More on the Obama Effect. Did you see the big obit for Mildred Loving, the black Virginia woman whose marriage to a white man in the 60s led to the landmark Supreme Court case knocking down laws against interracial marriage– in 1967, six years after Obama’s birth? We’ve made progress.
Here’s another case of interracial marriage. Ofra Yeshua-Lyth is an Israeli journalist and author, the daughter of an Arab Jew and a European Jew. Such marriages were rare when she was born. She’s written a book (now seeking a publisher in the U.S.) called A State of Mind: Why Israel Must Become Secular and Democratic, a memoir, published in Hebrew in Israel. Says Chomsky:
[It] reviews the painful course by which the chains of religious orthodoxy
from which the early Zionists sought to escape have become hanging
cords, as Israeli Jews accept life in a homemade trap constructed from
the dedication to expansionism and religious-nationalist domination
that shatters aspirations for democracy and enlightenment.
Nice. Chris Varley has also seen the book in English and writes:
Yeshu-Lyth’s father was of Yemenite descent, her
mother European. She was born in
Israel at a time when mixed
marriages were rare, and is acutely aware of the difficulties that the Arab
Jews have had integrating with the European Jewish community. Arab Jews were
unscarred by the Holocaust, and, as the author states on p. 253 of this English
translation:"There was no external necessity for them to
throw away their life in the old country and briskly start a new chapter in a
new place, with no preparations and no real support. In their countries
of origin, Arab Jews were a major element in the backbone of the local middle
classes. They had no economic motivation to suddenly migrate to
Zion and seek employment
as laborers…"Moroccan Jews do not exaggerate when they
insist that they had no reason to leave their homeland except the
religious-Zionist excitement raised by the Israeli Aliya delegates."The author believes most of
Israel ’s problems can be
traced to the imposition of halakhah (Jewish religious law), interpreted and
enforced by the Orthodox rabbinate. She wonders why Conservative and
Reform Jews abroad continue to support a national project from which they are
effectively excluded.A large majority of Israelis may be secular, but there is
nothing secular about the makeup of the nation.
Israel as a pluralistic democracy–now there’s the Obama Effect for you! (P.S. Secular post-Zionist Israel is also one of Leon Hadar’s themes…)
