The State of the Jews

Update: The partial interview was replaced with the complete one.

Shameless plug: A conversation on how the Jewish people may be falling apart.

Phil Weiss is angry that Israeli law has no mechanism for intermarriage, since there is no civil marriage and the religious hierarchies that handle personal status law do not recognize intermarriage. He learned of this dark reality, though not its source or reasons, from Shlomo Sand.

I pointed out that Israel’s marriage laws, like its divorces, burials, etc., are not constructed against Muslims or Catholics, but in the old Ottoman confessionalist models, which are agreed upon by everybody.

Now he returns to accuse me of misrepresenting the essential evil of this system:

Well I’m reading Shlomo Sand’s great book now and Gur is I believe misrepresenting the reality. Sand makes it clear that a bar on intermarriage was no leftover accident of history. “In 1953 the political promise to bar civil marriage in Israel was given a legal basis. The law defining the legal status of the rabbinical courts determined that they would have exclusive jurisdiction over marriage and divorce of Jews in Israel. By this means, the dominant socialist Zionism harnessed the principles of the traditional rabbinate as an alibi for its fearful imaginary [sic] that was terrified of assimilation and ‘mixed marriage.’”

It sometimes amazes me that someone can launch a years-long cultural attack against an entire society without knowing some really basic facts about it, such as the degree to which its “ethnic democracy” is a common phenomenon, or the mechanisms for marriage, or the fact that its marriage laws that effectively forbid intermarriage are supported by the minority religions more than by the Jews.

Of course, the problem is not with the singular fact of the year of the passage of the law, but with the thick layer of deconstruction slathered over it by Sand. The law formalized the already-existing Ottoman system, preventing the state from having to take away from the Muslim minority its generations-old sharia courts. The Muslims, Druse and Christians were not predisposed to give these up for a new Israeli jurisprudence. This wasn’t accomplished by Israeli racism – by and large the Druse are admired by Israeli Jews, but still demanded their own courts – but by a cultural commitment of Israel’s religious groups to maintain their traditional collectivist identities.

I neglected to note – and this is important for Weiss to consider – that I am no supporter of the rabbinate. I have done everything in my power, including Jerusalem Post editorials, interviews, etc., to advocate against Israel’s established rabbinate. My own father is a Reform rabbi. My wife’s father is an Orthodox rabbi. When we married in Israel in March 2008, it was in a wedding unrecognized by the state of Israel because neither of our fathers (who together officiated) were recognized rabbinate officials. We refused to invite a state rabbi to our wedding. Our legal standing is through a quickie civil marriage conducted in a Baltimore courthouse a few weeks earlier.

I don’t like this system. I think the “state church” of Israel has utterly politicized Israeli spirituality and collectivized Israeli religious identity. Without getting into the real suffering the haredi-controlled rabbinate is causing to agunot and would-be converts, the greatest tragedy is that the politicization of religiosity has had the effect of making Israel a spiritual wasteland. I yearn for the day – and I teach in a high school program and premilitary academy to bring it closer – when Israelis look to American Jews to discover how to construct authentic personal spiritual journeys.

But for all that, it’s simply not the reality to claim that the system was born primarily as a means of preserving Jews from religious intermarriage. That misunderstands the motivations of the early years of the state, and ignored some of the most basic identity structures of Middle Eastern religions – where religion is more akin to tribes than to the individualistic confessional faiths of the United States.

Consider: How much is the Sunni-Shi’ite split in Iraq to do with theological difference, and how much tribal? Are the Christians of Syria merely a confessional difference, or a collective tribal one? Or the Druse in Israel, who have an intermarriage rate estimated at 1% despite commonly dating Jews during our shared military service, and who live in their own villages apart from the Arabs or the Jews – are they primarily an American-style religion or a Middle Eastern tribe?

Weiss doesn’t prove anything by quoting the date of the passage of the law and then Sand’s ideological interpretation. He must show not that the Jews of Israel identify collectively like all other Middle Easterners, but that their personal status laws go beyond that and are motivated by a special prejudice against minorities. Since he can’t prove it, he interprets it.

I grew up with these attitudes in American Jewish life. They’ve faded a lot since I was a kid. But in Israel they were memorialized in law. Later Sand writes that even the liberal secular Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak said, “A Jewish state is one in which Hebrew Law plays an important part, and in which the laws of marriage and divorce of Jews are based on the Torah.”

Here is Weiss’ main mistake: believing that at their core Jews are the same in the US and Israel, and therefore the values of one can easily judge the other. American Jews have transformed into a Protestant-style individualistic faith. Israelis, perhaps 60% of whom hail from the Muslim world, have transformed the notion of Jewishness into a Middle Eastern religion-affiliated national collective that draws more from Muslim world identities than from Zionist ideology.

This is a vast gap in the basic structures of identity, and the two communities (which are together 80% of all Jews) will have to start learning about each other in order to begin to understand each other better. In the meanwhile, it’s not legitimate to offer cheap and easy indictments of the other community. Israelis are fond of saying that American Jews are either disappearing or living on “borrowed time.” Both are false, and come from an Israeli misunderstanding of what it means to live one’s Jewishness as Americans. Some Americans (still a small minority) believe Israeli Jewish nationhood is somehow a warping of the essentially religious nature of Jewishness. True, it’s a deep change, but no deeper than the American spiritualization of Jewish identity. After all, the shtetl Jew was not merely an autonomous citizen with a spiritual affiliation. He was part of a feudal corporate system that identified Jews as a distinct group with distinct living areas and separate legal obligations.

Jews have been many different things in different periods, and both Americans and Israelis are new kinds of Jews. Neither is “wrong.”

As for Aharon Barak, again, this is a twist of the truth. Some of the influence of Halacha in Israeli law includes, for example, viewing the prostitute as the victim, and the pimp and client as its perpetrators. That Israel draws from millenia of Jewish legal thought is not bad, as long as it is subject to oversight over the question of equality and the Basic Laws.

There are more responses to my claims in the comments on Weiss’ site, but I can’t respond to them because I’m awaiting approval as a commentor. These include the claim that what I wrote about “German ethnic origin” in article 116 of the German constitution isn’t there at all. This is a strange complaint. Google it. It’s there. (Search “right of return” on Wikipedia to find it easily.) It refers to East European German-speakers in the post-war period who had nowhere else to go – but had never been citizens of Germany.

Another comment responds to my statements about Israeli marriage law by bringing up the debate over Palestinian family reunification across the Green Line. This is an important question – the Supreme Court decided it on one vote – and I’m happy to get into it if that’s necessary. It continues to be debated to this day. But it has nothing to do with marriage law. Can we stick to one topic at a time?

You may have already read about in the JPost. The founding of a pan-European Jewish lobby in Brussels is an important development, I think, though it remains to be seen just how serious this lobby becomes. As Europe expands geographically and deepens its roots in the identities and daily lives of its citizens, so European Jewish identity will likely become a force to be reckoned with in the Jewish world.

Of course, if Europe remains an illusion of bureaucrats, and European peoples retreat from the European notion into their ethnic and national identities, the identities of the Jews living in these societies will likely do the same.

Asked about the European Jewish “constituency,” Yossi Lempkowicz, founder of the European Jewish Press, a pan-European news agency based in Belgium, noted that it is not easy to pin down such issues of consensus.

“Europe’s Jews are citizens of Europe,” he says. “They care about many different issues as Europeans,” not in clearly defined Jewish blocs.

…

In a sense, this question of a Jewish agenda for Europe is a microcosm of the larger question of European identity.

What does it mean to be “European?” asked one attendee at the reception. Is this an authentic popular identity or, as some complain, an invention by activist bureaucrats?

I’ve never been able to get too worked up over the latest fashion of left-wing Jewish anti-Zionism. Always had a much deeper respect for the agonized theological contemplation that produced haredi anti-Zionism, which at least grows from the Jewish bookshelf rather than from a simpleton’s misreading of it.

At the end of the day, the many movements and ideals, sometimes contradictory, that together made up the Zionist movement in the last century constituted a profound shift in Jewish identity and communal organization. Obviously such a vast project would inspire opposition. In 1948, just after the murder of six million in Europe, only 600,000 Jews lived in Israel. Even factoring for the refugees stuck in British transit camps, Zionism had failed to convince the masses.

Yet so little remains of Yiddish civilization, or Iraqi Jewish civilization, after the massacres and expulsions of the 20th century that to be anti-Zionist is to nitpick about an ideological leaf in a vast forest of brutal historical experience.

Zionism’s “triumph” was caused by a horrific human tragedy, and stands as a devastating moral rebuke to 20th-century Europe and Islam. The Jews deserve their state whether or not they are being massacred. But it sure makes it tougher to argue against Israel’s legitimacy when this country harbors the last major civilization of Jews left alive in the Eastern Hemisphere.

(The exception to this Zionist experience, of course, is the English-speaking world. But that’s a whole ‘nother story beyond the purposes of this post.)

So it is with that caveat that I want, bechol zot, to note a well-written intellectual curiosity on the radical anti-Zionist Jewish Left – published Saturday on the Mondoweiss website. (Scroll down to “And one last obvious point” for the essence. Continue below for the fun argumentation.)

The framework of this critique of Zionism is, predictably, a glowing review of Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People by Jack Ross.

It begins:

Last Spring, I asked my father over dinner why it was such an outrageous proposition, leaving aside whether or not true, that Judaism is solely a matter of confession, as opposed to an ethnonational identity.

What follows this pointed question are reflections on the allegedly anti-historical lunacy of seeing the Jews as anything but a religious faith. Sand is brought in as a man who, in Tony Judt’s words:

normalized Jewish history. In place of the implausible myth of a unique nation with a special destiny – expelled, isolated, wandering and finally restored to its rightful home – he has reconstructed the history of the Jews and convincingly reintegrated that history into the general story of humankind. The self-serving and mostly imaginary Jewish past that has done so much to provoke conflict in the present is revealed, like the past of so many other nations, to be largely an invention.

He did this by “discovering” that Jewish history is the history of the Khazars, who became Ashkenazic Jewry, and not that of a primordial Jewish people expelled from Judea into a two-millennia exile.

In other words, the “Exile” is an ideology, an invention, and the modern Jewish nation, nothing more than an “invented nation.”

Here ends the recap, and begins the exposition of The Problem. (Notice the dramatic capitalization.)

The Problem is that this entire discourse is essentially political, not academic, and thus disjointed. The pretext of academic rigor is intended to corroborate already-existing political views.

Taken on an academic level, this is appalling. It is one thing to do the wonderful work of tracing Ashkenazic Jewry to the Khazars – an unproven but fascinating hypothesis. It’s also nothing new. But it’s quite another thing to develop a theory of unproven historical events structured around contemporary political need. Yes, the Khazars may be antecedents to Ashkenazi Jewry. But does that theorizing prove, for example, that they are the only antecedents?

The need to disprove the Zionists leads Sand – or at least the public debate he has attempted to launch – to ignore the fact that the Exile is Ashkenazi Jewry’s own origin story. It was not invented by the Zionists. And there are good reasons (like this one and this one) to give them the benefit of the doubt.

In determining that Jewish nationhood is “invented” – which is a fancy way of saying the blindingly obvious truth that if all Jews everywhere stopped feeling like a nation they would stop being one – Sand’s allies are not pursuing intellectual truth, but trying to deny Jewish nationhood the authenticity it needs to stand up to the “natives” in Palestine.

Take, for example, this paragraph extolling the Khazars:

Lost to the Torah of Jewish nationalism then is the history of a great cosmopolitan and religiously pluralist empire the size of India or Brazil, which lasted four times longer than the Hasmonean Kingdom of less than a century (about as long as, on its present course, the State of Israel) – which thrived no less in the darkest of the dark ages and, as the nexus of trade between East and West for several centuries, came remarkably close to giving birth to capitalism almost a thousand years before the English and the Dutch.

Did you catch the jibe about Israel’s coming destruction? Is that really the lesson to be learned from the Khazar example, which in any case is here exalted far beyond any real historical knowledge? Is the professed Jewish identity of Israelis so utterly false it is destined to collapse faster than the House of Hashmonai?

The Palestinians sure think so, and it drives a lot of the impulses that have turned their national movement into such a tragedy.

But the anti-Zionists’ own question actually works against them. If identities are “invented” – as, of course, they are – can “Jewishness” be something other than what the Jews believe it to be? So if a majority of Israelis say they are Jews, and that their Jewishness is a nationality, are they wrong?

And is Palestinian identity also invented, or does the deconstruction of national identification apply only to Jews? After all, walk through Jenin and you’ll notice different skin colors. In Hebron half the population is still called “Yemenite.” The word Palestinian did not denote an Arab, but a Jew, when it was used in the New York Times circa 1948.

Sand, of course, wants to be considered not a member of the “Jewish” nation, but of the “Israeli” one. This is completely kosher, I suppose, and entirely his choice, but he does owe us the intellectual honesty of noting that this is an ideological project, an essentially political campaign which has yet to convince most Israelis. And after winning over all the Jews, Sand will have an even harder time convincing the Israeli Arabs that they share a “nation” with them.

And one last obvious point that still needs to be made, because it is on this score that this particular breed of anti-Zionist fails most profoundly (the haredim are much more serious, believe me): acknowledging the complexities of identity formation.

It isn’t at all clear what makes up Jewishness even in Judaism’s inner definitions. Some of the earliest halacha already envisioned a tribal collective that can be joined through religious conversion. Anybody got a name for that in English?

And things have changed a lot since Persia and Babylon. In Israel, with a majority of Jews hailing from the Muslim world (or, since they are all mixed now, a majority of their grandparents), Jewish identity has become structurally more tribal and, well, Arab. (Consider: the difference between Sunni and Shi’ite in Iraq is tribal first, theological a distant second. Now think about the gap between Israeli Jews and their neighbors.) In America, meanwhile, things became very American: individualistic, spiritual, obsessed with personal autonomy…Protestant.

And so we face a Jewish world today with radically different, but still collectively agreed-upon, structures of identification – two worlds with different historical experiences and fundamentally different ways of identifying. It hardly needs pointing out that these two kinds of Jews, Israelis and Americans, make up over 80% of all Jews currently living.

So to get back to Ross’ initial question to his father, a question his father was unfortunately unable to answer satisfactorily: what are the Jews? The answer, I’m afraid, is “Who knows? The Jews sure don’t.” Or better yet: “It’s complicated. The Jews are many things all at once, not always in agreement with themselves.”

And here comes the really damning question that the budding anti-Zionist must answer: Why does that complexity, the difficulty to pin down a single “truth” about something as deep and shifting as human identification, give someone the right to “discover” that the core identity of one of the major living Jewish civilizations is “untrue?”

Two weeks ago, I commented on how mainstream media misunderstood the Masa brouhaha, thinking that it signified an anti-Israel push by Diaspora Jews. These organizations failed to notice that Masa’s ad campaign was based on what Masa’s Israeli officials genuinely believed were American concerns. They believed their ad campaign involved educating Israelis about American Jewish issues.

It was, I said, a sign of the gap of understanding between the two communities.

Now, Prof. Jack Wertheimer, an important scholar of Jewish identity and community, opines on why Masa was more right than wrong:

In an opinion piece titled “Time for Straight-Talk About Assimilation,” he writes:

While the ad may have been clumsy in its execution, its central point is essentially correct: Large numbers of Jews around the world are disconnected from any Jewish communal activities.

Is there any reason to doubt that the Jewish people is suffering an erosion of its engaged membership? … When we add up all the activities of synagogues, federations, service programs, national organizations, cultural providers, educational institutions and the myriad start-ups, it is clear that vast populations of American Jews are steering clear of organized Jewish life.

Wertheimer also takes issue with the complaint that the concern over intermarriage is mere prejudice:

So why, then, if there is a large kernel of truth to its claims, did the Masa ad elicit such a sharp reaction? In large part, it is because it was inferred that the 50% assimilation figure the ad cited refers to intermarriage rates, which in the United States reached that level in the late 1990s. Critics contend that the ad — though it does not actually mention the word “intermarriage” — gives offense to the children of Jews who intermarry, by implying that they are somehow “lost.” Many children of intermarriage, these critics note, are raised as Jews and go on to identify strongly with the Jewish people. This is, of course, true — but only up to a point. Unfortunately, this optimistic reading describes only a minority of intermarried families. The majority of intermarried families raise their children in a faith other than Judaism or in two faiths or no faith at all; not surprisingly, when they reach adulthood, most of those offspring do not identify as Jews.

In the end, he writes, “this hesitance to grapple seriously with the issue of intermarriage is part of a broader phenomenon: Speaking of threats to Jewish survival has become passé.”

I’m glad Prof. Wertheimer wrote what many in the American Jewish community have surely been thinking. It’s a shame it has not reached a very wide audience, based on the circumstantial evidence of Google search results.

In case you’re now looking for the ad:

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.

…

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.

…

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”.

…

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.