Earlier today I posted about "reverse aliyah," or the desire of Israelis to move to the U.S. A friend points out that many Jews would prefer to live with gentiles:
Jews have never been especially interested in moving to Israel. Ben
Gurion was deeply disappointed after 1948 when so few Jews moved to
Israel. I think there were about 5 million Jews in Russia in 1900. Over
the next 15 or so years, about 4 million stayed put (although there was
much migration to cities inside Russia), about 1 million went to the US,
and probably about 50,000 went to Palestine. As Walt and Mearsheimer
point out in their book, the Jewish quotas for Mandate Palestine weren't
filled till Hitler came to power. And remember we had to force the Jews
from the FSU [Former Soviet Union] to go to Israel after 1989. Most
wanted to come here.
Don't forget that you also have a lot of internal migration in Israel
with movement of the secular out of Jerusalem. Also remember what is
happening with birthrates among Jews: your average ultra-orthodox woman
has 7.6 children. That has major consequences over time, especially since
most refuse to serve in the military.
The truth is that like you, huge numbers of Jews really like
living among the goyim, as long as they are behaving themselves of
course, and they have been behaving very well for a long time now. In
fact, so well, that many of them dream of jumping into bed with Jewish
boys and girls. And before you know it they are falling in love and
swallowing the "candy coated poison" known as inter-marriage.
(Weiss again) Interesting when experience meets ideology. Aliyah means moving up. Living in New York means yoredim, or living down. But people don't feel that way.When Israeli Yossi Alpher opines in my previous post that Jews can't shake the diaspora out of their consciousness, he's got it wrong–they like diaspora.
I would add that I lived for many years with my grandmother on the Lower East Side, five blocks from where she was born, and used to lament the absence of Jews there. Pure nostalgia. Honey we done moved to the suburbs as we soon as we could put the ghetto air behind us. The same can be said of other ethnic communities in this country. I used to visit New Ulm in Minnesota, where they make great beer and used to speak German. I hear that Germanophone towns in Minnesota are no longer. My friend Susan is Norwegian from Pipestone, MN. Her aunts and uncles used to speak some Norwegian. That time is over. The same process of deracination is eroding the identity of privileged young Jews, notwithstanding the sizeable effect of Michael Walzer's revivalism and Sheldon Adelson's birthright trips and Michael Steinhardt's many efforts to get Jews to marry Jews. Many people actually enjoy a diverse society. Witness the mixed-race American we're gonna nominate tonight to try and save our country.
