We went to Israel in Passover of 2023. I wrote up my notes as we travelled but didn’t get to publish this until the atrocities of October 7th.
As I got off the overnight flight from Tel Aviv, I see a man standing at the end of the jetway with a sign that says, “Bennett, Naftali”. I know I’ve heard that name before, and I think he’s a member of the Knesset. But it can’t be that Naftali Bennett, can it?
The problem is, before this trip to Israel, I didn’t know much about the country. It’s like when I Ari, as a first grader, asked me, “Can you tell me about Andrew Cuomo.”
And I said, “Well… he’s the governor of New York… he’s a Democrat… and his dad Mario was also governor. People liked his dad a lot.”
Ari then shot back, “Tell me more. Like if you had to write a first-grade book report about Andrew Cuomo, what would you say?”
“Oh,” I said, “I don’t know enough about Andrew Cuomo to do that.”
I knew less about Naftali Bennett. Most of my knowledge about Bennett came from a question my father asked when we were on a family archaeological dig in when my father asked, “So how does a bald man keep his kippah on his head.” To which our tour guide said, “There’s a special tape. Google Naftali Bennett kippah and you’ll see.”
And that’s all I knew about Naftali Bennett. It turns out that he’s a pretty nice guy. My mother (who knows even less about Israeli politicians than I do) refers to him as, “That nice man who helped me look for my iPhone.”
When I looked him up, I found that his perspective was exactly what I was looking for. While there’s always debate in Israel—if you have two Jews, you will have three opinions— that doesn’t mean that there’s no ground truth. About 70 percent of Israelis agree on 70 percent of the issues. As Benett says, “About 70 percent of Israelis agree on 70 percent of the issues.” It also means that as a liberal American Jew there are certain things that I need to support and fight against.
What is Israel?
While I was in Israel, I read two very good books while I was there: Noa Tishby’s Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth and Daniel Gordis’s Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn.
Tishby’s book, tells the story of Israel using the story of her family. The book provides a solid understanding of the liberal Isreali’s perspective of the country. While Tishby is a secular Jew who supports a two-state solution, she is a powerful proponent of the Israeli message, working as Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism until she was fired for speaking out against the Israeli government’s policies on judicial review.
Israel was founded as a secular Jewish state. It’s about Jews as an ethnic group rather than a religion. It’s less about “Jews who pray on Saturday” Jewish, and more about “Jews who were rounded up by the Nazis” Jewish. Jews have been persecuted for many millennia. We can find antisemitism from for the last 2 millennia, from The Merchant of Venice to The Spanish Inquisition. Antisemitism reached its peak during the Holocaust when the Nazi’s murdered 6 million Jews. Israel was created in 1948, just after Hitler killed 6 million of us just because we were Jews. During the Holocaust as Hitler was murdering us, there was no place for us to go.
You’d think that someone would have taken us in. Why didn’t we just go to pre-Israel British Palestine with the other Jews? Because the British placed strict limits on immigration. Why didn’t the US or some other country take us in? Because no one wanted us.
The most famous incident of abandonment was the SS St. Louis. In 1939, the St. Louis left Hamburg Germany carrying 937 Jewish refugees. The ship was headed to Cuba but denied entry. Then it stopped at in the US and Canada but found no better luck there. Finally, it was sent back to Europe where many of them were killed by the Nazis.
Even when they found a place to go, like in Britain, they were exiled to the Isle of Man, much in the same way the US rounded up the Japanese into internment camps.
After the war, as Britain was divesting of its colonies, British Palestine was split into two, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs. The Jews finally had a chance at a homeland. Few believed that the Jewish state, surrounded by countries who attacked it on creation, would survive.
In many ways, this was a challenge more than a gift. Before independence they didn’t have any military to speak of. After Israel declared it’s independence Harry Truman (God Bless Harry Truman!) recognized Israel as a country. John Marshall advised the president against it because he couldn’t fathom how a Jewish state could survive being surrounded by so many warlike neighbors.
Antizionism and Antisemitism
Antisemitism is a weird word. In common parlance, it means two things. The first is something more akin to Jew Hatred. This is the type of racism that’s similar to any group that’s different. Antisemitism as another, more conspiratorial meaning. The word was created in the mid-1800’s as a movement to keep Jews from gaining too much power.
This is an interesting turn of events in Israel. Because the Jews have become successful, they must have done something nefarious to attain it. On the left, they assume that anyone who has power inherently bad and to always stand up for the underdog. Even if that underdog is an anarchic terrorist group like Hamas.
BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions) has used the language of the liberal left to foment anti-Israel sentiment for years. When you hear words like anti-colonialism and apartheid you’d assume they were looking for peace. But they aren’t. They are looking to dismantle the state of Israel. Their mission states:
- Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall
- Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
- Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.
While this seems reasonable at first glance, it’s like the Native Americans in the US not just asking for restitution but for an end to the colonization of North America and the return of all property to their rightful owners. While that seems fair, it’s not the way the world works. Over the last 70 years, many Jews have been kicked out of their homes and fled to Israel, so while many Palestinians chant, “Go back to Poland!” they really should be chanting, “Go back to Egypt! Go back to Iraq!”
I felt extremely guilty when I found this out. I was complicit in not fighting against this. I didn’t know enough about Israel and BDS to take a firm stand on any issues. It was the Kathy Hochul book report all over again. When my friend Marc Edelman took a stand against BDS writing The city must stop CUNY Law using taxpayer funds to target Jewish students I was proud of him, but even Marc, who published about antisemitism in the paper was far too timid in his response.
Jews Don’t Count
There’s so much talk these days about diversity, equity, and inclusion. But when it comes to racism, Jews are somehow different. As David Badiel said in his book, Jews Don’t Count. There’s always something exceptional about the Jews that means that Jew hatred is less than other forms of racism. I’ve heard so many microaggression examples about Asians not being good at math, but I’ve never heard one about Jews being good at business, Jews ruling Hollywood, or anything else. We’re supposed to sweep these under the rug.
Take the case of Whoopi Goldberg from a few years ago. On her television show “The View,” they started talking about the Holocaust comic “Maus,” and how it was being banned because of images of naked mice. Whoopi said, “The Holocaust wasn’t about race” and that it involved “two groups of white people.” Whoopi was censured and apologized. But was clear that she didn’t believe that a person could be racist against Jews. As Jonathan Greenblatt, leader of the Anti-Defamation League, said:
“No @WhoopiGoldberg, the #Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people – who they deemed to be an inferior race. They dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering six million Jews. Holocaust distortion is dangerous.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, leader of the Anti-Defamation League
This is a woman, whose real name is Caryn Elaine Johnson, who uses the very Jewish name Whoopi Goldberg because it sounds funny. Oooh, a black woman using a Jewish last name. Not that Jews are up in arms about her using the name Goldberg but it is a cultural appropriation of a Jewish name. You’d think that someone who used that name for so long and felt a connection to that name would be more sensitive toward Jews. Now, if I were a black Jew, and someone thought it was funny to base their stage name on the premise that being a black Jew was inherently funny and oxymoronic, I can see how they would be offended.
Standing Up as Jews
I bring up the Whoopi Goldberg exhibit not to rile people up and have them yell and scream. There was enough of that. People screamed that Whoopi was being antisemitic and she was suspended for two weeks. But she’s not a Jew hater, she’s just unaware that Jews can be discriminated against.
I saw this most commonly at work where there are well-defined Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts. One of my friends tried to set up a Jewish group at work. Her company is based in the Midwest and many people don’t know much about Judaism. She was nervous about setting up the group saying, “Many people may not want to be part of this. They aren’t ‘out’ as Jews at work.” But these are the exact reasons you should have a group like this. When she went to the head of DEI, the leader said, “I have something that will be exciting for you! We are creating an interreligious group where all religions can talk with each other.”
Even at the company where I work, which really tries to do the right thing, we have issues. As part of our mandatory DEI training we learned about microaggressions and various different terms and words that have historical connotations. One of these terms was “halos and horns.” If we have a bias towards a certain group, we may be treat a member of that group better, like they have a halo. Similarly, we may have an unconscious bias against them and treat them worse, the horns.
I honestly couldn’t believe this. JPMorgan hired an expert in DEI to create this training. They talked about how different groups could be sensitive about words. Now for those of you who don’t know about this, the word “horns” has a long history for the Jews.
So after seeing this, I wanted to say something. From the training, I learned that when I felt there was a microaggression against me, I should stand up and do something. But what do you do when the training is against you? I started to ask around and eventually came to friend who happens to be a Jewish lawyer who specialized in these kinds of lawsuits. He said, “Clearly there was no malicious intent here. You wouldn’t be able to win a lawsuit.”
But it bothered me, so I kept asking and eventually I was able to get “halos and horns” off of our “Recommended DEI Language” list. It took months but it was worth it.
Why It’s Important to Stand Up
I learned that we need to be able to stand up and say, “This just isn’t right. I feel offended by this. You should take this seriously.” As Jews we need to stop “covering” and trying to pretend that we’re just the same as everyone else. As this article says, more of us need to be “heads up” Jews.
In her book Everyone Loves Dead Jews, Dara Horn points out that Jews seem to be a theoretical thing to most people. In a world where people talk about appropriation of many cultures, what happens to the Jews is so much worse. Horn writes about the Diary of Anne Frank. This book is a global best seller that shows how a young girl can maintain a positive mindset even under horrible persecution. The most famous line is: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” That’s the literary story of the Jews that the world sees. The world feels proud that they are honoring this girl by reading her book. However, the unwritten page after that is that Anne Frank was dehumanized by the Nazi’s and taken to a death camp.
That’s the problem with the narrative of the Jews vs. the lived experience of the Jews. We want to fit in. We want to be successful and some of us are, even wildly so. But as Jewish Americans, we’ve had to try to cover our Judaism for years and don’t even admit that to ourselves. We desperately want to fit in, and pretend that we do. Horn says that the most painful thing she shares with people is that “no one’s name is changed at Ellis Island.” You had immigration papers and ships manifests. It wasn’t about a confused clerk, it was about an ancestor who needed to change his name because of violent antisemitism.
What Israel Stands For
What did the Jews do with our land? We worked incredibly hard and transformed this land into something beautiful. We created the only democracy in the Middle East. When Germany sent reparations for the atrocities of WWII, Israel we spent the money building a national water system to transform the desert into lush greenery. In short, Israel is a place of innovation and working together to make things better.
On our trip we visited the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation which highlighted how Israel is using innovation to drive peace.
- During the Syrian Civil War in the 2010s, the Israeli military created a designated unit called Shchenoot Tova, translated as “good neighboring.” This allowed Israeli doctors to treat over two hundred thousand Syrians, a fifth of them children. As Galilee Hospital’s Dr. Eyal Sela said, “If I treat one man, 50, 1,500, and they go back to Syria, their families will be grateful. At some stage the child or grandchild will ask about their scar, and they’ll explain that the Zionist enemy treated them and saved their lives.”
- Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) are works to connect American companies with Palestinian programmers.
- Private citizens also use tech as a peace-building bridge, creating programs such as MEET (Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow), which brings together Israeli and Palestinian kids for three-year tech camps in Jerusalem and Nazareth.
Condoleezza Rice said it well when she said “Think about Israel and the Gulf states and what is developing there. Think about the fact that you could actually be at a place where the Arabs end the state of war against Israel — really end it. And why? Not because they’ve learned to love the Jewish democratic State of Israel, but because the smarter of them have realized that in order to modernize their own economies and not be completely dependent on oil, that they’re going to have to deal with the 800-pound gorilla on technology in the region, and that’s Israel.”
I learned that the only way to long lasting peace is to build something more than what’s there currently. We can’t fight over an existing piece of pie and expect to get peace.
Coming Home
I learned so much on my trip to Israel. I thought I knew I’d have a stronger connection to Judaism. How could I not, it’s this wonderfully sacred place where we could visit the most sacred sites and pray with the members of our religion. Praying at the Western Wall (Blake dancing), Passover Seder (most wonderful food), this was the stuff that was in the books.
I didn’t realize what it meant to be a Jew from a cultural perspective. What does it mean to have a place for the Jews? To paraphrase a possibly apocryphal joke by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, “Israel will be a country where Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes conduct their business in Hebrew and are arrested by Jewish policemen.” It’s a place where all Jews were welcome. It’s a place where we can say, “Even if the whole world is against us, here is a place where we can go.”
What does this mean to me? Israel is the embodiment of the Jewish people and culturally it stands for who I am.