The 60th anniversary of Israel's founding has given rise to a vast tranche of American journalism about the occasion, all following one of two tropes: Can Israel Survive? and Let's use the anniversary to settle old scores!

Still going: Goldberg's Atlantic cover The archetype of the former genre is without question Jeffrey Goldberg's recent Atlantic cover story, in which Goldberg ties the old question --- 60 years old, in fact --- of Israeli survival to current Israeli political and cultural fissures, and to stark demographic realities, which he suggests are mutually reinforcing.

On the one hand, if present demographic conditions continue, Jews will make up less than half of the population "between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea" by 2020, which means it's simply a matter of time before it becomes unintelligible to speak of a Jewish State. On the other hand, the Zionists' profound success in creating and defending Israel, the vast shift in opinion (at least in the west) away from antisemitism, and the quiet but precipitous Jewish overthrow of WASPs as the dominant force in the American economy and society --- all these cry out for a reevaluation of the merits of Zionism and its relevance to the contemporary world.

Left-wing Zionists are caught up in a fairly shallow and ahistorical effort to recast Zionism as some kind of shiny, impotent hybrid of Mandela-ism and tikkun olam, while right-wing Zionists pretend to relevance through fantasy stories about the possibility of a Holocaust in the US (as Ehud Olmert did in interview with Goldberg) and the occasional bloodletting of the nearby Arab population.

Goldberg has no sanguine proposal for how to navigate between those unappealing poles, only the wisdom of Benny Morris, the most profoundly Israeli Jew in history, to share: "We are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies. We want that we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies." Which might, in the end, mean that the Israelis are tired of Israel.

Sort of Jewish, definitely rumpled, not a Zionist: HitchensChristopher Hitchens gives explicit voice to the dour conclusion Goldberg keeps implicit: It confounds imagination to think "that a Jewish state in Palestine will still be in existence a hundred years from now. A state for Jews, possibly." Hitchens comes at the problem as an erstwhile pamphleteer for the Palestinian cause who found out late in life that he is, under the Law of Return and the Nuremberg Laws, a Jew. More recently still, he's moderated his views on the Israel-Palestine question (but remains a self-described "non-Zionist.") A more urgent question of Israeli identity, he argues, is "whether...Israel should be defended as if it were a part of the democratic West...to which Israelis themselves have not yet returned a completely convincing answer."

Moving from tragedy to farce, other Israel-at-sixty articles trot out barely reheated ancient talking points. Leading the pack here is Charles Krauthammer, whose Washington Post column today commences with a trumpet blast about "the return and restoration of the remaining two tribes of Israel -- Judah and Benjamin, later known as the Jews -- to their ancient homeland." Is it too much to ask that a Likud cheerleader get basic facts of Israelite history right?

There is scant purpose to Krauthammer's piece apart from bashing Palestinians. Sure enough, after reciting an alternate world history in which the dispossession of the Palestinians was solely the consequence of their rejectionism in 1948, without the slightest assist from the seraphic Israelis --- do consult with Benny Morris on that one, Charles --- we get to the crux: "One constantly hears about the disabling complexity of the Arab-Israeli dispute. Complex it is, but the root cause is not."

That's wrong, not to mention completely backwards. The root cause is exceedingly complex, thanks in part to the obfuscatory efforts of Krauthammer and his ilk (he has a surfeit of counterparts on the Palestinian side to be sure). Whereas the dispute, or at the very least, the nature of the only possible resolution, is simple as can be: Either a two-state solution, or the indefinite perpetuation of the status quo until Israel quietly ceases to exist.

The Nation's Israel cover: Kumbaya? For the sake of bipartisanship, let's take a look, lastly, at The Nation's commemoration of the occasion, consisting in a pair of articles by Oxford professor Avi Shlaim and Ben Gurion U. professor Neve Gordon (a piece by erstwhile Barack Obama acquaintance Rashid Khalidi, "Palestine: Liberation Deferred," completes the troika).

Shlaim's piece, a funhouse mirror inversion of Krauthammer's, begins with a stirring appreciation of the flawed but flourishing Israel that really exists, as opposed to the concoction of fantasists. It proceeds the the well-known but always worth repeating point that "[t]o its credit, the Israeli public has never been as implacably opposed to an independent Palestinian state as the politicians of the right."

But Shlaim gets carried away reveling in self-criticism, and succumbs to an equal and opposite departure from reality versus his opponents on the right. "The Palestinians learned from their own mistakes," he writes, "they put rejectionism behind them, moderated their program and opted for a two-state solution." Really? It's that simple? If for no other reason than they'll need to if they want to make the peace process saleable to the Israeli public, leftist Zionists really ought to come to grips with the fact that it's not social inequality, but people --- specifically, Palestinian people --- on the giving end of those Kassam and Katyusha rockets, and those people have a religious and political agenda. Firing rockets isn't just the sublimated expression of their desire for self-determination; they will ratchet up the violence the closer they get to self-determination.

Gordon, on the other hand, offers up an unintentional classic of saccharine flower power Zionism. Did you know that Zionism is really a universal humanism for the whole world? And that its core value isn't anything religious, but social justice? This, apparently, is what happens when the folk-guitar-playing kids at summer camp grow up. Still, though Krauthammer and Gordon's visions of Israel and Zionism are deeply unappealing in countlessly many incommensurate ways, I can't help but think that the world would be a better place if Gordon's ideas had the purchase that Krauthammer's actually do, and vice versa.

Yesterday, conservative LA radio host Kevin James appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews ostensibly to discuss George Bush and John McCain's decision to test whether repealing Godwin's Law is a winning issue.

James came on the air screaming --- literally --- that if George Bush wasn't, as Dana Perino assured us he was not, comparing the Democratic presidential nominee to Neville Chamberlain, "HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN" [that seems like the most faithful orthography -- ed]. After several minutes passed without James' wall of sound subsiding or giving any hint that it would soon, Matthews' bullshit meter went off.

So he asked James, "What did Chamberlain do wrong?" The result: A moment of television both entertaining and edifying. The fun starts at 4:10.

Before finally giving up and admitting he has no idea why it's unflattering to compare someone to Chamberlain, James let loose with several paroxysms that by all rights ought to have been co-scripted by George Orwell and Trey Parker:

"It all goes back to appeasement...It's the key term"; "His actions enabled, energized, legitimized ...It's the exact same thing" [presumably the subject is Chamberlain and the object Hitler, but that's far from clear -- ed.]; "'38, '39, what year do you want?...It's the exact same thing that happened"; "He's talking about appeasement!";

Best of all, in response to the specific question of what Chamberlain had done that James didn't like: "Neville Chamberlain was an appeaser."

That, of course, is the essence of Bush loyalism at this late stage (and what makes the clip so edifying): Parroting key phrases like an opera singer cantillating in a language she doesn't understand, and using language not as a medium of communication, but simply as a cudgel with which to beat political opposition.

Which highlights precisely what is so crazy not just about this latest display of classlessness from the president, but about the media-enabled codification of the idea that steadfastly holding to the principle of conducting diplomacy like a petulant kindergartner makes a politician "strong" on national security. Chris Matthews may have fun embarrassing a buffoon like James, but it's thanks to him and his colleagues that we consider someone like Joe Lieberman --- who has yet to encounter a foreign policy problem he wouldn't solve by getting other people killed, and has yet to encounter a domestic freedom he wouldn't consider restricting --- a moderate. Lieberman's reputation for moderation is diagnostic proof of a pathology in our political culture. The fact that a man can be comfortable going on national television to excoriate appeasement without having the slightest clue what 'appeasement' means is only a minor symptom.

But sane people who know words like 'appeasement' and what happened at Munich just don't sign off on this codicil of the Bush doctrine, or much of the rest of it for that matter.

Hence, back in the land of agitprop-free reality, there is virtually no one outside a faction within a faction of neoconservatives --- the clan that warned of Reagan selling us out to Gorbachev and presciently predicted a massive Soviet revival by the late 80s --- dumb or paranoid enough to confuse talking with appeasing. Not even John McCain, who as Jamie Rubin notes, favored negotiations with Hamas as recently as 2006. To be sure, Rubin has honesty issues of his own, but the Huffington Post found the video evidence to prove McCain was for negotiating with Hamas --- along with an admirably perspicuous explanation of what got Hamas elected (hint: it's not Palestinians' intractable hatred for Israel).

And why would McCain have taken that position? Because it's simply flipping nuts not to, that's why. Here we have a basic tool of diplomacy that comes with a negligible opportunity costs, a literally zero potential downside cost, and an enormous potential upside; and rather than use it, some people would rather impugn the fitness of others for leadership.

That's how you know they're full of shit. If their ancestors had faced such a decision and opted to throw a tantrum rather than use the low-cost, high-profit tool, they would have been culled by natural selection long before passing on their genetic material to our current crop of ostriches who think they're hawks.

The Republican party seems to think that the crucial swing voter in this election will be Apollo Braun. How else to explain their decision to abandon anything resembling a traditional political strategy --- including their recent instant classics of fearmongering --- in favor of a months-long extended violation of Godwin's Law at once hysterical in its desperation and overreach, and nearly impenetrably byzantine in its content. Apart from a certain minority of ignorant American Jews afraid of their own shadow, it's difficult to imagine any undecided voters who are on the right wavelength to pick up such rarefied dog-whistling.

George W. Bush has been in Israel this week to take part in 60th anniversaryGeorge Bush: "If my opponents are so smart, how come they're like Hitler? Riddle me that, Harvard." celebrations, and had a chance to address the Knesset earlier today. Rather than say anything remotely germane, he decided instead to denounce an unnamed American senator who reacted to the Nazi invasion of Poland by exclaiming, "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided." The reference was to Sen. William Borah (R - ID), who left office in January 1940. Bush's press flack, Dana Perino, assured the press that any apparent comparison to another senator from a state starting with "I" is purely coincidental; but John McCain (and his pet soothsayer Joe Lieberman, natch) missed the memo about not unveiling veiled slanders. Hence he piled on:

If Senator Obama wants to sit down across the table from the leader of a country that calls Israel a stinking corpse, and comes to New York and says they're gonna, quote, "wipe Israel off the map," what is it that he wants to talk about? What is it that he wants to talk about with him?

Hmm. That is a real poser of a riddle, but let me take a crack at it. Obama would want to talk to Iranian leaders (not necessarily Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who wields very little actual power) about negotiating Iran out of pursuing nuclear weapons, about nuclear non-proliferation generally, the stability of the Iraqi state, a resolution to the Kurdish national question, Lebanese sovereignty, shutting down anti-Iranian and anti-Shiite terrorist networks, opening up the Iranian economy to American goods and vice versa, trade and allocation of petroleum resources, relaxation of infringements of the rights of women and religious minorities, integrating Iran into western political institutions, setting up student exchange programs, and of course, Israeli security.

Part of the reason Obama would talk to Iran about all the foregoing is that George W. Bush --- unlike other American presidents since the fall of the Shah, who found uses for back-channels to Iran other than flipping them off --- has abdicated his responsibility. Bush's grounds for his foreign policy malfeasance is his belief that it's futile at best, Chamberlinian appeasement at worst, to talk to "terrorists and radicals" (note the elision of an important distinction) unless you can "persuade them they have been wrong all along." Which is a nice encapsulation of many of Bush and McCain's strategic blinders. It is possible to talk productively with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (or the actual leadership of Iran) --- for example, by negotiating a framework for Iraqi stability --- without convincing him that Israel is not, in fact, a stinking corpse. It's even possible to talk to Iran about curtailing their support of Hezbollah --- say, by offering something in return, perhaps something that could be revoked if the Iranians break the agreement --- without deciding one way or another whether Israel is a stinking corpse. Believe it or not, it's even possible to conduct diplomacy with Iran without giving away the Sudetenland.

Sure, it may sound nuts, or worse, like Chamberlain, to conceive of diplomacy as an exercise in anything other than demanding that other states bow to our will or else, but hey, since that approach hasn't worked out perfectly, maybe we should roll the dice.

Not if McCain has his way. Negotiations with Iran, he claims, entail "enhanc[ing] the prestige of a nation that's a sponsor of terrorists and is directly responsible for the deaths of brave young Americans"; so arguing for such negotiations demonstrates a lack of "the knowledge, the experience, the background to make the kind of judgments that are necessary to preserve this nation's security."

So at least we know what strategic concept is McCain's top priority --- prestige --- but it's a concept unlike anything recognizable in the history of political or diplomatic history. It has nothing to do with the GDP of Iran, nothing to do with its International Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, or Freedom House ratings, nothing to do with the esteem in which anyone on earth holds Iran, nothing to do with its technological capabilities, and nothing to do with its military, political, and economic power. It can't have anything to do with any of them, since talking to Iranian leaders can't enhance any of them.

Still, we should probably trust in John McCain's knowledge, experience, background, and most importantly, his direct access to the Platonic form of prestige. After all, if pre-empting any enhancement of Iran's prestige weren't a matter of existential importance, then John McCain's monomaniacal pursuit of policies guaranteed to augment Iran's actual power and diplomatic clout, let alone his fatuous comparisons of anyone who stands in his way to Neville Chamberlain, would be alarming, inexcusable, and disgraceful, and probably render him unfit for the presidency.

Dr. Ron Paul earned the nickname "Dr. No" by voting against any and all federal appropriations that came before the House of Representatives, but it seems that Paul is equally adamantly opposed to purely symbolic governmental interventions. Nick Curran of Radar reports that Paul was the only member of the House to vote against a resolution sending condolences to the Burmese victims of Cyclone Nargis. Which is literally the least the US government could possibly do, but too much for Paul.

Ron Paul to Myanmar: "Fuck You" Don't call Paul an extremist though. He may be opposed to empty gestures of solidarity with southeast Asian natural disaster victims, but he's willing to compromise on empty gestures of solidarity with football players: As Curran notes, in the current legislative session, Paul has voted to congratulate the University of Kansas, Louisiana State, and the New York Giants on their respective seasons.

Even if Paul stands alone in Congress withholding condolences from the Burmese, there are legions of Paulians still fighting to somehow wrest the Republican presidential nomination from John McCain. They've managed to win control of several state conventions, including Minnesota and Nevada, and are expecting to provoke some kind of floor fight at the Republican National Convention in the summer. (Don't ask how they could believe that. Paulians also believe in the gold standard and fear a "North American Union.") And if the Paul movement can manage to a) embarrass John McCain and b) moderate the GOP's recent embrace of war as the health of the state, I can only say long live the rEVOLution.

On the other hand, if all their efforts fizzle, the Paulians have a backup plan: Buying up property in rural Texas where they'll establish "Paulville," a libertarian utopia "gated communities containing 100% Ron Paul supporters." After all, what could be more freeing than quasi-religious total political conformity out in Bumblefuck, Texas, far beyond the reach of the law? Nothing could go wrong with that.

To: Shmuel Rosner
From: David Samuels

Dear Shmuel,

You are right to say that we do different kinds of work. You are a reporter with a gift for simplifying Israeli politics and Jewish institutional wrangling in a way that makes outsiders like me feel like we are informed about an exotic world that we actually know very little about. My purpose is to captivate readers into leaving the orderly and reasonable-seeming place that you inhabit when you sit down at your keyboard for the wilder pastures of reality. I take the same facts you have available to you, filter them through my subjective consciousness, and create a universe whose particular combination of familiarity and strangeness causes readers to get The New York Times and Shmuel Rosner out of their heads and see the world with fresh eyes.

American Jews: Freaks even by their own standards So yes, when you seem unsettled by the idea that life is full of paradox and contradiction, I feel like I am doing my job --- though I also wonder why you have chosen to devote your particular gifts to thinking about literature. The demand that people "mean what they say and say what they mean" is futile in everyday life, and simply nonsensical when applied to literary work. If you think my mildly personal and contradictory brand of journalism is troubling and frustrating, just wait till you clap eyes on Kafka and Babel, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, or any of the other major or minor literary masters whose habit of forceful contradiction defines 20th century Jewish writing everywhere except perhaps in the Hebrew language --- and even there.

Now that I've complemented your very real talents while mocking your naïve and uneducated approach to literature, let's get down to the thread of my response that worries you the most, namely the idea that American Jews may not be exactly like other Americans.

I am sure that you have met plenty of patriotic, God-fearing Jews in Potomac, Maryland who say hamotzi every Shabbat under a Norman Rockwell portrait of George Washington crossing the Delaware River. But please believe me when I tell you that these people are freaks even by their own standards. If these people are really so uber-American, why do they pray every Sabbath for the welfare of a foreign government and its leaders, and the soldiers who defend its borders? Why do they celebrate the Independence Day of a small country in the Middle East? Why do they celebrate the new year in September instead of in January? Why do they insist on converting their goyish wives or children's children to their religion instead of simply letting them chose to be whoever they want to be? I'm telling you, Shmuel: by American standards, American Jews are pretty weird people.

But a more germane question may be why even such a mild assertion of the fact that American Jews are not exactly like all other Americans makes you so nutty. You say that my rather benign allusion to the double-ness of American Jewish identity is "a serious charge, with potentially grave consequences." I assure you that the Cheka or the FBI will not come knocking on my door --- even in this age of AIPAC prosecutions, and with Jonathan Pollard still behind bars.

I believe that American Jews are different, in the same way that blacks are different. Jews and blacks are both guilty of embracing an alternative historical narrative that at times trumps the mainstream narratives commonly accepted by our fellow citizens. I am not "ruining" anything for my fellow Jews in America by speaking the truth about the fact that we live as Americans even as we also live sometimes contradictory lives as Jews. Telling the truth is part of how I see my job as a writer, even if I choose to speak in opposites and misdirection some of the time.

One reason you may be such a timid mouse when it comes to discussing these subjects is that the word "double" suggests "double agents." To clarify this point, I want to state clearly that I do see American Jews as double agents in American society. I think both Judaism and America have been greatly enriched by the creative tension produced by trying to live two very different narratives at the same time.

Look at the history of progressive political movements in America in the 20th century, and lo and behold, you find Jews. Look at the history of anti-Communism in America, and lo and behold, you find Jews. You find Jews on the front lines of aesthetics and commerce, and for the same reasons, namely, that we don't see things exactly the same way that lots of our fellow citizens do. The struggle of American Jews to be both American and Jewish, and to bring two sometimes conflicting kinds of narrative consciousness to bear on the society in which they live, has had such an outsized effect on American life over the past century in part because many of the best minds of the Jewish people emigrated here. There is also the fact that the country was founded by a group of uniquely philo-semitic Protestant dissenters for whom "Jewish" ways of thinking and acting were more congenial than they were to the Catholic regents of France or Spain.

The other reason this conversation scares you is that you are an Israeli, meaning that you are a product of a 19th century ideology that believes that blood, soil and language must be united in order to form a healthy, unified self. It is no secret that Theodore Herzl and his fellow Zionist ideologues were heirs to many of the antisemitic stereotypes of the 19th century European nationalists they sought to imitate.

Israelis can't help but believe that the doubleness of the Jew in exile is a diseased condition that needs to be healed, and that the mark of being a healthy Jew is to be a member of a free nation living in its own land. That's why Israelis have such trouble understanding what it has historically meant to be a Jew in all other times and places --- and what it means to be Jew today for those of us who are not Israelis. The irony of course is that the Jews of Israel are in many ways the ones who are stuck in the past: You live in the largest Jewish ghetto in history, under threat of nuclear catastrophe, and under the thumb of a corrupt ultra-orthodox religious establishment whose definition of Judaism is quite literally medieval.

While I am a strong political supporter of the State of Israel, I don't see Israel as the necessary solution to the historical condition of the Jewish people, just as I do not necessarily believe that American Jews will always be at home in America. Perhaps you will not be surprised to learn that I believe that the Jewish condition is, in its essence, contradictory. I am Jewish, not because I think things are rosy, but because I chose to be Jewish, because I feel lucky to carry the historical weight of 3500 years of contradiction and argument and exile, and because there is something irreducibly slippery and human and contemporary about having to be two or more things at the same time.

To: David Samuels
From: Shmuel Rosner

Dear David,

Thank you for your explanation. My impression is that this could become a long and detailed dialogue about the nature of journalism, literature and all things in between, but I'm really not sure Jewcy's the right venue for such discussion.

However, after reading your comments, I think we stand to benefit from summarizing the differences between our respective approaches to our journalistic work. While I think my job is to make the world more orderly and understandable for readers, to try and overcome the chaos, your work does the exact opposite: You meddle with your readers' minds and make them more confused.

The American Melting Pot: Where do Jews fit? Having said that, I'm a little confused now myself: Is what you say in your letter is what you really think or just one of your mind-games? You write a lot of things (that's one lengthy letter, why do they tell me to write up to 800 words, and let you go crazy with a 1300 words - I wonder), but do you really mean them? I'll take a chance here, and assume that you do. So let's make this our topic of discussion for today:

If Americans are self-made people who embrace an imagined future in order to escape the burdens of the past, American Jews seek to have their cake and eat it too by embracing the future-oriented American idea without relinquishing their historically bound identity as Jews.

This, you imply, is the reason that "the themes of double-ness, lying and imposture have a special significance" for you "as an American Jewish writer." And these qualities are self-evidently vicious: Lying isn't be good, trying to have a cake and eat it too is what our mothers warned us not to do. But therein lies your irony. You go on to say that such characteristics "can be the source of a tremendous amount of creative tension." Which is a good thing, isn't it?

Basically, what you're up to is blaming American Jews for misleading their fellow-citizens, their communities, their friends: pretending to be aligned with American society while they really aren't. This is a serious charge, with potentially grave consequences --- a charge that shouldn't be made lightly just for the sake of toying with outrageous ideas. And I must say I am not yet convinced about your motives (if you haven't noticed, I'm the self-appointed responsible adult in this crowded neighborhood of rogue writers).

So the question arises: Is this accusatory description of American Jewry even accurate? Many American Jews whom I know --- who take the trouble to constantly marvel at the extent to which they are an integral part of the great American melting pot --- might dispute your narrative. And they might be even right. They see a tolerant society that can put up with the cultural and religious differences inherent in so many groups playing a part in it. They see an influential group overcoming the difficulties of being a true American minority while preserving its distinctiveness and uniqueness. This, they will say, is not "lying" or "posturing," but rather living a complicated and rich life in this shining city on the hill.

You want to ruin this for them, and one has to ask oneself why. What's bothering you?

"Life Is Full Of Important Choices" is the name of an article you published in the second book you've just released, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, a collection of articles you wrote for all sorts of magazines. Supposedly, the piece is about 9/11; it takes time for the reader to realize that as most of it is dedicated to, well, David Samuel's life. And too some degree, this old article of yours pulls the rug out from under the argument you made in your letter to me:

No one could dispute how beautiful Brooklyn was less than one year later, the summer after the towers fell. It was as if the ashes from the tower had fertilized our neighborhood. The local population of stoop-sitters, myself included, were the recipients of an unexpected bounty.

Can't this description of your Brooklyn count as proof that this joint venture of Americanness is no mirage, but rather the daily reality of "worshippers at the Mosque," and of your wife's mother who "called to tell us that Jesus Christ offered the only pathway to salvation," and of "Virginia and I" who "lit the Sabbath candles together, and said our blessings over the wine"?

"What is happening?", Virginia repeated as we stared at the picture on the television screen of the towers falling, one after the other. We went to the hardware store and bought white paper masks so we could safely breath, and then we went down to the Promenade, where my father used to take me to look at the cargo ships. We stood in the crowd of onlookers and watched the black cloud cross over the river.

Thus you, with your candles, and your decision to "not eat pork," were an integral part of an American tragedy. Not as a pretender, but as a participant. I'm no American, but it seems to me that your behavior that day, and the days following, is anything but part of an "ungracious refusal of large numbers of American Jews to buy into the full weirdness and wonder and scariness of the American idea."

It is your American-Jewish weirdness, your American-Jewish scariness --- that is the American idea.

Best,
Rosner

That interview Barack Obama did with Jeffrey Goldberg over the weekend outlined the perils of running for president without shutting off your brain. At the tail-end of his effusive praise of the Jewish people and the Jewish state, after pledging "unyielding support for Israel's security," Obama described the lack of resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict as "a constant wound, a constant sore" that bolsters Islamists' recruitment efforts and enables them to claim a moral high ground illegitimately. The idea was to frame the peace process, correctly, as a matter of American as well as Israeli national security.

Naturally, within hours, the Republican Jewish Coalition had its knickers in a painfulJohn Boehner, Anti-Semite: The Republican House leader attacks Israel viciously; just look at the quote twist. According to JTA's Ami Eden, the group released a statement accusing Obama of "excus[ing] the inexcusable actions of anti-American militant jihadists by putting the blame for their actions on America’s foreign policy."

Right. This is the real-world foreign policy version of Kyle Smith's lunatic review of Iron Man. It's not enough for Israel's false friends to swear "unyielding" fealty to Israeli security, pre-emptively decline to negotiate with Hamas, and for good measure, reject and denounce Jimmy Carter. If you so much as hint that resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict might be even marginally a good thing, on balance, you're not anti-war, you're on the other side. To adapt a line Julian Sanchez wrote of Kyle Smith, the RJC's hysteria is the dying fall of a movement that's lost its purpose and confidence.

Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Eden reports, Eric Cantor, the solitary Jewish Republican in the House, willfully misinterpreted Obama's description of the unresolved Levantine conflict as a "sore" as a description of Israel. John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, picked up the distortion and ran with it, prompting Jeffrey Goldberg to reply, "Mr. Boehner, I'm sure, is a terribly busy man, with many burdensome responsibilities, so I have to assume that he simply didn't have time to read the entire Obama interview, or even the entire paragraph, or even a single clause." That's far too polite a response, while Andrew Sullivan's suggestion --- calling Boehner the liar that he is --- has proven ineffective at moving the sort of people who behave this way. They seem to respond to two things: blunt force and smear campaigns. So let's try the legal option.

Have you heard the news? John Boehner said that "Israel is...a constant sore...commit[ted] to...terrorism...[and]...an apartheid state...that...Americans are rejecting." Shocking but true, it's all here and black and white. How did a raving antisemitic loon manage to become the top-ranking Republican in Congress, and how is he still in that position?

In another part of Washington, Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard, last seen excising "torture" from the dictionary, showcasing that point-missing irrelevant pedantry neoconservatives are so good at, has a chuckle at Obama's statement to Goldberg that the lack of resolution of conflict in the Middle East "infect[s] all our foreign policy." Cracks Goldfarb wise, "Call me naïve [love the umlaut--ed.], but while solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unquestionably an admirable and important goal, I’m not sure it 'infects' all, or even most, of the challenges we face in the world." Goldfarb goes on to name foreign policy challenges uninfected by Israelis or Palestianians, which include repression in Burma, genocide in Darfur, and Russian saber-rattling in Georgia.

Call me näïvë, but there's this thing in language and logic called restricted quantifiers. If I say, "there's nothing in the fridge," I don't mean there's strictly, literally, and unrestrictedly nothing --- there are plenty of air molecules. I mean there's nothing within the scope of what I'm talking about. Now you could insist that Obama meant that the SLORC crackdown on dissidents would end if Israel recognized the Palestinians' Right of Return. Or you could use English competently. But not both.

Now, does the Israel-Palestine conflict exacerbate "the challenges we face in the world" restricted to the middle East? This Pew survey, finding that "brokering a Comprehensive Middle East Peace" would do more than anything else to improve opinion of the US in the middle East (withdrawal of US forces from the Arabian peninsula comes in second), suggests that the answer is "yes." A survey of the editorial board of the Weekly Standard suggests that the answer is "no." So it's a tough call.

For those who are struck by the dangerously corrosive left-wing secularMike Huckabee: Is this man part of John McCain's "Christian problem"? cosmopolitanism inherent in the belief that Barack Obama is a Muslim fifth columnist who must be stopped at all costs, Michael Farris offers solace. A former Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor in Virginia and current Chancellor of Patrick Henry College, a private college for Christian home-schoolers (fully accredited as of April 2007!), Farris has a large following among Virginia Evangelicals. And in that community, Bob Novak reports, Farris is promoting "the biblical justification for an Obama plague-like presidency," in rejection of John McCain and the GOP.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. According to Novak's sources, Mike Huckabee is secretly in league with Farris and other elements of the Christian "bitter end opposition" hoping to sabotage McCain's candidacy. How will they do that? So far, it's unclear. And with just five months and change left until the election, they'd better figure out a plan soon, if they're going to manage to call down the Obama-plague upon the heads of the wicked (it's mentioned in Revelation, somewhere between the fifth and sixth trumpets, IIRC.)

Not to cast any aspersions on Novak's sources, but WTF? As Ross Douthat notes, the idea that Huckabee --- who you may remember from a few months back as not only an amiable sweetheart with an occasional retrograde view, not only a loyal Republican soldier, but also the eager president of the John McCain fan club --- is furtively plotting McCain's demise, doesn't pass the laugh test. But worse than that, does an Evangelical anti-McCain vanguard even make any theological sense? Either McCain is the closet liberal abortion-and-spic-lovin' traitor his enemies on the right make him out to be, or he isn't. Either way, vote for McCain. That provides a hedge just in case he stops what another Republican bitter-ender has called the "genocide [of] the wombs" of American women (at least as effectively as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), and otherwise, McCain offers almost the same presidency-as-biblical-plague value as Obama.

Edward Luttwak doesn't know anything about Islamic law, but he does have an agenda to push, which is apparently enough to get him space on the New York Times op-ed page arguing that Barack Obama, being the son of an atheist who renounced Islam and abandoned Obama at the age of two, is considered a Muslim apostate, and thus is subject to a sentence of death. Ali Eteraz, who does know some things about Islamic law, noted in the Huffington Post that Luttwak is wrong in every single particular. Ali only obliquely addresses the larger point, which is that even if Luttwak were (stopped-clockwise) right about Islamic law, his political argument beggars parody.

Daniel Pipes: He is to character assassination what Charlie Parker was to bebop Are we actually meant to believe that there is a government or organization on earth that would attempt to assassinate an American president because his grandfather was a Luo Muslim, but would leave any other American president alone? The question can't be asked with a straight face. Self-evidently, what Luttwak is trying to do is to sustain the belief that Obama is a Muslim in one form or another --- and it isn't particularly difficult to figure out what the next wave of Luttwak-inspired chain-emails will look like: Even the liberal New York Times admits.... But that's all there is to the story, right, just an old smear in fancy enough dress to win an invitation to the Grey Lady's ball?

Actually, no. Luttwak's seemingly original riff on the old Obama-is-a-Muslim, alert-the-cousins-in-Boca!!11!!! chestnut is actually a retread of --- wait for it --- a Daniel Pipes feature from FrontPageMag. When it comes to the spread of dishonest memes designed to stoke hatred of people who pray out of the Koran or have the wrong color of skin, pre-empt Israeli governments from working on peace deals (or failing that, destabilize Israeli governments), crack down on academic freedom, tar political opponents with the career-threatening charge of antisemitism, or just scare the shit out of credulous Americans (and especially American Jews), Pipes is inevitably, indefatigably at or near the origin.

Last week in Jewcy, I noted Pipes' central role in the character assassination of Debbie Almontaser: Knowing nothing whatsoever about her life and career --- and freely admitting it --- Pipes nonetheless launched a campaign to destroy her project of offering Arabic-language education to New York City students because he believes that "Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage" and "learning Arabic in of itself promotes an Islamic outlook." Having succumbed to such vile racist paranoia, it's hardly surprising that Pipes felt his end, obstructing public education in Arabic (thus hurting American national security in the process), justified his means. Namely, deliberately doctoring a quote from Almontaser to precisely reverse its meaning and depict her as a 9/11 denialist, calling her (secular) school a "madrassa," and thereby subjecting her to a deluge of slander in the months that followed.

One particularly hysterical comment raised in Pipes' defense pointed to a nice illustration of how Pipes' agitprops have become pathological, in addition to being immoral. This Weekly Standard article, offered as proof of Almontaser's sinister Islamist connections, in fact produces not a jot of original evidence against her, but merely recycles the Pipes-originated smear that she was "accused of trying to establish an 'intifada academy.'" The weaselly passive locution puts the whole sordid story in a nutshell: Yes, Almontaser has been so accused, by unscrupulous propagandists. That's how smears spread.

Likewise, all of Edward Luttwak's confusions about Islamic law find a place in Pipes' original reportage, but Pipes has even more proof that Obama is both a secret Muslim and soon to be targeted for death by Islamists for his apostasy. Did you know: Obama's middle name is "Hussein" (cognate to "Hassan" and other "H-S-N" names, Pipes reminds those of us who don't get the hint)? How else would Muslims worldwide react to a self-identified Chrisian American president with that name than to condemn him to death by beheading? (For a sane view of likely Muslim reactions to Obama's election, turn to Ali Eteraz again.) Did you know Obama once lived and went to school in Indonesia? Which is full of you-know-what?

There are at least two morals to the story, depending on whether you share Pipes' paranoia or dwell with the rest of us in the real world. For the former, start a blog if you like, but above all find a day job. Pipes has more energy than you do, more connections, and a larger and more devoted team of "researchers." Cannonball Adderley was a brilliant soloist, but he sounded too derivative of Charlie Parker to ever completely escape his shadow; similarly, it's just not possible for an emulator, no matter how talented, to top the work of the Yardbird of slander.

For the latter, the lesson is epistemic. Whenever a literally incredible McCarthyite charge that someone who most assuredly is not an Islamist harbors secret sympathy for Islamism breaks through into the mainstream media, check Daniel Pipes' archives for the past three to six months, and it's a fair bet you'll locate the original pathogen.

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, American Jewry has been privy to many (perhaps too many) sociological surveys taking its collective pulse. Surveys have covered everything from attitudes toward intermarriage, Jewish education, politics, literacy, beliefs, and practice. Recently another survey has appeared written by the pre-eminent Jewish sociologist Steven M. Cohen in conjunction with his younger colleague, Ari Y. Kelman, entitled Beyond Distancing: Young Adult American Jews and their Alienation from Israel. The study offers a provocative quantitative analysis regarding young American Jews' attitudes toward Israel.

Cohen and Kelman's study shows the first signs of erosion in unflinching American Jewish support of Israel. It's a trend that may have started in the aftermath of the first Lebanon War in the mid-1980s and is, in many ways, predictable, perhaps inevitable.

The generation of Jews who experienced the establishment of the Jewish State is now over the age of sixty-five. Those with memories of the war in 1967 are approaching fifty. Jews under the age of forty only know Israel as a much more complicated, and compromised, country: an occupying power engaged in a bloody struggle with a largely disempowered and stateless population. Such a battle, while intense and dangerous, is quite different from the more straight-forward struggle of fending off invading Arab armies. Whatever one may think of the present dilemma, or even whether "occupation" is an accurate description of what Israelis call "the situation" (ha-mazav), the experience of Israel for American Jews under the age of forty is, and should be, categorically different from their parents.

The reality of this change can be illustrated in various ways. When I show my students Otto Preminger's 1960 film version of Leon Uris' Exodus I am made conscious of how different Israel is for them than it is, and was, for me. Not only do they find the film horribly propagandistic (it surely is), overly sentimental (no doubt), boring (a matter of opinion), and unrealistic (uh...yes); it does not seem to evoke in them any feelings of sympathy toward the 1948 generation. Few, if any, are drawn to tears, as are many in my generation, by the music or the beautiful panorama of the Israeli landscape. Few get choked up by the scenes of young orphans dancing the hora on a kibbutz.

Exodus is not really a film about Zionism and surely not about Israeli Zionism. It is about the construction of the Jewish State in the American Jewish imagination, propaganda for a Jewish community comfortable but not yet secure in its new-found freedom. For my students, present day Israel is simply too complex (and too middle class) for them to make a connection between the romantic vision they see on the wide-screen and what they read daily on their computer screens.

Which Birthright?

This change in how Israel is viewed by the under-forty set has sparked programs such as Taglit: Birthright Israel and Israel advocacy movements on American campuses such as The David Project in an attempt to bandage depleting American Jewish support for Israel.

Birthright Israel is an innovative initiative to enable young American Jews to take a free trip to Israel. On the face of it, Birthright appears clearly to have a Zionist agenda. Yet, the Birthright mission explicitly aims "to strengthen participants' personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people," and for many of the young people who experience these trips, those connections are decidedly Diasporic.

While Cohen and Kelman's study indeed shows that young Jewish men and women who visit Israel (either on Birthright or some other way) are less alienated from Israel than those in a similar age-group who have never been to Israel, they are still more alienated than those over sixty-five who have never visited Israel. In other words, visiting Israel is productive toward curbing alienation from Israel but cannot close the generational gap.

What the study does not document, but what in fact may be more significant (we have no hard evidence yet as to the long-term impact of Birthright on American Jews) is the extent to which Birthright may be succeeding in its Diasporic agenda, that is, creating conditions for Jewish identity in America where attachment to, alienation from, or ambivalence about Israel may be a marginal part of a much larger and complex formulation of American Jewish identity.

What are the implications if, in fact, this Diasporic agenda proves to be more successful than its Zionist agenda where Birthright contributes to a more robust Diaspora not necessarily built on the foundations of Zionism? Does this tell us that Israel serves American Jews largely as their spiritual theme-park where they go to get a large does of "Jewishness" that makes them more Jewishly identified at home? That is, where homeland serves as simply a vehicle for home? Is Israel a means to a Diasporic end? And if so, is this good or bad for the Jews?

A Different Diaspora

For American Jews living in a free society, the age-old Judenfrage has internalized into a kind of Israelfrage--what do, and should, American Jews think about Israel? I summon the spector of the "Jewish Question" not as it was used against Jews from Augustine to Hitler, but as it was used by Theodore Herzl and the early Zionists to present Zionism as a solution to the European Judenfrage. Just as nineteenth-century American Jews debated Zionism or the Zionismusfrage, contemporary American Jews are confronted with "the question of Israel."

Israel as a Jewish State exists; this is, at present, undeniable. However, what role that state should play in American Jewish identity has been an issue since the first idea of a Jewish state sprang into being in the mid-nineteenth-century, and has only become a more complex matter.

In the mid-1800s, many American Reform rabbis sermonized vociferously against Zionism. By the 1920s, the American Zionism we know today emerged through the work of such charismatic figures as cultural theorist Horace Kallen, Rabbi Judah Magnus, and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. While that Zionism took some twists and turns over the next half-century (particularly a hard-right turn in the 1960s under the influence of Rabbi Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League), the actual birth of the State of Israel and its valiant David vs. Goliath battle during the Six-Day War in 1967 erased any remaining ambivalence that may have remained among American Jews towards Israel. By the 1970s, Norman Podhoretz was probably correct when he wrote of American Jews "we are all Zionists."

That American Zionism is now weakening, as demonstrated by Cohen and Kelman's study, may not necessarily be due to a growing ideology against Zionism (although there is a developing Diasporism in certain academic circles and on the far left). The situation on the ground has changed dramatically. Whatever one may think about the Palestinians or even Hamas, they are surely no Goliath to Israel's David. Younger American Jews may see less need to protect Israel and less willing to unequivocally defend it.

Just as significant, however, if not more so, is the possibility that young American Jews may not need Zionism or Israel the way their parents did. Throughout the history of Zionism, the dichotomous poles of Jerusalem and Babylonia often have served to frame the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora. This is perhaps best encapsulated in the title of the little known but significant work by Simon Rawidowicz (written in Hebrew in America) entitled Bavel ve Yerushalayim (1958) or the contemporary educational project Bavli ve Yerushalmi that has two adult learning communities, one in Israel and one in the United States, studying the same Talmudic texts and gathering a few times a year in Israel or America. While the comparison is easy, since it mirrors the two different versions of the Talmud, I suggest it is not apt.

Instead, the contemporary American Diaspora is closer to the situation of Jews in Alexandria than Babylonia. During the Second Commonwealth there was a thriving and creative Jewish Diaspora in Alexandria that was not a product of forced exile, like Babylonia, but rather a community that chose the Diaspora over Erez Israel. American Jewry, like Alexandrian Jewry of old, is a volitional Diaspora; there are few impediments preventing Jews in the United States from immigrating to Israel; the law of return (whatever one may think of it) makes all Diaspora Jews "virtual citizens" of the Jewish State. This volitional rather than forced Diasporic framework, coupled with the fact that Jews in America are free to practice (or not practice) Judaism in whatever form they choose, creates a different dynamic between home and homeland than the one that existed between Babylonia and Jerusalem. In the twenty-first century Diaspora Jews, whatever their stance on Zionism, choose home over homeland.

Reframing Jewish Identity

For the over-fifty generation, Israel and Zionism were both viewed as pillars of Jewish identity after 1948 and thus the highest levels of attachment to Israel in Cohen and Kelman's study are those in the over sixty-five age group, even those who have never been to Israel. This may have had less to do with Israel per se and more to do with the resonance of Jewish feelings of marginality in the wake of identity politics and the continued perception that, as Jews, they were not fully a part of the American mainstream. For some, it is driven by memories of the Holocaust (and America's less than firm commitment to prevent it), for others love of Israel may derive from the distant yet perceptible echoes of being immigrants or children of immigrants.

Russian Jew at Ellis Island: Photographed by Lewis W. Hine,1905. As a young child living in New York (and almost part of the fifty and older age-group), having my immigrant grandmother take me to Ellis Island where she arrived in the United States from Russia around 1920 was one of my most formative childhood memories of Jewish identity. That is, to a previous generation, Zionism was to some extent an expression of, or a response to, a protracted sense of insecurity in America. Moreover, for my generation, Zionism was always "statist" Zionism; it was always about the Jewish State and not about a renaissance of Jewish culture.

As a result, support of the "state" of Israel became the civil religion of many secular American Jews and a fourteenth article of faith (in addition to Maimonides' previous thirteen) for religious Jews. The state alone became the end, and not the means, of Jewish identity [see note below*]. This was surely not the case in pre-state Zionism but a combination of the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel swallowed up the more interesting, and robust, debates about Jewish collectivity of which statist Zionism was only one voice among many.

Most Jews in America under the age of thirty-five are third and fourth generation Americans. They live in a society where alienation from the mainstream is less than in previous generations. They live in a world where the intermarriage rate for Jews has hovered around 50 percent for a few decades. Among other things, this has increasingly changed the very way in which many American Jews view intermarriage and their host culture more generally. In 2000, the American Jewish Committee's Survey of Jewish Opinion cited about half of its respondents saying that "it is racist to oppose Jewish -gentile marriages." Most young American Jews today have non-Jewish relatives and most have close friends who are not Jewish. Exogamy and Amercian pluralism have all but erased the age-old ethnic myth of Jewish separateness.

Cross-Over Judaism

Moreover, Judaism has become fashionable in America, from Kabbalah to Klezmer to John Zorn and Tzadik records (Zorn won the prestigious MacArthur Genius Fellowship last year), to Andy Statman, the Moshav Band, and Mattisyahu (who, as one of the first real cross-over musicians who play "Jewish" music, last year signed with a major record label). This is quite different from the Jewish musicians (Gershwin, Irving Berlin Leonard Bernstein et al) and comedians (from Al Jolson to Milton Berle, Alan King, and Buddy Hacket) who made it into the American mainstream in a previous generation. The older generation of Jewish entertainers did not carry with them an overt Jewishness (after all, Berlin wrote "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas"). Even Woody Allen, Phillip Roth, and Jerry Seinfeld, all geniuses in their craft, offered nothing particularly Jewish other than Jewish male neurosis.

Similarly, in the political sphere, Jews as Jews are actively involved in movements such as Darfur, world hunger and poverty relief in third-world countries, the anti-Iraq war movement and AIDS outreach. In Los Angeles, the Progressive Jewish Alliance, soon to become a national organization, is working with the LA district courts in an initiative called The Jewish Community Justice Project founded on the principles of Jewish restorative justice devoted to criminal/victim mediation according to talmudic sources and values. While one could argue Jews were also deeply involved in the 1960s Civil Rights movement, they often were not organized around Jewish initiatives but functioned heroically as individuals within the more diffuse American counter-culture.

Even Judaism as a religion has gained a new following from outside the fold. Many non-Jewish college students are aware of Chabad Houses on campus, some attend services with friends, and Artscroll books are read by both Jews and non-Jews alike. Christians are converting to Judaism in increasing numbers and the maverick Rabbi Harold Shulweis in Southern California has advocated actively proselytizing to unchurched Christians--with much success. In short, American Jewry, broadly defined, (and not simply American Jews) is solidly part of mainstream American culture, popular, political, and intellectual.

Given the way young Jewish Americans in increasing numbers have chosen to express their Jewish/American identity around national and global concerns, it is no surprise that Israel is becoming more marginal in the lives of many young American Jews. The "negation of the Diaspora" ideology of Zionism, even in its new form espoused by the Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua, has no real teeth for many in this generation. Their regional, national, and global activism lived as an expression of their Jewishness illustrates the empirical vacuity of Yehoshua's claim.

A Mixed Blessing

While in the old paradigm, attachment to Israel was viewed as an anchor of Jewish identity in a less-than-fully-stable and confident Jewish community in America, this new paradigm sketched above suggests that the "distancing" Cohen and Kelman's study documents may be a mixed blessing. That is, if it is true that this distancing from Israel is coupled with a new sense of identity not wed to the ethnic attachment to a Jewish State, Jewish identity in American may be healthier than imagined. On the one hand, it may be showing us that the doctrine claiming Zionism is the glue that can hold non-Orthodox American Jewry together is becoming obsolete and that, in fact, what we may be witnessing is the beginning of a new Jewish secularism in America that hasn't existed since the demise of the socialist and Yiddishist movements in the early twentieth century.

One sign of this may be seen in the changing nature of the intermarried Jew. While in a previous generation the assumption was that the Jew who "married out" was basically lost to the Jewish community, at present many intermarried Jews are bringing their non-Jewish spouse to the synagogue and other Jewish communal activities. That is, today an increasing numbers of intermarried Jews (admittedly still the minority) do not view their choice to marry a gentile as severing them from the Jewish collective. In some cases, it is even the gentile spouse who encourages his or her Jewish partner to become more "Jewish."

One recent product of this new tendency can be seen in a pamphlet published by a group of Conservative rabbis entitled, A Place in the Tent: Intermarriage and Conservative Judaism. (2005). This booklet serves as a guide for rabbis, in halakhic and non-halakhic matters, of how to integrate the non-Jewish spouse into synagogue life. There is also a support group in Atlanta connected with the Jewish Outreach Institute run by Rabbi Kerrey Olitsky that serves gentile women married to Jewish men who want to bring their children up Jewish (according to Reform Judaism one Jewish parent is sufficient to consider a child Jewish) . The literature of this group contains interviews with some of these non-Jewish women about why they choose not to convert to Judaism yet want their children to be raised as Jews. Viewed in the context of Jewish history, the fact that a non-Jewish woman would choose not to convert to Judaism (many of these women feel deeply connected to their familial roots) yet choose to raise her children Jewish is quite remarkable.

In short, in conjunction with American Jews re-envisioning their markers of identity, there may be paradigm shift in America's attitudes toward Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism. I think the Cohen and Kelman study, viewed as part of a much larger shift in American Jewry, yields a complex picture that is not, by definition, "bad for the Jews."

In 1966 Gerson Cohen, then a professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary who later became its chancellor, gave a commencement address at Hebrew Teachers College in Boston that was later published as an essay entitled "The Blessing of Assimilation." (collected in Cohen, Jewish History and Jewish Destiny New York: JTS, 1997, 145-156). In this essay Cohen argued that it is both inaccurate and historically short-sighted to view assimilation as, by definition, "bad for the Jews." He writes, "A frank appraisal of the periods in which Judaism flourished will indicate that not only has a certain amount of assimilation and acculturation not impeded Jewish continuity and creativity, but that in a profound sense, this assimilation and acculturation was a stimulus to original thinking and expression, a source of renewed vitality. To a considerable degree, the Jews survived as a vital group and as a pulsating culture because they changed their names, their language, their clothing, and their patterns of thought and expression."

Twenty-first century America has thus far offered Jews many new avenues of expressing their identity as ethnic or post-ethnic Jews. Statist Zionism remains one avenue among them. To conclude that since this road is now less traveled we are witnessing a diminishing identification with the complex and transitional thing we call "Jewishness" in America is, in my opinion, a myopic view of the changing world around us.

This essay is dedicated to GZG, in friendship.

*I want to thank Professor David Myers of UCLA for a series of lectures he gave at Indiana University in April 2008 where he developed his ideas about “statist” Zionism in relation to a broader collectivist notion of Jewish identity. His comments greatly enriched my thinking on this point. 

Art Credits: Lead image is a t-shirt design from www.jewtee.com.

Young adults today aren't satisfied with a status quo existence. We want to find our true calling, and hopefully wealth and stability along the way. Unfortunately, real life isn't always conducive to finding the answers we seek.

Immersed in this post-college struggle to find a meaningful and productive life, I found myself with a diverse group of other twenty-somethings on an Israel Experts Birthright trip. Some of us came simply for the free vacation; others hoped to trace their roots and culture to help them find what is "true" and "real." What we didn't expect was to find ourselves in a charged atmosphere of questioning minds, as fertile-and at times illuminating-as the desert that was made to bloom.

As it turned out, all of us were "seekers," which is a nice way of saying that we were a little bit lost. I called myself a writer, although writing barely supported my coffee addiction. Before we even checked baggage, I met a girl who had just lost her fashion job along with her boyfriend (who also happened to be her boss), an insurance adjuster who hated his work, and a medical student who was taking a year off to work on a farm in Florida.

Most of us had danced around the idea of a Birthright trip before, but avoided it for various reasons. Some thought it would be too much like propaganda. Others had never felt entirely comfortable in Jewish groups. Still others (or their parents) were afraid of ending up on the evening news. The fact that we were finally able to sign on to Birthright (and actually board the plane) was a testament to our development as individuals; we felt sure we could walk away with our authentic selves intact no matter what the trip threw at us.

Luckily, the trip didn't require us to exude a happy-go-lucky attitude. "All we want is for you to ask questions," Joe Perlov, our tour organizer said, the morning we arrived in Israel, exhausted. "I don't care if someone is miserable the whole time. In fact I hope someone is miserable the whole time."

Jumping Off Haystacks

Our trip began with a visit to Kinneret Cemetery, the final resting place of the settlers of the first aliyah. Many found this the most inspiring part of the trip, largely due to our docent, Joel Goldman, who told us that his one wish for our group was not to give our kids bar mitzvahs or to marry another Jew. "I want each one of you to find that thing in life that makes you jump off your haystack in the morning," he said.

At a visit to Kibbutz Degania, I finally felt I understood what had made the settlers jump off their haystack. Having grown up in a Philadelphia suburb that was only two percent Jewish, I was deeply impressed by a place where Judaism united people, instead of being an indicator of difference. This was the Jewish community I had heard about, but never actually seen, and perhaps didn't even believe was actually possible until that moment. Not only did I see it actualized at Kibbutz Degania--and perhaps from the idealized perspective of an outsider--I watched our bus turn into its own close-knit Jewish community.

One girl who was half Jewish on her father's side, and who had hardly ever stepped foot in a synagogue, wrote to me last summer: "I tend to go through life feeling constantly judged by others and feeling that I need approval from them. On the trip, I always felt accepted. I got to escape into a surreal life that was the most memorable trip of my life."

Believing the Dream

In our liberal circles, we are often deprived of the opportunity to believe in anything whole-heartedly. My liberal arts education taught me that any distinct concept or idea will crumble under the scrutiny of too many questions. Birthright set an example where it was okay and even honorable to believe in the state of Israel, to adopt, so to speak, the settler's original dream.

When I returned home, I gave myself permission to act on my new love for Israel and other dreams I had lacked the bravery to carry through. I signed up for the WUJS Institute in Arad arts program, and soon was spending five more months in Israel, learning Hebrew and focusing on my passion, writing.

Of course, not everyone joined me on the plane back to Israel. One participant, Elizabeth, found that "being in Israel just makes me more certain that I want to live in New York." Birthright heightened our self-awareness and focus--but not according to an outside agenda. We each listened foremost to our own inner voice, whether we were being introduced to a holy site or discovering the person sitting next to us on the bus.

Perhaps, on a basic psychological level, my attraction to Israel is not so different from that of the original settlers. I recently found a quote by Chana Senesh, words she wrote shortly after her aliyah at age seventeen, describing how Zionism functioned in her life: "One needs something to believe in, something for which one has whole-hearted enthusiasm. One needs to feel that one's life has meaning, that one is needed in this world. Zionism fulfills that for me."

In Israel I found a source of pride that I can carry for the rest of my life--no matter what I end up doing.

***

 

Art Credits: Jerusalem by Johnny Hornig. Girl on Haystack by Renee Blodgett, whose blog, Down the Avenue, chronicles her extensive travels.

Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Barack Obama this past weekend. Surprising no one who has spent time studying the senator's career and writings, Obama showed himself to have a deeper and richer understanding of the American Jewish and Israeli experience than any previous presidential aspirants. (By the way, that includes Joe Lieberman, who is becoming a sadder and sadder self-parody with every passing day.) Some highlights:

I always joke that my intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Whether it was theologians or Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris. So when I became more politically conscious, my starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves. And obviously it’s something that has great resonance with the African-American experience.

One of the things that is frustrating about the recent conversations on Israel is the loss of what I think is the natural affinity between the African-American community and the Jewish community, one that was deeply understood by Jewish and black leaders in the early civil-rights movement but has been estranged for a whole host of reasons that you and I don’t need to elaborate...[snip]...

I think that the idea of a secure Jewish state is a fundamentally just idea, and a necessary idea, given not only world history but the active existence of anti-Semitism, the potential vulnerability that the Jewish people could still experience. I know that that there are those who would argue that in some ways America has become a safe refuge for the Jewish people, but if you’ve gone through the Holocaust, then that does not offer the same sense of confidence and security as the idea that the Jewish people can take care of themselves no matter what happens. That makes it a fundamentally just idea...[snip]...

I think the idea of Israel and the reality of Israel is one that I find important to me personally. Because it speaks to my history of being uprooted, it speaks to the African-American story of exodus, it describes the history of overcoming great odds and a courage and a commitment to carving out a democracy and prosperity in the midst of hardscrabble land. One of the things I loved about Israel when I went there is that the land itself is a metaphor for rebirth, for what’s been accomplished. What I also love about Israel is the fact that people argue about these issues, and that they’re asking themselves moral questions. Sometimes I’m attacked in the press for maybe being too deliberative. My staff teases me sometimes about anguishing over moral questions. I think I learned that partly from Jewish thought, that your actions have consequences and that they matter and that we have moral imperatives.

The rest is here.

Your weekend was incomplete if you didn't catch Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry's brilliant cameo at The American Scene arguing persuasively for the complete abolition of minimum voting age requirements. The argument works as a pincers, first by lowering resistance to the thought of toddlers lining up to fill out ballots they can't comprehend --- children are much more perspicuous than adults like to give them credit for --- and then shutting the door by pointing out the execrable qualifications and performance of adults as voters.

Our New Overlords: Aren't they adorable? Gobry places his emphasis on the first point. It's worth taking some time to flesh out the second. The standard objection to the idea of doing away with voting age requirements is that before a certain stage in development, people have neither the experience nor the basic mental tools to make informed decisions in the voting booth. Drawing the line at 18 years may be arbitrary, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere. So the thought goes.

But to state the standard objection to child-voting is to refute it. The overwhelming majority of adults have neither the experience nor the basic mental tools to make informed decisions in the voting booth. In his classic study "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," Philip Converse found that for 90 percent of the public, voting is simply an act of tribal affiliation, having nothing to do with competing political ideologies, less still with inferring voting preferences from facts, logic, and background political beliefs. (The Converse study is from the 50s, but subsequent studies have simply reinforced his findings.) In other words, if you're like 98 percent of the public, and you buy the standard objection to letting kids vote, you ought to believe you shouldn't have the right to vote either.

Besides all that, if you're ahead of the curve, you already know that voting is a sucker's game in the first place. If you were truly rational, you'd never do it. So it makes no sense to insist that voters be able to make rational, informed decisions, because no matter what you're capable of, voting is neither rational nor informed --- and irrational, uninformed people of all ages will tend to do equally well at it. (So would trained chimps.)

Still unconvinced? Then let me ratchet up the case rhetorically. Minimum voting age requirements are very much like Communism, and suffer from many similar fatal blind spots. The voting decisions an electorate makes today quite obviously not only affect today's voters, but also those of the future. By restricting the franchise to those above a certain age, we effectively socialize the preferences of everyone below that age, leaving it up to a cadre of elders to make what we hope will be enlightened decisions on behalf of everyone else. But of course, those elders don't make enlightened decisions. They make selfish, short-sighted, myopic decisions: In concrete terms, pensioners and boomers, thinking of themselves first, second, and third, are leaving as