The announcement of the Continental gate agent is given in a world-weary tone. For most passengers, the first sentence would naturally imply the second. But the group gathered for the Christmas eve flight to Tel Aviv is not an ordinary group of passengers. It is almost entirely composed of Members of the Tribe, Israeli and American branches. Prior to giving the message, a steady stream of passengers had followed the age-old Jewish adage that it “never hurts to ask.” The gate agents do an admirable job corralling the crowd in a semblance of a line when it comes time to board the plane, through repeated verbal herding. I may technically still be in America, but I am clearly on the way back to the Jewish state.
The flight over is more eventfully than I had hoped. I am seated in between two ba’al teshuva defense attorneys in their 40s. The attorney on my right has gone the Full Monsey. He is full of good cheer, peppering his speech with “Barukh Hashem” and armed with plenty of food for the flight. His friend on the left is for the moment, going with the clean-shaven black leather kipah look. Our generally cordial conversation runs aground at one point with his claim that we are in the midst of a World War 3 with the entire Islamic world, and that there was no substantive difference between the Iranian Regime and the Green movement opposing. A sensible person would have retreated to his on-screen game of Othello rather than attempting to conduct an impromptu class in Islamic Law 101.
I’m jostled awake in the still dark morning as the plane begins an emergency descent into Rome. Even in my groggy state, my rusty Hebrew is enough to pick up the standard “kol beseder” promise that Israelis give when they have no idea what the problem is. The business-like English announcement in contrast does not promise that “everything is OK. The stop in Rome is chaotic. It is Christmas morning in the Holy See, and the Continental ground crew had the day off and needs to be roused. The large observant contingency is palpably aware that the margin of error for arriving in Israel before a Friday sundown is dwindling. And yet, the more chaotic the scene, the more the passengers pull together. A young modern orthodox woman possessing one of the few functioning blackberries, lets me send a message ahead to my wife, who has long sicne arrived in Tel Aviv. Two haredim break out an impromptu fiddle and guitar performance. After five hours, Continental fixes the electrical system sufficiently to continue on to Israel. The flight staff offers any shomer Shabbat passengers an opportunity to stay in Rome, but warns them they are “on their own.” Armed with a ruling from Israel, even the frummest passengers opt to take their chances on the flight. On arrival in Ben Gurion, my aisle mates, along with the other strict Shabbat observers bound off the plane, leaving luggage and customs for another day as they pack into taxis for the nearby haven of B’nei Brak.
It has been 9 years since I’ve last visited Israel, more than 13 since I lived there for a year. In the interim, much has happened – the collapse of Oslo, the horrors of the Second Intifada, the building of the fence/barrier/wall/border, the withdrawal from Gaza, the Lebanon War, the Gaza War, and somehow throughout all of this, the rise of Israel as Start-up Nation. I am traveling to see what remains familiar, what has changed. It is not really a vacation – rather a visit to extended family. The metaphor is more apt this time, as I am traveling with my wife to find her long-lost extended family.
After clearing customs, I am greeted by the welcome site of my wife, who had been conducting dissertation research in Cairo for the past month. We immediately head out to Zikhron Ya’akov, 23 miles south of Haifa, to meet her presumed long-lost cousins, who live in. On the basis of no more than the same, extremely rare last name, we are warmly welcomed into the lovely home of Yoni, his wife Sara and their 19-year old son, Ofer. Both my wife and Yoni had believed that all but their immediate family had perished in the Shoah. Yet through the miraculous power of a typo and the internet, here we are, sharing Shabbat dinner with them. The next day, the rest of the family streams in to meet us. One asked if they know for sure if they are related. No, Yoni replies, “but we’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.”
Yoni and Ofer both give us tours of the town. Zikhron Ya’akov was one of the first Zionist settlements in Israel, established in 1882 and settled with funds from Baron Rothschild. Today it is best known as the home of the Carmel winery. There are spectacular views of the mountains and the sea. Completing the Bay Area vibe are the fruit trees that line the block. In contrast, the call to prayer from the neighboring Arab village of Faradis brings you back to the Levant. The center of town has been converted to a pedestrian mall, with many of the original structures preserved. Everything about Zikhron Ya’akov stands in contrast to the Israel I most familiar with - the extremes of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It is neither timeless nor evanescent, neither purely religious nor secular, neither wholly separate nor wholly integrated with the outside world. It offers a tantalizing glimpse of a rooted, balanced Israel, the Israel that is rarely seen by the tourist or even resident student. It is tempting to say that here is the “real” Israel. But on further reflection, while the beauty of Zikhron may be representative of Israel, its sanity certainly is not.
This week, Reform Grand Rebbe Eric Yoffie spoke at the convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). In his speech, Yoffie deplored the "profound ignorance" of Islam in the US, and its demonization by "opportunists." Yet at the same time, Yoffie challenged American Muslims to combat the anti-Semitism that is rampant in the Muslim world.
The Reform movement determined that ISNA was a genuine partner for interfaith dialogue after it shifted its position from terrorism is bad (except when it is against Israel) to terrorism is bad (even when it kills Jews.) ISNA's efforts to allay Jewish concerns were met with skepticism elsewhere in Jewish Alphabet soup.
Yoffie's overture drew criticism from David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee.
"Here is another discredited group eager for mainstream recognition," Harris wrote in a blog on the Web site of The Jerusalem Post. "Inadvertently, in the name of inter-religious dialogue, [Yoffie] gave it."
Fortunately for ISNA, while the URJ represents 1.5 million congregants, a plurality of affiliated American Jews, while the AJC represents...the AJC (although to be fair, it performs its role as the Jewish Brookings Institution quite ably).
The skepticism towards ISNA and other American Muslims organizations has a genuine basis. As an initial mater, it is unclear how representative any of the American Muslim organizations really are. Wahhabis and other external groups are spending millions in an effort to strangle a tolerant, indigenous American Islam in its cradle. (Indeed, Jewcy contributor Stephen Suleymain Schwartz has in the past identified ISNA as playing a central role in that campaign.) Leaders of American Muslim organizations have been disingenuous about ties to Islamism, utilizing double-speak to dupe well-intentioned dialogue partners. Finally, even genuinely moderate and tolerant American Muslim leaders have been prone to have an irrational blind spot when it comes to Israel. (It should be noted that the leading critics of American Muslim organizations are often considered quite controversial themselves.)
However, it is critical that American Jews engage in meaningful dialogue with American Muslims, and that dialogue cannot be limited to groups on the guest list at the American Enterprise Institute. There is tremendous ignorance of Judaism in the American Muslim community, and only through engagement can we combat the pernicious leakage of Antisemitism from the wider Muslim world.
Moreover, given the season, it is time that American Jews take a hard look at our own behavior. Far too many of us have let real concerns regarding terror and Israel be used as cover for rank racism and wholesale defamation of a sister faith. Group libels that we would never allow pass against any other group are laughed off. Absurd questions of whether American Muslims are capable of fully participating in American democracy are entertained. The entire Koran is judged by its most problematic passages. The first elected American Muslim congressman is subjected to invective by prominent Jewish pundits and unfair scrutiny by the Jewish defense organizations. We of all people - who have a history of being deemed foreign and impossible to assimilate - should know better than to contribute to a 21st century Know-Nothing movement.
It is too soon to tell whether ISNA's reformation is genuine or whether its invitation to Yoffie will result in genuine, sustained dialogue between our communities. However, for our sake and theirs, we can only hope that a true corner has been turned.
Cross-posted at Jewcy.
The findings in the most recent Kelman/Cohen studyare not as blazingly obvious as "men want hot women", but they are nonetheless unsurprising.
Based on the responses of more than 1,700 non-Orthodox American Jews of all ages, the study indicates that successively younger age groups show a greater detachment from the State of Israel.
According to the report, which was based on statistics collected as part of the 2007 National Survey of American Jews between December 20, 2006, and January 28, 2007, less than half of Jews under the age of 35 believe Israel's destruction would be a personal tragedy, compared to 78 percent of those over 65. Sixty-six percent of Jews aged 50-64 believe it would be a personal tragedy, compared to 54% aged 35-49.
The study doesn't even lend itself to the favorite American Jewish pastime of fruitless hand-wringing in that there is an obvious policy solution to this "dilemma.":
The new study showed sharp differences in levels of attachment to Israel between people who have visited the country and those who have not. Among those who have never been to Israel, the number of those with a high level of attachment is less than half that of those who have visited at least once (19% vs 42%). Additionally, the level of attachment grows with the amount of time spent in Israel. Thirty-four percent of those who have traveled to Israel once are highly attached to Israel, while only 17% of them report low levels of attachment.
The numbers go up as the time spent in the country increases. Fifty-four percent of those who have traveled to Israel two or more times are highly attached, while less than 10% report low levels of attachment. Meanwhile, 68% of those who have lived in Israel for a semester or year-long program show high levels of attachment.
That last paragraph should be quite effective in rousting up additional funds for Birthright (which given the study's sponsors, was probably the point of the study in the first place).
Not surprisingly, the Post article contaiins the requisite quotes from young, progressive American Jews who express their "detachment" from Israel. But what the findings really show is that young American Jews are increasingly alienated not from the reality of Israel, but of the myth of Israel. The Israel presented in Hebrew schools is one of child-like simplicity - SabraLand!- with the less convenient aspects of Israeli history and society omitted. Without a more sophisticated understanding of Israel, American Jews are ill equipped to respond to the counter-myths that are peddled by anti-Zionists at American universities, which they embrace or at least triangulate. On the other hand, those American Jews who get to personally experience Israel and all of its contradictions - the incredible surface rudeness and underlying warmth of the people, the wonder of Ben and Jerry's and McDonald's being just down the road from the Old City of Jerusalem - develop a mature love for the country, one that can withstand Israel's very human failings and the shifting currents of political fashion.
Cross-posted at Jewcy
Controversy continues to swirl around the Arabic-language Khalil Gibran International Academy in New York and (as Michael previously noted) its bizarro cousin, the Hebrew-language Ben Gamla charter school in Hollywood, Florida. The criticism of both schools is driven by skepticism regarding the secular nature of the schools. It is easy to dismiss the critics as the usual suspects, from Daniel Pipes to the ACLU, but the schools have also drawn criticism from less ideological figures. Recently in the New York Times Magazine, Jewcy's favorite constitutional law scholar Noah Feldman took the view that the projects of isolating Islam from a Arab cultural curriculum and Judaism from Jewish cultural curriculum were ultimately futile tasks, and therefore both schools were of dubious constitutional legitimacy.
Although it cannot be known for certain before they have begun instruction, Khalil Gibran and Ben Gamla seem poised to teach religion as a set of beliefs to be embraced rather than as a set of ideas susceptible to secular, critical examination. What, after all, is the point of a Jewish cultural school if not to bring the students to appreciation and acceptance of Jewish values? And what are those values if not the outgrowth of Judaism's millenniums of religious faith and practice? Not that Judaism without God is impossible. Secular Zionism sought to redirect yearning for God's redemption toward a national homeland. Likewise, Arab nationalism was born from the effort to supplant Islamic religious membership with a secular, cultural identity. But in both cases, the surgery designed to excise God was only partly successful, and there is ample reason to anticipate a recurrence in the classroom as there has been in the rest of the world.
If Feldman is right that Ben Gamla and Khalil Gibran are properly viewed as publicly funded religious schools, they clearly run afoul of the Establishment Clause. If one principle has held constant in the swirling morass that is the Supreme Court's religion jurisprudence, it is that the direct provision of public funds for religious indoctrination is treyf. If this red line is breached, the result will be the creation of multiple and parallel religious establishments - something the Founders clearly rejected.
Given this, the case of religious charter schools calls into serious question the Court's recent jurisprudence in school funding cases, which has held that parochial schools can be funded through public voucher programs. In the 2002 case of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the Court upheld Cleveland's voucher program despite its inclusion of parochial schools on the grounds that the funding was: (1) distributed through neutral criteria and (2) directed to religious schools as a result the individual private choices of parents. Both of these conditions are also present in a religious charter school context - charters are granted on religious neutral criteria and parents freely elect to send their children to particular charter schools. Thus, the constitutionality of vouchers seems to rest on the mere fact that funds technically pass through the hands of parents on route to funding religious indoctrination, an empty and formalistic distinction.
Even if Ben Gamla and Khalil Gibran could somehow scrub their texts of references to tefilah and salat, tzedaka and zakat, these schools would still be problematic in that they amount to publicly financed self-segregation. It is understandable why parents might want to send little Avi and Ibrahim to these schools. They provide an affordable way to help stem assimilation, through homogeneous social networks and literacy in the native languages of Jewish and Islamic civilizations. But as laudable as these goals from the view of parents, they should not be funded by the American taxpayer. One of the reasons why America has been so successful in integrating its immigrants is that they are thrown into the melting pot of the public school systems. Social networks become mixed, loyalties cross-cutting. If you have any doubts of whether our system works, the European model of state-sponsored religious schools and its failure to integrate Europe's Muslim immigrants stands in sharp contrast. (Or for a more extreme example, Israel's fractured education system and its failure to promote understanding between secular Jews, religious Jews and Israeli Arabs.)
Sure, a case can be made that Ben Gamla is a less problematic than Khalil Gibran as a matter of education policy. American Jews are already well integrated into American society, and the American Jewish success story would make any Jewish public school attractive to non-Jews. (Already Ben Gamla appears to have attracted a significant Black and Latino population.) But it is simply untenable to have a policy of permitting ethnocentric public schools for some cultures and not others and Arab and Muslim Americans would rightly be offended by such a policy.
There is a way out of both the constitutional and policy dilemmas posed by Ben Gamla and Khalil Gibran, one which can retain the primary benefits of these programs. Create charter schools that offer language immersion for multiple cultures- Chinese, Swahili, Farsi - under one roof. Better yet, pair the Hebrew and Arabic language school together, and have Avi and Ibrahim recite Shakespeare and dissect frogs next to each other. Since the Rambam already plenty of schools (as well as a Kentucky Derby favorite) named for him, why not Ibn Ezra-Ibn Rushd. It has a nice ring to it.
Cross-posted at Jewcy.
Labels: American_Jews, Foreign_Policy, Israel
Tasty commentary on politics, law, religion and more, without the fattening dogma. (The views expressed on this blog are the author's alone, and do not represent those of any past, current or future employer or his past, current, and future soulmate.)
