The State of the Jews

I suppose I should be amazed at the interest shown by major mainstream media outlets on an issue that, ultimately, is about the complexity of Jewish identity in our age. But I’m not.

Reading CNN and a Guardian opinion piece today, I realized why the Masa story generated such interest: The response to Masa was being read, and written, as a blowback against Israel from Diaspora Jewry. It is a crisis in which Israel itself, rather than a handful of educators at Masa, is the target of criticism. Now that’s a whole new level of interesting, no?

CNN writes that:

Critics say this campaign ultimately exposed what is sometimes seen as the disconnect between the Jews of Israel and their counterparts around the world: the assumption that Israeli Jewish authorities are the only ones to determine what is truly Jewish.

I assume “critics” means me, and yes, I thought it reflected the disconnect between Israel and American Jewry.

But why is the disconnect described as “the assumption that Israeli Jewish authorities are the only ones to determine what is truly Jewish?” That could fairly be said about Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar’s end-run around American Orthodox conversions – but about Masa?

If anything, the Masa campaign was a bunch of Israelis saying what they believed Americans wanted to hear! I know firsthand that they are still reeling from shock at the response of large numbers of American Jews.

As for the Guardian, its Comment is Free section printed a fascinating and slightly disturbing piece by one Dimi Reider subtitled “A controversial ad focusing on the ‘assimilation’ of Jews fails to accept the reality that you don’t have to be Israeli to be Jewish.”

There’s that Israeli cultural hegemony rearing its ugly head yet again.

It begins – true to form – with an exposition on the ideological errors of Zionism:

The crux and core of Israel’s existence is realising the project of auto-emancipation; in other words, to emancipate Jews in what in the late 19th century appeared to be the bright future of territorial nationalism. The means to that was establishing the Jews as a distinct nation, rather than a culture or a faith present in a variety of territorial nations; and endowing this nation with its own territorial sovereignty.

Today, 112 years after the first Zionist Congress, there are at any given time more Jews outside Israel than inside it, despite murderous ethnic cleansing in Europe, forced-emigration ethnic cleansing in some Arab states and the very real, modern antisemitism that most Jews in the diaspora continue to experience. In other words, many Jews still don’t see their Judaism as a package deal with an Israeli passport or residency.

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Even the argument that migrating to Israel is the only way to keep your identity rings strange, because Jewish identity is often a lot more pronounced when living among non-Jews – both in a desire to maintain identity and in the give-and-take with other people, other cultures and other creeds.

All this is not recognised by the ideology behind the ad. Even though most Jewish cultural strands – Talmud, Hassidism, Yiddish, Haskala and Zionism, to name a few – were born in constant friction and interaction with the non-Jewish world. People-fishers such as the Journey Project see 2,200 years of Jewish diaspora as a historic error that needs to be forgotten and bulldozed as we go back to our “normal” state of purist nationhood.

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Mixed marriages, rather than decline of antisemitism and exclusivist nationalism, are seen here as the reason for the ever-dwindling Jewish migration to Israel, our main resource against the “Arab demographic threat”.

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It’s worth noting that life for a mixed family in Israel is very difficult – not only because the education system and society is intolerant towards non-Jews, but simply because acquiring citizenship and legal rights for non-Jews is unbelievably complex, even if their partners are Jewish Israelis.

The ad was hastily scrapped less than a week after it was launched; Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky needed few reminders that a third of his home constituency, Russian-speaking Israelis, are either partners or products of mixed marriages of the kind targeted by the ad.

Where to begin? The only reason there are more Jews outside Israel than inside is, well, America – which accounts for some 80% of the Diaspora. There’s a good reason for this: Just about every other Jew in the world was either killed during the 20th century or, if they were a bit luckier, became Israeli. With the minor (demographically) exception of Britain and a handful of tinier communities, Zionism was unfortunately accurate in predicting – and readying for – the near-total ethnic cleansing of Jews from Africa, Asia and Europe, whether (before Israel) through genocide or (after Israel) through expulsion and flight.

Even France, today the third-largest community of Jews in the world, is largely composed of North African refugees fleeing into a country emptied of its Jews by the Holocaust – hardly a stinging critique of the Zionist narrative.

So I hope Reider can forgive the Zionists their skewed perception of the Diaspora – Israelis are more or less the last major Jewish population to survive the Eastern Hemisphere’s 20th-century purges. Only in the English-speaking world did Jews survive without the Zionist movement having to rescue them.

As for the ideology behind Masa, of course, Reider is extrapolating wildly and irrelevantly. Visiting Israel has a profound effect on Diaspora Jewish youth – even those who are not deeply connected to Jewish religious and cultural life. Study after study has shown that birthright israel, for example, has a strong positive effect on Jewish affiliation across the board – whether religious, cultural, ethnic, you name it.

And he can rest easy: these newly-affiliated young people almost never make aliya. (I explain why here.)

So if aliya is the goal of programs like birthright or Masa, they have failed miserably. If they see “Jewish diaspora as a historic error” then they should shut down, because the net effect of their work is to strengthen it.

As for Sharansky’s “home constituency,” the vast majority of these would likely support the ad enthusiastically. They do not tend to share the profoundly individualistic structure of identity Reider seems to espouse, and most say they’d prefer to convert into the Israeli Jewish collective. The fact that they can’t is another agony-filled story of rabbis and intra-Orthodox competition which is best left for another day.

As for Israeli society’s intolerance toward non-Jews – I’ll generously put that comment down to Reider’s British milieu. It seems it’s hardly possible to get published in the Guardian without at least one throw-away comment about Israeli racism.

To sum up, the Masa fiasco has been a particularly fascinating canvas on which different kinds of Jews have painted their particular pictures. For Americans, they have lashed out at the misunderstanding of the assimilation problem, which calls for outreach and education, not, as the ad suggested, national mobilization. For the Israelis, most of whom have never given Diaspora identity much thought, it’s been a lesson in the simple fact that massive Diaspora Jewish civilizations exist. For CNN, it’s been a crisis ripe for MSM-style misunderstanding. For at least one British Jew, it’s been one more instance of Israeli state aggression and cultural hegemony.

Hey, on matters of Jewish identity, to each his own, right?

By the way, it’s worth noting that the anger at Masa was hardly universal. To describe “assimilated” Jews as “lost” is a legitimate statement of values, especially if the ad makes explicit that they are lost “to us,” to the community. It’s not as though they will burn in hell for leaving the church, just that they will not be Jews in a generation. Is it so wrong for an educational program to take its cues from American Jewry and set about trying to reverse that?

Discuss.