Conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute’s Guttman Center for Surveys and the Avi Chai Foundation, the survey, which analyzed the responses of 2,800 Israelis, confirmed the truths I held to be self-evident when I grew up in Israel not too long ago. (Avi Chai is affiliated with the Keren Keshet Foundation, which created Nextbook Inc., Tablet Magazine’s publisher.) Back then—after the arrival of McDonald’s but before the second Intifada—it felt like a given that if you were Jewish you most likely had some sort of relationship with God, regardless of your level of observance. Except for a few pesky atheists, my friends and I all defined ourselves as secular even as we fasted on Yom Kippur, took much pleasure in the way the streets cleared up on Friday afternoons, and directed our prayers—about girls we wished would notice us or older brothers we wished would make it home safely from the front—to God.

Not much has changed, according to this new survey. Yet when the findings were released, many of my colleagues on the Israeli left took to the op-ed pages to register their shock and lament the demise of modern Israel. The survey, went the common cri de coeur, was a sure sign of the impending apocalypse, which would finally turn the Jewish state into an intolerant theocracy.

Writing in Haaretz, journalist Uri Misgav argued that the findings reflected a “depressing ideological situation.” The disturbing thing “about those who believe in the theory of the Chosen People,” he wrote, “is the fear that they are not particularly smart,” perceiving the world on “an infantile theological level” that surely should have been vanquished by reason and modernity.

In the same paper, columnist Gideon Levy sounded even grimmer. “You have to give it to the pollsters,” he wrote. “They let the cat out of the bag. … Israeli society isn’t secular, it isn’t liberal, and it isn’t enlightened.”

It’s easy for me to understand Misgav and Levy. Like them, I consider myself a proud member of the battered and decimated tribe known as the Israeli left. Like them, I look with horror as brutes of all stripes—from hill-dwelling Jewish terrorists to Avigdor Lieberman and his comrades in Knesset—trample democracy’s core values. But in their disdain for and fear of religion, Misgav, Levy, and the lion’s share of the Israeli left fail to understand not only their past but also, more troubling, their future. Unless the Israeli left learns how to stop fearing and start loving—or at least understanding—religion, its chances of advancing a popular agenda are slim.

***

It’s tempting for secular, educated adults to see religion as the flickering remnant of a primitive fire that once guided mankind—a fire no longer necessary now that we have the quiet heat of science, technology, and rational thought. And it’s easy to look at an idea like divine election as nothing more than pure chauvinism. I used to entertain these notions. But two years ago, together with my friend and teacher Todd Gitlin, I decided to grapple with these ideas by writing a book.

What I learned startled me. Far from a simple call to exceptionalism, chosenness is a devilishly complex idea. At the height of the biblical drama, at the moment a collection of disparate tribes are made into a solid nation, God appears to the Israelites at Mount Sinai and bequeaths to them their status as his chosen sons and daughters. “And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests,” God says, “and a holy nation.” Why the Israelites? What does it mean to be chosen? Are the children of the chosen also chosen in perpetuity? God never tells.

The result is a never-ending quest, over the course of millennia, to solve this divine riddle. To have been chosen means spending a lifetime wondering about what it means to have been chosen. Some possible answers to this question align neatly with the Israeli left’s worst fears: Much of the settler movement is powered by an understanding of chosenness as a divine mandate to occupy land, even when others are living on it.

Continue reading: Chosenness as a challenge

Unsurprisingly, Gingrich’s comments set off a firestorm. Some thought his observations were refreshingly honest, others argued they were needlessly provocative and extremely counterproductive. But as many commentators have noted, the Palestinians are one of many peoples whose nationhood is “invented.” In the Middle East alone, invented nations include Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, and even Turkey. Like the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza, these, too, were all once part of the Ottoman Empire. None existed before World War I, after which these jerry-built states united various, and often competing, sectarian, ethnic, and tribal identities.

The real question, then, is not whether Palestinian nationalism is “authentic,” but whether this particular national fiction is useful. Gingrich’s proposed alternative identity for the Palestinians—linking these Arabic-speaking, non-Jewish residents of the territories to the rest of the “the Arab people”—is bad for the region, the United States, and Israel.

The problem is that current Palestinian nationalism is not strong enough. If it were, Yasser Arafat and, later, Mahmoud Abbas might have been more inclined to accept the peace deals offered by Israeli prime ministers and American presidents. If Palestinian leadership were more like the early champions of Zionism, who wanted a state for the Jews no matter its size, then the conflict might have been resolved at any point over the last seven decades.

Maybe the Palestinians are still waiting for a better deal. Perhaps, as some argue, the Palestinians really believe that they’ll eventually manage to drive the Jews into the sea. In any case, one of the major problems is that the decision has never been entirely in the hands of the Palestinians. Even before the United Nations partition plan of 1947, there have always been external regional forces trying to prevent a resolution to the Palestinian problem, since prolonging the conflict enhances their prestige and bargaining position.

From the 1930s to the present, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Iran have wrestled over the Palestinian file. Those states’ rationale for interfering in the domestic affairs of a foreign people is based on the presumption of a shared pan-Arab or pan-Islamic sensibility. But even assuming that all Arabs and Muslims really do care an awful lot about the Palestinians—though the status of Palestinian refugees in neighboring Arab states and as the paltry financial aid provided by oil-producing Muslim states strongly suggest otherwise—the notion that U.S. policy should accommodate regional forces because they claim to share a common identity with Palestinians is dangerous.

A region-wide contest to represent the Palestinians not only sets regional powers against each other, but it also channels their often destructive energies against Western interlocutors, primarily the United States. Through 1973, the Saudis fought for their role with their weapon of choice: oil. The Islamic Republic of Iran and Syria’s Assad regime use terrorism, just as Gamal abd el-Nasser did when he ruled Egypt. Therefore, a key goal of American policy-making has been to de-link the Palestinian file from other regional issues and to have the Palestinians represented by one agent: themselves.

Gingrich’s vague formulation cuts directly against the grain of the U.S. regional strategy. If the Palestinians aren’t a nation, which is the Arab nation that American officials are supposed to deal with regarding the Palestinians? Or, more vaguely yet, who is the representative of the “Arab people”? Is Gingrich referring to that entity imagined by the ideologues of Arab nationalism, a single and unified Arab nation?

It should be clear to even the most casual observer of the Middle East that the Arabs are anything but unified. Iraq’s conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, as we now understand, was only the tip of the iceberg in a region where civil war is not an exception but the norm. The Bahraini and Syrian uprisings are effectively sectarian revolutions against the established, and repressive, orders. Even in Egypt, Muslim violence against the Coptic Christian community reveals the true sectarian nature of the region.

The theorists behind 20th-century Arab nationalism recognized the region’s sectarianism and tribalism—which is why they proposed an identity based not on sect or tribe but rather on shared attributes, like language. The inhabitants of the region, from Western North Africa to the Persian Gulf, all spoke some variation of Arabic, thus they were Arabs. Their particularities, whether ethnic (Kurdish, for instance) or sectarian (Christian, Shia, etc.) were insignificant in comparison to their Arab identity. According to ideologues like Sati’ al-Husri, they were Arabs whether they liked it or not.

Accordingly, Arab nationalism has been a coercive and repressive doctrine. Even though it was an idea intended to forestall the civil strife that arises from competing identities, in reality enforcing Arab nationalism has led to bloodshed throughout the Arabic-speaking Middle East. Under Saddam Hussein, Arab nationalism meant Sunni supremacism and the violent suppression of Kurds and Shiites. In Syria, the minority Alawite regime has used the doctrine to keep the Sunnis as well as the Kurds in line. In Lebanon, Hezbollah waves the banner of Arab nationalism in its fight against the Zionist entity, in order to intimidate and rule over other Lebanese sects. Violence and repression are key components of Arab nationalism, because as a totalitarian ideology like Communism and Nazism, it can brook no differences, no particularity.

Respecting that particularity is not only good for the inhabitants of the region but also for the interests of the United States and Israel. The United States has bilateral relations with other nation-states and political institutions like the Palestinian Authority. But this country is ill-equipped to deal with large amorphous bodies like the “Arab people” or, alternatively, the “Muslim world.”

The latter was the intended recipient of Obama’s Cairo speech in June 2009. Unfortunately, it seems not to have occurred to the president that the Muslim-majority Middle East comprises various Muslim sects often at odds, plus non-Muslims as well. By employing this particular fiction, the “Muslim world,” the Cairo speech happened to comport perfectly with the belief of Islamists who hold that non-Muslims and even Shiite Muslims are second-class subjects in the Sunni-majority Middle East, rather than individuals deserving of equal rights.

The “Arab people,” like the “Muslim world,” is an invention—and neither of them should hold much appeal for U.S. policy-makers. Given the nature of our own polity, Americans should take the lead promoting particular identities, even if some of them are formed more recently than others, like that of the Palestinians. This makes them no less worthy of the rights and respect due to other Middle Eastern identities, some of them ancient, like Egypt’s Christian community, or the region’s Jewish minority, which after being ruled by the Ottomans and other regional empires and powers, now enjoys its own state in Israel.

Modern Jews are not immune to this kind of nostalgia; but as so often happens, the Jewish case is different and more complicated. At the beginning of her superb and thought-provoking new book, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton), Leora Batnitzky explains that modern definitions of Jewishness are inescapably divided and partial. She begins: “Is Judaism a religion? Is Jewishness a matter of culture? Are the Jews a nation? These are modern questions.” But there was a time, “prior to modernity,” she continues, when “Judaism and Jewishness were all these at once: religion, culture and nationality.” Until the 18th century, the question of how to define Jewishness never arose, because Jews lived in a wholly Jewish world. A Jewish community was made up exclusively of Jews, lived by Jewish law, prayed according to Jewish ritual, and even had a large degree of political autonomy—it could levy its own taxes, appoint its own officials, and punish lawbreakers. Each community, Batnitzky writes, enjoyed this wholeness, and together they formed an even larger whole: “Premodern Jews imagined themselves as one united people, as klal Yisrael, ‘the collective people of Israel.’ ”

For Batnitzky, too, modernity is the age of fracture, when this ostensible wholeness and unity began to come apart. This began in Western Europe with the French Revolution, which introduced the principle that Jews should not be viewed as members of an autonomous community but as individual citizens in a secular nation-state. As one French statesman put it: “One must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation but one must give them everything as individuals.” This principle spread with Napoleon’s rule to Germany, where the substantial Jewish population became a test case for the possibility of true emancipation in an anti-Semitic society.

For these German Jews, who make up the focus of the first half of Batnitzky’s book, the age of lost wholeness was too close to be the source of comfortable nostalgia. It was too close in time—the most assimilated German Jewish families were only a generation or two removed from the ghetto—and too close in space: Just over the German border to the east lay Poland and Russia, the Jewish heartland, where millions of Jews lived traditional lives and labored under bitter government persecution. The only way out, for these emancipated Jews, was forward. But if Jewishness was no longer an all-encompassing identity, no longer the name of a world, what could it be?

Batnitzky’s answer is given in her title. Judaism became a religion, she argues, when it stopped being a civic and political identity. Religion was the name of the shrunken sphere of life that Jewishness was allowed to occupy in the modern world. In particular, Batnitzky argues, German Jews began to think about Judaism in terms borrowed from Protestantism, as a private faith whose most important dimensions were emotional and ethical.

The problem, of course, is that this understanding of religion manifestly clashes with rabbinic Judaism as it had evolved over the centuries. Rabbinic Judaism, as expressed in the Talmud and many later commentaries and codes of law, was above all a religion of practice, of public and communal life. Every area of a Jewish life was regulated Jewishly, from sexual relations to diet to tort law. Yet these were exactly the things that, in the modern world, were meant to be governed by the nation-state and by a common, secular culture. How could Judaism’s all-encompassing legacy be squeezed into the small compartment designated for religion?

The first four chapters of How Judaism Became a Religion are devoted to the ways major German Jewish thinkers tried—and, in Batnitzky’s view, largely failed—to answer that question. She begins, inevitably, with Moses Mendelssohn, the 18th-century philosopher who is remembered as the first modern Jew, in large part because he was accepted as an equal by Gentile thinkers such as Lessing and Kant. In his 1783 book Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism, Mendelssohn, an Orthodox Jew, argued that—in Batnitzky’s words—“Judaism … is not concerned with power and therefore does not conflict with the possibility of the Jewish integration into the modern nation state.” Equally important, as Batnitzky writes of Mendelssohn’s case, Judaism does not possess a creed to which every believer must adhere, the way Christianity does. Instead, it possesses “divine legislation—laws, commandments, ordinances, rules of life,” which the Jew can follow without prejudice to his citizenship in the German state.

There is, however, a fairly obvious contradiction between the two premises of Mendelssohn’s argument. If Judaism is a religion of legislation, of behavior rather than belief, how could it not conflict with the legislation and custom of the wider Christian society? Or, to put the question another way: What compels the Jew to keep practicing Jewish law, living a Jewish life, once the possibility of assimilation opens up? “Mendelssohn offers no philosophical or theological justification for why Jews should obey the [Jewish] law,” Batnitzky writes. Personally, he would find it possible to be at the same time an enlightened philosopher and an observant Jew; but all of his grandchildren would end up converting to Christianity.

Continue reading: Zionism arises

My father understood this and helped whenever he could. There are agricultural communities, he used to say, “that I cradled in the palm of my hand.” This never stopped our kibbutz neighbors, all of whom belonged to the Labor Party, from coming out to protest outside the gate of our farm, armed with angry placards. He used to remind our friends from the nearby kibbutzim, the ones who came to our house, “During the day you stand outside the gate and protest, and at night you sneak inside and ask for help.” He would say that with a forgiving fatherly smile. But then he would come to their aid, always, and even when he was in the opposition and their people, Labor, were in power, they still came to him. The difficulties of agricultural communities such as kibbutzim or farming villages, quite frankly, don’t interest the members of either party.

My father’s other role in Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s government was as chairman of the Ministerial Committee on Settlements. In this role he put Likud policy and his own beliefs into practice. He founded many dozens of settlements in Judea, Samaria, the Gaza Strip, Galilee, the Golan Heights, the Negev, and in the Arava. If somebody was needed to speak about our rights to the land of Israel and the security need for settling different areas in Judea and Samaria, there was no better man than Begin. The history of his movement is filled with flaming speeches and ideological directives, but those stand in stark contrast to their record of actual accomplishments.

My father was born into a different culture, pragmatic Zionism, which believed in simply getting things done: establishing another village, laying another water pipe, planting another orchard, tilling another furrow of earth. Political Zionism, which Begin and his people believed in, attached great power to words, to each comma in their ideological constitution, and far less importance to the actual execution of those ideologies. It was only natural, then, that my father would be the one to translate Likud ideas into action.

My father began to consolidate his thoughts on the matter of settlement in Judea and Samaria during his service as Yitzhak Rabin’s adviser. He believed that Israel could not under any circumstances afford to return to the June 4, 1967, lines. Living within those borders, Israel was attacked by Jordan and suffered for years from Palestinian terror. Pre-1967, Israel’s width along the coastal plain at the country’s center, where the majority of the population lives and where the national infrastructure such as power plants and the airport is housed, is only a few miles across. That is not a defensible border. The plan that my father drafted and brought before the government for approval offered solutions to several problems—Israel’s lack of depth along the coastal plain, its vulnerable eastern front, and the safeguarding of Jerusalem. Holding a large map, he presented his vision to the ministerial committee in September 1977, three months after being appointed minister of agriculture. What he showed them was a line of settlements along the high ground that looms over the coastal plain. In that way Israel was given depth at its most vulnerable point and it secured control over the dominant terrain, which could no longer be occupied by hostile forces.

Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia all waged war against Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973. They constitute what is known as the eastern front. Even Labor governments have recognized the need to create a line in the Jordan Valley, which is nearly entirely empty of Palestinian villages. A Labor government had already erected a thin line of settlements along the Jordan River. My father’s plan called for fortifying the hills to the west of the Jordan Valley with additional settlements, building a cross-Samaria road that would be protected by settlements and serve in a time of need as emergency routes for troops heading to the eastern front.

The third element of his plan was Jerusalem. The question was how to secure Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jewish people, especially in light of the post-1967 wave of Palestinians flocking to the city. In the decade following the war, the Arab population increased by more than 50 percent.

The solution my father presented was a ring of Jewish settlements around the city. This would preserve the demographic character of the city and would prevent the threat of making Jerusalem a part of an urban Arab bloc stretching from Bethlehem in the south to Ramallah in the north.

On Oct. 2, 1977, the Cabinet authorized the plan, putting it into motion. My father and his aide Uri Bar-On, a brigadier general in the reserves who was also a close friend, began surveying the terrain, mountain by mountain, hill by hill.

The points chosen were state-owned lands that were untilled and uncultivated. These lands had been the property of the Ottomans during their rule, then the British, followed by the Jordanians and then Israel. He worked with the Ministry of Justice, accompanied by Plia Albeck, the head of the civil department of the state attorney’s office. As Albeck explained, “My job in regards to the settlements was to make sure that the land upon which they want to build a settlement is state land and that no individual rights are infringed upon.”

My father would laugh when recalling his trips with her on helicopters and on rocky hillsides, her hair covered according to Orthodox tradition in a kerchief and her feet in boots. Her rulings regarding state land all stood up under appeal to the Supreme Court.

During the following four years my father spearheaded the effort to found 64 new settlements in Judea and Samaria. But the rise of the Likud to power and the fact of his service in government were not enough to get the project off the ground. They needed people willing to settle the land, too. These were found in the form of the Gush Emunim loyalists. These God-fearing religious nationalists felt that settling in the biblical land of Israel was a commandment of supreme importance. Years later, my father would remark with a smile that they viewed him as “the Messiah’s donkey,” the man who would help them realize their ideals and faith.

Excerpted from the book Sharon: The Life of a Leader by Gilad Sharon. Copyright © 2012 by Shikmim Agricultural Farm Ltd. English translation copyright © 2011 by Mitch Ginsburg. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Faith unites us, knowledge gives us freedom. We shall therefore prevent any theocratic tendencies from coming to the fore on the part of our priesthood. We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples in the same way as we shall keep our professional army within the confines of their barracks.

Suffice it to say, it didn’t quite work out that way, not even from the start. In his new Nextbook Press book, Ben-Gurion: A Political Life, co-written with the veteran Israeli journalist David Landau, Peres describes the deal that Ben-Gurion made with ultra-Orthodox rabbi-politicians at the time of Israel’s founding: kashrut in all public institutions, Shabbat as the day of rest, rabbinic control of marriage and divorce, and the exemption of full-time yeshiva students, who at the time numbered only in the hundreds, from army service. This would all seem a violation of Herzl’s vision, but Peres defends Ben-Gurion’s consensus-building move as wise and pragmatic, “because the number of people in Israel who defined themselves as people of faith was large.” In a dialogue between the co-authors, the president of Israel declares:

Israel is a secular state. The Orthodox have bargaining power, so everything has to be done by compromise. But Israel is not under religious control: It’s not a halachic country, it’s not a theocracy. Ben-Gurion opposed religious coercion and opposed anti-religious coercion.

True, Israel is not a theocracy the way, say, Iran is one. But stop any bareheaded Jew on a Tel Aviv beach and ask them if there’s religious coercion in their country, and the knee-jerk response will be yes. For many Israelis, “religious coercion” doesn’t mean forced synagogue attendance, but the evasion of military duty by tens of thousands of young ultra-Orthodox men; the harassment of Reform rabbis and citizens who drive on Shabbat; the overflowing of public money to yeshivas and to ultra-Orthodox families that don’t pay taxes; the premature ending of Daylight Savings Time before the High Holidays to facilitate penitential ritual; and the hurling of dirty diapers at women wearing prayer shawls at the Western Wall, a spiritual magnet for all Jews that has been turned, with the complicity of governmental authorities, into an ultra-Orthodox synagogue. As for “theocratic tendencies,” we have the hegemony of the ultra-Orthodox-dominated, state-funded Chief Rabbinate over marriage, divorce, and conversion, protected by the ultra-Orthodox parliamentarians in the Knesset.

How did all this come about? The reasons are over-determined, as the Freudians say. Landau presses Peres, who as a young man was Ben-Gurion’s emissary to the ultra-Orthodox on the conscription issue, on whether they had perhaps miscalculated the staying power of Orthodoxy in Israel. “He wasn’t thinking about what was going to happen later,” says Peres of his mentor. “Anyway, to be completely frank, in negotiating with the venerable rabbis, I felt like I was sitting with my grandfather.” In The Imaginary Voyage, Peres puts it even more frankly: “Whenever I had to make a decision touching upon the relationship between religion and state,” he tells Herzl, “I asked myself whether grandfather would agree with what I’d done.”

As a child in White Russia, Peres studied Torah at the knee of his pious grandfather, who years later, we learn in this new book, was murdered by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen—burned alive in his synagogue. After the Holocaust, out of guilt and nostalgia, along with a sense of moral obligation, Ben-Gurion and his secular comrades understandably felt a need to indulge the surviving practitioners of the separatist Judaism that kept Diaspora Jews afloat for centuries. Besides, they probably figured that ultra-Orthodoxy, in a sovereign, modern state, would soon wither away. How wrong they were.

***

To this day, there are no civil marriages in Israel. A Conservative rabbi, steeped in Maimonides, cannot perform a legally binding wedding in the Jewish state. Yet each year, thousands of Israelis hop over to Cyprus for civil marriages recognized as valid by Israel’s Interior Ministry. Some time back, as a publicity stunt, a couple married by a Reform rabbi in Israel had their civil ceremony in Las Vegas, where they were wed by an Elvis impersonator.

Every so often, there’s a movement by Secularists in the Knesset to remedy this absurd situation, but it always fails. Coalitions are fragile, and ultra-Orthodox parties, supported by legions of faithful voters, are able to thwart such maneuvers. “Israel is the only democracy in the world where Jews don’t have freedom of religion,” groused Nitzan Horowitz, a Knesset member from the Meretz party, after a civil-marriage bill he sponsored was shot down in July.

Israeli disregard for Jewish religious pluralism creates an unpleasant wedge between this country and American Jewry. But the sad truth is that most Israelis don’t much care. As a secular sabra businessman once explained to me: “For me, a Rabbanut wedding is like getting a driver’s license. In both cases, you play by the rules.” It has long been remarked that American Jews are Protestant Jews, and Israeli Jews are Catholic Jews. As in Italy, you’re a bad Catholic or a good Catholic, but still a Catholic. In other words—and despite the laudable blossoming, in some communities, of Israeli renewal-style Judaism—the shul the average Israeli doesn’t go to is still Orthodox.

In reality, of course, Israeli society is not truly polarized between dati and hiloni, “religious” and “secular.” You can be religious without being Orthodox, though in Israel this mainly means mesorati, or traditional. This large category is characteristic of Jews from Arab lands, who observe many rituals and go regularly to synagogue, but are not strict Sabbath observers. This does not, however, make them pluralists. I’ve lectured many times to IDF officers—a mixed audience of religious-nationalist, mesorati, and secular Jews—about liberal Judaism in Israel. When I am challenged to explain where one “gets the right” to pick and choose what religious laws to observe, I say that the Reformim behave much like mesorati Jews, to which the rejoinder will often be: You’re wrong, because the Moroccan Jew who drives to Teddy Stadium to watch soccer on Shabbat knows he is sinning. You don’t.

***

Behold a central irony of Israeli Judaism: Ultra-Orthodox Israelis may be widely resented as draft-dodgers who sponge their living from hard-working, tax-paying citizens. But they are, at the same time, widely perceived as custodians of the flame.

For its part, the Rabbinate unabashedly prefers the Tel Aviv metrosexual who goes windsurfing on Yom Kippur and eats pork in a pita on Pesach to a devoted Reform Jew who teaches her daughter to read from the Torah. The former, in rabbinic parlance, is a tinok shenishba, equivalent to a child abducted by heathens or Cossacks who cannot be blamed for his ignorance, and is so far gone as to be a prime candidate for hazara beteshuva, the full embrace of Orthodoxy. The Reform Jew, by contrast, is a defiant apostate, a scofflaw who dares suggest an alternative to old-time religion. When first I moved to Israel, I found in my mailbox on the eve of Rosh Hashanah a flyer sternly warning Jews not to be tempted to hear the blowing of the shofar at a Reform congregation, for these folks are a neta zar, a “foreign sapling in our holy land.”

Such a blinkered worldview encourages a cynical symbiosis, providing the secular Israeli with ample reason to remain distant from Judaism. Thank you, he or she says to the Rabbinate, for affirming your authority and authenticity. You have reminded me that Judaism is rigid, coercive, and sexist, which is why I want no part of it. Perhaps the sorriest legacy of Ben-Gurion’s political deal is widespread Israeli alienation from the beauty and wonder of Jewish tradition.

A story is told—in several versions, though not by Peres and Landau—of a meeting in 1952 between Ben-Gurion and Rabbi Avraham Karelitz, a Russian-born ultra-Orthodox leader known as the Chazon Ish. The rabbi seeks to persuade the prime minister of the need to defer to Torah scholars by citing a passage from the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin: “If two camels met each other while on the ascent to Beth-Horon … How then should they act? If one is laden and the other unladen, the latter should give way to the former.”

Was there a part of Ben-Gurion, champion of the Bible and Hebrew culture, that believed that his own camel lacked Jewish gravitas? He famously said, as quoted again by Peres, “that in Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.” In exempting the yeshiva students from the draft, did he also believe that their lives of study and prayer would bring about the protection of the Almighty? Or by giving a green light to “theocratic tendencies,” did he have another agenda entirely?

The Israeli religious philosopher and scientist Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a sternly Orthodox Jew, wrote in 1977 that Ben-Gurion had told him in the 1950s: “I will never agree to the separation of religion from the State. I want the State to hold religion in the palm of its hand.” For Leibowitz, this meant that “the status of Jewish religion in the state of Israel is that of a kept mistress of the secular government,” which he deemed “contemptible.” But in the ongoing Israeli soap opera, it often seems like the mistress is running the show.

With the help of journalist David Landau, Peres has written a new biography of Ben-Gurion, his mentor: Ben-Gurion: A Political Life, available now from Nextbook Press. Landau, a former editor of Haaretz and Israel correspondent of The Economist, spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about Ben-Gurion, his realpolitik approach to leadership, and what lessons his example can provide to Israel’s leaders today. [Running time: 30:09.]

I tried not to think of Gilad because I felt guilty. Not only was I doing nothing to help the campaign to free him, I opposed its implicit demand that the Israeli government release as many terrorists as it takes to bring him home. Israel has no death penalty, and now we would lose the deterrence of prison: If the deal went through, any potential terrorist would know it was just a matter of time before he’d be freed in the next deal for the next kidnapped Israeli.

But the argument could never be so neatly resolved. Each side was affirming a profound Jewish value: ransom the kidnapped, resist blackmail. And so any position one took was undermined by angst. What would you do, campaign activists challenged opponents, if he were your son? “He’s everyone’s son,” sang rocker Aviv Gefen.

One day I passed a rally for Gilad in a park in downtown Jerusalem. Several counter-demonstrators were holding signs opposing surrender to terrorism. “I happen to agree with you,” I said to one of them. “But don’t you feel uneasy protesting against the Shalit family?”

“We’re not protesting against the Shalit family,” he replied. “We’re protesting to save future victims of freed terrorists. Those victims don’t have names yet. But they could be my son or your son.”

Every debate over Gilad ended at the same point: your son.

We never referred to him as “Shalit,” always “Gilad.” The Gilad dilemma set our parental responsibilities against our responsibilities as Israelis—one protective instinct against another. The prime minister’s job is to resist emotional pressure and ensure the nation’s security; a father’s job is to try to save his son, regardless of the consequences.

And so I tried, too, not to think of Gilad’s extraordinary parents, Noam and Aviva. Even when denouncing the government they spoke quietly, incapable of indignity. The best of Israel, as we say here, reminding ourselves that the best of Israel is the best of anywhere.

For more than a year the Shalits have lived in a tent near the prime minister’s office. When I walked nearby I would avoid the protest encampment, ashamed to be opposing the campaign. This past Israeli Independence Day, though, I saw a crowd gathered around the tent, and wandered over. “GILAD IS STILL ALIVE,” banners reminded: It’s not too late to save him. Inside the tent, Noam and Aviva were sitting with family and friends, singing the old Zionist songs. I wanted to shake Noam’s hand, tell him to be strong, but I resisted the urge. I didn’t deserve the privilege of comforting him.

I wanted to tell Noam what we shared. As it happens, my son served in the same tank unit as Gilad, two years after he was kidnapped. I wanted to tell Noam that that was the real reason I couldn’t bear thinking about his family. That in opposing the mass release of terrorists for Gilad, it was my son I was betraying.

Now, inevitably, the government has given in to the emotional pressure. Inevitably, because we all knew it would—must—end this way. A few months ago, as part of its psychological war against the Israeli public, Hamas released an animated film depicting Gilad as an elderly gray-haired man, still a prisoner in Gaza. No image tormented us more.

Still, there are few celebrations here today. Even those who supported the campaign to free Gilad must be sobered by the erosion of Israeli deterrence. And those who opposed the campaign are grieving for Gilad’s lost years. All of us share the same unspoken fear: In what condition will he be returned to us? What have these years done to him?

Hamas leaders are boasting of victory. If so, it is a victory of shame. Hamas is celebrating the release of symbols of “resistance,” not of human beings. Hamas’ victory is an expression of the Arab crisis. The Arab world’s challenge is to shift from a culture that sanctifies honor to a culture that sanctifies dignity. Honor is about pride; dignity is about human value. Hamas may have upheld its honor; but Israel affirmed the dignity of a solitary human life.

In recent months the campaign to free Gilad demanded that the government worsen conditions for convicted terrorists in Israeli jails, to psychologically pressure the Palestinian public. So long as Gilad was being held incommunicado, activists argued, Palestinian families should be barred from visiting their imprisoned sons. While Gilad’s youth was wasting away, terrorists shouldn’t be allowed to study for college degrees.

The government promised to oblige. But as it turned out, there were legal complications. A newspaper article the other day noted the results of the government’s get-tough policy: Imprisoned terrorists would no longer be provided with the Middle Eastern delicacy of stuffed vegetables.

How is it possible, Israelis ask themselves, that so-called progressives around the world champion Hamas and Hezbollah against the Jewish state? Perhaps it’s because we’re too complicated, too messy: a democracy that is also an occupier, a consumerist society living under a permanent death sentence. Perhaps those pure progressives fear a contagion of Israeli ambivalence.

For all my anxieties about the deal, I feel no ambivalence at this moment, only gratitude and relief. Gratitude that I live in a country whose hard leaders cannot resist the emotional pressure of a soldier’s parents. And relief that I no longer have to choose between the well-being of my country and the well-being of my son.

You might not know it, but we have Israel Zangwill to thank for the go-to phrase to describe America’s cohesive cultural heterogeneity. Born in 1864, the British playwright wrote a play called The Melting Pot, which featured a romance between a Jewish immigrant and a non-Jewish woman, and which won the approval of President Theodore Roosevelt in October of 1908 for its positive depiction of America. In 2006, upon the very first revival of the play since Zangwill’s 1926 death, Chloe Veltman wrote, “If there was ever anyone capable of turning a metaphor into a household word, it was Israel Zangwill.”

For such a popular playwright, however, Zangwill’s legacy remains largely obscured. An outspoken Zionist after meeting Theodor Herzl in 1895, Zangwill’s politics moreso than his plays garnered attention, and some believe his literary reputation suffered as a result of his political and social activism. Jews were angered by what they felt was an inconsistent yet dogmatic Zionist stance, and were especially inflamed when, in 1923, Zangwill firily declared Zionism dead.

Yet Veltman defends Zangwill against the resulting criticism that the playwright was in favor of a completely homogenized America, as seen through his glorification of the melting pot ideal and seeming abandonment of the Zionist cause. “He was committed to building a Jewish homeland but also understood that Jews had come to a fork in the road:” she wrote, “if full Jewish nationalism could not be achieved, full assimilation into a multi-ethnic melting pot was, for him, the next best thing.”

Read Melting Point, by Chloe Veltman

The walls of Luttwak’s donnish study—which is by far the nicest room in the Luttwaks’ house, with the best view, and might otherwise have served as the dining room, if Edward and Dalya were more like their neighbors—are lined with bookshelves containing the Roman classics, biographies of Winston Churchill, works on military history and strategy, intelligence gathering, Byzantine art, old atlases, and decorations and plaques from foreign governments. Luttwak’s work as a high-level strategic and intelligence consultant for the U.S. Defense Department, the National Security Council, the State Department, the Japanese government, and the defense departments and intelligence services of other countries in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East (he appears to be spending a lot of time in South Korea and China) is also augmented by a parallel life as an “operator,” about which he is both secretive and obviously proud.

While the details of Luttwak’s life as a private intelligence operative are sketchy, he has been actively involved in military and paramilitary operations sponsored by the U.S. government, foreign governments, and various private entities. By his own admission, he has been directly involved in attacks on physical targets, interdiction efforts, and the capture and interrogation of wanted persons—although “admission” is clearly the wrong word here, since he is almost boyishly eager for visitors to understand his familiarity with the nuts and bolts of special ops and cites his own field experience to support his estimations of people like Gen. David Petraeus, whose reputation as a counter-insurgency genius he dismisses as a fraud. He is also careful to state that his activities have never violated U.S. law. The Walter Mitty-ish component of Luttwak’s enthusiasm for his other life—academic by day, special operator by night—seems less significant in his psyche than a driving appetite for physical risk that has helped him understand military strategy and related policy questions in a way that the current generation of Western policymakers often does not.

Loved and loathed, and capable of living multiple lives, any one of which would quickly tire out a less intellectually and physically robust man, Luttwak glories in the undeniable fact that he is not the usual Washington think-tank product. His instinctive tendency to reject common wisdom as idiotic, combined with his need to prove that he is the smartest person in every room, has deprived him of the chance to shape events in the way that every policy intellectual not-so-secretly craves. Yet his first allegiance is clearly to the habits of mind that have made him one of the most brilliant strategic thinkers in America, capable of understanding the psychological and practical necessities that drive human action in a highly original, insightful and counterintuitive way.

We met last month, at the height of a rainstorm. What follows are selectively edited portions of the transcript of our interview, during which I made a point of not asking him about his childhood experience as a Jewish refugee in Europe, which seemed like a subject for a different conversation.

I think that if America had been able to tolerate a second Henry Kissinger, that person would have been you.

Kissinger at 88 is writing brochures for Kissinger Associates. His last book on China is one such work written by the staff at Kissinger Associates. It is designed to curry favor with the Chinese authorities and nothing else.

I know him personally very well, but he is such a deceptive person; he’s a habitual liar and dissembler. Although I’ve spent a lot of time talking to him, I have no insight on him at all. His book ends with a paean to U.S.-Chinese friendship and how every other country has to fit in. I have to review it for the TLS, but I’ve been delaying it by weeks because I don’t know whether it is a case of senility or utter corruption.

There are two differing interpretations of the events of the Arab Spring. The dominant one is: “Here is this marvelous wave of popular revolutions where everyone uses Facebook and Twitter to spread democratic ideas.” The other is that “Rickety state structures held together by repressive police and state apparatus are now collapsing into tribal bloodshed.”

Well, any dictatorship creates an unnatural environment, analogous to that of taking peasants from the field and putting them in an army, where they get uniforms and are drilled and disciplined. Dictatorships attempt to turn entire populations into well-drilled regiments. The North Korean regime takes it to the logical extreme of actually having the entire population drilled in regiments. The Ben Ali and Mubarak dictatorships were attempting to regiment their populations by having state structures imposed on them. Both of them, for example, were able to create loyal police forces.

Once the regiment dissolves, then the people are released and they revert to their natural order. They stop wearing uniforms, they put on the clothes they want, and they manifest the proclivities that they have. A few Egyptians are Westernized, hence they have exited Islam whatever their personal beliefs may be. But otherwise, there is no room for civilization in Egypt other than Islam, and the number of extremists that you need to make life impossible for the average Westernized or slightly Westernized Egyptian who wants to have a beer, for example, is very small. The number you need to close all the bars in Egypt is maybe 15 percent of the population.

Do you think stepping away from Mubarak was a mistake or it made no difference?

I think it made no difference. The regime was senile. Literally.

How much of a role do you think the so-called “democracy promotion” efforts of the United States under President George W. Bush, including the invasion of Iraq, played in the increasing instability of the Arab regimes, and how much of their collapse was the result of their own senility?

I will pretend that this is an easy question; it’s not. The easy answer is that Bush and the Bush Administration for a brief period of less than two years were on a democracy-promotion binge. They used a pickax and attacked a wall, seemingly making an impression, and perhaps they caused some structural damage. The Iraq War, with the defeat, humbling, and execution of a dictator, was a big blow with a pickax. On the other hand, when the regime becomes sufficiently involuted as to become hereditary, which is what happened in Syria and appeared to be happening in Egypt, then you are dealing with senility of the regime embodied: “The dictator is old.” So, both answers are true.

There have been many different explanations given over the past 10 years for the strength of the American-Israeli relationship, ranging from the idea that Israel has the best and most immediately deployable army in the Middle East, to the idea that a small cabal of wealthy and influential Jews has hijacked American foreign policy.

You mean the Z.O.G.? The Zionist Occupied Government?

Yes.

Personally, from an emotional point of view, myself, as me, I prefer the Z.O.G. explanation above all others. I love the idea that the Zionists have sufficient power to actually occupy America, and through America to basically run the world. I love the idea of being a member of a secretive and powerful cabal. If you put my name Luttwak together with Perle and Wolfowitz and you search the Internet, you will get this little list of people who run the American government and the world, and I’m on it. I love that.

Anytime you need an added jolt of ego gratification, you open your laptop and confirm the fact that you rule the world.

In Pakistan, there are millions of people who go to schools where they are taught that I am the ruler of the universe. So, emotionally speaking, I would explain everything that happens by referring to the Z.O.G., the Zionist Occupied Government, which is run by a small cabal of people, and that I am one of them.

Now, if I’m forced to actually think about this question, I would say that the cleanest analytical way of understanding the American-Israeli relationship is to say that the post-1945 career of the United States as a world-meddling, imperialist power has forced Americans to be very foreign-oriented. Many American families have had their sons killed overseas, and many other Americans have become foreign-oriented for many reasons. Among them there is a group of Christians who read the Bible, who believe in the Bible to some degree as a document that registers God’s will. For them, Israel is the proof of the truth of the Bible. Hence, the notion that the United States should be supporting rather than opposing Israel has now become expected, which was absolutely not true in 1948 when the United States did every possible thing to prevent the existence of Israel by systematically intercepting arms flows to the Jews.

Therefore, if we in the Z.O.G. didn’t really run everything, and there was no Zionist influence, then this solid mass of foreign-aware Americans, who also happen to be Bible-believers—we’re talking 50 million people—to them, the only foreign policy that counts is America’s support for Israel. Period.

Many American Jews are viscerally uncomfortable with this kind of support. They say, “Oh, look at these Bible-thumping Christians who want to make us kiss Jesus. The only reason they like Israel is so they can turn it into a landing strip for their God.”

You are now invoking a second constant—

Why are so many Jews so stupid about politics?

They have not had a state for 2,000 years, they have had no power or responsibility and it will take centuries before they catch up with the instinctive political understanding that any ordinary Englishman has. They don’t understand politics, and of course they confuse their friends and their enemies, and that is the ultimate political proof of imbecility.

It is now a cliché to note that the Six Day War and its aftermath triggered a perfect storm of messianic enthusiasm and, to a great extent, the messianization of Zionism. This should not be surprising. In the space of a scant three decades, the Jewish people underwent the Holocaust, the reconstitution of the Jewish state, the threat of a second Holocaust at the hands of Arab armies, and then an astonishingly swift victory, the reunification of Jerusalem, and the reacquisition of the ancient heartland of the Jewish state. I doubt if there is a people in the world who could experience such upheavals and not find itself in a somewhat otherworldly frame of mind.

That this state of mind was and is nonetheless otherworldly deserves emphasis. Especially as we find ourselves in a moment in which Zionism and the state it created are once again under ideological siege and the temptation to turn in anger or despair to the divine becomes ever more powerful. The upheavals of modernity and the distinctive madnesses known as anti-Semitism and totalitarianism gave birth to the Holocaust; Israel’s victorious wars were the product of a level of military investment, readiness, and courage that was demanding and difficult but by no means divine; and the rebirth and reconstitution of the Jewish state was—very far from a divine miracle—a direct result of the expenditure of many decades of very human blood, treasure, and sweat.

Even so, over the 40 years since the Six Day War, Zionism and the state of Israel have taken on ever greater messianic connotations in the minds of both Jews and non-Jews. Among some Jews, of course, the results are obvious: a reflexive faith in the power of the almighty to redeem his people, and a return to the belief that we need not ourselves undertake any difficulties or hardships in order to effect or influence our own redemption. Among the more aggressively messianic, it has meant undertaking difficulties and hardships, but only in continuing service of the divine plan as originally outlined by Rav Abraham Kook, according to which the land must be redeemed at any cost, because all costs—human or otherwise—will be compensated by the tikkun, or reparation, that must come at the end of days.

Among Israel’s more fervent gentile supporters, the plague is equally infectious. The Six Day War, we are told, was due to the uncompromising will, and, some argue, the direct intervention of the almighty. I remember seeing an evangelical documentary on the 1967 war that told how God had turned back the Egyptian tanks in the Sinai—tanks that had, in fact, been blown to pieces by the earthly weapons of the IDF. There is, it must be admitted, an endearing sincerity to these convictions, but the phenomenon is not, ultimately, about anti-Semitism or philo-Semitism: It is only another iteration of that 2,000-year-old Oedipal dance that Judaism and Christianity have engaged in on the theme of God and man.

Yet messianic disorders are hardly confined to the right, religious or otherwise. The left, secular and religious, is equally infected. Since the death of dialectical materialism the left of all stripes has, whether or not they wish to admit it, cast off the secular trappings of its ideology—which was once presented as nothing less than a branch of science—and embraced its own dangerous varieties of messianism. Israel is a demonic force to many on the left today—an embodiment of unearthly evil whose misdeeds have nothing in common with the crimes of other, less cosmic nations. But Israel’s supporters on the left are equally prey to seeing Israel as a vaguely cosmic nation—possessing redemptive powers unheard of in the prosaic domains of economics, war, and politics.

The Jewish—and, increasingly, non-Jewish—left has its own tikkun that is no less mystical and no less apocalyptic than its right-wing counterpart. An Israel that withdraws, that reconciles, that admits its sins, that redeems itself from itself and from its own sinful history, will effect a repair of the world that radiates far beyond the nation’s meager borders. Out of that redemption and repair will come the redemption and repair of the Middle East and, then, it is intimated, the entire world. Because the sins of Israel are divine in size, the redemption of these sins will be of equal and opposite dimensions. The repair of Israel will be the repair of the world. Hence their fervency, their desperation, and their inevitable adoption of the language of theology, of demons, of sinners, or holy innocents, holy war, and holy death, of martyrdom and the final reward, that has made the left into a church and its admonitions into a Quran.

To be named an apikoros is, of course, no great honor for a Jew, and its equivalents are no great honors for gentiles. But even in its earliest forms, in its most protean moment, even among the religious, even in the hands of Judah Halevi, that messianist of messianists, Zionism was utterly of this world. It was a defiance, a rebellion, a turning away from the devil’s bargain, perhaps unavoidable, that the Jewish people had made with fate. Crushed by the exigencies of this world, the Jews retreated into the world of words and symbols and existed in a perpetual deferral of existence itself.

Perhaps they had no choice. Certainly, they felt that they had no choice. But that is no excuse for, and no endorsement of, going back. To raise Israel into heaven is to reduce and demolish the Israel of the earth. This little country, crowded and contradictory, made up of millions of tiny victories and as many tiny defeats, can never compete with the divine perfection conjured by its partisans. But nonetheless this country exists. It is real. And in that alone, it is superior to any of its nonexistent divine counterparts.

It is time to acknowledge, without shame and without undue pride, that Israel is not a miracle nor the result of divine fiat, not a mere shadow of some perfection in the mind of an unknowable deity but the result of the sacrifices, the contributions, and, above all, the unglamorous, quotidian labor of many individual human beings, all of whom, to one degree or another, rebelled against the same pleasing but empty messianic illusions so many of their progeny have now embraced. Israel is not here to feed our wishful hopes or our quiet faith in redemption. It is here to remind us that it is, and always will be, in the power of the Jewish people to grasp its fate, to remake if not the world at least its own place in it, and to step out of the fears and shadows of the past, into the light of a world that, while imperfect and unredeemable, does hold the promise of replacing all those terrible and unanswerable questions—what am I? What is wanted of me? What is my place in the unknowable plan?—with a far simpler and more honorable query: What do I do now?

Benjamin Kerstein is a Tel Aviv-based writer and editor.

Yet Bernard Lazare never rejected fame. Over the next decade, he became one of Paris’ most respected and feared journalists and literary critics, his dapper suits and delicate pince-nez belying a fierce and combative character. Yet that fame failed to endure: Though he was the first of Alfred Dreyfus’ defenders and the first of French Zionists—roles deeply entwined with one another—Lazare is mostly forgotten today. Lazare, however, deserves a second look; his life story reveals the aspirations and the limitations of French Jewry at the dawn of the 20th century.

For tourists, Nîmes is best known for the bullfights still held in its Roman arena. For the French, Nîmes is notable for its large Protestant population—as anomalous in this overwhelmingly Catholic country as Belfast is in Ireland. In the 19th century, Nîmes was the capital of France’s thriving textile industry and the birthplace of the famous rugged fabric, denim, that took its name from the town. The shmata trade, however, was the affair not just of the local Protestants but of Jewish families as well. Significantly, this small but influential community—home to the Crémieux clan, whose most notable member, Adolphe Crémieux, served as minister of justice in the Second and Third Republics—had not just stepped off the boat: Many of the Jewish families in Nîmes had roots that extended at least as far back as the Avignon Papacy in the 14th century, while yet others were as ancient as the Greco-Roman ruins littering the countryside.

While Lazare’s maternal line seems to have stretched back several centuries on French soil, it was his father’s family, immigrants from Germany, that had entered the textile trade and rose to prominence. Like many young men from families of means, young Lazare rebelled against the middle-class traditions and tepid faith of his parents. At the local lycée, he announced to one and all his hatred of authority and power, be it his father, his teachers, or the republican state. “I have always held in horror masters and rulers of any sort,” he wrote as an adult. It was his life’s credo.

But Lazare was hardly a rebel without a cause. At first, he plunged into symbolism, a literary movement that anticipated our own Age of Aquarius. Led by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the symbolists turned their backs not only on the stodgy pieties of bourgeois France but on rationalism itself. Like the surrealists who would shortly follow, they insisted on the reality of unconscious and irrational forces at work in the world and our selves.

But the purity of art couldn’t contain an active mind like Lazare’s. In the hothouse atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Paris, his aesthetic concerns quickly blossomed into political engagement: He was as eager to challenge traditional political parties as he was traditional artistic schools. And he certainly had ample opportunity to do so: In the last decades of the 19th century, Paris was rehearsing our own era of the Internet, convulsed by the explosive growth of the penny press that left the city awash with cheap, mass-circulation newspapers that made sport of the reputations of politicians and powerbrokers. Lazare flourished in the bedlam of Parisian journalism; by 1892, he was writing for several different papers as a theater and book critic.

Two events propelled Lazare away from the arts and toward politics: anarchist terrorism and the Dreyfus Affair. For Lazare, these seemingly disparate phenomena had a great deal in common.

For most of us, anarchy invokes visions of a Montessori playground or the lawless regions of Sudan. In Lazare’s Paris, it meant a wave of terrorist attacks that paralyzed the city with fear. Between 1892 and 1894, politically motivated bombers hit targets ranging from the National Assembly to popular cafés, a wave of terror climaxing with the assassination of the French President Sadi Carnot. These so-called acts of “propaganda by the deed” aimed at nothing less than the collapse of the Third Republic—for the anarchists, the rights guaranteed by the state amounted to little more, in the famous phrase of Anatole France, than the right to starve while living under a bridge.

But these deeds had nothing in common with Lazare’s brand of anarchism. He was as appalled by the bloody terrorist acts as he was by the repressive laws passed in their wake. For Lazare, workers would inevitably get the short end of the stick whether they lived under a socialist or a conservative regime. Governments may change, he believed, but the exploitation and neglect of the poor and the disenfranchised remained constant. Only a society of workers’ cooperatives, he believed, democratic and decentralized, could meet the material and emotional needs of all citizens. If a Tea Partier was to marry a Communist, their ideological brainchild might resemble Lazare.

In 1894, however, the arc of Lazare’s career was suddenly hauled into the powerful gravitational pull of the Dreyfus Affair. Long before renowned writers and politicians like Emile Zola, Jean Jaurès, Georges Clemenceau, and Charles Péguy joined forces on behalf of Dreyfus, Lazare had thrown himself body and soul into the battle. His anarchist convictions help explain his decision—after all, while ruthless in his treatment of the Republic, Lazare was always a committed republican. The revolution of 1789, which led to the first French Republic, represented to Lazare everything that was great and good for humankind. Fidelity for the trinity of revolutionary ideals—liberty, equality, and fraternity—was particularly great among the Jews of Nîmes, a well-established minority living in a town that was itself, religiously speaking, a minority within the country at large. And as Dreyfus’ arrest made clear, safeguarding these vaunted values required the constant vigilance of all French citizens, Jews and anarchists as well as Catholics and conservatives.

With France flooded by anti-Semitic sentiment in the wake of the affair, Lazare’s politics led him on an unlikely path back to his Jewish roots. In 1896, he issued his incendiary pamphlet A Judicial Error: The Truth About the Dreyfus Affair. In both its biting style and merciless analysis, the brochure anticipated Zola’s more celebrated J’Accuse, which would not appear for another two years. Captain Dreyfus, Lazare declared, was the victim of the lies and machinations of officials at the highest levels of the army and government. Unlike Zola, though, Lazare homes in on the matter of Dreyfus’ religion. “It is because Dreyfus was Jewish that he was arrested,” he roared, “because he was Jewish that he was judged, because he was Jewish that he was condemned and because he is Jewish that the voices of justice and truth have fallen silent.”

The silence that greeted the pamphlet’s publication left a deep impression on Lazare. Few friends and colleagues on the Left rallied to his call, while anti-Semitic newspapers pummeled him. By 1898, when Dreyfus was brought back from Devil’s Island to France for his retrial, Lazare was prepared to see not just the captain but also himself as the “symbol of the persecuted Jew.” The same anti-Semitic frenzy that sparked the Zionist epiphany of Theodor Herzl—who covered Dreyfus’ public degradation for a Viennese newspaper—spurred Lazare’s conversion as well. Deeply impressed by Herzl’s book Judenstaat, Lazare had come to a conclusion similar to his Austrian counterpart: Despite their best efforts to assimilate, Jews would always be reminded by the world that they remained Jews. It was a far cry from his anarchist beginnings.

Like Herzl, too, Lazare abandoned his belief that Jews could assimilate into a secular republic like France. Yet it soon became clear that this was the only position they did share: Lazare never surrendered his radically egalitarian ideals and instead simply channeled them into his particular understanding of Zionism. As his biographer Nelly Wilson observed, Lazare believed that just as the Jew will never succeed to assimilate to French society, he must also never allow himself to assimilate to its unjust social and economic order.

Herzl’s more conservative vision carried the day, perhaps in part because Lazare did not live long enough to carry on the fight. He died, most probably of cancer, in 1903. The 200 mourners who gathered at his grave at Montparnasse were, along with a few anarchists, mostly immigrant Jews from eastern Europe. Five years later, a statue was erected in Nîmes’ central park, the jardin de la fontaine, to commemorate Lazare’s achievements. Thirty years later, it disappeared under the watch of the Vichy regime.

Should you ever visit the garden, take a minute away from the ruins of the Temple of Diana and walk toward the eastern gate. Against a rock wall and behind leaves and branches you will find a plaque where the statue once stood. Its inscription would not embarrass Lazare: “A statue once stood here,” it reads, “dedicated to a man who, in dangerous times, defended the rights of man trampled under in the person of Dreyfus.”

Robert Zaretsky is professor of history in the Honors College, University of Houston, and the author, most recently, of Albert Camus: Elements of a Life.

Now get this: I’m sending my kid to a Zionist summer camp. For the second summer in a row.

How did I get from point A to point B? (And at a time when Zionist camps are—shall we say—less than popular in certain parts of the Internet, no less!)

It started with a lot of research—I wasn’t going to send my precious Jewish snowflake to just any overnight camp. First, the camp had to be Jewish. That was non-negotiable. Research shows that Jewish camps are a superb way to cultivate a kid’s positive feelings about his or her Jewishness. According to the Foundation for Jewish Camp, 66 percent of Jews who attended Jewish camps considered their Jewish identity “very important,” as opposed to 29 percent of those who never attended a Jewish camp, and Jewish camp alumni are 90 percent more likely to join a JCC than their non-Jewish-camping compatriots. Sure, we might make a methodological argument that the kind of kids who are sent to Jewish camps are predisposed to feel better about Jewishness than those who aren’t, but let’s just go with this: Camp is way more delicious than shul or school. I stole a first kiss behind the chadar ochel (mess hall), performed in Hebrew plays, sang my heart out in Hebrew during zimriya (songfest), competed fiercely in that terrifying nighttime game where were issued passports of actual Holocaust-era Jews and had to flee our Nazi counselors to freedom on the tennis courts. (Trivializing of tragedy? Perhaps. Indelible? Certainly.) I have camp friendships that are hugely meaningful to me nearly 30 years later. Camp Ramah in New England filled me with far more warm feelings and sense of Jewish community than anything else I experienced in childhood.

But I wanted my own young children to go to camp close to New York City, where I live. (I am a Jewish mother; I live to fulfill the stereotype of being neurotic and smothering.) But when I started looking for Jewish sleepaway camps in a two-and-a-half-hour radius from the city, I found a terrifying amount of princessery, camps filled with unnervingly sophisticated, spoiled kids with Shabbat dresses more expensive than my entire family’s wardrobe. I found parents who ignored cell-phone bans and sent contraband candy to camp elaborately hidden in tennis-ball canisters. When I asked for other spoiled-campers stories online, my Facebook page lit up. I heard about camps with “no bottled water” policies, because parents were sending so many cases, some camps ran out of storage space. I heard about girls so obsessed with straightening their Jewish hair and worrying about how they looked in a bikini that they flatly refused to swim. I heard about pale pink Shabbat shoes with spike heels (to be worn in the grass and mud!). I heard about kids packing enough technology (iPods, iPads, handheld gaming systems) to rival the contents of J&R and enough jewelry to rival Tiffany. My friend Dan reported overhearing the following exchange:

Camper 1: “My dad works for the largest blah blah blah in the country.”
Camper 2: “Your dad works for somebody?”

Perhaps worst of all, in poking around campers’ online message boards, I found kids saying approvingly that their camps were beloved by cool kids like themselves, but weren’t enjoyed by geeks.

Do you know where these vile youths don’t go? They don’t go to Zionist camps. Zionist camps like the one at which we’ll be dropping my daughter this week, Zionist camps that embrace geekery. Her camp makes kids do chores. It does not have spiffy bunks or a lake. The kids dress like shlumps. They are unspoiled and lovely. The camp has a super-strict anti-bullying policy. It is haimish. It felt like family immediately.

When I got married, I had a very DIY wedding in the woods. We counted on friends and family pitching in. Do you know who the most helpful and spirited were, by far? My cousins who went to Habonim Dror Moshava, a socialist Zionist camp that stresses the values of kibbutz: shared labor, cooperation, social justice, and a cultural love of Judaism. Some of my family members failed to do the weensy minor tasks I asked of them, but my cousins were whirling dervishes of chopping, grilling, serving, clearing, singing Birkat Hamazon. When I grabbed my cousin Abe, mayim-stepping by with a plate of veggies, to say thanks, he grinned, “No worries, cuz. Socialist Jew camp. It’s what we do.”

Now, would I be uncomfortable if Josie’s (and soon to be Maxie’s) camp was advocating dehumanizing Palestinians and supporting tikkun olam only if it applied to Jews? You bet. Camp has a privileged place of kid-centric-ness, away from parental eyes, so I cannot say for sure that my child was not subjected to Clockwork Orange-like brainwashing sessions about the evils of intermarriage. But given that the camp’s own literature discusses the values of diversity and pluralism, and that it is not affiliated with any particular branch of Judaism, I’m guessing no. There are attractive Israeli counselors there, yes, but I’m guessing their perspectives on Palestinian statehood vary from hard left to hard right, just like actual Israelis do. At Josie’s camp, social action is a huge part of the curriculum: The kids research different charities—not all Jewish—and decide which ones to support. They do volunteer work. Josie came home singing “Ani v’ata n’shaneh et haolam”—you and I will change the world—and she meant it. I am a world-class mocker of things, and I don’t think that childhood sentiment is mock-worthy.

The upshot: If American Jewish identity is to be something more than silver-and-blue wrapping paper instead of red-and-green wrapping paper in December, Zionist summer camp can be a parent’s best ally.

Last year, Josie returned from camp as joyful as I have ever seen her. She belted out the songs I’d sung at my own camp. Her Hebrew had improved by leaps and bounds. She made us Israeli salad, refusing all offers of assistance, dicing tomatoes and cucumbers into tiny pieces. It took her 45 minutes. (We learned to plan ahead when Josie was making Israeli salad.)

The Zionist camp Josie attends fosters what I think is a particularly American sort of Zionism, one that says that Jews are a people defined by both religion and ethnicity. It isn’t boosterish. It allows for nuance. Even an 8-year-old can understand nuance. And even an 8-year-old can understand Jewishness is more than demanding an Elsa Peretti Star of David necklace for your bat mitzvah, because everyone at camp has one.

My first experience with the history of the Nakba came as a young Jewish Studies student at the University of Maryland. One graduate seminar I attended was led by Benny Morris, the prominent Israeli historian responsible for revolutionizing his country’s historiography pertaining to the founding period. The subject of the seminar was 1948, and the course material—army reports from the field, personal letters, radio transcripts—came directly from Morris’ influential first book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, published in 1988.

Early on in the seminar, I asked Morris, a short man with a fiery personality, if it was difficult to be a post-Zionist—an adherent of a movement that strives to replace Israel’s Zionist identity with a liberal cosmopolitan one—in Israel. He responded, almost snapping at me, that he was not a post-Zionist and never had been. As I would see in the seminar, Morris had exposed one of Israel’s darkest chapters without abandoning a strong allegiance to Zionism.

The traditional Israeli 1948 narrative, which Morris challenges, starts with the Arab rejection of the U.N.-sponsored partition plan for Palestine. The plan guaranteed an Arab and a Jewish state, living in peace, after the British mandate over Palestine expired, according to that traditional narrative. Due to the Arab rejection of the plan, a violent regional war broke out in which a small number of Israeli soldiers fought thousands of Arab fighters bent on driving the Jews into the sea. Caught in the crossfires of war, the native Palestinian population voluntarily fled their homes to neighboring Arab countries. As the dust settled, the newly formed state of Israel had no choice but to refuse the return of the Palestinian refugees, given the high numbers of Jews who had been expelled from Arab countries in the course of the war.

In the late 1980s, a group of Israeli “new” historians began rewriting the foundation myths of the country. Through recently declassified Israeli and British state documents, the new historians uncovered a different version of events, which was much closer to Palestinian accounts of partial ethnic cleansing that took place in 1948. Led by Morris, a devoted archive historian, they were able to confirm that roughly 750,000 Palestinians fled from their homes, in part due to Israeli military force, small-scale massacre, episodic cases of rape, and violent intimidation. The new historians proved that Israel had planned to expel thousands of Arabs regardless of the success of the U.N. partition plan. As the 1990s dawned, Israeli society was no longer able to easily dismiss the Palestinian narrative of the Nakba as mere propaganda.

Israeli society was also slow to react to the information coming from the halls of academia. There has always been a narrative of Palestinian flight during 1948, but never one that acknowledged undertones of ethnic cleansing or active Jewish participation. Given the small size of Israeli society in 1948, it is striking that high-ranking military and intelligence officials, not to mention soldiers and kibbutz members who were responsible for expulsions, did not come forward in the 1950s and share their experiences.

According to Haaretz, the Israeli ministry of education faced a crisis when textbooks including the Palestinian narrative of 1948 were introduced for 11th- and 12th-grade students in 2009. For the first time in the history of the country, Palestinian narratives were presented alongside Israeli narratives, and the words “ethnic cleansing” appeared in high-school texts. In one section, the textbook’s authors argued that armed Jewish forces instituted a policy of ethnic cleaning, “contrary to the proclamations of peace in the Declaration of Independence.” After 61 years, the Palestinian narrative had reached Israeli high-school classrooms—but that inclusion did not last long. In 2009, the textbooks were replaced.

Despite the damaging nature of his research, Benny Morris maintained in opinion pieces and interviews that one must “break eggs to make an omelet.” He vociferously argued that ethnic cleansing was a necessary part of Israeli state building, just as the creation of the United States required the ethnic cleansing of the Native American population. In a now famous 2004 interview with Haaretz, Morris even argued that David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and commander of the Israeli Defence Forces in 1948, did not go far enough in the expulsion of Palestinians from newly controlled state territory. Had Ben Gurion removed all the Palestinians, Israel would have been better off in future conflicts with the Palestinians and the Arab world, Morris said.

Not all of the new historians share Morris’ rationale for Israeli actions in 1948. Ilan Pappé, author of the 2006 work The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and one of the prominent new historians, uses the Nakba to portray an overall Zionist strategy predicated on the ethnic cleansing of all the native inhabitants of historic Palestine to establish a Jewish state. Pappé is a social historian who relies on testimonies, interviews, and first-person accounts of Palestinians to construct his version of events. Unlike Morris’ pragmatism concerning the process of Israeli state building, Pappé has condemned the events of 1948, in his professional and political life, as a part in Israel’s growingly oppressive posture toward anything Arab, including Jews from Arab countries.

***

The Israeli social and political climate has not changed much since the new historians began publishing their books in the halcyon days of the Oslo peace accords. The Israeli political debate still lacks honest discussion of the Nakba and its relevance today. The Nakba debate and the groundbreaking research associated with it remain confined to small intellectual circles and the halls of academia, and even that arena is under attack. To mark the Nakba this year, Im Tirztu, an Israeli university group, published a 70-page booklet in Hebrew titled “The BS That Is the Nakba.” The pamphlet demonizes the new historians (excluding Morris, who is selectively referred to) and other Israeli academics for disseminating Arab propaganda about the country’s founding.

“There was automatic resistance when we first started publishing,” Benny Morris told me in a recent telephone interview from Oxford, where he is conducting research. “Many told me that the conflict with the Arabs is ongoing, and discussion of certain aspects of 1948 should wait until after the conflict is over and peace is here.”

Ilan Pappé told me by email from the University of Exeter, where he is a professor of Middle Eastern history: “One cannot deny that during the Oslo years (1993-2000), it was possible to air some questions about the Israeli mythology of the 1948 war. When I commenced my research I was convinced that there was a basis for a dialogue with my peers in the academia and with the public at large. But this was an illusion.” He continued, “The debate was allowed as long as it was conducted within the Zionist frame of mind; if you were able to liberate yourself from this mind-set, which I did, you were delegitimized as a partner in the debate.”

After the high-school textbook controversy broke with the Haartez coverage, education minister Gideon Saar launched an investigation that found “a great number of mistakes” in the text. The book, Nationalism: Building a State in the Middle East, was quickly edited so that the term “ethnic cleansing” and most of the Palestinian narrative disappeared. New copies lacking the controversial terms—and without any explicit mention of the Palestinian narrative of 1948—were then sent to Israeli classrooms.

In March 2011, the Knesset passed a bill that made publicly-sponsored commemoration of the Nakba a punishable crime. The bill, sponsored by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, is designed to prohibit activity “which would entail undermining the foundations of the state and contradicting its values.” In practice, the bill will allow Israel to levy fines on local- and state-funded organizations that commemorate the Nakba inside the state.

The bill has been denounced by some, including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, as an attack on free speech, which it clearly is, and criticized for its vague language. Israelis and Palestinians on the right and the left will continue to differ about the meaning of the Nakba and the relative validity of different versions of their national narratives. But the refusal to acknowledge documented historical realities is clearly something else. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously put it, “Everyone is entitled to his opinion, but not to his own facts.”

Including the Nakba in Israeli public discourse, newspapers, and textbooks hardly means the unqualified embrace of one version of history over another. But open discussion of competing narratives with reference to the historical record is clearly a precondition for any wider kind of social and political understanding between Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel and between Israelis and Palestinians. Repressive attempts to criminalize narratives of the Nakba—however partial or wrong-headed its opponents may believe those narratives to be—block any possibility of mutual understanding and weaken critical discourse inside Zionist circles and within Israeli society as a whole. The most likely victim of such misguided attempts to shore up Zionism through attacks on free speech and the historical record is Zionism itself.

Joseph Dana, an Israeli-American writer based in Tel Aviv and Ramallah, is a contributing editor to the Israeli web magazine +972. His work has appeared in The Nation, Le Monde Diplomatique, The National, and Haaretz.

In a conference room down the hall, Jerusalem-based accountant Philip Stein stood in front of a PowerPoint projection talking taxes. Although presenting to a group of mostly retirement-age couples, Stein was showing a slide that showed a happy young family frolicking on a perfect sandy beach, under a headline announcing their “Ten Year Vacation From Israeli Tax.” The slides that followed outlined the benefits offered by a series of new tax breaks aimed at encouraging olim and expatriate Israelis to come to Israel. In addition to the 10-year tax break on income earned abroad, Stein explained, the new law would also give them breaks on business taxes, exempt them from paying taxes on their pensions, and offer a series of point-based deductions for their first three years in Israel.

The small crowd sitting in front of him seemed to lack the necessary attention span for Stein’s spiel, constantly interrupting with irrelevant questions and uncontrollable cell phone rings. A small, quiet man with a dark blue kippah over his neatly combed sandy brown hair, Stein persisted, trying in his measured way to sell these American Jews on the benefits of a reform aimed at them. At the end of his presentation, he turned to the crowd to make one last appeal: “Israel’s a very exciting place, you’ll meet a lot of exciting people,” he said in perfect Midwestern monotone.

When Philip Stein and his wife made aliyah more than 30 years ago, Israel certainly was a very exciting place. At the time there were virtually no support systems in place to help new immigrants. Raised in Chicago, Stein was a young, newly minted accountant, and no one tracking his professional development would have recommended that he move to Israel. A few days after the Paramus “Mega” event, I asked him what his family thought when he told them he was moving to Israel. “That I was out of my mind,” he responded, grinning.

In its drive to attract professional, “high quality” immigrants, Israel faces the stark reality that Jews in America have relatively little to complain about. The people at these events are not the pioneering kibbutzim of an earlier era, embarking on a mission to build Israeli society from the ground up. The current success of Nefesh B’Nefesh lies in shifting the focus of aliyah from the ideological onto the material, as they aim to eliminate the practical barriers keeping American Jews in the United States. Nefesh seminars and webinars often take on the no-nonsense qualities of a business convention. And if they rarely mention questions of ideology, this is perhaps because, like every confident salesperson, Nefesh’s people are operating under the assumption that you already want what they’ve got.

Perhaps they are right. Since Nefesh B’Nefesh was founded in 2002, the number of North American Jews moving to Israel has doubled, up to nearly 4,000 last year. More than a third of that increase happened between 2008 and 2009, the year the U.S. economy fell through the floor. While the unemployment rate in the United States surged to nearly 10 percent, in Israel it hovered between 6 and 7 percent through 2010, according to data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. As a nod to the organization’s success, in 2008 the Jewish Agency, its one-time “rival,” ceded North American aliyah efforts to Nefesh, retaining responsibility only for confirming the eligibility of candidates and paying their airfare.

And with new incentives like the tax reform, which was passed as a part of the “Returning Home for Israel’s 60th” promotion in 2008 and first went into effect in 2010, the Israeli government is actively recognizing that economics can play a pivotal role in the decision to move to Israel. “We wanted to give people the right conditions so that they move to Israel and stay there,” Israeli Minister of Immigrant Absorption Sofa Landver said of the motivations behind the reform in an interview with Tablet Magazine. “The government’s decision suggests that there’s a change in attitude. I think Jews belong in Israel, and Israel will do everything to get them back home.”

“It’s expensive to be Jewish in America,” Landver added. Moving to Israel frees American Jews from burdensome day-school tuition and health care costs, for example. And with its focus on overcoming practical obstacles to aliyah, Nefesh B’Nefesh may be benefiting from Israel’s relative economic stability when compared with America, gaining traction with a niche group of quietly passionate people who have long held Israel at the back of their minds. Now, as the economic disparities between the two countries have narrowed, Israel has become a more attractive option, a place where they can fulfill both their emotional and financial life goals. Put another way: “People need numerous reinforcements in their decision to make aliyah,” Nefesh Vice President Danny Oberman told me. “This is one of them.”

***

Stein sits across from me just a few days before Christmas in the lobby of the Upper West Side hotel he booked for the last leg of his cross-country tour with Nefesh B’Nefesh, which had invited him as an expert speaker at events from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Chicago and now New Jersey. A small man with an open, friendly face, he hardly seems to me the kind of hardy, passionate Zionist who would leave his life behind and strike out for unknown horizons. Instead, he is the sort of man who always keeps at least one pen tucked neatly into the breast pocket of his collared shirt.

But Zionist passion was in fact the source of his decision. His young wife had just returned from a year in Israel, and when she insisted they make aliyah, Stein promised to give it a year. “I had the aliyah experience pre-Nefesh B’Nefesh, and when I came you were really on your own,” he tells me. At the time, in the late 1970s, Israel was still a volatile and underdeveloped nation, and Stein’s main client prospects—a group of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contractors stationed at a base in the Negev—were transitory at best. But the two of them stayed, and slowly, through the economic trials of the 1980s, he built up a clientele of Americans and returning Israelis. With the birth of his five daughters, he and his wife put down roots in Israel, and now, as his company website boasts, he runs the “largest U.S. accounting firm in Israel.”

As a tax-man, Stein naturally speaks in highly pragmatic terms. Israel has changed, he says, listing the benefits. Income disparities are not as great as they used to be. And with the medical expenses retirees face in America, they might actually profit from the move. “When I meet people, they’re talking about the practical side. I don’t see the zealousness,” he says, without any sense of pioneering self-righteousness. “It’s sort of post-ideology. They’re just seeing a nice lifestyle.”

Many of Stein’s clients are Israeli expats residing in the States. Because they are tuned in to Israeli TV and news sources and are saddened by the idea of watching their children grow up outside of Israel, they may be most receptive to many of the government’s latest economic incentives. The new tax reform, for example, extends to returning Israelis many benefits previously reserved for olim. The Ministry of Immigrant Absorption website for the new law loudly trumpets this fact, with sparkling, Saturday-morning-cartoon-styled rainbows shooting from the headline. The ensuing description is so ecstatic it almost descends into absurdity, describing the reforms as “a genuine revolution, one that for the first time combines Zionist and ethical principles with financial viability.”

***

Israeli President Shimon Peres addresses new Jewish immigrants upon their arrival from the United States at Ben Gurion International airport near Tel Aviv on August 3, 2010.
Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images

“The desire to make aliyah has been there forever,” Debbie Rapps tells me at the Paramus fair expo in Conference Room A. With her dark-rimmed glasses and gently sarcastic sense of humor, she seems like the kind of cool mom everybody wanted to have in junior high school. “I definitely have the passion,” she tells me. “I need the means,” she adds, as she politely shoos away a representative from Meuhedet Insurance. Stein has just arrived and is arranging his business cards on a back table.

Several days after the Paramus event, Debbie and I meet to talk in the cafeteria at Stern, the women’s college at Yeshiva University, where she occasionally works proctoring exams to students. When we both get stuck at the register without any cash, she casually asks the other students in line if they have extra meal plan points they’d be willing to donate, and one girl wordlessly passes her card up to the cashier. As we talk, Debbie stops periodically to exchange small talk with students she knows, asking about their parents and where they plan to go over their winter breaks. She comes across as incredibly friendly, I notice, while maintaining an honest, tell-it-like-it is attitude.

“Israel was always at the forefront of everything I’ve ever done,” she says, explaining that making aliyah is something she has dreamt of for more than 20 years. Because she was recently laid off from her job in public relations, there are several factors she must take into consideration when planning the move. The first is her five children (three boys and two girls). Her three older children are already in Israel, but the younger two—aged 16 and 7—are still in Jewish day schools. The tuition she and her husband pay is a major expense, and cutting that expense is a big draw to Israel.

And then there’s the job question. Her husband is a kosher food broker, but because of Debbie’s lay-off, they are limited financially. For the moment, she tells me, she is “freelancing” and occasionally driving into Stern from her home in Teaneck, N.J. “We’re basically very practical, cautious people. So, we’re still here.”

While hardly naive about the difficulties of living in Israel, Debbie is enthusiastic about the country’s status as a “start-up nation,” referring to authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s 2009 paean to Israel’s entrepreneurial achievements. She has been impressed by what she’s seen at the Nefesh B’Nefesh seminars and has looked into incentives like the Go North program, a $10 million project that provides extensive financial assistance for people to move to less-developed areas of northern Israel. In particular, the program provides a family grant of up to $25,000 and up to $16,000 in vehicle subsidies. She praises Nefesh B’Nefesh for cutting through Israel’s notorious bureaucracy. “There are certainly more options,” she says, mentioning the convenience of Nefesh’s online jobs bank. “It’s a very American organization.”

Continue reading: the “push” and “pull” factors, missing America, and “building Israel one person at a time.” Or view as a single page.

Which, Israel being the subject matter, is guaranteed to make some people mad. Amir Ofek, the press attaché at Israel’s embassy in London, told the Israeli press that the show is “an attempt to demonize Israelis” and the worst example of anti-Israeli propaganda he’d ever seen. Writing in the Jewish Chronicle, England’s premier Jewish publication, one columnist argued that the series’ script could have been written by Fatah. The institutionalized Jewish community in England issued strongly worded press releases. Pundits in Israel shrieked. By the time the show had finished its run, more people had read about The Promise than had actually seen it.

That’s a shame, because contrary to these howls of discontent, the show is a rare and riveting example of telling Israel’s story on screen with accuracy, sensitivity, and courage. It begins with Erin (Claire Foy), a recent high-school graduate, visiting her dying grandfather in the hospital in London 2005. The old man, we’re led to understand, had gone through life being somewhat of a sod, but then Erin finds his diary. In a series of flashbacks, we learn that Grandpa Len (Christian Cooke) had been among the liberators of Bergen-Belsen. This is conveyed via raw and harrowing documentary footage of the camp’s aftermath; seeing the skeletal corpses piled up, we understand every tormented line wrinkling Len’s handsome face.

But the plot soars once Len and Erin arrive in Israel, each in his or her own era, he as a rosy-cheeked British soldier and she as a contemporary tourist, reading the diary and doing her best to retrace her grandfather’s steps. After we see Len injured in the 1946 attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Erin meets with an old Israeli who, as a member of the Zionist paramilitary group Irgun, was one of the attack’s perpetrators. This genial septuagenarian tells Erin that having lost his entire family in the Holocaust, he was happy to fight for the Jewish homeland by any means necessary. Erin—like presumably many viewers—finds the attack noxious, but the old man’s version of events is emotional and intelligent, ripe with the nuances that make Israel both deeply appealing and hopelessly complex.

The show’s writer and director, Peter Kosminsky, walks this tightrope of evenhandedness remarkably well. One moment we follow Erin as she survives a Palestinian suicide bombing and wanders, bleeding, through the corridors of a hospital packed with disfigured, writhing victims. The next, we follow her to Hebron, where the suffering of the Palestinian population—largely imprisoned by a small and vitriolic community of Jewish settlers defended by a large military force—is acutely felt. The same is true for Len, shown in pre-State Palestine between 1946 and 1948, as his sympathies shift between the Jewish underground operatives fighting for independence and the local Arabs with whom the Jews vie for land. To Kosminsky’s credit, nothing and no one in the series is simple, and even the most zealous characters are allowed moments of humanity, a few good arguments in support of their cause, and a few moments of grace.

One such moment comes toward the end of the series, when Erin, looking for one of her grandfather’s old acquaintances, makes her way into Gaza. Through a complicated set of circumstances, she ends up spending the night with the family of a female suicide bomber who had exploded herself in Tel Aviv the previous day. Erin is woken up in the morning by determined-looking members of the Israel Defense Forces (the show is set before the IDF’s withdrawal from Gaza in August of 2005), who inform her that the house, per Israel’s policy of combating terrorism, is slated for immediate demolition. Erin is angry—she doesn’t see the point of punishing the family for the actions of their fanatic daughter—and decides to chain herself to a post in an attempt to block the soldiers’ path. Enter Eliza (Perdita Weeks), Erin’s best friend and now a young IDF soldier serving in Gaza. Throughout her visit to Israel, Erin had been staying with Eliza’s family, supporting her friend—a dual citizen of England and Israel—as she finished her basic training. A plausible plot twist puts Eliza in the same condemned house with Erin, and a fierce dialogue unfolds between the two women. Erin weeps for the Palestinian family about to be rendered homeless; Eliza makes a compelling argument that reminds Erin—and the viewers—of the atrocities of terrorism and of Israel’s right to defend itself. What the English audience sees, then, is two young English women, one wearing a kafiyah around her neck and one in a tight olive IDF uniform, each making her point emotionally and eloquently, each convincing.

Viewed through the much narrower prism of the professional propagandist, however, it is not difficult to see why someone might take offense with the show. Several of Israel’s highly questionable practices are shown here accurately and unequivocally. In Gaza, for example, Erin and a local Palestinian child are grabbed and used as human shields by soldiers searching a nearby house; this controversial practice has been repeatedly deployed by the IDF in Gaza and the West Bank for the past decade or so. Similarly, the portrayal of Hebron’s Jewish settlers as violent aggressors is unflattering but not inaccurate. But as he’s done in his previous shows—about the radicalization of British Muslims, the lead-up to the war in Iraq, and other deeply controversial and multilayered subjects—Kosminsky never allows these harsh truths to steal the focus away from the story. Watching the show, audiences are likely to care as much or more for Erin’s personal drama—the beautifully mundane tale of a young woman emerging from the cocoon of childhood, blinking, blinded by sex and family and other impossibly bright lights—as they do about the morsels of reality planted here and there throughout the plot. This, perhaps, was what reality television was meant to be all along: edifying but never preachy, entertaining but seldom silly, a lesson in history and current events that realizes that for anyone to care, facts and emotions must be given equal footing and the opportunity to clash with each other for the viewer’s sympathy.

For the most part, and despite the vocal criticisms, English audiences seemed to embrace the show and its complexities. More than a million and a half people, or a strong showing of 7 percent of the television-watching audience, tuned in to The Promise, and there was occasional praise from across the political spectrum for the show’s even-handedness and thoroughness. If The Promise gets what it deserves, it will be given an airing here and in Israel, injecting a note of artfulness and subtlety into a debate too often dominated by the shrill.

I eventually found him—though he did not, at first, meet my expectations.

***

From my early teens, discussions around our family table took off from articles in Commentary, the only publication read in common by my father, my brother Ben, and me, five years Ben’s junior. These discussions continued once Ben and I formed our own families and became independent subscribers.

In all that time, few essays ever got us more riled up than “My Negro Problem and Ours,” written in 1963, at the height of the American civil rights movement, and almost certainly intended to provoke the hundreds of letters it generated. In it, Commentary’s legendary editor-in-chief, Norman Podhoretz, pitted his experiences as a poor kid in Brooklyn who was stalked and bullied by bigger black boys against the prevalent notion that Jews were rich and Negroes persecuted. He unearthed in himself emotions like envy and hate and examined them in light of what increasingly militant blacks were saying about their treatment in America. Far from minimizing their grievances, Norman concluded that the tortured relations between blacks and whites should be dissolved. “I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned.” Intermarriage was the desired resolution. Were he asked whether he would like one of his daughters to “marry one,” he wrote, he would have to answer, no, he would not like it at all, but he would accept it as the man he had “a duty to be.” There was real import to this statement by a man with three daughters.

“Politically incorrect” hardly suffices to describe the tenor and substance of this article, which retains every iota of its disturbing power to this day. Norman’s mercilessly rational analysis falls like a searchlight on thoughts and feelings that might have benefited from softer illumination. But what troubled us in Montreal was less the treatment of race, which hardly resonated north of the border, than the author’s indifference to whether his daughter’s hypothetical black suitor was Jewish. So the boy was black—big deal. But how could the editor of a Jewish magazine so casually treat his daughter’s marriage to a gentile?

And then, almost as an aside, came this reflection: “In thinking about the Jews I have often wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant,” Podhoretz wrote. “Did the Jews have to survive so that six million innocent people should one day be burned in the ovens of Auschwitz? It is a terrible question and no one, not God himself, could ever answer it to my satisfaction.”

Was the question terrible or simply off-key? Striving for ultimate honesty, it betrayed moral innocence without registering what Judaism had come to accomplish. Jews had forsworn human sacrifice. The Germans murdered because they were not Jews and did not follow God’s law. The genocide of the Jews was the consequence not of Jewish survival but of Nazism’s perverted search for the “fittest.” Surely the unspeakable crimes by enemies of the Jews ought to have prompted questions about the value of their existence.

***

It wasn’t until several months later that Norman received redemption in our family, which came as a result of his response to Hannah Arendt’s coverage for The New Yorker of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had been captured and brought by Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, from his hiding in Argentina to Jerusalem to stand trial for crimes against the Jewish people. This was the first such reckoning, as earlier trials of Nazi war criminals had charged them with crimes against humanity or against other nationals. Israeli leaders felt duty bound to try one of the chief organizers of the Final Solution for the genocide that had inspired the jurist Raphael Lemkin to coin that term. Arendt, by contrast, was bothered by what she considered legal gerrymandering in trying the SS officer in the court of a country that had not existed at the time of the massacres, by the prosecution’s emphasis on the national catastrophe rather than the narrow specifics of the case, and by its inadequate understanding of the Nazi mind. Author of a major study of totalitarianism, Arendt was convinced that the modern technocrat—Nazi or Soviet—was so regimented and brainwashed that he was not intellectually agile enough to try to save himself in a court of law. Eichmann was dull-witted, a pencil pusher: It was ridiculous to cast an efficient bureaucrat as arch-villain in so large a drama.

Of all the prominent European Jews who found refuge in America during the war, Arendt had, before this, been singled out for homage by the New York intellectuals, who were just coming to terms with the Jewish national experience they had until then mostly ignored. They had not realized that she was moving in the opposite direction, distancing herself from her earlier Zionist and Jewish sympathies. Although no one at the time suspected her liaison with her teacher Martin Heidegger, or the resumption of her correspondence with him despite his wartime association with the Nazi regime, the Americans felt betrayed by her account of the trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Saul Bellow ascribed his dislike to one of his characters, the Holocaust survivor Arthur Sammler, who protests that the Germans’ idea of making the century’s great crime look dull was not banal but an idea of genius: “Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abandon conscience. Is such a project trivial? Only if human life is trivial. This woman professor’s enemy is modern civilization itself.” The historian Jacob Robinson exposed Arendt’s many factual errors in a study called, after Isaiah, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, and Arendt’s German-Jewish landsman Gershom Scholem called her tone “heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious.” Citing Scholem, Irving Howe recalled that what struck them both—“struck like a blow—was the surging contempt with which she treated almost everyone and everything connected with the trial, the supreme assurance of the intellectual looking down upon those coarse Israelis.”

The debate over Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial affected the American Jewish intelligentsia almost as powerfully as the trial shook Israelis.

Norman’s contribution telegraphed its verdict in the subtitle: “Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance.” As if taking up her challenge to look at the universal aspects of what might otherwise seem merely a Jewish quarrel, he examined the symptomatic qualities of her reportage: Eichmann may or may not be a new type of modern man, but Arendt represented a new style of modern thinker. What she did, he noted incisively, was to “translate this story for the first time into the kind of terms that can appeal to a sophisticated modern sensibility. Thus, in place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the ‘banal’ Nazi; in place of the Jew as virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in place of the confrontation between guilt and innocence, she gives us the ‘collaboration’ of criminal and victim. It has all the appearance of ‘ruthless honesty,’ and all the marks of profundity—have we not been instructed that complexity, paradox, and ambiguity are the sign manifest of profundity?”

Norman identified the technique of postmodern inversion that destabilizes the moral order: preferring flawed originality to mere accuracy. Resentful of being a “young fogey,” he was by this point publishing articles as subversive as the work he was dissecting here. But the venerable Arendt was turning frivolous, and so he took on the task of undoing her mischief—a task that required a more patient pen and disciplined mind than the mischief-maker’s own. Distortion is to accuracy as snorting is to sobriety, but unlike the private vices that harm only their practitioner, the intellectual follies—to use Lionel Abel’s term—infect the body politic.

Let me quote Norman again: “The brilliance of Miss Arendt’s treatment of Eichmann could hardly be disputed by any disinterested reader. But at the same time, there could hardly be a more telling example … of the intellectual perversity that can result from the pursuit of brilliance by a mind infatuated with its own agility and bent on generating dazzle.” He was speaking here for almost all the New York Intellectuals, who had painfully outgrown their own misguided enthusiasms. One can hardly exaggerate how genuinely thinkers like Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, and Irving Howe had come to value lucidity and intelligibility over other literary virtues. But attaining that clarity required filtering out pollutants, not once but repeatedly, in a society that embraced Arendt’s “perversity” as eagerly as France sanctified the criminal Jean Genet.

What no one foresaw, of course, was how quickly postmodern frivolity would engulf the elites and flood the humanities. Bellow would soon be savaged by the counterculture, and Howe by the New Left, the latter winning his way back into its good graces only once it had passed its faux-revolutionary phase. As for Norman, he cleaned the stables, earning the Homeric adjective that accompanied these labors.

Continue reading: Zionism, “our love for the State of Israel,” and being a soldier. Or view as a single page.

Both liberation movements eventually took up arms against Britain, the imperial power, and on occasion they cooperated with one another. In 1938, Bornstein writes, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of the hard-line Revisionist Zionists, went to Ireland to receive guerrilla training from Robert Briscoe, a Jewish veteran of the Irish underground. Yitzhak Shamir, as a leader of the terrorist Stern Gang in Palestine, used the code name “Michael” in honor of Michael Collins, a leader in the Irish war of independence. And both these causes helped to inspire the African-American nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose Universal Negro Improvement Association sought to create a new homeland for the black diaspora. At the UNIA’s rally in Madison Square Garden in 1920, Bornstein writes, Garvey read a telegram of support from a Zionist leader and announced that he was sending a telegram of support to the Irish revolutionaries.

Here, then, is one interpretation of Bornstein’s title: Shamir and Collins and Garvey each had a “Zion,” a dream of national redemption, and so they understood one another. But there is not much reason to tell the stories of these nationalisms together, because their Zions were, at best, parallel. By definition, nationalism is opposed to fusion, and the last thing any of those leaders would have wanted was to mix the three groups together. (Indeed, Bornstein acknowledges, some major Irish and black nationalist leaders, including Garvey, were anti-Semitic.)

But that kind of mixing is the whole purpose of the American “melting pot”—a metaphor that comes, Bornstein notes, from a play by the English Jew (and leading Zionist) Israel Zangwill. At the premiere of Zangwill’s The Melting Pot in Washington, in 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt called out, “That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill!” He recognized that its message of patriotic tolerance was perfectly suited to an America struggling with mixed feelings about the immigration of Jews, Italians, and other groups. Bornstein usefully summarizes the plot of Zangwill’s play, now more often referred to than read, and quotes its Act One peroration: “Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you’ve come to … into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.” To Zangwill and Roosevelt, the real colors of Zion were red, white, and blue.

Bornstein, then, is telling two very different stories about these three groups, with contradictory implications. Are Irish, blacks, and Jews different nations, with destinies in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, or are they three ethnicities, happy to blend together in America? If Bornstein never really comes to grips with this question—and if his method, in The Colors of Zion, remains magpie-like and anecdotal, now examining Broadway shows, now giving a close reading of Ulysses—it is because he is writing less out of a historian’s desire for enlightenment than out of a familiar, and undeniably appealing, kind of Jewish liberal sentiment. In brief, Bornstein wants to remind us of a time when Jews, blacks, and Irish all stood together because they were all victims. Today, he complains in his introduction, that solidarity has dissolved into mutual suspicion:

When our present historical memory includes contact at all, it usually stresses tension rather than cooperation. Whether in the Black-Irish confrontation of the movie Gangs of New York, the poetry of Amiri Baraka libeling Jews as absent from the World Trade Center on September 11, or the tendency of the Irish nationalist movement to align itself with the Palestine Liberation Organization or Hamas rather than with the Zionist movement it once invoked, the images of the past few years feature antagonism between separate groups.

This is a peculiar list, reflecting the uncertainty of Bornstein’s focus: It mixes up American ethnic tensions with geopolitical tensions, Irish Americans with Ireland, and Jewish Americans with Israel. Then there is the more basic problem of insisting that black, Jewish, and Irish relations can be seen as three sides of a triangle, with each group having similar allegiances and tensions with each other group. In fact, it is the black-Jewish part of the equation that has been most historically fruitful and complex, and which interests Bornstein the most. The alliance of blacks and Jews, from the founding of the NAACP through the Civil Rights movement, and the subsequent fracturing of that alliance, have been the subject of much study and emotion (on the part of Jews, mainly). The Jewish-Irish relationship is much less significant to the development of American Jews’ sense of themselves, and it mostly appears in The Colors of Zion when Bornstein discusses literature and popular culture. He devotes a number of pages to Leopold Bloom, the Irish-Jewish hero of Ulysses, and quotes Joyce’s riff on the parallels between Gaelic and Hebrew:

The presence of guttural sounds, diacritic aspirations, epenthetic and servile letters in both languages: their antiquity, both having been taught on the plain of Shinar 242 years after the deluge in the seminary instituted by Fenius Farsaigh, descendant of Noah, progenitor of Israel, and ascendant of Heber and Heremon, progenitors of Ireland: their archaeological, genealogical, hagiographical, exegetical, homiletic, toponomastic, historical and religious literatures … ”

This is good fun, but it would be hard to argue that Joyce had much effect on the way Jews and Irish thought about each other, especially in America. Only a little more weight can be given to the vogue, in the 1910s, for Broadway shows and vaudeville songs about mixed Jewish-Irish romances: It’s Tough When Izzy Rosenstein Loves Genevieve Malone, My Yidisha Colleen, Kosher Kitty Kelly, and so on.

The interaction of Jewish and black musicians was more significant, but by now it is a very well-known story. In writing about George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess, Bornstein is mainly concerned to refute the idea that a Jewish composer was exploiting an African-American art. On the contrary, he writes, one of the black singers in the original production called Porgy and Bess “a monument to the cultural aims of Negro art” and described Gershwin as “the Abraham Lincoln of Negro music.” So, too, Bornstein argues that The Jazz Singer, which is now in ill favor because of the scene in which Al Jolson wears blackface, was largely embraced by black audiences in 1928. (The Amsterdam News, New York’s leading black newspaper, called it “one of the greatest pictures ever produced.”) To see Jolson as a Jewish interloper in black culture, Bornstein writes, is a “back-projection of present attitudes onto the foreign country of the past.”

This phrase suggests that the best way to read The Colors of Zion is as Bornstein’s nostalgic protest against the identity politics that have dominated American life, especially in the academy, over the last 20 years. The academic school known as “whiteness studies,” in particular, emphasizes the way the Jews and the Irish were helped to assimilate in the United States by identifying as white, in opposition to America’s eternal Other, blacks. (See books like How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev, How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says About Race in America, by Karen Brodkin, and Walking Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White by David Roediger.)

In response, Bornstein reminds us of occasions when Irish and Jews and blacks all stood together—whether it was Louis Armstrong wearing a Star of David in honor of the Jewish family that helped him as a young boy or Al Jolson refusing to eat in segregated restaurants that excluded his black fellow-performers. In his closing pages, Bornstein goes so far as to apply the term “righteous gentile” to all “men and women who served and saved groups other than their own … whether they risked their lives or only their reputations.” The problem, however, is how to translate that solidarity into the present, when the situations of Irish, blacks, and Jews are no longer so parallel. By ending his study in 1945, Bornstein spares himself such questions, remaining content with the pleasure of virtuous nostalgia.

Yaakov “Kobi” Shimoni, also known by his stage name, Subliminal, didn’t sign that letter. As the self-proclaimed father of Israeli hip-hop, Subliminal has become over the past decade by far the most prominent solo hip-hop artist in the country, acquiring a fan base of thousands of teens and young adults—many of them Israeli soldiers. Subliminal has performed to sold-out arenas in Israel and the United States and has sold over 150,000 records (from a variety of solo, duet, and collaborative projects), an impressive number in the modest Israeli market. The business daily The Marker estimated that his latest solo album, Just When You Thought It Was Over, grossed well over 4 million shekels (about $1.2 million) in combined album sales, ringtones, and downloads, which places him among the top-earning Israeli musicians today.

Although a rapper by name, Subliminal radically defies the archetypical characteristics of traditional hip-hop performers. He doesn’t drink, smoke, do drugs, or fight, and he preaches against these things in his music. Sporting a self-styled wardrobe he refers to as “chic-Zionism,” his bling is a colossal diamond-covered Star of David necklace. He wears baggy pants, oversized knee-length jerseys, and sideways baseball caps—the style of a “gangsta rapper” without any of the “gangsta” features. Like a reformed rapper who lacks those rebellious qualities that for good or bad may actually make rap interesting in the first place, Subliminal offers his fans a sterilized hip-hop spectacle: Snoop without the weed, Eminem without the rage, or Tupac without the guns.

What Subliminal lacks in belligerency, though, he makes up for with his signature trait: patriotism. In the wake of the Ariel controversy, Livnat, the culture minister, publicly chastised Israeli artists for their politicization of art, calling on them instead to “leave the political debate outside the realm of culture.” But Livnat’s request was as unreasonable as it was futile, as Subliminal’s immense popularity proves.

In the past, critics have viewed Subliminal’s mass appeal with an elitist suspicion that led them to dismiss him as a populist rightwing extremist. But with such broad strokes, critics also forfeit the chance to explore the complexity, contradiction, and outright confusion that characterizes Subliminal’s music, lyrics, and public persona, and the problematic political culture that he represents. For anyone seeking to understand Israel’s right turn in recent years—a trend exemplified by the government’s decision to require loyalty oaths from its non-Jewish population—Subliminal’s music seems like a good place to start.

***

How does a nice Jewish boy from the Tel Aviv suburbs appropriate a cultural form of protest once reserved for inner-city black youths? I sat with Subliminal one evening this August, drinking coffee in a quiet bistro in the modest northern Tel Aviv neighborhood where he grew up and still lives, just a few houses down from the home of Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni. He is dark skinned and wide bodied, with a trim beard and black clothes, and the first impression he gives off—by his own admission—is the air of an Arab. If not for his Cheshire-cat smile, he could easily be mistaken for an intimidating figure. (“When I go abroad people are always surprised to meet me,” he said. “No one believes Jews could look like me.”)

The son of immigrant parents—his father fled Tunisia and his mother Iran—Subliminal, 31, came of age during the chronically unstable days after the Oslo peace accords. Like many teenagers at the time, he listened to American rappers like Public Enemy, N.W.A, and Notorious B.I.G. Like other youth around the world, Subliminal found a message to which he could relate in those rappers’ dissident culture and protest lyrics. “I have always been a proud Zionist,” he explained. “But when I was growing up, being a Zionist was tantamount to being the outcast. The prevailing vibe around me was more in tune with the anarchic messages of [popular Israeli rock artist] Aviv Geffen and his motto that we were ‘a fucked-up generation.’ ”

In Subliminal’s eyes, Geffen’s controversial call to not serve in the army epitomized “negativity.” As a result, Subliminal started writing lyrics challenging those peacenik attitudes and adapting them to the rhythmic riffs he had been precociously composing since he was 12. “Hip-hop was a godsend that gave me the tools to wage my own protest,” he said. “A protest on the side of good and in favor of all those ideals that no one was talking about anymore, like Zionism, Judaism, and traditionalism.”

By the end of the decade and after completing his military service, Subliminal fused his tough-guy image to his original mix of quick phrases, patriotic paeans, and electronic beats, often augmented by a catchy melodic chorus. Local record producers took note. Together with his former partner Yoav Eliasi, known as “The Shadow,” and several other collaborators, Subliminal has recorded four studio albums and a number of chart-topping singles in the last 10 years. He has also founded his own hip-hop record label, called TACT.

Unlike American hip-hop, which developed in stark opposition to anything that could be associated with the establishment, Subliminal’s self-proclaimed “Zionist hip-hop” has always followed an inverted model. (He half-jokingly told me, “I am the establishment.”) While Public Enemy called on listeners to “fight the power,” Subliminal instead decided to join it. “This is Israel, not America” he explained. “If I see a cop chasing someone down the street, odds are, you will see me running along to help out the cop.”

Subliminal makes no apologies for borrowing from hip-hop’s musical form while leaving its combative lyrical content behind. His long-standing cooperation with government institutions remains a noticeable source of pride for him. Over the years, Subliminal has worked with the prime minister’s office, the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Education, and numerous charities that benefit the Israel Defense Forces. He has recorded songs to help prevent traffic accidents. In support of Holocaust education, Subliminal teamed up with renowned violinist Miri Ben-Ari to make a hip-hop version of the sacred Jewish prayer Adon Olam. His songs have a palpable pedagogic quality that can sound like a public service announcement, with explicit suggestions to get a job, study hard, stay off drugs, avoid violence, and respect women. As one of his latest singles preaches, “Whoever acts well, lives well.”

***

Subliminal’s unprecedented success came with a price. His institutional solidarity, nationalist lyrics, and jingoist theatrics often lead him to perform on flag-draped stages to chants of “Who here is proud to be a Zionist?” Israeli critics have branded him a fascist, a right-wing extremist, and a hip-hop sellout. An editorial on the popular Israeli news site Walla went as far as to call for a boycott of his music. “I have been called a fascist, even a Nazi, but I could never really understand why,” Subliminal said. “The truth is that what the media has always thought of me is the opposite of what the average man on the street was thinking.”

Talking with Subliminal has the feeling of listening to a man dictate his memoirs. He has a personal anecdote for every question and an endearing family story to go with any answer. Although at times unabashedly self-aggrandizing (“I am not ashamed to say that I am by far the best hip-hop artist in Israel,” he told me) and occasionally simplistic and infantile (“Why can’t people just say that I am good?”), Subliminal’s words are passionate and his intentions seem sincere.

Listening to all of his music at once can feel like taking in a full DVD box set of after-school specials, with a broad set of subjects: hope, patriotism, strength, unity, order, faith, and peace. There is no mention of hatred, racism, Islamophobia, Israeli occupation, or other touchstones of Israeli radicalism. The image of violence—the sine qua non for any self-respecting extremist—is unequivocally presented in a negative light and shunned rather than sanctioned by his music. “When a song makes a left-wing stance they call it protest,” says Arye Avitan (aka “Tchulu”), who owns a chain of hip-hop clothing stores and is a veteran music producer who has mentored many young rappers, including Subliminal. “But when it suggests something remotely right-wing, they immediately call it fascism.”

Subliminal’s earliest hit, “Live Day by Day” (co-written with Eliasi), debuted just as the Oslo accords began to fall apart, and the lyric “The country swings like a cigarette in Arafat’s mouth,” elicited a barrage of criticism, even though the idea echoed what prominent left-wing politicians like Ehud Barak were saying in speeches at the time. Subliminal bemoaned the selfishness, crime, poverty, avarice, and fanaticism that have pervaded Israeli society (“We are all at fault that everything here sucks”), but his song sounded less like a right-wing anthem and more like Tupac’s popular rendition of the Bruce Hornsby classic “The Way It Is.”

While Subliminal’s lyrics may send out mixed signals, his personal convictions are much less ambiguous. “When Rabin was murdered, I cried for days like everyone else,” he said. He adamantly also denied being “a right-wing artist” and further claimed that if he thought the Palestinians could be trusted he would support “doing everything possible” to secure genuine peace. In response to radical right-wing activists attending his shows, Subliminal began performing with the Israeli-Arab rapper Tamer Nafar, though the two have since fallen out over Nafar’s increasing anti-Israeli militancy. Maybe most surprising was to hear that Subliminal’s ideal political party was Kadima under Ariel Sharon—the same moderate centrist party that led Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005.

***

Subliminal prods critics, but in his music there is no discernible, distinctive political agenda. Instead, there are only crude nationalist emotions guiding listeners through a wasteland of broken promises from both the left and right. But if Subliminal does not fall squarely under any prevailing political category, then where do we place him? The rapper himself defines his political identity as Zionism. But less than reflecting a cogent set of ideas, Subliminal’s Zionism seems to symbolize an internal confusion.

Two distinct themes emerge in Subliminal’s music. The first is disappointment with the peace process. In “Live Day by Day,” Subliminal sings: “Ask me where we’re at, it’s nowhere; living in a land without peace, where everyone is sinking into a dream.” In his catchy hit “Tikva,” from his and Eliasi’s 2002 album, The Light and the Shadow, this theme continues: “You promised us a dove, but instead a buzzard has swarmed from above. We are living in a dream, talking about peace but still squeezing on the trigger.” And from the hit song “Divide and Conquer”: “To think that an olive branch symbolizes peace? Sorry, it doesn’t live here anymore; it’s been kidnapped or murdered. Where is God in all of this?” But this recurring pattern of disillusionment doesn’t so much express an inherent objection to the peace process as reflect disappointment in its results. After all, Subliminal, like most Israelis today, once embraced a two-state solution on the basis of land for peace.

Listen to “Tikva”:

The second distinctive quality of Subliminal’s music is that it is tied to the past. Disillusioned by the present, Subliminal has found inspiration in old Israeli pop hits and traditional Jewish hymns, and this remixing of old songs with new beats has become one of his trademarks. Haaretz critic Amos Harel has called Subliminal’s musical realm a “third-rate gangster’s paradise.” But unlike his hip-hop heroes Puff Daddy, Jay-Z, or Coolio, who he at times appears to imitate, Subliminal romanticizes—instead of resurrects—the past.

He has remixed “Flowers in the Barrel,” a victory song from Israel’s 1967 war, originally recorded by an IDF army band, and the Hanukkah chant “Banu Hoshech Legaresh,” which celebrates the Maccabees. But the most famous display of his retro style is the hit single, “60 Years Old,” released two years ago on Israel’s 60th anniversary, and featuring the legendary kibbutz chorus “The Gevatron.” The remix orientalizes an early-1980s folk hit with an onslaught of derbekkeh drums and swirling ethnic background vocals, and it layers on lyrics with nostalgic longings:

We learn from our experience,
So let’s remember what once was, and do it right,
Let’s take responsibility, ’cause this country is ours,
We won’t accomplish anything, if we don’t remember where we come from

In choosing a song originally written as an apotheosis for the mythologized kibbutz, Subliminal has sought to appropriate the implicit qualities of strength, solidarity, and sacrifice, which are embedded in that myth. The cultural critic Rubik Rosenthal has called this rendition an adequate reflection of the “chaos” gripping Israeli culture, because it suggests “a chain of values that have almost nothing in common with contemporary Israel, nor with its conceivable future, but rather maybe with what once was her past.”

“I want us to live like people here used to live way back,” Subliminal said when I asked about his excessive nostalgia. “I am my father’s son. And I want to preserve the traditions from my father’s generation. In his time, people cared about each other and about the state of Israel. Today, an entire generation has forgotten that, and it’s my task to help them remember.”

***

There is something in Subliminal’s reconstruction of the past into a grand palliative for the present that is much more reminiscent of conservative political thinker Edmund Burke than rapper Biggie Smalls. The disillusionment from the unfulfilled promises of peace, and the consequential longing for a mythologized past to alleviate the disappointment, are neither fascist nor populist traits but rather conservative ones. Subliminal’s unwavering dedication to the stability and continuity of the state and its traditional institutions, his reverence for Jewish heritage and faith, his profound commitment to family, and his uncompromising respect for law and order, have the markings of an archetypical conservative ideology. Irving Kristol famously described neoconservatives of postwar America as having been “mugged by reality”—a fitting label for the disenchanted generation of Israelis to which Subliminal belongs.

That such a label doesn’t fit all or even most Israelis does not undermine the fact that it speaks to enough of them. In the wake of last year’s parliamentary elections, Haaretz observed that the most distinctive characteristics of the current Knesset is that it is more right-wing and younger than any before it. The rise over the past decade of what Subliminal refers to as his own “mass movement”—primarily made up of younger Israelis—certainly helps explain why.

Like with any conservative ideology, the attempt to navigate the present through the past is destined to leave many Israelis mired in contradiction, as Subliminal himself remains. “I think that being pro-Palestinian is a very good thing,” he told me. “But I also think that being anti-Israeli is something against which I am willing to fight until my last drop of blood.”

Consistently ambivalent, Subliminal claims that brains and not brawn will resolve the conflict; yet every idea he offers in one way or another falls back on force. When I confronted him with the timeless Israeli dilemma—is it good to die for your country?—he answered, hesitantly: “No, it’s not good to die for anything, period. But, if you have to die for something, it might as well be for something as important as that.” This recurring oscillation reflects the immaturity of those Israelis who want everything but are willing to give up nothing. They dream of a genuine peace but are not prepared to sacrifice in order to gain it. They believe that only overwhelming military power can guarantee Israel’s security, while overlooking the fact that their continuing corruption by such power may contribute to their insecurity in the first place.

Subliminal’s pacified hip-hop won’t resolve any of these dilemmas. But political demands still saturate Israeli popular culture, which suggests that art may yet open a window of imagination through which politics could one day redeem itself. That Subliminal’s next album will probably not provide us with any solutions doesn’t mean we should not keep listening, and hoping, that at the very least, it will help us better understand the complex problems at hand.

Listen to an unreleased Subliminal track, “Fuego”:

Yoav Fromer is a New York-based journalist and a former columnist for Maariv.

And yet new petitions on his behalf have recently begun to circulate, and gain momentum, both in the U.S. Congress and the Israeli Knesset. This is, in large measure, because Pollard’s situation rests on a contradiction: He was guilty of a reprehensible crime, and yet he has been treated abominably. One of the most infamous Jewish criminals in modern times, he is also the victim of the worst act of official American anti-Semitism in our lifetimes. With his round face and shoulder-length hair, Pollard today still looks more like a perpetual grad student than an arch criminal, but he has suffered severely. He has served hard time, mostly in maximum-security prisons, spending years in lockdown 23 hours a day. Websites pleading his case detail his medical ailments, noting that he has “developed diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, pre-glaucoma, and arthritis while in prison.”

From the moment he was sentenced, there were people in the Jewish community—and beyond—who believed Pollard had been unjustly punished and who fought for his release. But they were few and far between, and they often made the wrong case for him. This newest round of argument on Pollard’s behalf is different. For starters, many of his champions have been careful not to lionize him. Rather, they focus on correcting what Judge Stephen Williams, who filed a dissent in one of Pollard’s failed appeals, deemed “a fundamental miscarriage of justice.” Most surprisingly, on September 27, 2010, a former assistant secretary of Defense confirmed many people’s decades-long fears that, at some point, the case had turned personal—and poisonous. Without explaining what prompted him to break his silence, Lawrence Korb, who served in the Pentagon in Reagan’s first term, wrote President Barack Obama: “Based on my first-hand knowledge, I can say with confidence that the severity of Pollard’s sentence is a result of an almost visceral dislike of Israel and the special place it occupies in our foreign policy on the part of my boss at the time, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.”

Decades into this tragic and pathetic tale, American Jewry’s continuing allergy to defending Pollard says more about our communal fears and the price we are willing to pay for social and political acceptance than it does about Pollard and his crimes.

***

On November 21, 1985, FBI agents arrested Pollard, 31 at the time, just outside Israel’s embassy in Washington. Since June 1984, Pollard had been routinely removing sensitive documents from the Naval Intelligence Support Center on Friday afternoons, passing them to his Israeli handlers for Xeroxing, and blithely returning them on Monday mornings. When first interrogated by the FBI, Pollard called his wife. After he worked the word “cactus” into the conversation, their designated SOS code word, Anne Henderson-Pollard scurried about their house—with a neighbor’s help—sanitizing it. The neighbor subsequently gave the FBI a 70-pound suitcase filled with secret documents, reflecting the volume of Pollard’s activities and sloppiness.

Despite transferring thousands of documents to his Israeli handlers, Pollard failed to gain asylum at the embassy on that day in 1985. Backpedaling furiously, Israel first labeled Pollard a rogue agent, as his handlers worked out of a shadowy organization called Lekem, the Defense Ministry’s Bureau for Scientific Relations. The department, headed by the legendary Mossad man Rafi Eitan, was disbanded shortly after Pollard’s arrest. Israel granted Pollard citizenship in 1995—long after such a move could have done him any good. And it wasn’t until 1998 that Israel finally acknowledged what everyone knew: Pollard had been an authorized agent spying for Israel.

An American Jew’s arrest as an Israeli spy was upsetting enough for American Jews. But Pollard’s defense made the affair excruciating. Minimizing the thousands of dollars he earned, the diamond-and-sapphire ring the Israelis gave him, and his efforts to shop American secrets to South Africa and possibly Pakistan, too, Pollard portrayed himself as a Zionist idealist. Anti-Semites bullied him as a child, he recalled. He claimed that the documents he smuggled out, so crucial to Israeli security, should have been shared freely. And, using a most obnoxious and threatening term, he said a “racial obligation” compelled him, as a Jew, to defend the Jewish state.

Suddenly, amid Ronald Reagan’s resurgence of hard-bodied patriotic machismo, in the age of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo and Clint Eastwood’s tough-guy “make my day” taunt, a balding, mustachioed, jowly-faced American Jewish nerd in glasses was betraying the red, white, and blue for the blue and white. Pollard’s crimes epitomized Zionism-run-amok, with the ideological implications of Jewish tribal solidarity pushed to its extreme.

“I feel my husband and I did what we were expected to do, and what our moral obligation was as Jews, what our moral obligation was as human beings, and I have no regrets about that,” Anne Pollard said defiantly on 60 Minutes shortly before being sentenced, one of many arrogant, self-destructive moves the couple made back then. While stirring up the terrifying “dual loyalty” charge—far more terrifying to Jews than to Irish-Americans and other hyphenated Americans—the Pollards defined every Jew’s ultimate loyalty as being to the Jewish state. Desperately repudiating the charge, the prominent academic Jacob Neusner would declare America to be the true “promised land.”

This American Jewish skittishness regarding Pollard was particularly surprising because by the 1980s American Jews were thriving in America’s suburban meritocracy. Some American Jewish superstars were accented immigrants like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, Elie Wiesel. But most American Jewish success stories were 100 percent American. Speaking unaccented English, they were supposed to be unscarred psychologically, unapologetically American.

***

American Jews had been here before. Three decades before Pollard made headlines, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s arrest, trial, and conviction as Soviet spies for stealing atomic secrets rendered the American Jews’ nightmare scenario in pinkish hues. But in the 1950s, American Jews were greener, more marginal. Julius Rosenberg represented the intellectual, foreign-born, New York Jew as Communist, at a time when Communism was disproportionately popular among Jews.

With the Rosenbergs—as with the Pollards—the rightness of finding them guilty was often confused with the wrongness of their punishment. The zeal with which they were prosecuted, the way Judge Irving Kaufman presided over their trial, and Ethel Rosenberg’s unjust execution along with her husband, all suggested something deeper in both the American Jewish psyche and the larger American political culture. The American legal establishment particularly enjoyed prosecuting these treasonous Jews, while many American Jews leapt to prove their own loyalty—at the Rosenbergs’ expense.

Just as in the Rosenberg case, the judge presiding over Pollard’s sentencing was swayed to render too harsh a punishment—a decision that kicked up new waves of suspicion and anxiety.

In an effort to keep his wife out of prison, Pollard pleaded guilty to one count of espionage. His wife, Anne, then 26, pleaded guilty to the milder charge of illegally possessing classified documents. In return, the prosecutor asked the judge to punish Pollard with a “substantial number of years in prison.” During the sentencing phase, one voice proved damningly influential. In a secret 46-page-pre-sentencing “damage-assessment memorandum” sent to the judge—and an additional four-page memo that was recently declassified—Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger made a fierce argument. “It is difficult … to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the U.S., and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel,” wrote Weinberger, before adding—malevolently and unnecessarily—that Pollard’s “loyalty to Israel transcends his loyalty to the United States.”

Judge Aubrey Robinson Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, sentenced Jonathan Pollard to life in prison and his wife to five years. (After Anne Henderson-Pollard served three-and-a-half years, she was paroled. Jonathan Pollard divorced her so she could rebuild her life without him.) The sentence was surprisingly harsh. By comparison, in 1987 Sgt. Clayton Lonetree, who’d been seduced by a Soviet agent, became the first Marine ever convicted of espionage. His crimes compromised agents and the American embassy in Moscow. Yet a military court—under Weinberger’s direct authority—sentenced Lonetree to 30 years in prison, and he eventually served nine years. Richard Miller, an FBI agent who spied for the Soviets in the 1980s, served 13 years. Spies for other allies, like Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Egypt, and the Philippines, served anywhere from two to four years, with maximum sentences of 10 years. Pollard’s extreme sentence—along with the continuing refusal to free him–has raised questions about official American anti-Semitism and whether Pollard is enduring harsher punishment for the crime of being an American Jew spying for Israel.

Given that neither Weinberger nor Robinson ever explained their actions, the Pollard case remained shrouded in this noxious mystery. Years later, Weinberger would skip over the case in his memoirs and, when asked about the omission, would dismiss the Pollard case as a “very minor matter.” But it’s clear that his accusation that Pollard committed “treason”—and harmed the nation—had a devastating impact.

In his recent letter, Lawrence Korb suggested that Weinberger, his former boss, had exaggerated the damage Pollard caused and that an anti-Semitic bias distorted the case. From the start, some speculated that Weinberger, who had Jewish grandparents but was a devout Episcopalian, sacrificed Pollard to exorcise his own ancestral demons. There was something about this pudgy, sloppy, unapologetic Jewish spy for Israel that repulsed Weinberger. Weinberger was also one of the Reagan Administration’s leading Israel skeptics. Caught in a power struggle with the pro-Israel Secretary of State George Shultz, Weinberger usually viewed the Jewish state as more albatross than asset.

More benign observers guessed that the secrets Pollard spilled did more damage to U.S. interests than Pollard or the Israelis suggested. Perhaps, some argued, Russian spies secured key codes thanks to Israeli-based KGB agents. Others assumed Pollard received instructions from a higher-level mole who remains unexposed. After Aldrich Ames’ arrest for spying in 1994, some speculated that Weinberger and others may have blamed Pollard for the damage Ames had actually caused, including the deaths of as many as 10 CIA assets. The author John Loftus and others theorized that Ames, who was a top CIA counter-intelligence official, probably pinned his own crimes on Pollard. In 1995, Moment magazine editor Hershel Shanks would quote Loftus quoting naval intelligence “sources” who admitted that “90 percent of the things we accused [Pollard] of stealing, he didn’t even have access to.”

***

After Pollard’s sentencing, New York Times columnist William Safire warned that Pollard encouraged “anti-Semites who charge that Jews everywhere are at best afflicted with dual loyalty and at worst are agents of a vast fifth column.” Issuing a personal declaration of independence from Israel, Safire proclaimed: “American supporters of Israel cannot support wrongdoing here or there. In matters of religion and culture, many of those supporters are American Jews, but in matters affecting national interest and ultimate loyalty, the stonewalling leaders of Israel will learn to think of us as Jewish Americans.”

But one keen observer of American Jewry, the political scientist Daniel Elazar, noticed that it was American Jews—and not their non-Jewish neighbors—who were actually raising the dual-loyalty specter, “apparently in the hope of preventing the issue from surfacing by raising the charge in order to deny it. Even more frequently, it was raised by Jews in the media, most of whom were highly assimilated but still apparently needed to demonstrate their ‘bona fides’ as Americans.” Elazar concluded: “The level of American Jewish insecurity is astounding.”

American Jews still viewed themselves and their community as on probation in the United States, with their ultimate acceptance conditional on good behavior. This pathology would be stated clearly, if unconsciously, years later, by one of the highest-ranking Jews in American history, who served his country nobly as director of naval intelligence from 1978 to 1982 and yanked Pollard’s security clearance—temporarily—years before the spying began. Rear Admiral Sumner Shapiro sounded like a scared yid when discussing Pollard. Annoyed at fringe American Jewish groups that defended Pollard, Shapiro told the Washington Post in 1998: “We work so hard to establish ourselves and to get where we are, and to have somebody screw it up … and then to have Jewish organizations line up behind this guy and try to make him out a hero of the Jewish people, it bothers the hell out of me.”

All minorities want to celebrate their tribal successes as reflecting the best of their people without being tarred when one of their own acts poorly. And given the torturous history of anti-Semitism, American Jews feel this intensely. We circulate lists of Jewish Nobel prize winners, delighting in each American Jewish success, using Jewish achievements to validate our rich but complex Jewish baggage. And while we reserve the right to cringe when a Bernard Madoff becomes the modern face of the greedy Jew or a Jonathan Pollard becomes the modern face of the traitorous Jew, we also reserve the right to object when our neighbors make similar leaps from the one bad apple to the whole bunch.

Nearly two years after Pollard’s arrest, with the sentencing returning the case to the headlines, the Israeli academic Shlomo Avineri zeroed in on this American Jewish insecurity—and inconsistency. Writing in the Jerusalem Post, first condemning Pollard as a traitor and his own government as clumsy, Avineri mocked the “nervousness, insecurity, and even cringing” of American Jews. Playing the role of the abrasive Israeli—or biblical prophet—Avineri wrote: “Today, American Jewish leaders by their protestations of over-zealous loyalty to the United States at a moment when no one is really questioning it, are saying that America in the long run is no different from France and Germany. When you have to over-identify, there is no other proof needed that you think that your non-Jewish neighbors are looking askance at your Americanism. You are condemned by your own protestations of loyalty and flag-waving.” At a time when Israel’s actions made it unpopular with many American Jews, Avineri’s aggressively Zionist analysis only exacerbated tensions.

***

The controversy–and speculation–peaked during the Wye River negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in October 1998. Benjamin Netanyahu, in his first round as Israel’s prime minister, lobbied hard for Pollard’s release. President Bill Clinton seemed set to free him as a sweetener to Israel until the CIA director, George Tenet, threatened to resign. Such power politicking against a spy who had been imprisoned for over a decade reinforced both camps’ speculation. Those who fear anti-Semitism say this irrational move reflects a deep aversion in the WASP-iest bastions of the American government. Those who believe Pollard did more damage than we know insist that the usually mild-mannered Tenet had a good reason to be so rigid.

To Israeli settlers, Pollard’s case symbolizes the anti-Semitism of even benign non-Jewish polities such as the United States and the weak-kneed appeasement policies of successive Israeli governments, which have failed to free Pollard. The most popular pro-Pollard bumper sticker in Israel simply appeals for Pollard to come home “haBaytah,” but a few years ago one poster challenged: “BUSH: FREE YOUR CAPTIVE.” This poster not only targeted a good friend of Israel’s, George W. Bush, but it pictured Pollard with the young Israeli Hamas is holding, Gilad Shalit. The implicit comparisons, between the innocent Shalit and the guilty Pollard, as well as between the democratic United States and the terrorist-state Hamas, were offensive. While the right’s support has sustained Pollard emotionally, it may have made his get-out-of-jail card even harder to get. The Israeli right is unpopular with both the American Jewish community and the American political establishment, making Pollard even more unappealing.

***

However unappealing he may be, the time has come to free Jonathan Pollard—not as some sop to Israelis but as a matter of justice. Holding an individual hostage to the vagaries of the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process is cruel and unusual punishment. The Pollard case has become a question of justice, American-style, unrelated to American-Israeli relations. And justice when applied too zealously becomes unjust. For decades, the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil-rights organizations have taught that we take up certain criminals’ cases not because we like the criminals or excuse their crimes but because, at a certain point, it becomes the right thing to do.

Imagine another case in which an accused man served a disproportionately long sentence after being tried in a court where direct pressure was applied by the secretary of Defense for reasons that may well have been mistaken or personally motivated. If there was another such case, one imagines that it would attract lots of attention from the ACLU and other groups concerned with the civil liberties of Americans. So why are they silent? More to the point, why are we silent?

If the Pollard case represents the worst of American anti-Semitism, then, by historic standards, anti-Semitism American style is mild indeed. Still, that American Jews, despite their long record of defending the underdog, still hestitate to champion Pollard’s release now, suggests that we—like Jonathan Pollard—remain victims of the “astounding” insecurity Elazar witnessed two decades ago.

Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University in Montreal and a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, is the author of six books on American history and Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today.

Sitting in his office at the Department of Philosophy and Linguistics at MIT, Chomsky appears as an avuncular, white-haired presence in baggy blue jeans and a navy crewneck sweater who visibly struggles to retain physical and emotional details against the force of a powerful structuralist imagination. He is a lively conversational presence who enjoys intellectual thrust and parry, and who moves quickly to the attack when challenged. When the tone changes, or a new idea catches his fancy, he steps back and quickly resets. He is less interested in people than he is in ideas, and he is more interested in general rules than in the highly textured specifics that might interest a cell biologist or an historian.

There is a noticeable gap between the incredible quickness of Chomsky’s mind and the unadorned banality of his political rhetoric. While his political tracts decorate the shelves of his outer office, his inner sanctum is lined with flourishing plants and souvenirs from his travels around the world. His bookshelves hold a very Chomskian mix of tattered academic books about linguistics and nicely bound literary volumes about other countries and cultures, displaying a mind that finds equal pleasure in Into Tibet and a Festschrift for Roman Jakobson. Staring out from the wall near the door is a large, saintly looking portrait of Bertrand Russell accompanied by a motto: “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life; the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” On his desk is a framed photograph of a memorial stone for his wife, the linguist Carol Schatz, who died in December 2008 of cancer.

Chomsky’s political writing can seem like a deliberate casting-off of the habits of mind that made him perhaps the last great thinker of the Enlightenment, so that he could take his place on the intellectual cafeteria line, serving up politically useful slop. The sheer volume of his output, which can seem equally thrilling and nauseating even to people who write for a living, seems at times like a loopy attempted proof for the linguist’s terse and methodical academic work of the 1950s and 1960s, which posited the existence of a fixed set of inborn rules that allow humans to form sentences.

Yet there is also something awe-inspiring about the consistency and breadth of Chomsky’s political writing over the decades that defies even the most dogged attempts to label him a hack. The theory of generative grammar that Chomsky laid out in a series of papers that began with his master’s thesis at the University of Pennsylvania and culminated in his landmark 1957 paper “Syntactic Structures” has to be regarded as one of the most powerful and influential ideas of the 20th century, reshaping crucial debates in the fields of linguistics, behavioral psychology, and cognitive science. It is hard to identify another thinker who has combined Chomsky’s breadth of interest with the depth and productivity of his best ideas, aside from Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein.

I talked with Chomsky about his upbringing in a Jewish home in Philadelphia by Cultural Zionist parents who devoted their lives to the revival of Hebrew language and culture, and about some of the strange bedfellows that he has acquired in five decades of impassioned crusading. I left his office with a sense of a specifically Jewish Chomsky that in three decades of engagement with his political writing, his academic work, and a few dozen of his radio appearances had never really struck me before, and now seems obvious and unavoidable.

You grew up in a home that was heavily influenced by Ahad Ha’am, the father of cultural Zionism.

My father was a great sympathizer of Ahad Ha’am. Every Friday night we would read Hebrew together, and often the reading was Ahad Ha’am’s essays. He was the founding figure of what came to be called cultural Zionism, meaning that there should be a Zionist revival in Israel, in Palestine, and it should be a cultural center for the Jewish people. He wrote in Hebrew, which was novel, because Hebrew was then the language of prayer and the Bible. He saw Jews as primarily a Diaspora community that needed a cultural center that had a physical presence, but he was very sympathetic to the Palestinians. In fact he wrote some very sharp essays, after a visit to Palestine, criticizing the way the new settlers were treating the indigenous population. He said, “You can’t treat people like that.” Also, on practical grounds, he didn’t want to create enemies. A Jewish cultural center in Palestine was his ideal.

Now I won’t swear to the precise accuracy of this, because these are childhood memories, but I remember reading together with my father an essay that Ahad Ha’am wrote about Moses. The basic idea was there are two Moseses—the first is the historical Moses, if there was such a person, and the other is the image of Moses that was constructed and came down through the ages and occupies an important place in the national mythology.

Ahad Ha’am was an early advocate of the idea that later became famous with [the Marxist political scientist] Ben Anderson, when he wrote his books about how nations are imagined communities. He said there’s an imagined—I don’t think he used the term—but there’s an imagined Jewish community, in which Moses plays a central role, and it really doesn’t matter if there was a historical Moses or not. That’s part of the national myth, which is a sophisticated version of what [author] Shlomo Sand was trying to get at. Sand debunks the historical Moses, but from Ha’am’s point of view, it makes no difference.

Did you read Nivi’im, the prophets, with your father in Hebrew?

The word “prophet” is a very bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word, navi. Nobody knows what it means. But today they’d be called dissident intellectuals. They were giving geopolitical analysis, arguing that the acts of the rulers were going to destroy society. And they condemned the acts of evil kings. They called for justice and mercy to orphans and widows and so on.

I don’t want to say it was all beautiful. Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful. You read Sakharov, who is sometimes appalling. Or Solzhenitsyn. And the nivi’im were treated the way dissident intellectuals always are. They weren’t praised. They weren’t honored. They were imprisoned like Jeremiah. They were driven into the desert. They were hated. Now at the time, there were intellectuals, “prophets,” who were very well treated. They were the flatterers of the court. Centuries later, they were called “false prophets.”

People who criticize power in the Jewish community are regarded the way Ahab treated Elijah: You’re a traitor. You’ve got to serve power. You can’t argue that the policies that Israel is following are going to lead to its destruction, which I thought then and still do.

Did you imagine yourself as a navi, a prophet, when you were a child reading those texts alone in your room or on Friday night with your father?

Sure. In fact, my favorite prophet, then and still, is Amos. I particularly admired his comments that he’s not an intellectual. I forget the Hebrew, but lo navi ela anochi lo ben navi—I’m not a prophet, I’m not the son of a prophet, I’m a simple shepherd. So he translated “prophet” correctly. He’s saying, “I’m not an intellectual.” He was a simple farmer and he wanted just to tell the truth. I admire that.

Did religion play a role in the life of your home? Did your mother light Shabbat candles?

We did those things, but they were­—I don’t know how you grew up, but my parents were part of the Enlightenment tradition, the haskalah. So you keep the symbols, but it doesn’t involve religious faith.

At the age of 10 I came to the conclusion that the God I learned about in school didn’t exist.

I remember how I did that. I remember it very well. My father’s family was super Orthodox. They came from a little shtetl somewhere in Russia. My father told me that they had regressed even beyond a medieval level. You couldn’t study Hebrew, you couldn’t study Russian. Mathematics was out of the question. We went to see them for the holidays. My grandfather had a long beard, I don’t think he knew he was in the United States. He spoke Yiddish and lived in a couple of blocks of his friends. We were there on Pesach, and I noticed that he was smoking.

So I asked my father, how could he smoke? There’s a line in the Talmud that says, ayn bein shabbat v’yom tov ela b’inyan achilah. I said, “How come he’s smoking?” He said, “Well, he decided that smoking is eating.” And a sudden flash came to me: Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile. He can’t figure these things out. If that’s what it is, I don’t want anything to do with it.

And what did your father say?

I was just thinking about that. He just quoted the line to me and then explained, “He thinks he is eating.”

Your father, Zev, was one of the significant Hebrew grammarians of the past century, and you did your early academic work on medieval Hebrew. Did something interest you about the structure of the language, or was it just available to you as the language in your home?

It wasn’t the language in the home. We spoke English. My parents would never utter a word of Yiddish, which was their native language. You have to remember there was real kulturkampf going on at this time, in the 1930s, between the Yiddish and the Hebrew tendencies. So we never heard a word—my wife either—of Yiddish. Hebrew was the language we studied. And then when I got to be a teenager I was immersed in novels.

You returned to Hebrew for your college thesis.

When I got to college, I had to do an undergraduate thesis. I was in linguistics then, so I figured, “OK, I’ll write about Hebrew. It’s kind of interesting.” I started the way I was taught to: You get an informant, and you do field work and take a corpus. So I started working with an informant, and I realized after a couple of weeks, this is totally idiotic. I know the answers to all the questions. And the only thing I don’t know is the phonetics, but I don’t care about that. So I just dropped the informant and started doing it myself.

My work was more or less influenced by the style of medieval Hebrew and Arabic grammar. It was historical analysis. But you can translate the basic ideas into a kind of a synchronic interpretation, a description of the system as it actually exists, and out of that came the early stages of generative grammar, which nobody looked at.

So your theory of generative grammar in its early stages came out of your study of medieval Hebrew and Arabic?

Yes. When I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, I was actually reading the proofs of my father’s doctoral dissertation, which was on David Kimhi’s Hebrew grammar, and then I read articles on the history of the language and Semitic philology. When I got to college I started studying Arabic. I wanted to learn Arabic, and I got pretty far.

It’s the same basic structure, but Hebrew is based on a root vowel pattern distinction, so there’s a root, which is neither a noun nor anything else, and it’s not plural or past tense or anything. It’s a root, typically a tri-consonant root, with a couple of exceptions, and it fits into any large array of different vowel patterns, which determine what its function is in a sentence. Is it a verb? Is it a noun? If it’s a verb, is it third-person plural, does it agree with some other nouns? The whole language builds up from that. And that’s how I treated it in my early work, which is kind of the way it was done in traditional grammar. Now people do it differently, rightly or wrongly.

Of course the modern Hebrew language is quite different. I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.

When you were refused entry to the West Bank recently by the Israeli Interior Ministry, did you talk Hebrew to the people who sent you back to Jordan?

I could’ve, but I didn’t. I’ve done it before, at security. Back in the 1980s I attended a conference in Jerusalem, and on the way out of the country you have to go through security. There were two of us, and the other guy was a friend who I don’t think is Jewish, and they opened everything in his suitcase, took out his dirty socks. There were things in my suitcase I didn’t want them to see. It was during the First Intifada and I had managed to break curfew a couple of times and get into places under curfew until we were picked up by soldiers. I had found a container for a grenade that had stamped on it the name of some place in Pennsylvania, and I wanted to bring that home.

I also had a lot of illegal pamphlets. Israeli security could never find out how they were circulating these pamphlets. In fact it was young kids jumping over rooftops. So I had a collection of these  pamphlets that I wanted to bring home, and I was hoping I wouldn’t get inspected. When I got to the inspection, the woman security officer took my passport, and said, “Oh, you have a weird name.” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “Do you speak Hebrew?” So I said, “Yeah.” Then we went on to have a discussion in Hebrew. “Did you visit your relatives, did you have a good time.” And she never bothered to look in my suitcase.

Were there any gentiles in your parents’ world?

Practically not. In fact there weren’t even Yiddish-speaking Jews. They lived in if not a physical ghetto then in a cultural ghetto. Their friends were all people deeply involved in the revival of the Hebrew language and cultural Zionism. I happened to have some non-Jewish friends, but that’s just from school.

Describe Mikveh Israel, the synagogue that you grew up in and where your father first taught.

Well, Mikveh Israel was actually Sephardic, so I grew up in the Sephardic tradition. It was kind of the elite synagogue in Philadelphia, like the Portuguese synagogue in New York. It was Sephardic because the original settlers were Sephardic Jews from Holland. So we had a Dutch, actually originally Portuguese, rabbi, and the hazan was from Morocco. We learned all the Sephardic rituals, and pronunciation and everything, even though everyone in the community was from eastern Europe. It was kind of the Jewish elite, but it was also the center of a Hebrew renaissance-oriented small society. The people were either teachers, rabbis, there were businessmen and others, but they all shared a passionate interest in Hebrew cultural revival. My father was the head of the school. My mother was running the Hadassah meetings.

Did your mother also come from a religious family?

She came to America with her family when she was 1 year old. They were so religious that she told me that when she was a teenager, talking with her girlfriends on the street, if she saw her father coming toward them, she would get them to cross the street so that she didn’t have to suffer the embarrassment of having her father walk past her and not acknowledge her because she was a girl. It was a very Orthodox family. Of course, they grew up here, and the kids lost it quickly. My father came here in 1917. He and my mother shared many interests and experiences in common.

They were so dedicated. I remember friends of my father and mother, a couple of women, who when they called a department store downtown, they would insist on talking Hebrew, in the hopes of convincing them to hire a Hebrew-language operator. I mean they all spoke English. It was real dedication. It had to be. How do you revive a dead language?

Was that what motivated you to live in Israel?

My wife and I were there in ’53. We lived in a kibbutz for a while and planned to stay, actually. I came back and had to finish my Ph.D. We thought we’d go back.

Was it the idea of the kibbutz, or was it the fact of speaking Hebrew, or what was it?

It was political. I was interested in Hebrew, but that wasn’t the driving force. I liked the kibbutz life and the kibbutz ideals. It has pretty much disappeared now, I should say. But that time was incredible in spirit. For one thing it was a poor country. The kibbutz I went to, and I picked it for this reason, was actually originally Buberite. It came from German refugees in the 1930s and had a kind of Buberite style. It was the center for Arab outreach activities in Mapam. There was plenty of racism, I should say. I lived with it. But mostly against Mizrahim.

When you think of the motivations of people like your parents or the people who founded those Mapam kibbutzim, you don’t think of those motivations as being inherently linked to some desire to oppress others?

By then I was old enough to separate from my parents. I’d been on my own intellectually since I was a teenager. I gravitated toward Zionist groups that were not in their milieu, like Hashomer Ha’tzair.

My father grew up in Hashomer.

I could never join Hashomer because in those days they were split between Stalinist and Trotskyite, and I was anti-Leninist. But I was in the neighborhood. It was a Hashomer kibbutz that we went to, Kibbutz Hazore’a. It’s changed a lot. We would never have lasted. It was sort of a mixed story. They were binationalists. So up until 1948 they were anti-state. There were those who gravitated toward or who were involved in efforts of Arab-Jewish working-class cooperation and who were for socialist binationalist Palestine. Those ideas sound exotic today, but they didn’t at the time. It’s because the world has changed.

Continue reading: Hezbollah, Robert Faurisson, and Israeli crimes. Or view as a single page.

In the two-and-a-half years since J Street launched, under the banner of “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” two competing narratives have emerged about the group. One is that by channeling the energy of the anti-war, anti-Bush Jewish left into the cause of Middle East peace, using grassroots organizing tactics borrowed from the playbook developed by MoveOn.org and put to good use by the Obama campaign, Ben-Ami and company have given voice to the inchoate frustration of many American Jews with the impasse between the Israelis and the Palestinians and their frustration with hawkish pro-Israel organizations, namely AIPAC, which was so famously expressed earlier this year in an essay by Peter Beinart of the New America Foundation. The opposing view is that J Street is a front for Democratic political operatives aligned with Obama, and potentially to his left on foreign policy, who hope to exploit the naive sympathies of liberal Jews for the political purpose of undermining the existing Washington consensus on Israel, thereby weakening AIPAC and other Jewish groups whose power depends in part on the perception that they speak on behalf of American Jewry.

Both versions are, to a greater or lesser degree, true. Last month, using an unredacted tax return that appeared on a public website, the Washington Times reported that J Street receives funding from the billionaire investor and social activist George Soros, a longtime critic of Israel, Zionism, and the American Jewish establishment. Though insiders had already assumed as much, the controversial revelation showed that Soros and his family gave J Street $245,000 in fiscal year 2008 as the first installment of a three-year, $750,000 commitment. Critics pounced on Ben-Ami, accusing him of repeatedly lying in interviews about Soros’ involvement, and intentionally obfuscating on the group’s website, which in a section titled “Myths and Facts about J Street” denies claims that Soros was a founder or “primary funder” of the group. “J Street’s Executive Director has stated many times that he would in fact be very pleased to have funding from Mr. Soros and the offer remains open to him to be a funder should he wish to support the effort,” the website said. In an update posted after the scandal erupted, the organization reiterated that Soros did not found J Street—though his senior Washington adviser, Morton Halperin, a senior State Department official in the Clinton Administration and a longtime critic of Israeli policy, was deeply involved in J Street’s inception and continues to serve as one of three members of the lobby’s executive committee.

Yet it remains the case that Ben-Ami has managed, in a remarkably short time, to build something unprecedented in the decades-long history of leftwing American Jewish activism: an organization with the capacity to raise millions of dollars to win political support for ideas about Israel and the peace process that are frequently at odds with the positions articulated by organs of the Jewish establishment. Whatever one thinks of J Street’s policies—which, among other things, include support for East Jerusalem becoming the capital of a future Palestinian state and firm opposition to new construction in the settlements until negotiations are complete—the group has succeeded in provoking a tremendous amount of debate about the political and emotional relationships of American Jews to Israel. “They have built up this thing, which is just this side of miraculous,” said Mark Pelavin, associate director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center.

Ben-Ami and the other progenitors of J Street stepped into the political vacuum left by the perennial inability of established leftwing groups—Americans for Peace Now, the Israel Policy Forum, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, Ameinu, and a long list of long-defunct predecessors—to transcend policy disagreements, clashing egos, tiny budgets, and, according to many veteran activists, a general unwillingness to pick public fights with other Jewish groups. “I tried over the years to get the left to coalesce, and you’d be better off herding cats,” said Charney Bromberg, the former director of Meretz USA, the American branch of the leftwing movement also represented by an Israeli political party of the same name. “We were being totally outgunned by the right, and we consoled ourselves with the idea that we were in the right.” Now, Bromberg went on, “J Street has totally eclipsed the other organizations combined.”

The result is that Ben-Ami is now the de facto leader of the American Jewish left, and his counterparts at other organizations working on peace-related issues feel compelled to support him. “J Street has to succeed, and it has to grow,” said one member of the “peace camp” in Washington. “Now that it exists, we can’t afford to let it fail, because that would be seen as the failure of the left.”

***

J Street’s supporters are quick to point out that despite its meteoric rise, which was helped along by a generous 2009 profile in the New York Times Magazine, its budget is still just a fraction of the $60 million AIPAC attracted in the fiscal year 2008, the most recent for which documents are available—about $5 million this year across all operations, according to Ben-Ami, including a $500,000 grant from Jeff Skoll, a former eBay executive, who has partnered with Soros on recent initiatives in the Middle East. It’s harder for J Street to claim the role of scrappy David to AIPAC’s financial Goliath in light of Soros’ financial commitment, anchored by Halperin’s active role in the group. “He’s not in the office every day, poring over stuff,” Ben-Ami told me last week, in the last of a series of conversations this summer and fall, of his relationship with Halperin. “Basically we email, definitely every day.”

Indeed, according to Ben-Ami, the germ of the J Street idea sprouted in discussions with Halperin during the 2004 presidential election, when both men worked on Howard Dean’s campaign. “From day one I’d been talking to him,” Ben-Ami said. “He was almost the first person I talked to about this.” The vision that emerged from those conversations, and in other conversations with the marketing strategist David Fenton, the former Rolling Stone PR man and social activist for whose firm Ben-Ami worked after the campaign, bore obvious hallmarks of lessons learned from Dean’s run. The most important was the decision to abandon the humble fundraising attitudes of the left. “It’s a self-defeating world outlook that says, ‘We’re some poor minority backwater that will never raise money,’ ” Ben-Ami told me earlier this year. “We said, $10, $20, $30 million. You’ve got to have ambition.”

Ben-Ami set out asking for $1 million from initial donors—at around the same time that Benjamin Netanyahu was trolling the ranks of wealthy American Jews for contributions to his 2007 election campaign for the Likud leadership. Netanyahu’s target list, published last week by the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth, included pillars of established Jewish groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents: Sheldon Adelson, Haim Saban, Ronald Lauder, Ira Rennert, James Tisch, Leslie Wexner, and Mortimer Zuckerman. The hidden contributors revealed on J Street’s tax return show that Ben-Ami tapped instead into a parallel establishment with a great deal of influence both in Democratic politics and Jewish life. J Street received $25,000 from S. Daniel Abraham, the billionaire founder of Slim-Fast who is a longtime Clinton supporter and advocate for Middle East peace; $75,000 from Alan Sagner, a real-estate developer and former head of New York’s Port Authority whose daughter, Deborah, herself a progressive political activist, is on J Street’s board; and $25,000 from Robert Arnow, a major contributor to New York’s Federation who also helped found the Jewish Week. “I’ve been a radical all my life, somewhat, and I was imbued with the idea of another organization challenging the policies,” Arnow, now 86, explained in a phone interview. “I still have faith—I’ll give them a year or two and then we’ll see.”

J Street’s tax filing also included a $25,000 donation from Martin Bunzl, a Rutgers philosophy professor with long involvement in the political side of the peace movement, and $10,000 from Alan Solomont, a former Democratic National Committee finance chair who was a board member of the Israel Policy Forum during the Clinton years and is now the U.S. ambassador to Spain. There was also a $5,000 contribution from Hollywood heavyweights Phil Rosenthal, the producer of Everybody Loves Raymond, and his wife, Monica. And there was Elaine Attias, a feisty 86-year-old Democratic activist from Beverly Hills whose parents, Edward and Anna Mitchell, were such active and early donors to Israel that they became, according to the Los Angeles Times, the first Americans to have a square named in their honor in Jerusalem. “I’ve been involved with the Israeli situation for a long time,” Attias explained to me. “J Street was an opportunity to voice our concerns and express our support for the kind of Israel we want it to be.”

Continue reading: Breira, Clinton, and the J in J Street. Or view as a single page.

The idea itself—a heterogeneous and democratic nation of Israelis and Palestinians, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River—was far from new. With Israel’s left-wing parties reduced to electoral rubble, the center of gravity among many committed progressives has shifted in recent years toward support for the so-called one-state solution. But the speaker wasn’t a radicalized leftist; he was Uri Elitzur, formerly the head of the settlement movement, Benjamin Netanyahu’s onetime chief of staff, and one of the most stringent thinkers of Israel’s religious right.

Anyone baffled by Elitzur’s speech didn’t have to wait long for clarifications. A few months later, writing in Nekuda, the official magazine of the settlement movement, Elitzur used an inflammatory term to describe the reality Israel would likely face if it prolongs its occupation of the West Bank: apartheid. If Israel wants to absolve itself of its sins and solve its problems, Elitzur argued, the only feasible option is absorbing the West Bank and making the 2.5 million people who live there full-fledged citizens of the state of Israel.

Among the right’s intellectuals, Elitzur is hardly alone in his beliefs. Earlier this year, Moshe Arens, Netanyahu’s political mentor and one of the Likud’s most hawkish elders, published an article in Haaretz supporting a similar position. Israel, he wrote, “should apply its laws on Judea and Samaria,” as the right calls the Occupied Territories. Reuven Rivlin, the current speaker of the Knesset, sounded a similar note when he told a reporter earlier this year that he “would rather have Palestinians as citizens of this country over dividing the land up.” Others—including Emily Amrousi, the settler movement’s former spokesperson—have expressed similar views.

Ironically, these same views were, until recently, considered as falling outside the realm of polite political conversation. When historian Tony Judt made a case for a binational state in a 2003 New York Review of Books essay, the outcry was considerable. Calling the essay “haughty and ugly,” Leon Wieseltier, writing in The New Republic, argued that “a bi-national state is not the alternative for Israel. It is the alternative to Israel.”

Yet the epithets that were readily hurled at Judt—anti-Semite, anti-Israeli, self-hating Jew—could not so easily be lobbed at Arens and Amrousi, at Rivlin and Elitzur. These new advocates of binationalism are enjoying an attentive audience. The idea they champion—the long-reviled one-state solution—now deserves serious examination.

***

From the narrow perspective of political science, bereft of ethnic and theological complications, the one-state solution is hard to beat. Having rejected, for the most part, the array of encompassing ideologies that roiled the 20th century—Communism, Totalitarianism, Imperialism—most of the world, with a few notable exceptions, now invests its political energies in the idea of the state as the stage on which we all play out our ambitions and aspirations and the entity to which we all turn for security, comfort, and, often, meaning. The citizens of a modern democratic state, say binationalism’s supporters, needn’t look for meaning anywhere outside the state itself; rather than see themselves as Jews or Muslims or Christians, they argue, Israelis of all ethnicities and religious beliefs need to learn to identify simply as Israeli. If they do so, say the idea’s proponents, they could slowly overcome ancient hatreds, learn to keep the peace and share the power, and build a brave new state that treats all of its citizens equally.

But if the state were to shed its Jewish skin, argue some of binationalism’s critics, wouldn’t bloodshed ensue? Not necessarily, argues Avrum Burg, formerly the chairman of the Jewish Agency and the speaker of the Knesset from 1999 to 2003. Announcing his return to politics last week after a six-year absence, Burg endorsed the one-state solution and advised skeptical Israelis to look to the European Union for inspiration. True, the Italians might still begrudge the French, the French might still suspect the Germans, and the Germans might still contemplate abandoning the union altogether, but these nations tolerate each other nonetheless and sustain their shared enterprise, a kind of collaboration that would have been unthinkable in the trenches of World War I. Just as the old continent learned to put aside animosities and mistrust and enter into a comity of nations, Burg argued, so could Israel eradicate its borders and let its barriers down.

Mention the European example to most Israelis, however, and they would likely scoff at the analogy: If Israel became a unified state—the Hebrew idiom is medinat kol ezracheya, or the state of all its citizens, in stark contrast to the Jewish state—wouldn’t swarms of Palestinians relocate from Lebanon, Gaza, and elsewhere and condemn the Jews to life as a negligible minority? It’s a terrifying scenario, but not an inevitable one: Were the one-state solution to come up for serious discussion, it would not be inconceivable to place strict limitations on immigration, as is the case with most western nations. Rather than allow an endless stream of newcomers, the binational state’s founding fathers could insist on quotas, as Palestine’s British overseers did throughout most of their mandatory rule. They could furthermore demand that anyone proven to partake in violent actions or advocate unrest would not be allowed to enter the state. If this were the case, the new nation could maintain a healthy balance between Arabs and Jews, each group separately administering its own municipalities and religious institutions, and both groups coming together to govern the nation at large.

Such an arrangement most likely would inspire a great deal of good will worldwide, which, in turn, might translate into unprecedented investment. Israel’s already strong industrial base could benefit from a cascade of regional markets opening up to its products. And security expenditure—currently standing at more than $14 billion, which represents 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, a grim ratio surpassed only by Oman, Eritrea, Georgia, and Saudi Arabia—would be greatly reduced, freeing up even more resources and flooding the economy with a soaring surplus. Seen through the narrow prism of finance, a binational state is a far more promising prospect than a Jewish one.

The bounties binationalism promises, then, are at least as numerous as the disasters it threatens to evoke. In every rational respect, it is, if not a ready solution, at least an alternative worthy of one’s careful consideration.

That is, unless one happens to be Jewish.

***

There are, of course, scores of interpretations of Judaism, but here is the one to which I subscribe: Judaism is a religion founded upon the notion that God commanded the ancestors of one particular man, Abraham, to inhabit one particular land, Canaan, and there, adhering to the Almighty’s divine laws, establish an independent nation-state that would serve as a shining light to a benighted world.

This may sound like a theological rant, but it makes perfect sense. Divine laws are ephemeral things, and they have little relevance to human existence unless they are somehow tried and proven here on earth. To that end, Judaism, from Abraham onward, promoted the centrality of the Jewish state, a holy kingdom that would be run in accordance with God’s decrees, an intricate series of regulations and prohibitions that govern every facet of life and that, in spirit if not always in practice, is an astonishing agenda of justice and compassion. The Jewish kingdom, at least ideally, would end indentured servitude and ban high-interest loans, protect the poor and care for the beasts, enshrine reason and pursue peace. In short, it would set an example that every other nation would wish to emulate. Take the independent state away from the Jews, and they become nothing but itinerant prophets, full of spirit but devoid of power, the kind of folks one admires but doesn’t necessarily wish to emulate.

A Jewish state, then, isn’t a byproduct of the religion but rather the other way around: the religion was set in place to serve the idea of the Jewish state. When exile brought Jewish sovereignty to an end, Jewish scholarship still concerned itself primarily with questions of statehood. Striking an eschatological note, the Talmud, for example, argued that “there is no difference between this world and the days of the Messiah except [that in the latter there will be no] bondage of foreign powers.” In other words, the only thing the Messiah would do for God’s chosen children is reinstate their political independence. Throughout more than a millennium of exile, the homeland beckoned, giving us hope, keeping us alive.

The Emancipation, backlit by the radiance of the Enlightenment, threatened to extinguish the yearning for political independence for good—Moses Mendelssohn captured this spirit when he claimed that “the messiah, for whom we prayed these thousands of years, has appeared and our fatherland has been given to us. The messiah is freedom, our fatherland is Germany.” Zionism emerged as an inevitable response, recapturing all the spiritual energies that the Emancipation set loose. At its core, Zionism was nothing but the old dream stated anew: to establish once again the Jewish kingdom in the Promised Land. This is why Zionism was able to attract so many divergent thinkers, from the radically Marxist A.D. Gordon to the messianic Abraham Isaac Kook; however different their visions for the nature of the yearned-for Jewish state, they nonetheless all understood a Jewish state to be an instrument of salvation.

***

The proponents of binationalism, of course, would likely disagree with this interpretation. To them, Zionism’s very diversity is proof that one may advocate all sorts of solutions to the problems plaguing Israel and still remain firmly within its fold. Reuven Rivlin argues that Zionism is first and foremost interested in territory, while former Knesset Speaker Avrum Burg maintains that it is, at heart, a liberal movement that should give up its powers rather than compromise its progressive values. They are both wrong. If—as those who preach the one-state solution from the right argue—the unity of the land and access to its holiest places is key, there is no real reason to insist that the land’s governors be Jewish. One could imagine a wholly Palestinian state in which Jews have the right to settle wherever they pleased. And if—as binationalism’s leftist advocates claim—Zionism’s goal is to promote democracy, they needn’t insist on remaining in the ancient homeland; a vast stretch of Montana, one imagines, or some swath of the Andes, would provide just as good of a backdrop for Jews wishing to be free and just. Both of these solutions are acceptable, yet neither corresponds with the core principle on which Jewish history pivots: that of the Jewish state.

Anyone for whom Israel represents not an abstract political entity but a historical necessity and a spiritual foundation would do well to unequivocally reject the one-state solution. The alternative, granted, isn’t as exhilarating. The Jewish state, even given the possibility of successful peace talks in the near future, groans under the weight of unbearable burdens, not the least of which is the struggle to balance Judaism’s traditions and democracy’s dictates. But it’s this same struggle that has defined us for millennia. It’s the struggle that made us who we are. Abandoning it for whatever reason might sound temporarily tempting, but we can’t afford the cost.

Taub starts out by reminding us that Zionism, properly understood, is a liberal movement. It is nothing more or less than the belief that, in the words of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, it is “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations.” The Jewish experience in Europe, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, convinced the early Zionists that it was only in a sovereign Jewish state that this self-determination could be achieved. Indeed, the same belief inspired all the peoples of Eastern Europe, from Lithuanians to Greeks.

It is often said, in reproach of Theodor Herzl and the other founders of Zionism, that their eagerness to establish a Jewish state in Palestine led them to ignore the existence of the Arabs already living there—that they believed in “a land without a people for a people without a land.” In fact, as Taub points out, this is not at all the case. From Herzl onward, the Zionists were aware that any Jewish state would inevitably have a large Arab minority, and Israel’s founding laws established collective rights for that minority, as well as legal equality. As Taub writes, this ideal of an Israel that is both Jewish and democratic was not fully lived up to, for a variety of reasons. But it was not until 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the Six Day War, that the ideal itself came under serious threat. Ever since then, there has been a two-tiered government: democracy in Israel proper, military rule and harsh subordination of Arabs in the Occupied Territories.

The philosophical danger of the Occupation—to say nothing of the diplomatic and military and economic dangers—is that its illiberalism will make Zionism itself look illiberal in retrospect. This is, as Taub points out, the view of the “post-Zionists” in Israel and of much of the left in Europe and America: that “Zionism was never democratic, and the very idea of a Jewish democratic state is a mere contradiction in terms.” Ironically, Taub argues, this is the same thing that the settler movement believes. The difference is that, while anti-Zionists want to resolve the contradiction by making Israel cease to be Jewish (the so-called “one-state solution”), the settlers want to resolve it by making Israel cease to be democratic. For as Taub writes, “the concept of a Jewish democratic state [stops] making sense if Jews are not a clear majority,” and an Israel in permanent possession of the West Bank would, in time, inevitably have a non-Jewish majority.

The reason why the religious settlers can face this prospect with equanimity is that they are not democrats but fundamentalists and theocrats. This is made quite explicit in some of the statements Taub quotes. To Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the chief theologian of “redemptive religious Zionism,” “The Almighty has his own political agenda, according to which politics down here are conducted.” Shlomo Aviner, head of a religious Zionist yeshiva, went still further, saying that settlement is “above moral-human considerations,” because it is a direct command from God. Actually, Taub writes, Judaism has historically had little to say about resettling in the Land of Israel, except to caution against it. According to one Midrash, when the Jews went into exile after the destruction of the Temple, they made three vows: “not to hasten the end of days (i.e., not to do anything to expedite the coming of the Messiah), not to ascend the wall (i.e., not to immigrate to the Land of Israel and reestablish the House of David), and not to rebel against the nations of the world.”

To some haredi sects, these prohibitions still hold, which is why certain fringe ultra-Orthodox rabbis opposed and continue to oppose the existence of the state of Israel (such as Yisroel Dovid Weiss of Neturei Karta, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s favorite rabbi). But Zvi Yehuda Kook preferred to follow the so-called fourth mitzvah (mitzvah dalet) of Nahmanides, which held that “we were commanded to take possession of the land which God gave to our fathers … and we must not abandon it to any other of the nations or leave it in desolation.” In the hands of Kook and his followers, this became one of the most important of all commandments, so urgent that it was held to justify sacrificing life—or taking it. When Yigal Amir assassinated Prime Minister Rabin in 1995, his justification was that Rabin had been branded a rodef (literally, “pursuer”) by some settler rabbis, a halachic designation that meant it was justified to kill him.

For Taub, the Rabin assassination marks the crucial turning point in the history of the settler movement. It demonstrated beyond a doubt that the settlers’ mission to redeem the land of Israel was on a collision course with the security of the state of Israel. For two decades, starting with the election of Likud in 1977, this distinction had been elided: Territorial expansion was the policy of conservative Israeli governments on national-security grounds, which fit in nicely with the settlers’ religious agenda. But when even Ariel Sharon, whom Taub describes as “the patron of the settlers,” decided that Israel must withdraw from Gaza, it became clear that this political alliance was over. Ultimately, all factions of secular and mainstream religious Zionism believed that the secure existence of a Jewish state was more important than its control of the land promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The larger problem, which The Settlers only begins to address, is how this consensus should be translated into actual policy. For, as Taub acknowledges, the settlers on their own have never been numerous or powerful enough to dictate to Israel’s government. When Israel encouraged settlement in the Occupied Territories, it was because the government believed this policy would ultimately strengthen the state. This has proved to be a huge mistake, and there is little doubt that most Israelis would now be glad to see (most of) the West Bank and Gaza turned over to a moderate Palestinian government. But there is no immediate prospect of such a government emerging—and the fate of Gaza, where Israeli withdrawal led to Hamas rule and a barrage of rocket attacks, makes withdrawal from the West Bank even less likely. “For all its military and economic power,” Taub writes, “Israel was helpless to extract itself from the territories and prevent itself from sliding down the slippery slope to binationalism.” The title of Taub’s last chapter is “Conclusion: What Next?” and he is no more able to answer the question than anyone else. But The Settlers goes a long way toward reminding us of the values that Zionism must preserve, if it is to be worthy of its great history.

Córdoba was the capital of the Islamic caliphate that controlled the Iberian peninsula during the Middle Ages. Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who runs the Cordoba Initiative with his wife, named his project “after the period between roughly 800 and 1200 CE, when the Cordoba Caliphate ruled much of today’s Spain, and its name reminds us that Muslims created what was, in its era, the most enlightened, pluralistic, and tolerant society on earth,” he wrote in his 2004 book What’s Right With Islam. Rauf is seeking to align himself with those who see the period as the “Golden Age of Spain,” or what’s called the convivencia—“the coexistence”—when members of the three Abrahamic faiths lived side-by-side in peace, prosperity, and astonishing cultural and intellectual creativity.

For almost two centuries, though, as many Jewish scholars have described medieval Spain as atrocious for its Jews as have seen it as a sort of utopia. The latest to call the utopians’ bluff is essayist Hillel Halkin, in his 2010 Nextbook Press biography of the period’s greatest Jewish poet, Yehuda Halevi. “The higher Jews did rise,” Halkin writes of the time and place, “the more they aroused the anger and resentment of the Muslim or Christian majority, and the more vulnerable they became. The culture of tolerance stretched only so far.” Muslims, Christians, and Jews in medieval Spain “kept socially to themselves,” according to Halkin, “never intermarried, were convinced of the superiority of their own faith, and shared no common identity.” As for the intimations of some that the period was an ancestor of our contemporary multicultural West? “Such an analogy,” Halkin concludes, “is misleading.”

The debate over what Spain was like for its Jews 900 years ago has rarely been purely academic. Rather, over the past two centuries, Jewish historians have frequently seen in the period things they needed to see in order to make arguments about contemporary circumstances. If coexistence in Christian- and Muslim-ruled Spain was possible even in the 11th century, some have argued, then why do Jews today need a state in which they are the ones in charge—why, rather, shouldn’t the states in which they already reside welcome them as fully equal citizens? And if, on the other hand, even the convivencia—supposedly history’s most brightly shining beacon of multifaith tolerance—was a myth, then how could the Jews do without a state in which they are the ones in charge? The battle over medieval Spain is, to many, a battle over Zionism, and over what it means to be a Jew today.

***

According to Princeton historian Mark Cohen, the notion of convivencia, of medieval Spain as utopia, began with mid-19th century German-Jewish historians. Disappointed to find that emancipation did not equal equality, they crafted a long-ago world of true Jewish freedom as the model that their own world failed to live up to. “They looked back nostalgically to Muslim Spain, and said, ‘Look there,’ ” Cohen told me. “They wanted to embarrass the Christians.” They were not demanding a state of their own; on the contrary, they were demanding the right to live freely in another people’s state and, moreover, to be considered members of that people.

A subsequent batch of historians, under the spell of early-20th-century Zionism, cast medieval Spain not as a utopia but as, according to Cohen, “an unmitigated disaster.” They did so in order to argue that “Arab anti-Semitism is firmly rooted in a congenital, endemic Muslim/Arab Jew-hatred,” which in turn buttressed their case for a country of, by, and for the Jewish people.

So, which of those versions is right? Neither, Cohen said. In one essay, he refers to a “myth” (the German historians’ heaven) and a “counter-myth” (the Zionist historians’ hell) and asserts that the truth lies somewhere in between. Those who hold up the period as an ideal are exaggerating: “In a medieval situation,” he argues, “where you have monotheistic religions living in proximity, there is no such thing as toleration.” (In other words, tell “toleration” to the Jews of Granada, many of whom were massacred by angry Muslims in 1066, or to Granada’s Jewish vizier at the time, who was crucified.) And those who downplay the extent of tolerance and pluralism exaggerate, too. “If by convivencia,” said Cornell historian Ross Brann, “we mean that cultural and social proximity, conversation, and interaction among Jews, Muslims, and Christians were significant and productive,” then convivencia was real.

Despite the rise of this compromise position, some historians continue to push versions of the two more extreme visions of the period. The most prominent contemporary member of what might be termed the “utopian” school is Yale humanities professor María Rosa Menocal. And the historian to most recently advance the “counter-myth”—to posit that medieval Spain was largely hellish for its Jews—is Halkin.

***

Though Yehuda Halevi is wide-ranging (it spends a great deal of time, for example, on Halevi’s poetry, which Halkin translated), its central thesis is this: The defining moment of Halevi’s life was his decision to leave Spain for the Holy Land—a decision he made after realizing that a Jew could not freely and fully be a Jew in the Spain of his lifetime (roughly 1070 to 1140). “Halevi understood,” Halkin argues, “that Gentile oppression was the inevitable result of exilic existence.” It was an inevitable result nine centuries ago, and—to hear Halkin tell it—it remains an inevitable result today. And just as aliyah was the solution to the oppressiveness of exilic existence nine centuries ago, so it remains, according to Halkin, the solution today.

Yehuda Halevi is really a dual biography: a biography and an autobiography. “Like Yehuda Halevi,” writes Halkin, who moved from the United States to Israel in 1970, “I grew up with convivencia. It was just that the con didn’t go with the vivencia. Like wrong pieces of a puzzle, the two sides of me refused to fit together. The Jew and the American were barely on speaking terms.” The central moment in Halkin’s own life was when he chose to make aliyah, much as Halevi had done.

Halkin needs convivencia to have been a myth, and to be replaceable with a world in which the Granada pogrom was merely the most extreme example of a general trend, because Zionism—specifically, the strand of Zionism that states that Jews must rule themselves and have the ability to defend themselves—is a second-order value for him. For this reason, he attacks Menocal, the Yale professor and ultimate Golden Age-ist, in his book. In his interview with me, he asserted that medieval Spain has been “greatly idealized” and that Menocal and others, “in holding it up as some kind of human ideal of coexistence, are involved in a distortion of history.”

(Brann, of Cornell, disputes Halkin’s characterization. “Menocal only asserts that this period of cultural creativity featured abundant social and economic interaction,” he told me. And Cohen accused Halkin of projecting his polemical method onto Menocal; he insists that she is an academic historian seeking the objective truth rather than a debater trying to make a point. Menocal declined to comment for this article, instead referring me to Brann and Cohen.)

***

The professors I spoke to—who all offered various praises of Yehuda Halevi—supplied the same general critique: Halkin is a talented writer; he knows his stuff; but he is not an academic. More to the point, he does not possess the academic’s relentlessly single-minded focus on determining what actually happened. Rather, he allows his historical descriptions to be influenced by his ideological beliefs—”He’s very political,” said Raymond P. Scheindlin, of the Jewish Theological Seminary, “and has very strong opinions about the role of the Jewish people in the world.” (See Scheindlin and Halkin discussing Halevi earlier this year.)

Halkin can snipe as good as he is sniped at. “Academics are in the habit of deconstructing everyone but themselves,” he told me. Additionally, he is merely the latest in a two-century-old line of Jewish historians who have deployed preferred versions of medieval Spain in arguments about the present day. “I suppose you could say,” he admitted, “that the book was written all along with what I openly profess to having: A Zionist bias.” He added, “My Halevi is very much a Zionist, or a proto-Zionist. I approached the subject with that sense, and I came away with it only strengthened.”

Imam Rauf, the man behind the Cordoba Initiative, appears to be doing much the same thing as Halkin: using his view of what Spain used to be to advance his idea for what the world ought to be today. (Rauf is traveling and did not reply to requests for comment.) “We strive for a ‘New Cordoba,’ a time when Jews, Christians, Muslims, and all other faith traditions will live together in peace, enjoying a renewed vision of what the good society can look like,” he writes in the introduction to his 2004 book.

I asked Halkin what he thought of the Cordoba Initiative’s name. “It’s obvious what Cordoba stands for,” he replied. “Whether the real Cordoba was what Cordoba stands for is another question. But there’s nothing terribly wrong with it.”

So, maybe the solution is just to move beyond symbols? “We’re all basically defending our choices and lives and honors,” Halkin told me. “My Halevi is a defense of the choices I’ve made.”

“I’m willing to put Halevi aside and just say it,” he added.

Additional reporting by Mark Bergen.

Kidding! Actually, the basis for Beinart’s new book, tentatively titled The Crisis of Liberal Zionism, is the controversial essay, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” that he published in the New York Review of Books in May. Times Books is planning a late 2011 release.

I talked to Beinart when his essay first dropped, but, intrigued by the proposed title change, I decided to call him up again.

Why the change in title? Your article focused mostly on the crisis of liberal Zionism in America. Do you expect to spend more time on the Israeli side in your book?
I think there is a crisis both in Israel and in the United States, and you can’t understand one without the other. I think a lot of the book will be about the American Jewish community. But the moral challenge only arises because liberal Zionism is in crisis in Israel. What I want to try to do is suggest how you could try to build a Zionism that will be somewhat different in Israel and in the United States, a struggle in both societies to reconcile liberal democracy and Zionism. More of the book will be about the American side, but you can’t understand the American side unless you believe liberal Zionism is in trouble.

Which challenges to liberal Zionism do you hope to expand upon? Your essay focused mainly on the American Jewish establishment and the Israeli government’s settlement policies.
In the article, I wrote a bit also about Palestinian citizens of Israel. I think that’s an underappreciated but really important part of this, vis-à-vis [Foreign Minister Avigdor] Lieberman and his agenda. There’s also this question of the haredim [ultra-Orthodox Jews] and their own often highly illiberal political agenda. I’m interested in the points of intersection between the settler project and the haredi hostility to liberal democracy. I think Israel is a complicated place, but for me the framework will be to try to argue that there has been such a thing as liberal Zionism, there are liberal democratic currents in Zionist thought and Israeli institutions, but they are under siege, and we can’t defend them unless we first recognize that they’re imperiled.

Do you plan to do reporting—interviews and such—for the book?
I have already started to do a bunch of interviews. I was in Israel a few weeks ago, and had some conversations there, too.

Do you plan to interview people at some of the American Jewish institutions, like AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League, that you criticize?
I would like to do that. I’ll have to see how keen they are to do that! But I do want to try to delve deeper into the history and evolution of American organized Jewish life. Before I wrote my piece, I had friends at some of the organizations that I criticized, and I think I still do—I hope I still do. My hope is that, yeah, I can have some conversations to continue to deepen my understanding.

[Marc again] For further reading, may I suggest two Tablet Magazine pieces:

• Yoav Fromer’s essay, today, arguing that Israeli democracy is actually bound to have an illiberal effect on Israeli policies.

• Dan Luban’s rejoinder to Beinart’s essay, in which he wondered whether liberal American Jews’ adherence to Zionism and identification with Israel is even something worth fighting for.

Deals: Week of 8/2 [Publishers Weekly]
Related: The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment [NYRB]
Earlier: Beinart Speaks To Tablet

So, it came as a surprise when, at 11:30 on that first Saturday night, after an exhausting opening session, about a quarter of the 200 conference-goers, overwhelmingly under 30, gathered to celebrate havdalah, the ceremony that ushers out the Sabbath. As they swayed in a circle singing “Lo Yisa Goy,” a Hebrew folksong—“and into plowshares beat their swords, nations shall learn war no more”—the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network felt for a moment like Jewish summer camp. Many Jewish community leaders would not have been enthusiastic about the scene. And, in echoes that reverberated throughout the conference, neither were some leaders of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.

A growing cohort of young Jews actively involved in Jewish life—often in alternative realms like independent minyans, the Yiddish-revival movement, and social-justice organizations—are taking left-wing positions on Israel that leave them feeling marginalized even in the Jewish communities they call home. Ideologically, they range from those who couch their politics in the language of international law and ultimately favor a two-state solution to those who use the more radical language of anti-imperialism and insist that true democracy can never happen within a Jewish state—with countless shades in between. By flirting with the labels “non-Zionist” and “anti-Zionist” without abandoning other traditional affiliations, they have crossed a line into territory where there exists no well-marked space on the American Jewish ideological map.

Into this vacuum came the first conference of the two-year-old International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, a still-obscure organization (though one now on the watch list of some mainstream Jewish organizations) with a moniker echoing those of long-defunct groups, like the Jewish Communist Labor Bund, that tethered Jewish specificity to the international left. For many of the young Jews who turned out in Detroit—most en route to the U.S. Social Forum, a major activist expo that was held in the city later that week—the Assembly seemed to promise a distinctly Jewish space in which to engage in or try on the ideas that Zionism does in fact equal racism and that only a one-state solution can mean justice for Palestinians—regardless of whether they take such a hard line in their day-to-day lives.

But then they encountered a new problem: Their elders on the radical left didn’t know what to do with them either. They were too Jewish.

“Folks like us get it from both sides,” said a 27-year-old Jewish religious professional at the conference who requested anonymity because, she said, she feared repercussions if her views became known. “We’re not loyal enough to the Jews and we’re not pure enough for the anti-Zionists.”

The existence of non- and anti-Zionist Jews is in itself nothing novel; from socialist Jewish movements in prewar Eastern Europe to the ultra-Orthodox sect Neturei Karta, they have been around as long as Zionism itself. What may be new is the emergence of a group of Jews whose leftism does not automatically equal secularism, as it did for generations of Marxists, and who, at the same time, grew up in or were welcomed into a liberal sector of the religious landscape that has grown exponentially over the past few decades. It’s not hard these days, at least in most American cities with large Jewish communities, to find synagogues or minyans that explicitly welcome feminists, gay Jews, and those suspicious of religious hierarchies—as well as spaces next door for those more interested in Yiddish culture or social action.

“For the past 10 years, and particularly from the Second Lebanon War up to the present, there’s been a resurgence of Jewish anti-Zionism where Zionism had once been strongest: among secular liberal Jews,” said Sam Freedman, a Columbia University journalism professor who has covered the American Jewish community for decades. In a recent New York Times column, he discussed the revival of the American Council for Judaism, a non-Zionist spinoff of the Reform movement. “It’s gone from being a totally peripheral part of the Jewish scene to some growing minority of the Jewish scene.” (According to Hebrew Union College sociologist Steven M. Cohen, no numbers yet exist on the size of the trend.)

The members of this demographic who turned up at the Assembly of Jews voiced a range of complaints about the Jewish institutions in their lives. A 25-year-old environmental activist named Hillary Lehr from Oakland, California, said she no longer wanted to visit the Reform synagogue she’d attended as a child because its pro-Israel stance was casually embedded into ritual life, from prayers for the Jewish state to tzedakah boxes for the Jewish National Fund. “I want to de-Zionize my synagogue because it’s not about being a Zionist, it’s about Judaism,” Lehr said. “There’s a generation that’s ready to go back to those religious and spiritual spaces. I want to say to my rabbi, ‘I want to come back to my spirituality and I want there to be space for all of us because we’re all Jews.’ ”

Avi Grenadier, 27, who helps run a progressive Jewish radio show called Radio613 in Kingston, Ontario, voiced similar objections about his religious education at a Conservative synagogue in a small Ontario town: Israel, he said, had taken the place of religious content—which meant that when he became disillusioned with the Jewish state, there was no other iteration of Judaism to fall back on. “I knew more about Mossad agents’ biographies than about the Nevi’im,” said Grenadier, who said he studied Jewish texts for the first time last year at Yeshivat Hadar, an egalitarian yeshiva in Manhattan. He now wears a yarmulke and observes the Sabbath.

Others voiced a complaint specific to institutions at the left-most edge of the mainstream Jewish world: Because opinion on Israel can be expected to vary widely—and explosively—in such congregations and organizations, some, by dictate or custom, have simply made discussion of Israel taboo.

Some non-Zionist Jews say they want what more pro-Israel factions of the community have: spaces where the Jewish state can be freely discussed and, indeed, turned into a political cause. But others questioned whether creating congregations that organize around the Palestinian cause would simply replicate the inextricability of Judaism and Zionism at more traditional places of worship.

“It’s not like I’m trapped in this synagogue where there’s all these Zionist politics on Shabbat and I want to create a Shabbat where there’s all these anti-Zionist politics,” said Aaron Levitt, 40, a former board member at West End Synagogue, a Reconstructionst congregation in Manhattan, who left the shul after several years of trying to unmoor it from allegiance to Israel (and who was not at the conference). “It would be just as bad; it might even be worse.”

Levitt helped start a non-Zionist minyan this year called Page 36 with fellow Jewish pro-Palestinian activists including a young Reconstructionist rabbi, Alissa Wise—not, he said, because he ultimately wants to pray only with political comrades, but as a kind of stopgap measure while truly “Zionist-neutral” congregations remain few and far between. At the same time, he added, the minyan was inspired by frustration with what he sees as a lack of interest among many of his coreligionist political comrades in aspects of spirituality and peoplehood that go beyond Jewish-flavored universalist politics.

“I care about Palestinians as much as anyone else,” said Levitt, “but I’m engaged in all this stuff because I care about Jews and Judaism.”

****
It was around precisely these questions of priorities—whether anti-Zionist Jewish movements should be motivated at their deepest level by concern about Jews, or about Palestinians—that the Assembly of Jews became to some extent factionalized. At one end of the spectrum were Jewish Anti-Zionist Network leaders who argued that Jewishness was relevant to the group’s mission primarily to the extent to which it could be used strategically in the public-relations battle over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and that to center their own identities much beyond that would, ironically, become another vehicle for Jewish self-obsession.

“Lots of successful movements have found resources and inspiration in spiritual and cultural work, and none of them have mistaken spiritual and cultural work for the movement itself,” said Sarah Kershnar, one of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network’s founders. “The reason we pushed back on identity being the central place to act from is it sometimes lacks that connection with what’s really happening in the world.”

That reasoning went down well with some participants, particularly older ones who, in many cases, described themselves as red-diaper babies or as having been alienated from an older and more conservative iteration of the Jewish world for decades over anything from politics to sexuality.

At the other end of the spectrum were those who hewed more closely to Levitt’s view. They got their havdalah service on the Assembly’s program (though everyone else left the conference center before it began) and led workshops on “Jewish Anti-Zionist Spiritual Reclamation” and “Reclaiming Ashkenazi Cultural Spaces From a Zionist Agenda.” But tensions repeatedly surfaced, at public discussions and behind the scenes.

“It’s startling how much easier it is to bring my politics to Jewish spaces than to bring my Jewishness here,” said a participant active in the Boston minyan scene who wanted to remain anonymous because she hopes to apply for Hebrew school teaching jobs. “The organizers kept asking, ‘What is the material benefit this will have? How is this going to end Zionism?’ And it was like, we don’t want to justify why we pray.”

For those who left the Assembly of Jews with mixed feelings, the conference may ultimately have connected them less to the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network than to a nascent, nameless network of similarly minded young people. Interested parties passed around sign-up sheets for non-Zionist Yom Kippur retreats and hatched an idea to participate in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement to isolate Israel by selling their own, emphatically Diaspora-made, Jewish ritual objects.

A few days after the Assembly ended, some participants who had stayed in town for the Social Forum held a non-Zionist Shabbat dinner along Detroit’s waterfront. And almost immediately, they encountered a challenge: One of the few other Jewish contingents at the Social Forum had come from Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist Zionist youth movement. How to integrate the two groups while giving the anti-Zionists the Shabbat they had been promised? The event’s coordinator crafted a text message that she hoped would address the concerns of Assembly folk while also engaging with their Zionist colleagues.

“As most Jewish spaces marginalize the voices of non- and anti-Zionist Jews, this space will privilege the voices of those Jews,” she wrote. But, she added: “All are welcome.”

The Hollywood jargon isn’t entirely inappropriate. The scolding sermon in question, by the prophet Isaiah, has everything a blockbuster can hope for: Sex (“how has she become a harlot, a faithful city”)! Corruption (“everyone loves bribes and runs after payments”)! A happy ending (“Zion shall be redeemed through justice and her penitent through righteousness”)! Good luck getting all that from a bunch of brooding vampires.

Isaiah laments the moral depravity of his people and preaches justice and compassion. While his fellow Israelites engage in worldly pursuits, he devotes himself to ethereal visions. This is why this Shabbat is called “Shabbat Hazon,” or the Shabbat of the vision: As we prepare to commemorate the destruction of the Temple, we’re instructed to reflect on Isaiah’s divinations and chart our own course toward repentance and redemption.

And what’s true for Jewish people is even more pressing for the Jewish state.

For the past year, I have frequently used this column to tie the prophets’ ire to Israel’s contemporary woes. Too often, I was saddened to discover in the ancient rebukes sharp lessons for modern times. The lamentations felt fresh, as if the sinfulness and hard-heartedness that so pained Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the rest of their holy ilk were committed not in biblical times but just a short while ago. But this week, I wish to linger on no specific ill. This week, I’d like to think about vision.

It’s a strange thing, of course, to believe that a state must have a vision. The overwhelming majority of nations, after all, owe their existence not to some ephemeral organizing principle but to geographical proximities, historical consequences, and ethnic similarities. They inhabit contiguous slivers of land long enough to mine for shared cultures and common ways. They become nations the way animals become fossils, a centuries-long journey in which a once-living entity becomes an immutable part of the landscape.

Israel is not such a nation. Israel was founded on an idea. It came to be because generations of Jews looked back at the covenant between God and his Chosen People and decided that they could no longer wait for the Messiah to lead them to the Promised Land. They had a vision. Some called it Zionism, others mixed in elements of socialism or militarism or literature or labor or religion. But the Jewish vision hadn’t changed in millennia. It remained the same from the destruction of the Temple onward. The vision called for an independent and just Jewish community in the Land of Israel, the sort the Lord had in mind when he spoke, at Sinai, of a holy nation and a kingdom of priests. That was the vision that propelled scores to war and hardship, the vision in whose name I and so many others took up arms. And that vision, alas, is in peril.

The problem isn’t left versus right. It has nothing to do with Palestinian violence or the Iranian threat. It looms far above the petty concerns that fill up the pages of our newspapers and our dinner-table conversations. The problem is existential: Israel, I believe, has lost its vision.

How else to explain a nation that so desperately and candidly craves peace and yet time and again lends its unequivocal support to military escapades that gain nothing but calumny? How to account for a population that disagrees bitterly with the settlers’ zealous dream of grasping on to Judea and Samaria yet votes enthusiastically for those politicians who continue to build more and more Jewish outposts on the West Bank’s contentious hills? What do we say when no plan is in sight, no hope foreseeable, and the sole comfort comes from slinging mud at enemies, real or imagined?

These days, I can think of little else. These questions are at the heart of a new book I’ve co-written with Todd Gitlin—The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election—and I hope to have the opportunity to discuss them in greater length in the fall. For now, however, I can say this: The way out is further in. If—as Todd and I became convinced when researching our book—Israel wants to be a Jewish state, then let it be a Jewish state. Let it take Isaiah’s warning seriously and commit itself once more not merely to the mechanics of Judaism—its rituals and rigidities, its tired symbols and battered tropes—but to its wonderful and wild and vibrant soul, the same spirit that witnessed the birth of monotheism and made it its mission to tell the world of God and his mercy. Let it listen to the prophet and abandon its fantasies of might and money. Instead of accusing the world of hypocrisy for judging Israel by a different standard than the one habitually applied to other nations, let it cheer and reply that any nation that was forged in the crucible of divine election, that was founded on faith in being God’s favorites sons, has no choice but to accept double standards as a matter of fact. Let it learn to tell the difference between the malicious few who burn with hatred and the perplexed many who look at Israel’s actions and wonder—as every sensible and conscientious person must wonder—just what kind of future the Jewish state imagines for itself.

As we ponder these questions, let us praise the instruments of war or the pirouettes of peace, each of us according to her or his heart; for some the road might be clear, for others pebbled with the debris of broken promises and shattered dreams. But let us never stop thinking about our vision, and let our vision never stray far from that bequeathed to us from above. This summer, if you have only one thought of transcendence and fate, let this be the one.

Was it hard to return to Orthodox Judaism after all those years in which you called yourself a “freethinker”?

Well, don’t forget I was educated Jewishly, thank God, and I’ve never had trouble admitting I was wrong. Thank God for that, too, and that may be because I made so many mistakes. Thank God for all of them.

Was it a mistake going underground against the czar?

No, I don’t think so, though it was a mistake going against Judaism—or at least abandoning it for freethinking. It would have been better to have fought the czar and defended Judaism.

Who made you realize that?

Levinsky. David Levinsky. He was a fictional character, of course, my own creation. But it’s no coincidence that at the start of the novel and the end of it, Levinsky notes that all his worldly success meant nothing to him and he was still, in his innermost being, the same Yeshiva boy who had swayed over his prayers. I wrote that at the peak of my career, and it was the most important thing I ever wrote, and it just came out of me. And I began rethinking my whole life at that time.

When was that?

Well, I started writing The Rise of David Levinsky in 1912 for McClure’s. I’m not sure the magazine understood what it was getting in to. I finished it in 1917, and we brought it out just before the Bolshevik Revolution. I was 57 at the time. There were a lot of friends, including that young fellow Mencken, who wanted me to give up newspaper work and spend the last third of my life writing fiction. I rather liked Mencken, by the way, despite his attacks on the Jews; we used to lunch once in a while at the Algonquin, and I helped him with his Yiddish monograph. He later wrote of his disappointment that I couldn’t give up the “razzle dazzle” of the newspaper life.

Was that it, the razzle dazzle?

Well, there were serious matters. And not just World War I, which was one of our mistakes, and a serious one—the pacifism was a serious mistake, but not as bad a mistake as the cynicism about America and America’s motives. The fact is that even as we all came to America we underestimated her.

Someone once made a remark about the little speech in David Levinsky about how, for all the exploitation of Jewish garment workers by the bosses, the Americans were the best-dressed people in the world. The remark was that it signaled your understanding that maybe the labor unions themselves were too cynical.

While I was writing that chapter, the garment workers were outside the Forward building throwing stones at my office. That’s because I’d urged a settlement in the strike. It was a bitter time. I began to rethink a lot of things then.

Like Zionism.

That, too.

What was your error?

Arrogance. A lack of vision. I came to understand only later that no socialist, not one of them, could compete with Herzl in that department. He was just way ahead of us. And the people were with him.

Meyer London taught you that?

He was the first socialist ever elected to Congress, and he lost his seat over it because the voters, the workers, right here in the Lower East Side, the workers who had just elected a Socialist, they understood what it would mean to have a Jewish state. He was asked about the Balfour Declaration. He said: “Let us stop pretending about the Jewish past and let us stop making fools of ourselves about the Jewish future.” He promptly lost his seat. Looking back, we can see it was a kind of socialist arrogance. His own workers were ahead of him.

Can that be said of about your movement vis-à-vis the communists?

No, I think we adjusted to the facts sooner than most anyone. I declared my position in 1923 when I got back from the Soviet Union and said: “Russia has at present less freedom than it had in the earliest days of Romanov rule. … The world has never yet seen such a despotism.” It would have been impossible, illogical for me to go back to a literary career at that point. It was essential that we defeat the communists here, and that was what I gave it all up for. In the fight against the Soviet, we were not followers but we were in the lead. I gave up a lot for that fight. I think Mencken understood that better than most, believe it or not. I am like the son who gave up a literary life for business—only on my business everything depended, and I have sorrows, but no regrets.

You failed to lead on Zionism.

I met my match in Jabotinsky. It was an important error in my life, my denunciation of him after his speech at the Manhattan Opera House. That was 1940. He called then for the urgent evacuation of the Jews from Europe to Eretz Israel, and I turned around and belittled him in the pages of the Forward. I gave a whole page to it, and that’s when I wrote, “Six million is a pretty small state.” I was derisive, and I was wrong.

When did you realize that?

Immediately, and when Jabotinsky died a few weeks later—he lay down from fatigue at a right-wing camp in upstate New York where he was training young Jews to defend themselves, and his heart gave out as he was lying down—it was a terrible blow for all Jews. I was furious at the staff of the Forward, which refused to cover his funeral. So, I wrote the editorial that has been quoted ever since, saying that his death was, coming as it did at such a grim time for the Jewish people, “in the true sense of the word, a national catastrophe.” I predicted that he would be missed not only then, in the middle of the storm, but later, “when the storm is over and the time comes to heal the wounds and rebuild Jewish life on new foundations in a new time.”

New foundations—or old ones.

Hah! Alt-neu-foundations. How’s that?

Is that when you began to re-think religion?

Well, I’d been re-thinking it for a long time, as the beginning and end of The Rise of David Levinsky makes clear. It never left me. It was gnawing at me the whole time. But freethinking is a kind of addiction of its own. What started the dam to break was Sholem Asch. He came in and plopped his novel about Jesus on my desk, and it just came out. He was suggesting that Jews treat Jesus the way Christians view Jesus, and I threw him out. I told him to burn the novel. And when he resisted, I banned him from the Forward. And I wrote a whole book attacking him, and in that book I insisted that I wasn’t religious. And then the illogic of my position began to eat at me, and that is how it happened, and I worked my way back to the Torah and to Talmud and I made peace with the boy in the yeshiva, and I consider it my greatest achievement.

Did it destroy all that came before in your life?

[After a pause.] I would have to say it validates it. Remember that as Levinsky stood at the rail of the ship as it prepared to deposit him on American soil, he said a prayer, and it was that God would not hide his face from him in the new land. It was a promise as much as a prayer, and I tend to see my return to religion as a redemption of that promise.

This is an imaginary interview. So, what are we to make of it?

Read the record. It will show you where I was going. My great deputy at the Forward, David Shub, wrote long after I had passed away that what I lived for above all else was Russian literature, and it is true. It was my greatest love. But literature itself is something that can’t be proved and is a matter of faith and speculation. It doesn’t make it wrong.

Seth Lipsky is the founding editor of the English-language Forward. He is writing a biography of Abraham Cahan for Nextbook Press.

Some commenters saw a Zionist conspiracy (when they weren’t expressing disdain for the video’s “bad taste”). But could the Israeli government, or any sympathetic organization, have masterminded something so anarchic, brazenly neglecting to tout Israel’s holy sites and instead pitching the Azrieli Mall highway bridge? Another theory: Maybe the artists were spontaneously moved by their love for Israel on their way home from an evangelical church. Yet others speculated it was all a big prank staged by an Israeli backpacker trawling the Incan ruins of Peru, who thought it’d be funny to juxtapose their song with footage of the Tel Aviv pride parade.

In truth, credit (or blame, if you prefer) lies with a different set of rootless cosmopolitans: several creative-class Argentine Jews (and one quarter-Jew) living in Madrid, Buenos Aires, and New York, only one of whom has actually been to Israel, and none of whom even met the singers during the video’s production. Their intention, these impresarios say somewhat vaguely, was to fight preconceived notions that Israel is a sad and scary place.

“It’s not a song in favor of Israel,” said Gastón Cleiman, an advertising man in Buenos Aires who wrote the song’s lyrics and who, along with Sebastian Muller, dreamed up the idea. “It’s a song against prejudice.” Cleiman is freelancer; Muller works for an interactive firm in Madrid whose clients include Nike and Coca-Cola. Both men swear the project was their own initiative, with neither official money nor messaging. The music was written by Gaby Kerpel, another Argentine Jew, who also scored De La Guarda and Fuerza Bruta and is part of a Latin electronic collective known as Zizek and performs reinterpreted Colombian cumbia under the alter ego King Coyo, and the video was directed by Picky Talarico, better known for directing Latin mega-stars’ videos and high-profile commercials.

It started with Muller and Cleiman, who were channeling their mutual obsession with the millions-strong YouTube sensations Wendy (who, at 8, recorded sugary-voiced videos about her thirst for breast milk and beer), La Tigresa (a surgically enhanced hairdresser from the Peruvian Amazon fond of leopard print and reborn as a singer at 65), and Delfín, an amiable but stone-faced Ecuadorean whose first rise to his feet in indignation had been for a disco-beat ode to 9/11.

“One sees them and is seduced,” Cleiman said, speaking in Spanish. “These are things upon which you cannot force reason, because then surely you will find defects. But the truth is, you cannot stop watching them.”

“I feel they are doing something new that relies on authenticity,” Muller, who studied film at Tel Aviv University, told me earnestly, in Hebrew. “They haven’t learned the rules of how to communicate with images. It’s a kind of dogma without consciousness.”

Muller conceded that some of the singers’ fan base was ironic or mocking. “For many people, the combination of authenticity, of pop-culture kitsch and the bizarre is an ugly aesthetic,” he said. “But once you break from your prejudice, you can get to a different approach. Once you break those barriers, you are free.” He likened the process of changing one’s perception of the video—in part because of its pure addictiveness—to changing one’s view of Israel.

That’s the argument he presented to the singers, too. “They also had preconceived notions about Israel,” Muller said. “So, we said, what do they think when people write negative things about them on the Internet?” All three signed on.

This time, parts of the Internet responded with enthusiastiasm, bringing the performers unimagined international fame and tributes. The breathlessly heralded “pasito de Delfín” dance in “En Tus Tierras Bailaré” has spawned homages by someone in an Iron Man costume in a park, by well-off children in a kiddie pool, and by at least one woman in drag.

***

Sitting in a Manhattan bar, Talarico, the video’s director, recalled how pleased he was when Muller forwarded him YouTube comments complaining that the video looked like the work of a beginner student, and a not very good one.

Talarico’s usual clients are the likes of Julio Iglesias, Nelly Furtado, and Juanes, but when Cleiman called and asked him to recommend a director for “En Tus Tierras Bailaré,” Talarico volunteered himself.

“I have this concept of art as being when you manage to do something without your mind interfering, without being led by preconceptions and prejudices,” he said. “For me, there’s always an opinion, there’s always self-consciousness. I think these people don’t have that. So, I think they’re true artists.”

Cleiman had written the lyrics to Kerpel’s music on a boat to Uruguay, trying to mimic the imperfect rhyming and simplicity of the singers’ previous work. “I’m trying to remember a phrase of Picasso’s—It took many years for me to learn how to paint like a child,” he said.

All of them had labored to make themselves invisible, befitting a video that Alma Guillermoprieto, writing on the New York Review of Books blog, saw as evidence of “the chaotic transformation of a culture that has always had an infinite and joyful capacity for self-invention. This is not outsider but insider art of the deepest sort, forged in a hot-hot crucible, and it is we who stand on the outside, peering wistfully at the screen.” For the Argentines involved, cultural insiders by profession but arguably outsiders as Jews and in a country that has always held itself apart from Latin America, the wistful peering was in awe, at footage shot in Peru and Ecuador by local directors given only the loosest instructions.

“After 200 music videos and 400 commercials, it was like an undoing,” said Talarico. “A deconstruction.”

He intentionally used footage of Israel that defied logic. “If we were doing a corporate video for Israel and we had a voice-over saying, ‘Visit Jerusalem,’ then fine, we use Jerusalem. But this was not like a video of a party where you can see the brand of whiskey.” It’s not clear to him whether the video changed the way anyone thinks about Israel, but it doesn’t really matter that much to him. “With Israel, there’s something in my blood”—he has a Jewish grandparent—“but if someone had approached me to do this video for Afghanistan or Argentina, I would have done it too.”

Meanwhile, the video’s wild success has meant the artists now have mobility beyond the virtual. La Tigresa has already been brought to Buenos Aires by a party promoter, where patrons at a chic restaurant she ate in burst into “En Tus Tierras Bailaré,” where she was stopped in the street for photos and hailed as a gay icon. Kerpel wants to collaborate with Wendy Sulca. Agencies are calling Cleiman and Talarico, seeking to tap this confusing enthusiasm.

And Muller is seeking partners or donors for a worldwide tour that would span Latin America, Miami, New York, and end up in Israel. “That’s our dream and their dream,” he said. “They already know a lot about the country because we showed it to them. And they have a connection. But they want to be there physically.”

Does it work? And what exactly happens on those tours? These are two of the questions that Kelner, a professor at Vanderbilt University, sets out to answer. Kelner himself went on a similar “Israel Pilgrimage” in 1987, sponsored by the Conservative movement’s United Synagogue Youth, and to write this book he tagged along with several Birthright tour groups and conducted surveys of participants. The anecdotes he shares from these trips make up the richest, and often the most revealing, parts of Tours That Bind.

But as an academic sociologist, and a practitioner of “tourism studies,” Kelner is concerned not to sound simply personal and anecdotal. Partly for this reason, and partly because of the nature of the academic monograph, Tours That Bind is for long stretches highly abstract and theoretical, with much translating of fairly straightforward ideas into conceptual jargon (e.g.,“Premised on the actual placement of physical bodies in tangible locations, tourism’s materiality ensures that the conceptual distancing of tourist and toured can never be absolute”). Not, plainly, a book for a general audience, it still offers some intriguing insights into a phenomenon of considerable importance in the American Jewish community.

At the heart of Kelner’s inquiry is a suspicion that must be shared by many people who hear about Birthright, and probably many people who go on it: Is it a kind of indoctrination? The very fact that the program is free for participants—funded by individual philanthropists, community groups, and the Israeli government—makes the question plausible. [Editor’s note: Tablet’s parent organization, Nextbook, Inc., has partnered with Birthright in the past and may do so again in the future.] Everyone knows there is no such thing as a free lunch: Is the price of this one adherence to a particular political line? “In light of the common assumption, shared by proponents and detractors alike, that state- and community-sponsored tours of Israel are a means of enlisting Diaspora Jews as partisans in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Kelner asks, “should we not expect the [tour] guides to ignore Palestinian points of view, to present only the Israeli government’s perspective, and to discourage tourists from expressing dissent?”

Kelner’s answer is no, and for several reasons. First, he shows, the program guidelines emphasize that Birthright trips—which, though funded by Birthright, are organized by other groups, especially Hillel—are meant to be educational experiences, not political ones, and the tour guides seem to take this seriously. In fact, Kelner shows, much of the value of a student’s experience depends on the personality and principles of the guide she is assigned. He tells the story of one guide, Ra’anan (all the names in the book are pseudonyms), who takes a group of young people to the “separation wall” that divides Jewish and Arab areas near the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem. The Israeli guide goes out of his way to explain both the Israelis’ perceived need for the wall, to stop suicide terrorists, and the Palestinians’ justified resentment of it. “The reality today [is] that if I’m an Arab farmer,” Ra’anan explains, “I want to go to my plantation, I need to go through a security checkpoint because of the security fence that those Israelis built to me.” (Here, as throughout the book, Kelner reproduces speech literally, both Israeli grammatical mistakes and the torrential “likes” used by the Americans.)

Still, Kelner observes, this admirable even-handedness exists within the fundamentally Jewish and Israeli orientation of the tour. The students hear about Palestinian grievances from Ra’anan, not from a Palestinian who is actually affected by the separation wall. In general, Kelner writes, they are introduced to many facets of Israeli life—nature preserves, army bases, discos, restaurants, beaches—but hear about Arabs only in the context of “the conflict.” As he puts it, “even in the most balanced of scenarios … when the discourse paints both Israelis and Arabs in shades of gray, the experience of Israel, and Israel alone, occurs in 3-D Technicolor with Surround Sound.”

This is less a criticism than an observation of the nature of Birthright tourism. More intriguingly, Kelner writes about the way Birthright revises, and in a sense contradicts, traditionally Zionist ways of thinking about the land of Israel. As he explains in his first chapter, there is an old Zionist tradition of using experience of the land to inculcate Jewish patriotism. In the Yishuv, an important rite of passage for young pioneers was tiyul, a rigorous hiking expedition “premised on the idea that yedi’at ha’aretz, ‘knowing the land of Israel,’ would breed ahavat ha’aretz, ‘love for the land of Israel.’ ” “Tiyul,” Kelner writes, “was not so much an act of teaching information about the land … as it was an act of sacralizing the homeland”—and also gaining familiarity with a terrain that might one day need to be fought for.

It is a long way from tiyul to the kind of activities Kelner shows us in his anecdotes about Birthright tours. The difference is not simply that American Jewish teenagers, at least the ones he writes about, are not interested in rigor, preferring to travel on air-conditioned buses and shop for souvenirs. It is that the whole premise of Birthright is opposed to the classical Zionist idea that Jews, to flourish as Jews, must settle in the Jewish State. Birthright trips are round-trip, not one-way; as Kelner provocatively puts it, “since the program’s inception, it has funded the departures of almost 200,000 Jews from the Jewish state.” Really, the tours are not Zionist enterprises but “diaspora-building” ones, meant to increase Jewish consciousness among American Jews once they return to America.

For this reason, Kelner spends a good deal of time observing the interaction of tour participants with one another, not just their responses to their Israeli guides. What he finds is not surprising, but it is still a little discouraging: Like all American teenagers, American Jewish teenagers tend to be ignorant about the world and saturated with pop culture. For all his neutrality, Kelner can’t help sounding annoyed when he hears students respond to an Israeli’s talk about the Palestinian intifada with jokes about “the enchilada.” If Birthright programs do not indoctrinate students with any one belief system, the book suggests it is at least partly because they aren’t paying enough attention.

Like most teenagers, too, Birthright tourists are also clearly more interested in sex and drinking than in politics and religion. Kelner notes that the programs are practically designed to encourage hooking up, among the participants and between Americans and Israelis—especially American women and male Israeli soldiers, during the “cross-cultural peer-to-peer encounters known in Hebrew as mifgashim.” (Female soldiers, Kelner observes, are not nearly as interested in the male tourists.) No wonder it has earned the nickname “Birthrate Israel”—which is, come to think of it, not a bad description of the program’s ultimate goal.

It was a classic illustration of the liberal Zionist predicament. In recent weeks this predicament has received an increased amount of attention, due in large part to a bracing and much-discussed essay by Peter Beinart—a former editor of The New Republic, the very citadel of American pro-Israel orthodoxy—in which he sounded the alarm on the plummeting levels of support for Israel among younger American Jews. “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door,” Beinart wrote, “and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.” Similar concerns led to the formation in 2008 of J Street, a lobby group that aims to represent the views of liberal Jews and serve as a counterweight to traditionally right-leaning groups like AIPAC. If current trends continue, American Jewish attitudes toward Israel may ultimately be transformed in a way unseen since the bulk of the community first got on board with Zionism, in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War.

How can liberal Zionism be saved? For those aiming to revive the form of American liberal Zionism that marked the generation that came of age after the 1967 war, it is tempting to blame its decline on a betrayal by outside forces. On this logic the collapse of support has been caused by Israel’s own shift to the right in recent years—epitomized by the rise of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman—a shift aided and abetted by a right-leaning institutional leadership of the American Jewish community that refuses to criticize Israel under any circumstances. Resuscitating liberal Zionism, this argument goes, will thereby involve siding with Israeli moderates while speaking out against settlers abroad and neoconservatives at home.

But can liberal Zionism, at least in the form that has dominated American Jewish life for decades, be saved at all? And should it be? These are harder questions but may ultimately be more important ones. It may be emotionally satisfying to posit a blameless liberal Zionism betrayed by outside forces, or to suppose that younger Jews are reacting only against the right and not liberal Zionism itself, but it is not clear that either claim is true. For one thing, Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman undoubtedly make good villains, but the aspects of Israeli politics that have alienated U.S. liberals go deeper than the current right-wing government. (To take only the most recent example, it was not the nefarious Netanyahu or the loathsome Lieberman who brought us the attack on Gaza, but rather the supposed “good guys”: Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, and Tzipi Livni.)

More generally, the apparently impending collapse of mainstream liberal Zionism in the United States is no accident. Some of the phenomenon may be attributed to the simple passage of time—to a generation growing up farther removed from the looming presence of the Holocaust and without memories of the 1967 and 1973 wars. But we cannot adequately understand this collapse without understanding the compromises and contradictions that liberal Zionism became involved in over a period of decades.

***

Let me drop the pretense of disinterestedness for a moment. I am a member of the “younger generation” whose attitudes have become the subject of so much discussion, and in many ways I am typical of it. When the last decade began I considered myself to be, broadly speaking, a fairly standard young liberal Zionist—at least insofar as I thought about these things, which was not often. In the years since, my views have shifted to the point that I would not consider myself a Zionist at all. I make no claim to “speak for my generation,” whatever that would mean, and one should never trust anyone who claims that they can. But I have reason to think that my experience was far from atypical, and it might therefore be worthwhile to examine it more closely.

It’s always tempting, when writing a conversion narrative, to exaggerate the magnitude of the shift for dramatic effect. But I can’t honestly claim that I was ever a neoconservative or a hardliner (aside from a brief Likudnik episode in my childhood). Rather, I held a set of views fairly typical of American liberal Zionism. I was largely uninformed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I was against the occupation and the settlements, and I considered myself sympathetic to Palestinian suffering. Still, I did not really question the basic Israeli narrative of the conflict (“we want peace, but they only want to annihilate us”); I believed that everything would be better if only the Palestinians could find their King or Gandhi; I was convinced that the shrill-sounding activists who constantly harped on Israel’s sins were hysterical at best and anti-Semitic at worst. I was a “serious” and “responsible” liberal, I told myself, and much of this identity hinged on differentiating myself from them.

I knew that my column last week about my ambivalence toward Israel would generate a lot of debate. I did not know I would be called a “vapid ignoramus,” a terrible mother, a “spoilt” consumerist, a “knucklehead,” and a “hypocrite” whose passivity helped cause the Holocaust. There were also repeated references to my Upper East Side, latte-swilling, Palestine-loving dinner parties, to which I did not respond because I was out buying caviar and berating my chauffeur.

Seriously: I was upset by the name-calling. But now that I’ve read and digested all the comments, I can see the makings of a genuine conversation amid the nuggets of abuse flung like monkey poo. I want to have a conversation. And so should the Jewish establishment, if its leaders are interested in keeping America’s non-Orthodox Jewish young people connected to Israel.

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