Roger Waters and BDS - by Kobi Oz (From the Makom blog)

Dear Mr. Waters,

I was deeply disappointed to learn that you have decided to build a wall between yourself and your Israeli fans. We love you here in Israel. Surely, you must know that from the warm reception you received when you performed here five years ago at the Jewish-Arab village of Neve Shalom. Read More:

DIASPORA? KEEP OUT! - from the MAKOM blog

"I find the need of Jews living outside of Israel to enlighten me on our complexities incredibly patronizing. What is their investment level in this social and political dilemma? If it's zero, then that's what their opinions are worth." Katie Green takes the gloves off with her own personal and passionate take on UK Jewish leaders openly critical of Israel. Come and join the debate here.

New Consensus Seen Emerging On Israel Education - by Julie Weiner

  Centrist players now calling for more open, critical approach to teaching about Jewish state..Two years ago, when the Gaza war began, Moriel Rothman felt caught in the middle.Then a sophomore at Middlebury College, he was distressed by what he saw as the “disproportionate” number of Palestinians killed. Read more

Tel Aviv Hub

Check out the Tel Aviv Hub in the Jerusalem Post - Quality Noise and Good Vibes

Happy Birthday Herzl!

By Carine Warsawski

Yesterday, 10 Iyaar 5620, marks the birth of a true visionary. It also marks:

A most important holiday…
A hearty Zionist holiday…
An often forgotten holiday…

Yesterday was… YOM HERZL!

The 6th one, as a matter of fact. And this year we are celebrating 150 years since the birth of Binyamin Ze’ev Herzl.

The significance of Zionism for Jews in Israel has changed throughout the history of Israeli civil religion. Cultural processes such as assimilation and secularization have contributed to these social and ideological changes. There has since been a divergence in Zionist ideologies which one might argue has weakened the national collective identity for Israeli Jews. So Herzl Day is an attempt by the State of Israel to restore Zionist sentiment and provide Israeli Jews with a renewed sense of collective identity and nationalism.

In 2004, the Israeli government decided to observe Herzl's birthday rather than the day of his death specifically so that it falls during the school year, albeit landing in an already overburndened time in the Jewish calendar. By becoming the subject for youth essay contests in Herzliya, appearing on the Bagrut, and Galgalatz playing a hip new version of a song about Herzl, are we successfully appealing to youth and fulfilling the holiday's mission? I can't say. Come the next stage of Israeli civil religion and we might have a better idea, although it may already be too late.

My bigger question is: As Jewish educators living in America, are we on a mission to restore Jewish collective identiy, nationalism, or is it something else? How are we already striving to realize similar goals?

While maybe a grand total of 23 people on the planet annually celebrate Herzl Day (5 of whom are my family), it only feels right to remember the significance of this day alongside the group of people and community who most closely identify with its meaning.

Thank you for the work you do for the Jewish people. Herzl, if anyone, would truly appreciate it.

-Carine

What Happened to Aliyah?

-Andrew Fretwell-

It’s a storybook ending when they board the plane. They have found their destiny, their spiritual home, cultural core and Jewish navel. They’re making Aliyah! It’s their fresh life, reborn in the ancestral homeland. So we wave with teary eyes as they cruise off into the sunset, content with their new fully Jewish life.

So why do so many of them come back and ruin the picture perfect ending? It seems like the majority of 20-30 year olds who have made Aliyah end up back in America after a few years; some just go to serve in the army. Is that ideology, to love a place enough to die for it but not enough to live for it? What happened to the ideal of Aliyah? Returning from Aliyah is not a new thing but with so many olim who aren’t able to outlast the average Knesset, is Aliyah where ideology goes to die?

I think in some ways it has. Part of the premature nature of Aliyah has to do with modern mobility. If you can spend a year or two in New York, and a few years in California, why not spend a few years in Israel? But that’s not the whole explanation. Aliyah was established as the highest ideal in the time when Jews didn’t go to Israel to live, they went to build. As the saying goes, they went to build and to be built. With Israel’s prosperity and development, is that over?

There’s a scary realization here, one that leads down the road of Post-Zionism: the belief that Israel’s normalcy relegates it to just another name on the UN roll call. Aliyah was a shield against that. What other country had these brave ideologues who dedicated their lives to altering a country they were not even born in? Olim who came out of choice were the lifeblood of Zionism to so many. Aliyah was important and immediately gratifying when an oleh could assess his/her contribution to Israel through the existence and success of the Kibbutz they helped found, live on land they helped defend or liberate, or enjoy the Jewish majority they helped establish. But with Israel’s success in establishing its institutions and presence in the region, that gratification couldn’t be replicated the feeling of building Eretz Israel leading up to and shortly after the state’s founding.

So the question naturally arose, “Why should I make Aliyah?” The question only became more profound and harder to answer throughout as Israel became more modern, capitalist and began resembling America. Now, people felt less compelled to make Aliyah for the sake of building Israel or for the sake of moving out of the capitalist frenzied US to the socially egalitarian Jewish State. So why make Aliyah? Because Israel is my home? But what if America also feels like my home? Repudiation of Jewish life in the Diaspora has always been a reason for Aliyah, but with the American Jewish community’s comfort and success, that’s not going to resonate with too many. So if I don’t hate my life in the US, I’m not moving across the world for the sake of saying I removed myself from comfort for the vague benefit of the Jewish People.

So is it game over for Aliyah? No, it just needs new meaning, new significance. The state may be built but there’s so much more building that’s being done. No, they’re not draining swamps or doing guard duty to protect from Arab armies. They’re in the slums of cities working with the abused, with foreign workers and refugees, with the neglected and forgotten in Israeli society. Those NGOs and non-profits are building their better Israel. They’re also in settlements, Ofra, Maaleh Adumim, and Gush Etzion. Though the left-wing volunteers and the settlers have totally different visions for what makes Israel a better Jewish state, they both have given themselves the task of building Israel that way.

If we motivate American Jews to go beyond being great spectators and cheerleaders but active participants, we can reinvigorate Zionism and Aliyah. But to do that we need to go beyond the comfort zone of ensconcing ourselves in the unchallenged Israel but to place it under a microscope. The discomfort of breaking with the traditional turning of a blind eye to serious and deep reaching questions may be too much for Jewish institutions, but that comes at the cost of the Jewish world as a whole. We must move Israel engagement to where we are inspiring Jews not just to get to know their home, but with a vision of how their home should look, and to equip them to get to work and will that dream into a reality, because as Herzl said… well you know.

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J Street: Opposing Traffic on a 1-Way Road?

-Andrew Fretwell-

I write this post sitting on a bus from DC to New York, coming home from the J Street First Annual Conference and J Street’s bottom line has about as much clarity as this bus has leg space; it’ll do for now but I could really use some more.

J Street is the 18-month-old “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” Lobby in Washington, headed by Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former adviser in the Clinton Administration. The infantile lobby has stirred major controversy in the Jewish community, highlighted by the intentional absence of the Israeli Ambassador to the US, as well as some of loony protesters outside the Grand Hyatt who compared J Street to Nazis (The Nazis were after all, Pro-Israel and Pro-Peace of course.)

Here are a few observations about J Street and their 1,500 person conference. First of all, J Street’s creation is a good thing for Zionism and Pluralism, especially for American Jews. It should be clear that’s where this blog post begins and ends. J Street puts a microphone to a voice that has been bashfully hidden for too long in American Jewish establishments. The creation of J Street invites American Jews to think critically and engage with some (but not all) of the same hard questions as voting Israeli citizens. The basic question of what values the government of the Jewish State espouses is one that Jews who identify with Israel must wrestle with on some level.

However, that wrestling has been chased out of most American-Jewish establishments, including federations, synagogues, day schools, etc. This has stunted the sophistication of many American Jews’ relationship with Israel or simply turned them away. There are so many Jews under 30 who basically say they perceived a simple warning. "Though you should question everything, Israel is different. The morality of its conduct is a fait accompli, and any fault in its behavior is a result of International Arab hostility.” The ultimatum is clear: Don’t question Israel or you’re bad for Israel and the Jewish People.

This is about as far from Pluralist as you get and with each passing generation, it turns more Jews away. J Street provides legitimacy to those who are comfortable in personally and publicly differing with Israeli governmental policy. For this they should be commended thoroughly. The great irony of course is that most American Jews believe in “land-for-peace” and have taken issue with Israel’s government at some point in time. It has just been within Jewish establishments that the cause of solidarity drowns out almost all dissent, stifling conversation.

However, J Street has been taking on two tasks, whether intentionally or not:
A. Creating an official Jewish “Land-for-Peace” lobby
B. Creating an established Jewish space for genuine discussion around Israel

Organizationally, they have achieved their first task with fair simplicity. Their tag line is “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace.” However, they may be taking for granted the diversity among Jews who believe in two states for two peoples. This is demonstrated by Ben-Ami’s publicly broadcasted disapproval of Operation Cast Lead in the winter of 2009.

Many American-Jews who favor the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state alongside Israel may also support Israel’s aggressive military strategy in Gaza. Remember Operation Cast Lead wasn’t Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman’s baby; it was the joint effort of Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, arguably the two of the most leftist Israeli premieres ever (Barak for his offerings at Camp David to Yassir Arafat and Olmert for advocating for unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, most of the West Bank and agreement to give up over 92% of the West Bank to Palestinians.) I would say that anyone who supported Operation Cast Lead probably felt out of place at the conference. If J Street is not more careful, they will drive away the center-left and lose significant influence and weight in the Jewish community and the diplomatic scene in Washington and Jerusalem.

For the second task that J Street has taken on, stirring meaningful conversation, they’re halfway there. Much of the conference was centered on cultivating interesting conversations. At least once each day, there were sessions where the conference participants sat at round-tables and discussed interesting questions for 20 minutes or so, as directed by someone at the front of the room with a microphone. It created a good atmosphere for sharing and thinking together, a very refreshing approach for a lobby organization in Washington.

The invitation to Rabbi Eric Yoffe, head of the Union for Reform Judaism, after Yoffe’s public refutation of J Street’s stance on Operation Cast Lead, impressed me. Ben-Ami was clearly interested in inviting the voice of respectful dissent. But the problem was Ben-Ami and Yoffe were in 90% agreement, especially around the basic premise of a Land-for-Peace formula for Israel and Palestinians.

The fact that Rabbi Yoffe was about as dissenting a view on Israel as you could find is telling; they bring together the American Jewish community who identifies with Israel’s left and Israel’s extreme lift. But left of center was as far right as the conversation went. During sessions, I heard more than a few people say there were ready to part with the “Pro-Israel” component of J Street and at time applause seemed more readily available for comments made about the future of Palestinians than the future of Israel and settlements. I am afraid that J Street may get pulled too far to the left to be an effective tool in bringing the Jewish People together. That’s not a truly vibrant conversation though this very well may still be an important step in that direction.

Ultimately, J Street should tread the center of the left to unite, strengthen and mobilize the land-for-peace vision, which will mean not putting on any pretense of true Pluralism as an organizational objective. J Street should not pander to the right, who want a Jewish State ruling over the Palestinian people, or the extreme left, who want to invite the Palestinians into Israel as citizens as Libyan Dictator, Muammar Gaddafi has called for in the creation of “Israetine.” Once they focus their message among their constituents around this, the question is then asked, “Who can get J Street and the Zionist Organization of America (a traditionally right wing organization) talking to, and not over, each other?” That is not a question I want to have to answer, at least not right now.

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An Ordinary Israel

For all Israel’s successes — it is the most open, creative and dynamic society in the region — this is a gnawing failure. Can anything be done about it?

Read more at The New York Times.

Silicon Israel

The most precious resource in the world economy is human genius, which we may define as the ability to devise significant inventions that enhance survival and prosperity. At any one time, genius is embodied in just a few score thousand people, a creative minority that accounts for most human accomplishment and wealth. Cities and nations rise and thrive when they welcome entrepreneurial and technical genius; when they overtax, criminalize, or ostracize it, they wither. During the twentieth century, an astounding proportion of geniuses have been Jewish, and the fate of nations from Russia westward has largely reflected how they have treated their Jews. When Jews lived in Vienna and Budapest early in the century, these cities of the Hapsburg Empire were world centers of intellectual activity and economic growth; then the Nazis came to power, the Jews fled or were killed, and growth and culture disappeared with them. When Jews came to New York and Los Angeles, those cities towered over the global economy and culture. When Jews escaped Europe for Los Alamos and, more recently, for Silicon Valley, the world’s economy and military balance shifted decisively. Thus many nations have faced a crucial moral test: Will they admire, reward, and emulate a minority that has achieved towering accomplishments? Or will they writhe in resentment and plot its destruction? The test has assumed a global face today, when a large proportion of the world’s genius resides in Israel. Israel has very recently become a center of innovation, second in absolute achievement only to the United States, and on a per-capita basis dwarfing the contributions of all other nations, America included. How Israel is treated by the rest of the world thus represents a crucial test for civilization. Will we pass it? Continue reading at www.city-journal.org.