American Jews Belong in Israel, Declare Israeli Authors Yehoshua and Halkin

By Allan C. Brownfeld

At a meeting celebrating the 100th anniversary of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua told the audience at the Library of Congress that American Jews belong in Israel.

According to the May 4, 2006 Washington Jewish Week, “Yehoshua dominated the panel discussion on ‘The Future of The Past: What Will Become of the Jewish People?’…insisting that one could fully be a Jew only by living in the Jewish state. ‘This is the success of Zionism—the Jews took responsibility,’ Yehoshua said at one point, arguing that the everyday decisions of Israel—whether to withdraw from territory, or ‘are we going to torture?’—are the important ‘Jewish decisions’ of our time. ‘You are not doing any Jewish decisions,’ he told the crowd…‘You are deciding, according to an American framework…You are playing with Jewishness.’”

Yehoshua’s chief sparring partner was Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, who declared that “people are not stupid servants of the state.” Nor is it the case, he said, that everything a Jew does is a Jewish act. “What matters is whether [Jews] are actively engaged in one’s Jewishness,” he said. When challenged by Yehoshua to name “an act of Jewishness,” Wieseltier responded with such examples as teaching Hebrew and learning about the history of the Jewish people. “These are not meaningless activities,” he said. Without them, “Jews will not survive, even if the state of Israel will.”

Wieseltier argued that “territory is not what kept Jews alive. The civilization of Jews was formed after the exile, after the destruction of the Temple…My pride in being Jewish has nothing to do with where I live.”

Discussing Yehoshua’s declaration that Jewish life in America is “meaningless,” J.J. Goldberg, editor of The Forward, noted in its May 12, 2006 issue that “Yehoshua expresses, in extreme, distilled terms, an essential truth about Israeli Jewish identity. Israelis tend to know very little about the reality of Jewish life in America. It’s not taught in their schools, rarely appears on their television screens and is seldom discussed in their newspapers. For Israelis, being Jewish consists of living in a Jewish country, speaking a Jewish language, serving in a Jewish army. What, they wonder, can it possibly mean to live as a Jew in Cleveland?”

http://www.wrmea.com/archives/August_2006/0608054.html