The Israel-Egypt Friendship Association is composed of hardy souls, but even they were forced to admit defeat last week when they phoned the Marriott Hotel in Cairo to confirm their reservations ahead of a planned goodwill visit to Egypt by a delegation of Israelis and Jews of Egyptian descent. Despite having booked and paid for their rooms three months in advance, there was, it seems, no room at the inn. Not just the Marriott, either; two hours later, their travel agent in Cairo was forced to advise them that there was not a single hotel in a metropolis of 8 million that was willing to host them.

Things seemed to be going pretty well initially. All the arrangements had gone smoothly; flights had been booked, visas cleared, diplomats and academics booked to speak to the delegates. Perhaps most importantly, the Egyptian security services --- the biggest potential stumbling-block --- had been consulted at all stages and given a list of the participants, and seemed to be cool with the whole trip. The trip's organiser, Levana Zamir, would have been justified in assuming that every eventuality had been foreseen. But she hadn't reckoned with Egyptian TV presenter Amr Adib.

Less jolly than he looks: Adib Wikipedia informs us that Adib is "a media personality with flair, intelligence, and integrity, as well as a sense of humor" and has "an uncanny insight into what interests his audience." Nothing like a bit of Israel-bashing to keep ratings buoyant, it seems. Adib devoted most of his Wednesday evening show to the visit; it was rich of the Israelis to come to celebrate the 60^th anniversary of Israel's founding "in Cairo, of all places." "Why should we bring in Jews born in Egypt", asked Adib, "who preferred to flee to Israel, which has fought us in blood-soaked wars?" Further, he suggested, they were coming to file claims for property that they had "donated" to the government when they left Egypt all those years ago.

Would that the Jews' second Exodus from Egypt had been so willingly undertaken. There were some 75,000 Jews in the country at the end of the Second World War. They had been good citizens during the war years; few Egyptians watched the newsreels footage of German lines advancing and retreating across the desert with quite so much attention. Cairo in those years, like Beirut or Baghdad, was a cosmopolitan city of Arabs, Greeks, Armenians and Jews, but also one that yearned to be free of British occupation. With the 1952 revolution and the coming of Nasser, Egyptians got their wish --- but not everyone was invited to the party.

Suez was the perfect pretext: Some 25,000 Jews were expelled from the country without delay, forced to leave with one suitcase and a limited supply of cash, and family members were allegedly taken hostage to ensure that the operation proceeded as smoothly as possible. All those leaving were made to sign documents "donating" their property to the Egyptian government; this was either retained or flipped for a quick sale to the highest bidder. After the Six Day War, most remaining Jewish property was appropriated by the state, and those Jews that had stuck it out decided their time was up. (No real shocker: Nasser's security service was said to be stuffed with ex-Nazis.) What right of return for them, I wonder?

The Jewish community in Egypt is now estimated to be in double figures. Ironically, given last week's events, that tiny community is as well-treated as any in the Arab world. Though typically disgusting antisemitism rages in the government-controlled press, authorities have in recent years co-operated with Cairo's Jews to renovate and rededicate the city's historic Sha'ar Hashamayim synagogue, and those few who remain --- elderly now, and fewer with every year --- live in peace among the teeming multitudes of modern Cairo.

There are even suggestions that the Jewish community in Egypt played their part in having the visit from their Israeli cousins canceled. Once the TV presenter, Amr Adib, had whipped up sentiment in the popular media, maybe it was more trouble than it was worth to host a visit at this moment in time, however anodyne and harmless it seems to us. Adib is, in strict fairness, not plucking the idea of reparations for the stolen property out of thin air. Israel has been known to use these forced "nationalizations" as bargaining chips in negotiations with the Egyptians; it has even been suggested that these assets might be used to offset Palestinian property claims against Israel itself.

Still, there is no evidence whatever that the Israel-Egypt Friendship Association had anything of the sort in mind. These were just a couple of dozen Egyptian Jews --- elderly, too, for the most part --- who wanted to visit the great synagogue, and the tombs of their relatives, once more before their time comes. There may not be that many opportunities for them to come back to the country they never wanted to leave in the first place.

Birthright Palestine: the trip of a lifetimeBirthright Israel has a doppelgänger called Birthright Palestine. The Palestinian program aims to "gather first-generation, western-born Palestinians (over the age of 18-years old) in their ancestral homeland, so that they can reunite and witness firsthand how their brethren are living under illegal Israeli military occupation."

Birthright Palestine participants are offered opportunities to volunteer in Bethlehem, take daily Arabic language classes, engage in cultural events, and party hearty. Although the program mimics the structure of its Jewish, Zionist counterpart almost exactly, there are some fundamental differences between the two. Shocking, I know.

One major difference is that Birthright Palestine doesn't support a two-state solution. Another is that they describe some of their destinations as the "1948 territories, which some people refer to as 'Israel.'" (Emphasis mine.)

Other differences: The Birthright Israel trip is a 10-day gift that covers roundtrip airfare, hotel, transportation, most meals and other associated land costs, while Birthright Palestine requires participants to cover their own airfare and pay approximately $1,000 to $3,000, depending on the length of their stay.

Though the site describes Birthright Palestine as a "concept created by the Palestine Center for National Strategic Studies (PCNSS)–a new non-profit, non-governmental Palestinian organization," the Birthright Palestine domain name is actually registered to Palestinian-American Nader Muaddi at an address in good ol' Pennsylvania, and Muaddi is an alum of the Palestine Summer Encounter–a strikingly similar program.

The first annual Birthright Palestine Program is launching this summer, and in case you're not convinced, more details about the experience can be found here.

[This post by Hinda Mandell is the first in a series of dispatches from Berlin, where she's making good on an international journalism fellowship.]

Ah, to be a Jew in Germany during the High Holidays. It’s filled with so much guilt, symbolism and sausage. My poor mamele.

There is a transfixing quality to Berlin. What is destroyed emerges again – a generalization that can be applied to the living and lived in: people, buildings, and yes, even botany. As I learned on a walking tour today (God bless America and walking tours), the famous boulevard Unter den Linden suffered an aesthetic blow when Hitler ordered the removal of lime trees for which the street is named, to be replaced with a more Fascist look: flagpoles bearing Third Reich swastikas. While the lime trees were subsequently replanted after 12 years of National Socialism, right now they’re still pretty puny looking. And there’s more: The behemoth building that was built to house the Nazi air force known as the Luftwaffe was taken over by Soviets in East Berlin. They transformed it into a government agency espousing propaganda on the opposite end of the ideology spectrum. Today, the building is used by the German government’s Finance Ministry. Talk about recycling.

This takes me back to the High Holidays. A religion that once thrived in Germany, then targeted for annihilation, is now vibrant once more. I geared up for erev Rosh Hashanah by – what else? – checking out the Ritz Carlton at Potsdamer Platz. The now tired chain can be proud of its Berlin manifestation. But exploring the swanky interior soon made me thirsty, and without any water fountains in sight (too low-brow? Too American?) I approached a Ritz Carlton staffer. I said I was parched and he disappeared and then returned with a glass of sparkling water – on a silver platter. They treat Jews well here, I thought.

The Chabad-led service was the real highlight. I might as well have been at an Orthodox outfit back home for all of the crying babies and pre-pubescents who ran through the makeshift shul at the downtown Marriot. Those in attendance comprised a motley Jew-crew of Diaspora tribesmen. Upwards of 85% of the Jewish community in Germany are former Soviet Union Jews whose relation to Judaism was marked by the “J” on their passport and little else. They came to the land of the perpetrators following the collapse of the Soviet Union, because America didn’t want them and they didn’t want Israel. And now – thanks to that “J” and Germany’s interest to nurture a small Jewish community – the FSU Jews are living here as privileged refugees. This means that in addition to government handouts of about 400 euros each month, they also receive government-subsidized housing. This also means that these FSU Jews suffer in reputation. A German-born Jew who works for a government ministry here told me that Russian Jews come to the synagogue only for the free grub.

That wasn’t the case at the Marriot – the only hotel in Berlin with a kosher kitchen, I was told – where I paid heftily. Forty euros (about $65) got me 25 minutes of prayer time, a lamb dinner and a severed fish head in front of my plate. My tablemate, a Brazilian Jew who is an advertising copywriter, was disturbed by something else. “It’s weird hearing a rabbi give a speech [in a language] that Hitler once spoke in,” he said.

That rabbi is none other than Brooklynite Yehuda Teichtel, who recently made headlines when his $6.8 million Jewish community center opened to much fanfare last month. It was reported to be the first such center since the Holocaust. It even boasts a replica of the Wailing Wall made with imported Jerusalem stone. A bit much? For Rabbi Teichtel nothing is too much for reinvigorating Jewish life in Berlin. The rabbi tells our table of American expats, transients and new residents: “That 350 Jews are celebrating Rosh Hashanah just miles away from Hitler’s bunker is amazing.” The bunker, now a gravel-covered parking lot, is around the corner from both the Reichstag parliament and the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. Yeah, talk about symbolism.

We don't often think about Jews in India. Well, I don't anyway. But  two years ago I was at a 20th-Century Literature conference in Louisville, Kentucky, and I discovered some things I didn't know. I had driven down from West Lafayette, Indiana to chair a panel on Philip Roth's literature for a friend of mine. One of the three panel participants was a man from India (who was not Jewish) -- it was his second time in the States, if I remember correctly, and he had made this particular trip just to present a paper on Philip Roth.

Now, if I were making a trip like that, I would wait for a conference to pop up in, say, Boston or New York, or San Francisco or Los Angeles. Can't see making the trip for Louisville. But that's neither here nor there. At any rate, there he was, beaming as he told me about all of his work on Philip Roth and pumped me for information on other Jewish American writers. But, importantly, I learned two things:

1.) Philip Roth is all the rage in India, particularly among non-Jewish people. And who can blame them -- Portnoy is just too irresistable to not get sucked in for the long haul. This Indian gentleman had, indeed, devoted most of his scholarly research to Roth's work, which I thought was really cool, but somewhat surprising -- not that it makes any sense, but I'm always slightly surprised when people outside of the US are scholars of Jewish American or Latino American or any other ethnic American literature.In the beginning there were Jews: Judaism was one of the first religions to arrive in India and assimilate with local traditions.

2.) There is a substantial Jewish community in India, much bigger than most people realize. And I was reminded of this today when I saw an essay over at Nextbook about the writer Sophie Judah from Jabalpur. Her stories deal with the tight-knit Jewish community called Bene Israel, which migrated to Jabalpur from India's southwestern coast in the late-19th century.

Not much fiction has been written about the Bene Israel, and the group's actual history is shrouded in myth. The earliest record of their presence in India, near what is now Mumbai, dates back to the 11th century, but some scholars say that they settled in India earlier, around the second century BCE, when they fled the Assyrian invasion of Galilee. Judah's collection traces a more recent history, proceeding chronologically from the 1930s, when Britain still ruled India; through the Partition of 1947, when India, Pakistan, and what is now Bangladesh became—violently—modern, independent nations; to the present day, when the river in Judah's fictional town has dried up, the Jewish population has nearly disappeared, and the old synagogue has become a pickle and chutney factory. As for the real Jabalpur, where at their peak the Bene Israel numbered about 200, Judah says there are now just four Jewish residents: her cousin, his wife, who converted from Hinduism, her husband's cousin, and his 80-year-old aunt. Judah herself lives in Hod Hasharon, a town in central Israel.

Talk about giving the notion of diaspora a new meaning -- between Jewish diaspora and Partition-related diasporic movements of people, this sounds like a complicated situation. It occurs to me that this is an area of Jewish literature that is yet untapped . . . . and would be a great project. In the meantime, you may find these sites on Jews and India useful:

Jewish India

Jewish Virtual Library

Diaspora Tributes: Just think of all we've given the worldAs a kid, I knew that there were eight days of Passover, just like there were eight days of Chanukah.  It made sense.  In my child-brain, the two seemed to mirror each other.  My two favorite holidays, placeholders in the year.  Latkes and Matzoh, eight days of each.

But then a few years ago, I learned that there are only really supposed to be seven days of Passover.  So I wanted to know why we extended the holiday...  and the answer interests me.  Check it out:

In the 5th century BCE, when Jewish unity was threatened by the exile from Israel, the patriarch Hillel II set a perpetual calendar and instituted an official "Second Day Yom Tov."

They did this even though they themselves had full awareness of the precise dates of all the holidays. The Talmud (Rosh Hashana 25a) already had pinpointed the length of the lunar month as 29.53059 days (later verified by NASA scientists using satellites, hairline telescopes, laser beams and super-computers).

So why was a second day Yom Tov added for all time? In order to make a distinction, to add to the Jewish awareness that one is living in the Diaspora and does not claim permanent residence in the Holy Land.

Hmmm.... it seems to me, thinking about it this morning, that this is something we should actually embrace. 

 Because our second Yom Tov (April 10th this year) doesn't just indicate that we are NOT in Israel... it also indicates where we ARE.  How far we've come.  And that we are a part of our own particular diaspora communities.  For worse, and for better. 

It seems to me that the second Yom Tov might be something we want to find a way to celebrate in a new way.  Since we don't hold a Seder on the last day of Passover, maybe we should do something else. After seven days of eating dry crackers, the bloom is off the rose anyway, and we could use a little bit of fun, a new tradition.

But I think it should be something distinctly Jewish-American, or region-specific. While we're eating our extra pieces of matzoh, maybe we should find some meaning in our diaspora experience, and our "extra day.".  Pay respect to a few hundred years in America, or a few thousand years outside Israel... and take note of all the cultural and historical and artistic moments that have made up the lifetime of that community! 

Maybe for April 10th this year I'll go on a tour of Jewish Atlanta, and  I'll do something southern-Jewish (and Kosher for Passover) for dinner. 

BBQ and borsht, anyone?

Diaspora Jews: Exiles or innovators?JBooks is running a lot of interesting content lately, and I thought you might be interested, in general…

In particular, I thought you might want to read this review of this book, New Jews:The End of the Diaspora. 

Full disclosure: I’ve not read it (yet), but it sounds interesting.  Like something we might want to tussle over here at Faithhacker.

(Speaking of which, do we need a Jewcy Bookclub?  We could do a weekly or monthly discussion online, in a chatroom or something... just a thought )

But to get back to my point!

From the sound of the review… this book suggests that the diaspora is at the center of Jewish life and culture.  Not Israel.  Wow.

From the review:

New Jews is a thoughtful, persuasive case for why the Diaspora matters. That may sound obvious: the “Diaspora,” after all, is where the majority of the world’s Jews live. But as the authors explain, Jews have a tendency to see their world like the old Saul Steinberg cartoon from the New Yorker, with Israel at the center, and a dozen or so less-important islands floating around it. Tilting that map toward “Diaspora” is the mission behind New Jews, which makes the provocative case that the Jewish future lies outside of Israel.

And from the Amazon page:

"New Jews makes the provocative argument that the Israel-Diaspora dichotomy no longer exists. In a series of engaging ethnographies of Jewish communities in America, Russia and Israel, Aviv and Shneer reveal a new generation of Jews embarked on a renaissance liberated from old ideologies and committed to creating homes where they live. A celebration of pluralism, this sure-to-be controversial book finds Jewish unity not in slogans but in the common search for new identities."

For many contemporary Jews, Israel no longer serves as the Promised Land, the center of the Jewish universe and the place of final destination. In New Jews, Caryn Aviv and David Shneer provocatively argue that there is a new generation of Jews who don't consider themselves to be eternally wandering, forever outsiders within their communities and seeking to one day find their homeland. Instead, these New Jews are at home, whether it be in Buenos Aires, San Francisco or Berlin, and are rooted within communities of their own choosing. Aviv and Shneer argue that Jews have come to the end of their diaspora; wandering no more, today's Jews are settled.

Hmmmmm….  I haven’t read it, and I’m not saying I agree.  But hmmmmmm….

American Flag with Bald Eagle: Glorious, but still Treyf.

In the news today, a brief story on the ongoing dialogue concerning whether Israel should/will recognize diaspora conversions.  And yes, the good guys are winning, but I can’t believe we’re still having this conversation. 

I mean, it’s not like this affects the law of return or anything, right? It’s just an issue of whether I count as a Jew.  To a country chock full of completely secular Jews who “count”. 

I, as a diaspora Jew who underwent a conservative conversion, find this dialogue to be inane.

NOT because I think that the religious Jews of Israel are wrong in questioning whether American Jews are up to snuff… Truly, we aren’t, if by “snuff” one means “comparable levels of religious observance”.  American Jews are lazy, by and large. Everyone knows that.  But as I’ve already stated, plenty of Israeli Jews could give a shit about religious observance. That’s not at stake. 

This is just about membership cards.  About whether American rabbis have the right to hand them out.

I think its total crap that there’s such huge pressure placed on American Jewry to support, defend, finance, and recognize Israel as “our homeland.”  But then the legitimacy of our American Jewish institutions is questioned by the country we’re being asked to support.

I feel like we’re either part of the club or we aren’t.  If you want our money, our media, our votes of confidence, than you need to accept that we belong in the club.  And we bring with us a wide range of perspectives… 

Even sometimes a southern drawl.

This is Ashkenazi? According to Google it is!After discussing the dilemma of the words we don't really know the meaning of and the resulting need to go back and re-learn some things, I woke up this morning with the realization that there's a Jewishy word I use without any real background: Ashkenazi.

In my lame-ass understanding of the term, an Ashkenazi Jew is someone whose family:

1. at some point spoke Yiddish

2. lived in Poland or thereabouts

3. looked Hassidic

That's about it for my sense of what that word means. Though if I wrote my own Jewish dictionary, it might say simply Ashkenazic- NOT Sephardic. (another only vaguely understood term... but we'll get to it later)

But then I got to thinking that I have no idea why a bunch of Polish motherfuckers speak German, and I have no idea when they got to where they got, or how long they stayed. Turns out...

... they arrived in northern France (we assume from the middle east) and the Rhineland sometime around 800-1000 CE, the Ashkenazi Jews brought with them both Rabbinic Judaism and the Babylonian Talmudic culture that underlies it. European Jews became called "Ashkenaz" because the main centers of Jewish learning were located in Germany. "Ashkenaz" is a Medieval Hebrew name for Germany.

But they didn't stay forever. It follows that...

With the onset of the Crusades, and the expulsions from England (1290), France (1394), and parts of Germany (1400s), Jewish migration pushed eastward into Poland, Lithuania, and Russia.

So some of these families were in Germany for as long as 700 years, and some as few as 200 years. In most cases, much longer than they were in Poland or wherever, and a helluva lot longer than we've been in the United States so far.

The other question I have about this relates to a rough sense that Sephardic Jews were classier and smarter and better off than Ashkenzic Jews for a long time... but at some point lost their clout. I've heard such rumors, and would like to look into the matter, but this post is already too long.... so maybe after I've had my coffee.

Well, it turns out that our entire conversation about Jewish identity is pointless, since according to Zeev Bielski, "Jews have no future in America and should all move to Israel."

I don't know about you guys, and I don't want to get into a huge political conversation, since that's not really what Faithhacker is all about... but I do want to bring up an interesting element to Zionism-- faith!

I find it curious, the relationship between Israel as a secular/political state, and Israel as a religious covenant.  And I know a lot of people have a blended sense of what Israel is, a sense of Israel as important primarily for what it represents in terms of Jewish safety/security/identity... but who also root that political sense in a mythic collective memory.  Something to do with that bible thing.

But there's another way to think about how Israel is connected to faith.  And that is to say that Israel is resposible for turning a religion of faith and learning into a cultural/national identity, a population now accountable for some awful shit (however cornered Israel may be, it still does nasty things to civilian populations). 

Like the man said, power corrupts.

This book by Douglas Rushkoff is a lot smarter than me on the matter.  But reading it, I found myself thinking about Israel, and the Golden Calf. I found myself thinking that one can (which doesn't mean we should or must, but...) see Israel as a giant SYMBOL for Judaism, that distracts us from what Judaism really is.  Or at least was. 

An issue on which we are all supposed to be so unified, that those of us with mixed feelings go silent.  Negating the amazing dialogue of Jewish tradition. The willingness to argue.  The place of a good paradox in the world.

Which is something I DO have faith in.