novelist more than a writer of Jewish-American fiction. That’s no joke.

Carlin Romano, Moment’s critic-at-large, teaches media theory and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Notable Books on Art and Artists discusses the intertwined histories of the Camondo family and de Waal’s own relatives from the Franco-Russian Ephrussi banking dynasty.

FIERCE POISE: HELEN FRANKENTHALER AND 1950S NEW YORK

by Alexander Nemerov Penguin Press

Recent volumes to expand your vision.

THE FLOWERING: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JUDY CHICAGO

by Judy Chicago Foreword by Gloria Steinem Thames & Hudson

This intimate and absorbing account of the life and work of the pioneering artist, feminist and activist is hard to put down. With her groundbreaking 1979 installation The Dinner Party, the colorful and often controversial Chicago turned the traditional household role of women on its head by creating a table for 39 remarkable women to bring attention to their achievements. Written in anticipation of her first retrospective, now at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, this personal story traces the artist’s career and highlights her determination to champion women.

ANDRE KERTÉSZ: POSTCARDS FROM PARIS edited by Elizabeth Siegel

MARISSA VONESH

Art Institute of Chicago

A perfect way to take an armchair tour of the City of Light, this compilation of all the known carte postale prints by the Hungarian-born photographer highlights his innovative contributions to photographic composition. One of the truly 70

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021

pivotal figures of photojournalism, Kertész (1894–1985) was born in Budapest to a middle-class Jewish family and emigrated to the United States in 1936. The volume features portraits and evocative views of Paris, along with essays exploring exile and the interwar art scene in Paris.

LETTERS TO CAMONDO

by Edmund de Waal

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, has written 58 imaginary letters that tell the story of Jewish banker and art collector Count Moise de Camondo, who was born in Constantinople in 1860 and died in Paris in 1935. When his son, Nissim de Camondo, a pilot in the Aéronautique Militaire, died during World War I, Moise dedicated his house and collection of peerless French 18th-century art to his son’s memory, bequeathing it to France as the Musée Nissim de Camondo. Seven years after he died, his daughter, son-in-law, grandson and granddaughter were arrested and ultimately murdered in Auschwitz. A meditation on preservation and loss, Jewish achievement and antisemitism, the book also

Helen Frankenthaler was one of the 20th century’s most esteemed painters. This engrossing biography focuses on her life in postwar New York City as she came of age as an artist. Fresh out of college at the beginning of the 1950s, Frankenthaler moved back home to New York City to make her name and distinguish herself in a man’s world. By the end of the decade she had succeeded in establishing herself as an important American artist of the postwar period, creating some of the most daring paintings of her day. Acclaimed art historian Alexander Nemerov paints a vibrant portrait of this period in the Abstract Expressionist’s career, from her initial encounter with Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, to her first solo gallery show, to her relationship and subsequent breakup with esteemed critic Clement Greenberg.

THE HOUSE OF FRAGILE THINGS: JEWISH ART COLLECTORS AND THE FALL OF FRANCE

by James McAuley Yale University Press

This compellingly written tale tracks the interlinking histories of a group of vastly wealthy, assimilated FrenchJewish families who acquired major art collections that they donated to the French state in the first half of the 20th century. Philanthropic and

BY DIANE M. BOLZ patriotic, the Reinachs, Cahen d’Anvers, Camondos and Rothschilds built houses brimming with splendid objects, but McAuley’s term “the house of fragile things” refers to the tenuousness of their French identity during the Holocaust era. They were robbed by the government they had believed in, stripped of their French citizenship and attacked as aliens.

MAN RAY: THE ARTIST AND HIS SHADOWS

by Arthur Lubow

Yale University Press

In this revealing biography of the elusive Dada and Surrealist artist and photographer, journalist Arthur Lubow uses Man Ray’s Jewish background as a path to understanding his life and art. Man Ray began life as Emmanuel Radnitzky, the eldest of four children born in Philadelphia to a mother from Minsk and a father from Kiev who both worked as tailors.

Defying his parents’ expectations that he earn a university degree, Ray instead pursued his vocation as an artist, embracing the modernist creed of photographer and avant-garde gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz.

PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED: A MEMOIR

by Edward Sorel Knopf

Alongside more than 170 of his wavy pen-and-ink style drawings, cartoons and caricatures, award-winning American illustrator, graphic designer and political satirist Edward Sorel (born Edward Schwartz) paints a verbal portrait of his Depression-era Bronx childhood, his Jewish immigrant parents, his 1960s graphic design firm Push Pin Studios, and his marriages and children.

moment cartoon ILLUSTRATED BY BEN SCHWARTZ

SUBMIT A CAPTION FOR THIS CARTOON BY DECEMBER 15 AT MOMENTMAG.COM/CARTOON

“Maybe the drums would be okay after all.”

—Michael Lomazow, Riverside, CA “If you don’t stop, I’ll give you a Tekiah Gedola you won’t forget!”

—Robert D. Diamant, Staten Island, NY “Haven’t our people suffered enough?”

—Adrian Storisteanu, Toronto, ON, Canada (SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021)

VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE CAPTION AT MOMENTMAG.COM/CARTOON

“Hey, the seventh day is over when I say it’s over.”

—Jim Gorman, Thousand Oaks, CA (SUMMER 2021)

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spice box In Poland it was Mangostein Submitted by Cynthia Lagdameo, Brooklyn, NY

FEATURED BOX

Just how many are we talking?

Courtesy of @bobbyteriyaki via Twitter

Santa got run over by a rabbi This 19th-century silver spice tower is in the shape of a fish with fins, scales and a movable mouth. The head comes off to reveal the spices contained inside, such as cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. The maker and owner of this object are unknown.

JEWISH MUSEUM OF LONDON

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SUMMER DOUBLE 2021

Submitted by Mark Goldenberg, Beverly Hills, CA

Send your unmarked original newspaper clippings, curiosities and photographs to: Spice Box, 4115 Wisconsin Ave. NW, Suite LL10, Washington, DC 20016 or email editor@momentmag.com

The perfect gift for the Brave and Brilliant people in your life.

"With clearly written, succinct text and exquisite art, this is an inspiring collection that will be welcomed by casual browsers and devotees of Jewish women’s history alike."

—Booklist starred review

"Fascinating in its breadth and depth, this historical book explores the contributions of known and unknown Jewish female heroes.”

—Common Sense Media

“This book is a treasure, filled with stories of remarkable Jewish women who deserve more attention for their courage & determination.”

—Ann F. Lewis, former White House Communications Director

"An exceptional resource, it can be read from cover to cover or just flipped through for ideas and inspiration."

—School Library Journal starred review

Available wherever books are sold.

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