One of my themes on this blog is that our policymaking in the Mideast will stay broken until Jews have the courage to openly describe and, if they need to, challenge the construction of Jewish identity. The problem with the neocons is that they have by and large acted out of a strong sense of essentially religious concern with the security needs of the Jewish state, but suppressed that component of their thinking in the public square. For instance, Charles Jacobs identifies himself only as the president of a Darfur group on a neocon foundation’s website, leaving out his many Zionist activities. He offers opacity, where the state of the world demands transparency.
Tikkun of Toronto has blazed new ground in this area by posting "Israel stories," ten-minute oral narratives from Jews talking in the most personal and plain manner about what Israel meant to them growing up and what it means now. Obviously, these are progressives, but the four narratives I’ve listened to so far all get at the crisis that is enveloping Jewish identity for the next generation when at its core is support for a state that practices apartheid in the West Bank. As Tikkun says, gently, in publishing the stories: "There is a tension raised in our lives when the clothes of our
ancestors, passed down to us, do not fit who we are. And there is a
tension when the truths we learned in childhood no longer seem true."
And so Harvey, a religious kid and the son of Holocaust survivors, describes the impact on his worldview of being jailed in Morocco on a drug charge and finding that his Arab prison-mates treated him as an equal. Married to an Israeli, he admits that he has not been back to the Jewish state in 18 years because his and his wife’s views have the potential to divide her family. As his own family was once divided when his mother retracted an invitation to a Passover seder to a relative who had reached out to Arafat.
Or there is Joan, who grew up going to Hebrew school and Israel as part of a "classic indoctrination in ethnic nationalism" and had her ethnocentrism blown apart on a trip to India when she realized that Hindus and Muslims had also killed each other before partition, and shipped trainfuls of refugees and corpses across borders. Soon she was studying Israeli history. Joan explicitly states another theme of this blog: How can we demand a "polyethnic, polyreligious" secular culture in the U.S. (or in her case, Canada) and meanwhile lend all our support to "another kind of dream for another country." In the end, she reluctantly comes to the conclusion that Israel can’t persist as a Jewish state. "It is not a very comfortable solution, but I can’t seem to find another," she says, her voice trailing off.
These voices are agonized. And that agony is spreading. I’ve referred before to a landmark study called "Beyond Distancing: Young Adult American Jews and Their Alienation From Israel," which demonstrates that younger Jews often have little emotional attachment to Israel, that the 62 percent of Jews under 35 years old who are intermarried are three times as likely as inmarried Jews to be "alienated" from Israel. When the New Republic and the ADL wring their hands over the campaign to "delegitimize Israel," they should ask young Jews why they feel the way they do…
I believe these divides are reflected in the Democratic primary battle. Older Jews are going with Hillary partly because she does not challenge the reliable ethnic identifications of the last generation. Obama does. The world’s changing right under our feet.
