?1 Jewish Communal Affairs Department Institute on American Jewish-Israeli Relations
CHARTING THE MINEFIELDS
American Academics and Israelis in Dialogue A Critical Analysis
by Janet Burstein
CM© THE AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE, Institute of Human Relations. 165 East 56 Street. New York. N.Y. 10022 CHARTING THE MINEFIELDS
American Academics and Israelis in Dialogue A Critical Analysis
by Janet Burstein o Contents
Preface v
Author's Foreword vi
Jewish Identity: Psychological, Social Religious and Cultural Dimensions 1
Living as a Minority: The Relationship of Jews •to Non-Jews in Israel and America 4 ״
Religious Nationalism 9
Jewish Secularism and Jewish Continuity 16
Jewish Cultural Creativity 21
Issues in American and Israeli Jewries:
Similarities and Differences 25
Ideas for Cooperative Efforts 30
List of Participants 35 Preface
For the past fifteen years the Jewish Communal Affairs Department of the American Jewish Committee has conducted annual winter seminars in Israel for American Jewish academicians. The purpose of these seminars has been to help Jewish academicians confront their Jewishness, a confrontation which often leads them into involvement with Jewish communal concerns and activities both on and off the campus. Over 275 academicians, from all types of universities and from every part of the country, have participated.
During the last two years the AJC has attempted to maximize the impact of these seminars by conducting follow-up activities with the alumni. One of these activities was a special two week program in Israel. Eight academicians, alumni of previous winter seminars, spent from June 12-June 26, 1984, in intensive dialogues with a variety of representative Israelis.
This special program was jointly sponsored by the Jewish Communal Affairs Department and the Institute on American Jewish-Israeli Rela tions of the American Jewish Committee. Its purpose was to advance mutual understanding between American Jews and Israelis about what they have in common and what, if anything, tends to pull them apart. At the very least, we expected these dialogues to help set an agenda and clarify the issues in Israel-Diaspora relations. We felt that Jewish academicians, who are already familiar with Israel and have a commitment to Jewish life in America, would bring a fresh perspective to the dialogues. This report is a subjective analysis of the sessions by one of the participants.
This publication is a contribution to understanding one of the most momentous issues facing contemporary Jewry: How, after two thousand years of statelessness, to maintain and enhance world Jewish unity through a mutually creative and enriching relationship with Israel.
Bertram H. Gold, Director Yehuda Rosenman, Director Institute on American Jewish- Jewish Communal Affairs Israeli Relations Department
v Author's Foreword
When winter leaves Mt. Hermon, melting snow does strange things to Israeli minefields. Some devices are lifted clear of the earth; some are buried more deeply; and some are carried far from their original beds, becoming threats not only to potential enemies, but also to those who would defend the mountain. Israeli reservists spend months each summer caring for these disturbed minefields. Many of the devices need to be dug up and exploded. All must be located and identified so that accurate records can be kept of their placement, size, and type.
In some ways the American academics who spent two weeks in Israel this Dune attempting to engage Israelis in dialogue reminded me of Israeli reservists clearing and charting the minefields on Mt. Hermon in the summer. We came, like them, to look at half-buried problems. We wanted, like them, to chart and order difficult things that could not always be easily seen. Like them, we did some stumbling around with our fingers crossed. But our efforts, like theirs, were on the whole quite successful.
We didn't always feel successful at the time. But as one replays the tapes of those two weeks one hears acutely the connections, the cruxes, the slippery but potentially fruitful issues which we brought to light, although they often eluded our notice during the program. Distracted by concerns we had brought from home, we sometimes failed to see links between them and the comparatively unfamiliar baggage brought to the table by our Israeli speakers. Preoccupied with the search for substantive issues within the topics formulated for this program, we sometimes missed subtle clues to specific, concrete subjects that touched nerves in both Israeli and American participants. We needed, I think, to hear Israelis react to our problems; thus we sometimes overlooked indications that our reactions were also important to our Israeli counterparts. The tapes suggest that behind the surenesses on both sides--that sounded a little like smugness when we spoke of pluralism, for example, or like rigidity when they spoke of security —there was, is, a mutual need for mutual response that reveals how deep are the ties that bind these two communities.
One is thankful, then, for the privilege of retrospect granted by the taped record and written reports of the seminars. This summary report is the fruit of reflection—of strong experience recollected in » tranquility, to rephrase Wordsworth. I have exercised the privilege of reordering, selecting, and condensing all our words. And I have chosen to leave discussants unnamed except for the presenters in each session and the leader of the program. I hope my colleagues will recognize the figures disclosed by retrospect in the richly patterned fabric of our two weeks around the table in Israel.
vi Jewish Identity: Psychological, Social, Religious and Cultural Dimensions
Thursday, June 14, 1984
Speakers: Dr. Arnold Offner, Boston University
Dr. Simon Herman, Institute for Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University
Dr. Ronald Kronish, Melton Center for Jewish Education in the Diaspora
Dr. Penina Talmon, Institute for Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University
This first morning in Israel, the four hour seminar on identity nearly overwhelmed us with both the variety and the seriousness of the issues it raised. Four presentations bracketed the subject as a whole. Professor Simon Herman laid out guidelines for abstract theoretical consideration of the problem of identity; he tried to teach us how to talk about identity in general, how to ask the right questions. He also raised two provocative specific questions: because Jewish identity exists nowhere in isolation, he said, we always need to imagine a relationship between two sub-identities: we need to conceive the difference, for example, between being Jewish in America and being Jewish in Israel, between American-Jewish and Israeli-Jewish identity. This specific, substantive question would reappear many times in the course of this program and could be fruitfully considered in some future American-Israeli conversation. Professor Herman touched a most sensi tive issue in Israeli-Jewish identity when he described the finding of one American researcher who had questioned children on one kibbutz and discovered that they wished to have no attachment to the history of the Jewish people. A later speaker referred to this problem as the Israeli version of assimilation. Herman is now studying 3700 eleventh graders throughout Israel to test, in part, the validity of the previous small sample.
Professor Arnold Offner's presentation developed the American side of the subject laid out by Professor Herman, describing in detail what American-Jewish identity consisted of for him. He balanced the ad vantages against the "tensions" of being Jewish in America, noting both the Jew's sense of his own strangeness in a "Christian" culture and the tendency to "identify with humankind.. .to represent others and thus to lend dignity to my own and others' lives." Quoting A.J. Heschel, he noted the "moral imperative" felt by Jews to behave as "God's stake in history," promoting "reverential attitudes toward learning, work, law, and justice, and compassion.. .for all." And he mentioned the capacity to speak not only for all humankind but also for Israel as part of the "mission God surely intended for American Jews."
In contrast to the strongly universalist tenor of Offner's remarks, Dr. Penina Talmon spoke from the Israeli side of this single subject by describing what she sees as the most characteristic feature of Jewish identity in Israel at the moment: the split between Ashkenazi and Sephardi cultures. What is happening now in Israel, she said, is that newly created identities are emerging—brought to life by the tension between these two Jewish cultures. She sees an attempt to combine, in the last fifteen years, the secular values that have long been as sociated with the Ashkenazic socialist culture and the traditionalist religious values associated with Sephardi culture.
Finally, Dr. Ronald Kronish's presentation attempted to draw together both sides of the dialogue by framing five categories within which Israeli and American-Jewish identity might be compared. Two resonant points emerged strongly from this paper. Kronish's third category, majority and minority experiences of Jewish identity, raised sensitive issues concerning the cultural contexts in which Jews exist and learn to define themselves as Jews. As Offner had already men tioned, American Jews know minority-ness; we know existentially the lack of a Jewish language and a Jewish calendar as powerful givens in our cultural matrix. Israelis, on the other hand, enjoy the fruits of cultural sovereignty, speaking a language in which Jewish values are implicit and living by the rhythm of the Jewish ritual year. These issues would appear again in both the seminar on minorities and the seminar on cultural creativity; they are clearly seminal issues, but these preliminary dialogues did not explore deeply their specific existential effects on Jewish self-images.
Kronish's final category formulated the most provocative issue raised in this session, an issue that would not be lifted up again, however, until the group's last meeting when two Americans would complaint that the subject had been "prohibited," that they had not felt free to raise or discuss it. Kronish called this issue either theo logical or ideological and named it "the value of the galut." Israelis assume that "being here is a redemptive act," he said. But how do Americans see their existence as Jews? Is there any purpose to Jewish life outside the land? Offner's reference to a "mission theory," he? observed, might shed some light on American notions of Jewish purpose in the diaspora. But no one responded directly—either here or in later sessions--to Kronish's invitation to validate Jewish existence in the diaspora.
In the discussion that followed, attempts to develop connections between Israeli and American perspectives on Jewish identity were secondary to a more general preoccupation with specific problems of assimilation in America. We considered our relative inability to absorb and Judaize elements of the Christian culture because of what Professor Herman called our "inadequate Jewish base": poor Jewish schools, no
2 common Jewish language. Some participants mentioned the growth of the havurah movement and the increase in dayschool enrollment as symptoms of cultural vitality; others cited the low level of ethnic and religious awareness among Jewish college students as evidence of continuing erosion of traditional learning.
The group also considered two other dimensions of the subject of identity that affect both American and Israeli Jews. First, we noted the conflict felt by both Israelis and Americans with respect to what Professor Herman called the "inextricable link" between religious and nationalistic elements of Jewish identity—a link that neither they nor we have either thought through or found a way to live out without discomfort. A later seminar on religious nationalism would consider this issue at length.
Second, Yehuda Rosenman raised the issue of private versus public Jewish identity as a key problem for both Israelis and Americans. Those who emigrate from Israel, like those who intermarry in America, he said, are separating their private choices from their more public Jewish commitments--like belonging to a synagogue or contributing to the U.J.A., or rushing back to rejoin their army units here in the event of an emergency. He explained that because contemporary Jews don't wrestle with the.God question they lack the sense of a transcendant authority that would make it necessary to live Jewishly in both the private and the public areas of one's life. We also suffer, he suggested, from the consequences of classical Reform—which taught us to identify as Jewish only one part of the prophetic legacy and to forget the other part; thus, we embrace the universalist ethics but neglect the passionate nationalism of our own prophetic tradition. Both of these issues called for further discussion by both Americans and Israelis.
3 Living as a Minority: The Relationship of Jews to Non-Jews in Israel and America
Friday, June 15, 1984
Speakers: Dr. Robert G. Weisbord, University of Rhode Island Alouph Hareven, Van Leer Institute
At the Van Leer Institute we encountered one of the most memorable Israeli speakers of the program, whose frankness—though highly provoc ative at the time—engendered in retrospect valuable insight into one persistent theme of the seminars. He spoke to us about Israel's problem with its Arabs, about his own hope for a solution, and about our role as Americans in both the problem and the solution.
Mr. Hareven opened by describing his work on the subject of the Jewish identity of Israel, his sense of that identity as a "pluralistic experience," and his belief that "one of the three or four crucial tests of the Jewish identity of Israel is the relationship between the Jewish majority..•and the Arab minority." Both Jewish values and Jewish history, he said, establish criteria for that relationship. In his view, Jewish values assert the "principle of equality: Equality of men before God and equality before the law."
Israel's Declaration of Independence, he observed, indicates that the state was originally committed to this principle of equality. But "ever since, there has been a deep tension about the application of this principle." For many years, Israeli Arabs lived under a military government which denied them civil equality and which was rooted in an imbalance of power. And even today, Arabs experience various kinds of discrimination: they do not share equally in financial resources, in government benefits, in social and professional status, or in civic responsibility.
Hareven is very disturbed by the Israeli tendency to stereotype all Arabs negatively, and he is devoted to a project of the Van Leer Institute, supported by the Ministry of Education, that will change the attitudes of Jews and Arabs toward one another by adopting a new curriculum in all the public schools in Israel. In his attempts to raise money for the implementation of this new project, however, he was refused support by some important American Jewish organizations, and he has concluded that, with some exceptions, "the American Jewish estab lishment is hostile to any educational effort which concerns peaceful relations between Arabs and Jews." He suspects that "deep in the heart of many American Jews is the wish to inflate themselves because they are a minority in America at the expense of Arabs here, using [Jewish Israelis] as a symbol of identification."
4 He is profoundly troubled by both the persistence of inequality in Israel and the refusal of support by American Jews. And he pleaded with the academics to abandon their neutrality and to speak out against inequality in Israel. Jews established Israel, he concluded, to liberate themselves from powerlessness as a minority. But here they became a majority that "dehumanizes someone else"; "...when you do that," he observed sadly, "you dehumanize yourself at the same time."
Without pausing to let us react to these strong words, the chairman c of this session introduced our next speaker who described and analyzed the tension between two American minorities: Jews and Blacks. Setting this tension within the context of a general decline in American anti-Semitism, Dr. Weisbord attributed Black hostility to Dews to several specific causes. First he cited "unequal status encounters" in the ghettos between Jewish landlords and storekeepers and poor Black customers. Second, he mentioned opposing Black and Jewish positions on affirmative action policies. And third, he discussed "irritations over the Middle East."
Chief among these irritations is Israel's relationship with South Africa; Prime Minister Voerster's visit to Israel, for example, "has been widely denounced by Blacks," Weisbord said. Israel is also accused,! he pointed out, "of military collaboration with South Africa." Blacks also tend to blame Jews for the "ouster of Andrew Young" after his contacts with the PLO, though Weisbord believes "there was no systematic organized Jewish pressure to "get rid of" Young. Finally, Israel's recent refusal to entertain several prominent Black leaders has offended Black sensitivities. Dr. Weisbord concluded by saying that "with the possible exception of Jews, Blacks are the most sensitive people in America."
After the formal presentations, eloquent words were spoken in formally by Omar Othman, headmaster of a high school in a small Arab village that had been partitioned for many years between Jordan and Israel. Othman said simply: "It is not easy to be an Arab in this country." He asserted that Arabs in Israel still lack civic equality and full participation in the government and the society. He said that Israeli Arabs' situation was worst during the fifties when they lived under a military government. In those years he needed to apply each day for a pass to travel from his village to his school. And sometimes when he applied early in the morning, he was detained to clean the police station before the pass was issued. After the fifties Arabs lived under civil law, and their situation improved. But in 1967 Israeli energies were diverted to the new Arab populations in Gaza and the West Bank; the Israelis "have paid less attention to our needs since then," Othman charged.
Othman admitted "there is some conflict" in his sense of himself as both Arab and Israeli. "But we belong here," he said. For example, one of the chief obstacles to full civic participation and equality is the Arab citizen's exclusion from the Israeli Army. But during the '67 war Othman and other Arabs helped the civilian population by delivering
5 bread and farm produce while the Jewish men served in the army. "We can serve the state during war without fighting," he said. Thus he believes some of his conflicts are resolvable.
In response to a question from one of the American participants both Othman and Hareven expressed their belief that negative attitudes could be changed. Othman's school works hard to create such changes, and Hareven argued that two existential processes have already changed the attitudes of Israeli Arabs. One process has made 700,000 Arabs, Israelis: Israeli cultural patterns affect them. Now they are different . from other Arabs. Another process—created by open borders with the West Bank —has strengthened the Palestinian identity of some Israeli Arabs. Moreover, Hareven pointed out, Israeli attitudes can be changed because only one quarter of Israelis are racists; the other three quarters are either ambivalent or liberal. Thus, real antagonism toward Arabs is "thin" —except among racists. Among the remaining 75% of the population you can change attitudes by teaching about and humanizing images of Arabs.
Beyond these absorbing questions of attitudinal and situational changes, discussion lifted up three other focai concerns—one question ing assumptions implicit in our attitudes toward Israel and its Arabs; one pointing back to the previous session on identity; and one looking forward to several other seminars and to future development, perhaps, in a later dialogue.
Perhaps the deepest probing into assumptions and feelings that underlie attitutes toward Arabs and Israelis occurred in an interchange provoked by Yehuda Rosenman. Mr. Rosenman observed that two factors need to be taken into account in any consideration of Israel's treatment of its Arab minority. First, we need to remember that Israel lives in a state of war with Arabs, that this war has existed since the birth of the state, and that in this war Dews are vastly outnumbered—are, in fact, a minority within a huge Arab majority. On this last point, Father Dubois—a Dominican priest who teaches at the Hebrew Univer sity—concurred: "Here," he said, "the Arab minority is seen as part of a huge Arab majority in the area." Second, Mr. Rosenman asked that we compare Israel's treatment of its Arabs with the treatment accorded other minority groups by their host countries.
Both suggestions were hotly contested by several participants. Hareven rejected the first suggestion because he believes one must 0 differentiate carefully among those Arabs who are and those who are not now at war with Israel. "A world of permanent war," he said, "is simpler than the world we really live in," in which some Arab neigh bors—Egyptian, Jordanian, Lebanese, Druse, even some Palestinians—and some Israeli Arabs as well exist in a state of "working peace" with Israel. More vehement objections came from several participants who insisted that comparisons are inappropriate because "Israel is supposed to be different and better." The double standard by which judgments of Israel are so often shaped has rarely been more explicitly set forth. Although no one at this session questioned or explored further the roots
6 of this assumption or the ways in which it modifies attitudes, both subjects might fruitfully be explored further by Americans and Israelis.
The question of identity, rather than attitude, emerged most vividly in a cluster of comments about the Israeli vision of future relations between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority here. In the U.S., one participant observed, "all are ethnics"--removed from their cultural roots, embraced by their common identity as Americans, an identity that transcends ethnicity. Can an "Israeli" identity transcend c Arab and Jewish identities in a similar way? Would such a vision imply fuller integration? Racial mixing? To this question both Othman and Hareven responded in terms that recalled Penina Talmon's observations at an earlier session. Both Israelis described their vision of a "multi cultural society" in which different groups "will remain different, but will live together comfortably with their own languages and cultures." Talmon had also stressed cultural differentiation, but she had looked forward to new cultural syntheses in Israel—"new identities" emerging out of the ethnic mixing of different kinds of Jews within the state. Clearly, the kind of permanent separation between Jews and Arabs envisioned by both Othman and Hareven should raise some questions in the minds of Americans, should at least stir our recollection of our own lost confidence in the notion we called "separate but equal" twenty years ago. Perhaps this subject, too, needs to be examined more carefully.
Finally, the comments by Aiouph Hareven about the attitudes and motives of American Jews stirred up more response than any other single issue at this session. One participant simply denied the accuracy of Hareven's stereotypes. Another questioned the so-called "neutrality" of American Jewish academics, pointing out that it is easier, given the minority status of Jewish faculty on non-Jewish campuses, to be critical of Israel's treatment of its Arabs--as Hareven was requesting—than to be either neutral or supportive on this issue. Still another pointed out that recent polls showed establishment Jews as actually more tolerant than non-establishment Jews of liberal attitudes toward Arabs.
Hareven responded in several ways. First, he was not interested in considering the effect of minority status on the attitudes of American Jews: "that is your problem," he said flatly. Like other Israelis we encountered at kibbutz and elsewhere in these sessions, Hareven said it was essential that Americans enter a "dialogue" with Israelis about what "is essential to our [Israeli] identity." But the questions raised by American-Jewish identity —so crucial to any balanced dialogical en counter--seem ed to him, as to several other Israelis, negligible. Perhaps, irrelevant. This apparent lack of Israeli interest in Amer ican-Jewish affairs and problems suggested that mutuality might be one important subject for a future agenda.
Hareven also explained that the key to understanding Israeli treatment of Arabs might be difficult for American Jews to grasp because it was fashioned by a people "strong enough to live as we wish, accord ing to the values we choose to adopt"—a people "sovereign" in matters
7 of behavior. Israelis, he said, are strong enough to trust Arabs and to defend themselves if that trust is betrayed. "One cannot relate to our problem," he warned, "from a diaspora perspective." And he expressed the hope that the present conversation would be "only the beginning of a dialogue."
Thus the issue of sovereignty, raised with respect to identity in the previous session and reiterated emphatically in this second dia logue, appeared as both a major obstacle to initial mutual understanding and a fascinating problem that calls for further examination in a political and ethnic as well as a social and cultural context. The effects of sovereignty on attitudes, images, and judgments of ail kinds needs to be looked at more carefully. We would stumble into this issue again in sessions on cultural creativity, religious nationalism, secularism, and Jewish destiny. And beneath the frustration provoked each time by its reappearance one begins to discern the outline of a subject significant enough to dominate a series of future dialogues.
A final, retrospective word needs to be said about Hareven's initial presentation. At the time, one could not mistake the strong, deep commitment of this man to the curricular project he described for us; nor could one overlook his anger toward both the American Jewish establishment and the neutral American Jewish academic. But only in retrospect can one see clearly the connection between the commitment and the anger and discern the issue beneath that connection.
Hareven made the connection explicit at the outset, by saying that Israel's treatment of its Arab minority is "one of the three or four crucial tests of the Jewish identity" of the state. Like the existen tialists who have taught that our acts define us more firmly than our beliefs or wishes or memories, Hareven was articulating for us his own belief in the existential link between what we do and what we are. And given that belief, the refusal to support a program that could change Israeli attitudes—and thus Israeli behavior—toward Arabs becomes very serious indeed, for it obstructs the process of Jewish self-definition in which the state is involved. At this early seminar we were not yet sensitive to the immense gravity of this process in the minds of Israelis. But after two weeks of hearing artists and kibbutzniks, academics and civil servants speak of their own identical concern with what being Jewish means--for both individuals and the state—one can understand more fully the intensity of Hareven's feeling. Perhaps that intensity and the persistence with which this issue arises suggests that it should be considered more deliberately in some future conversation.
8 Religious Nationalism
Sunday, Dune 17, 1984
Speakers: Dr. Gerold Auerbach, Wellesley College
Dr. N. Gordon Levin, Gr., Amherst College
Dr. Mordecai Nissan, Hebrew University
Yehuda Frankel, Oz v'Shalom
Mordecai Bar-Oz, Student, Gush Etzion
For this difficult session we travelled to a yeshiva, Gush Etzion, where we listened to six speakers develop six perspectives on political questions raised specifically by Israel's claim to the West Bank, and on moral ,and philosophical questions provoked in general by religious nationhood. The difficulty of this session rested partly in the complexity of the issues: at the nexus of history, politics, morality, and faith one finds few simple answers. But beyond the issues, strong commitments to differing value systems and incompatible modes of discourse made of the discussion a kind of prism that splintered complex issues into fragments--each fragment keeping its own, irreducible integrity, each apparently unreconcilable with the whole from which it had been split.
On the surface of the session, both the formal presentations and the informal discussion broke readily into two categories: in one camp were advocates and in the other, opponents of Israel's rights to the West Bank territories. Two formal presentations by Gerry Auerbach of Wellesley and Mordecai Nissan of Hebrew University developed the advocates' argument.
Auerbach argued that the controversial settlements were justified by the Biblical covenant, by the connection between the land and Gewish identity, and by the function of Gudea and Samaria as links between contemporary Gews and the patriarchs. The covenantai relationship between land and identity, he observed, was crucial—as both Simon Herman and Father Dubois had noted in earlier sessions. Thus in Auerbach's view, the settlements "are expressive of certain very basic, indeed, primal connections between religion, Gudaism, nationality, [and] land...." Moreover, the "settlement of the land," in his opinion, "was never conditional upon the absence of others."
9 He attributed American objections to the settlements to three main causes. First, "it is very difficult for American 3ews not to...impose their own values of compromise and moderation on another culture... •In the United States.. .everything is tolerated. In large part.. .because nothing really matters very much, and the political range of difference is very, very narrow." Then too, Auerbach suspected that Americans are not only reluctant to oppose their government's objections to the settlements but also are reenacting toward the post '67 settlements "something of the discomfort" that they displayed toward the Yishuv.. .before 1947." Only if Jews give up their claims to the land, to their identity as a people, he concluded, can the problem of the settlements disappear.
After Auerbach, Nissan spoke about the primacy and separateness of the Jewish world, about the "tension" between Jewish and democratic values in the state, and about the absence in Judaism of any tradition of equality between Jews and non-Jews.
Because, in Nissan's view, Zionism is both a separatist and an international movement, Israel is experiencing a tension between asserting "Jewish sovereignty independent of the nations of the world" and also "seeking a way to resume Jewish national participation amongst the nations of the world." Because this is "a democratic age," more over, Zionism is not entirely "in tune" with its era. Thus, Jews must choose whether to "cull [their] values from their own tradition .. •or ••• •f rom the western democratic tradition."
He argued emphatically for the first of these options. •According to Jewish tradition, he pointed out, Jews possess not just faith but "truth," and thus "bear themselves as an aristocratic people amongst the nations" in a democratic age. Indeed, even other nations have affirmed the "truth of our people" by honoring certain values drawn from our Bible. Thus Jews don't need John Stuart Mill, for example, to discover the value of "sensitivity to one's neighbor." They can find this value in their own tradition, and Israelis—like every other sovereign people—have both the "right and the obligation" to draw upon their own "history and culture to set the criteria for [their] national policies."
Not all Jewish values, however, are entirely consonant with the values of the western democratic tradition represented by John Stuart Mill. Realistically, he said, one must recognize that "straightforward equality is not part of the Jewish tradition in the relations between^ Jews and non-Jews." And intercourse between Israel and the rest of the world will improve, he believes, when Jews recognize this fact of their tradition and when other nations rise to the "spiritual, intellectual, and moral levels that the Jewish people are at least trying to attain."
In direct opposition to these arguments we heard a presentation by a young Orthodox Israeli, Yehuda Frankel, who represented Oz v'Shalom, an organization of religious Israelis who oppose Gush Emunim. Mr. Frankel attempted to rebut several issues raised by Auerbach and Nissan.
10 He agreed with Auerbach that land was a crucial element in his identity. But Torah and "the people," he said, are more important than land. Moreover, the land is important chiefly because it "allows me to fulfill more of what is written in the five books of Moses...to bring my morals, my ideals into a police force, into the army, into all that a nation has, that a person has not." These ideals, he continued, have been shaped by traditional texts that justify military action prin cipally as "a theological defense" against paganism. The five books of Moses, then, do not in Frankel's view condone acts aginst non-Jews for political, or strategic, or security purposes.
Moreover, he said, the Bible's God is righteous, and more modern Jewish texts like the Kuzari insist that Jews are distinguished by their non-violence—not because they have long been powerless, but because their religion leads them toward righteousness. Thus, for Frankei, tradition does not condone different treatment for Dews and non-Jews, does not entitle the Jew to judge the non-dew, does not justify ex pulsion of or violence toward non-Oews. He seeks a "kind of compromise" with Arabs "on the basis of Jewish morality."
In retrospect, Frankel's words clarify three underlying issues that became, as discussion progressed, more prominent and more intractable than the initial subjects of this dialogue. First, Frankei illuminated the problem of definition implicit in any discussion that invokes as complex a phenomenon as religious tradition. Drawing his support from the same texts and body of traditions that Auerbach and Nissan had cited, Frankei reached entirely different conclusions. Thus he demon strated hermeneutical options denied by the earlier speakers, but most welcome to the other participants.
Auerbach and Nissan had boldly sketched an image of "traditional Jewish values" that was simply not consonant with—nor even acceptable to—the images cherished by virtually all the other participants in this session. Consequently, although one or two Americans sought through their questions to pursue the problem of territories, most comments contested the image of Jewishness offered by the advocates of Gush Emunim.
That image was problematic for us in many ways. Both advocates had set possession of the land and dominance within it above values like "moderation," "fairness," and "compromise" which other participants esteemed highly. Auerbach, for example, had denigrated "compromise" by suggesting that it implied lack of commitment. In discussion Nissan also denied the vaiue of compromise by insisting that Jerusalem was, on the metaphysical plane, a place of "truth" -- not of compromise: the Jews, he believed, were possessed of a higher truth than that given to other peoples. He denied the virtues of democracy by asserting the Jewish right to supremacy in this land. He diminished the value of fairness and compassion by arguing for a dual standard: "what's good for an individual is not always good for a state," he said; pity and compassion, for example, are individual virtues in the eyes of Jewish tradition, but the protection of national dignity is more important for
11 those who represent the state. Asked whether there was halachic support for that double moral standard, Nissan responded that Biblical com mentators criticized King Saul for showing mercy to an individual enemy, for such behavior was not considered appropriate for a king.
On the whole, this version of Jewish tradition was unacceptable to most of the participants. One American argued that Nissan was simply wrong about the Jews' superiority to other peoples. "We're not only not different," he said; "we're not any better. Now that we have some power we're showing the world that we're like everybody else."
This speaker, like two of his American colleagues, questioned not only the superiority of the Jews but also the adequacy of the standards Nissan and Auerbach had described as traditionally Jewish. "I am disturbed to hear compromise, moderation, and tolerance described as negatives," he said; "it strikes me that what is really needed in the Middle East is a greater emphasis on the values of moderation and fair play." Another American was "struck by the failure to speak of the consequences of fundamentalist thought. If the Bible justifies in corporation of the West Bank," he observed, "why doesn't it justify Jewish terrorism? Where are the limits? Where do they come from? The arguments we have heard lead to a form of Jewish fascism."
Despite these objections, however, Nissan refused to modulate his views or even to acknowledge the validity of our reservations. He did not apologize for his elitism: "we live in a time when strong faith and deep commitment are not popular," he said: "they rub against democratic sensitivities." And he did not take seriously our concern that funda mentalist thought was intrinsically dangerous; indeed, he saw our identification of Khomeinism and Gush ideology as "an intellectual failure."
One facet of this session's discussion, then, developed a dimension of the theme of Jewish identity that had not been explored at the earlier meeting on that subject and would not even be clearly formulated until the last day of the program. Near the end of this session, Gordon Levin posed the question that seemed most urgent in the day's dis cussion: he said, simply, "who is to define what 'Jewish' means?" Ten days later in Jerusalem, Gideon Shimoni would respond—without having heard the question: "To make out that there is a Jewish tradition which is one monolithic thing...is a terrible over-simplification; the essence of a tradition in any culture is that the tradition continues to contend, dialectically, with the abiding human dilemmas." In Judaism, "contending with the basic human issues means a whole range of options which we have to confront."
In this clear denial that Jewish tradition can be understood to present simple, univocal truths, one recognizes the second underlying issue of this dialogue. Two presentations developed in very different ways the demand that we acknowledge and develop more fully our tolerance for ambivalence, complexity, and conflict. First, Gordon Levin of Amherst College set the problem of Judea and Samaria within the context
12 of the history of Zionism.
Dr. Levin described, first, the argument that "the question of settlements...represents a fundamental divide in Zionist history and values. From one perspective, the pre-1967 partition concept has given way to "a notion of total claims on both sides of all the land west of the Jordan River." Moreover, one could argue that "since '67 there has been a movement away from the fortuitous fusion of Jewishness and democracy which existed pre '67." This fusion was possible then because few Arabs resided in the State; within the borders of a post '67 Israel, the large number of Arabs makes such a fusion impossible.
From another point of view, however, one could argue that "the settlement policy...of the Israeli, government since 1967 has not represented a fundamental change in Israeli historical traditions." There never was a real consensus for partition; always, tacitly, Ben Gurion accepted what he could get at the time and hoped the boundaries could be moved out later on. Furthermore, if the Bible legitimates Israeli settlement in Haifa, it legitimates settlement in Hebron as well. Finally, the democratic nature of the state is as questionable before as after 1967; in the mandate years, Jewish settlement took place against the wishes of the majority Arab population. And where the issue of force is concerned, in 1949, "some portion" of Israel's Arabs "fled and some portion was expelled." Always, then, the state's commitment to equality and democratic process can be seen as ambiguous.
That ambiguity, however, is common also to our own historical experience as Americans. Our land was also not open; it was seized from an indigenous population by force. Thus we cannot resolve the question of the settlement either by recourse to the Jewish or the American past. Levin proposed that only by combining present values and prudence can one resolve the question, can one "conclude that enough is enough." Given the economic and political costs of the settlements as well as the "continuing moral dilemmas" they create, Levin would recommend a "freeze...pending reflection..•and the possibility of negotiation."
Acknowledging the complexity of the issue by developing two incompatible historical arguments and by introducing, finally, a non-historical caveat into a strictly historical analysis, Levin's paper neither advocated nor opposed, but moved between the two fixed posi tions—indicating, indirectly, the inadequacy of fixed positions and simple truths in the presence of such complex issues.
The final speaker, a former member of the Gush Emunim movement who was now a student at Gush Etzion, pointed even more directly to the danger of simple truths by describing the failures of the educational system of Gush Emunim. In that movement he had been taught as a child one simple truth: that "wholeness" (shlemut) was the most precious attribute of a man, of the land, of the Torah. There must be no inner division, no compromise. He had been comfortable with that idea until he went into the army and confronted, through the return of Yamit to Egypt, complex events for which his education had not prepared him.
13 Mordechai Bar-Oz, the boy who had been schooled by the Gush to deny conflict, confronted at Yamit serious conflict for the first time in his life. He recognized there two equally compelling values in conflict: the value of holding the land, and the value of a period of peace with Egypt if the land were returned. "I feel that conflict," he confessed. "I also feel the conflict aroused by my Arab neighbors who say this Yeshiva shouldn't be here. And I feel a very big conflict about Lebanon as well." The Gush Emunim education, he concluded, was too simplistic: it recognized only one alternative when there were "always two" to be recognized. He also believed this mode of education was terribly dangerous, for he saw the Jewish underground as one of the consequences of this sort of educational training.
As the session ended, Frankel also emphasized the complexity denied by simplistic readings of the Jewish tradition. "Halacha offers us different answers to questions," he said, "and I have to decide between them." For example, the tradition describes human beings in many different ways and thus affects the way we see one another. It teaches both that "all non-Jews are like donkeys," and that "all men are created in God's image." Thus the same tradition offers "not only one way of seeing things," but several ways; one must choose among them. Moreover, he said, "Judaism has always honored differences of opinion." But today, he reportedly sadly, there is "no room for differences. When I disagree I am called 'out of the tradition."1
Many of us shared this sadness, for we too had been treated in this session as though we were "out of the tradition." We had been unable, because of our own educational training, to argue our own definitions of Judaism based on our readings of traditional texts. But we cared nonetheless that the argument should continue so that in its ebb and flow we might place ourselves more comfortably within the boundaries of "Jewishness." And in this simultaneous inability and desire, one suspects, lay the third underlying issue of this session.
One sees this issue most clearly in the painful distinction between argument and dialogue manque'. When we arrived at Gush Etzion we were not unprepared for differences of opinion. But one suspects we didn't anticipate the major difficulty of the session: the disjunction between two modes of discourse that could not be drawn into any dialogic connection. We spoke always from the matrix of moral, philosophical,
historical understandings that nourish our intellectual and culturalc lives. But both the advocates and the opponents of Gush Emunim argued from interpretations of Jewish texts: the ambiance in which they pursue their intellectual and cultural lives. Though they disagreed, they could speak to one another. But because those texts exist only at the margins of our intellectual concerns, we could not enter their con versations. Nor could they respond fully to our arguments. Like gears spinning--unengaged—so that the engine cannot start, they and we could not create dialogue because the logic of our different modes of dis course prevented us from engaging one another•• We discounted Nissan's citation of John Stuart Mill because it was inconsistent with his
14 reliance on religious values as he formulated them; and Nissan simply rejected our insistence on democratic values because we could not locate them in traditional Jewish texts.
One cannot imagine how this difficulty may be overcome—however great the desire or deep the need. But on the last day of the program Jerry Auerbach made a plea that might also suggest a remedy. He argued that Gush ideology is not separate—but connected with both classical 0Zionism and historic Judaism. "It seems to me," he said, "that to miss those connections is to fail to understand one side of a central debate in Israel right now about the nature of Jewish identity."
The need to perceive subtle connections between apparently un related phenomena is, of course, crucial to intellectual growth; one's sense of what is Jewish can only benefit, as Auerbach suggests, from the attempt to conceive a spectrum of Jewish identity on which both Gush Emunim and Shalom Achshav have a place. But perhaps that movement toward inclusiveness might be extended also to embrace the differing modes of discourse that failed to engage one another at Gush Etzion. Perhaps if one could identify connections between the ancient tradition in which we are rooted and the more modern texts that have shaped our contemporary Jewish self-images, one might see more clearly a way that would lead to fruitful dialogue.
15 Jewish Secularism and Jewish Continuity
Wednesday, June 20, 1984
Speakers: Dr. Penina Glazer, Hampshire College
Mr. Avraham Shenker, Department of Development and Community Services, WZO
Rabbi Moshe Edelman, Bureau of Cultural Services to Communities, WZO
Rabbi Moshe Zemmer, Israel Council of Progressive Rabbis
The presentations in this session probed the value of secularism from an American point of view and the problem of religion from an Israeli point of view. First, Avraham Shenker argued the need to take secularism seriously, opening with brief biographical comments that put his own philosophical commitment into an appropriate context. He emphasized both his Orthodox and his Zionist background as •veil as his mature commitment as a "distinct and conscious....Jewish secularist." He cited statistics to indicate the increasing number of American-Jewish secularists, insisting that they should be recognized as a distinct and important group together with the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform movements.
He described secularism, citing Daniel Elazar and Jonathan Woocher, as a "civil religion" whose values are less religious than moral, historical, and social. Among these values Shenker cited "respon sibility to other Jews," "the validity of Jewish tradition" (though "tradition" is not definable in this context), belief in the "unity and distinctiveness of the Jewish people," and "preoccupation with anti- Semitism." Such values, he said, were the basis for many people's Jewish identity.
He argued also two other points. First, he suggested that Zionism should be seen not narrowly—as related chiefly to a return to the land, but more broadly—as an attempt by "Jews who no longer found religion a common denominator to find a way in which they could remain...within the Jewish community." Second, he spoke for a return to pluralism as a norm within the Jewish community, and for the legitimization of secularists within the pluralism of Jewish life.
Dr. Penina Glazer's remarks enlarged on the context in which secularism might be seen, by insisting on the need to maintain a creative tension between it and Orthodoxy. She observed that a secular ist orientation is natural in our time, for the "ideas of science, secular literature [and] nationalism..•have so dominated the modern mind
16 that it is inconceivable for most of us to imagine a non-secular world. And to imagine ourselves in it." Thus most Dews need to ask how religion can respond to the forces of modern secularism.
She described several kinds of responses to this question: First, the kind of dualism that accepted incompatible religious and scientific truths without attempting to reconcile them--like children in a school, who learn about Genesis on one side of the hall and Darwin on the other; second, the attempt to make religion accommodate itself to contemporary secular demands. She sees such accommodation in the emphasis on uni versal values of the Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative movements. Third, the rejection of a religious past through inter marriage and/or assimilation. And fourth, the attempt to identify in a secular way with Judaism —as Mr. Shenker described it in the Zionist movement, or as one sees it in various forms of cultural Judaism.
All of these responses, she pointed out, are problematical. But she believes that, despite the problems engendered by an attempt to find a rapprochement between religion and the secular world, such an attempt is "necessary," for neither Orthodoxy nor secularism is entirely adequate to the needs of modern dews. In her view, "Orthodoxy isolates.. .people and makes it very difficult to live in the modern world"; secularism, on the other hand, "tends to cut people off from their historic past...and doesn't*..have the staying power of religious institutions."
In the Conservative movement's response to the challenge of feminism, and in the creation of the National Yiddish Book Center, Dr. Glazer described the kinds of creative institutional responses to modern needs that must be made if Jews will continue to "face the major cultural, political, and social issues within a Jewish context." Looking, in conclusion, at the present rather than the past or future, Dr. Glazer closed with a question about the way one might build bridges between the religious and non-religious communities in both Israel and America.
The next two talks highlighted the absence of bridges, for after the two papers on secularism two Israeli rabbis—one Orthodox and one Reform — spoke briefly from a non-secularist Israeli perspective. Ironically, neither speaker addressed directly either the merits or the defects of secularism. Instead, both presentations led the group to consider problems and possibilities specific to religious life in Israel. Rabbi Moshe Edeiman, for example, described the conflict he experienced as a religious Jew, committed by his youth and education in Denmark to an Orthodox way of life. When he came to Israel, he said, he wanted a "normal, western way of life,"—a "secular" life. But he also wanted to "live the way of the Jewish religion" which is, he believes, "the only way to continue Jewish history." People who come to Israel, he insisted, "come to live a full Jewish life." Thus despite contro versies among the religious —like those currently swirling around the activities of the "Jewish terrorist underground,"--the community of Israel must live within Orthodoxy. An Orthodox Israeli soldier, he pointed out, must be able to "find kosher food everywhere."
17 Questioned repeatedly about the coerciveness of the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel, Rabbi Edelman insisted that "stone throwers" do not represent Orthodoxy. But he wished that all Jews in Israel would simply accept the givens that accompany life in a Jewish state. When the cinema in Petach Tikvah is declared by law to be open on Shabbat, for example, Edelman believes the rabbinate must react against that declara tion in order to preserve the Shabbat. But in many places cinemas play on Shabbat and the rabbis simply don't take notice. There is no coerciveness, he said; only a big community here in which ail are brethren, responsible for and to one another.
Mr. Shenker objected strongly to this argument, suggesting that the closing of cinemas in Petach Tikvah would not only violate the demo cratic principle of majority rule, but also substitute a question of ritual for a more important question of content: a secularist, he said, would want to consider the value of operating radio stations and cinemas in a Jewish state on Shabbat in order to deal with subjects of Jewish importance. In this exchange one could see clearly the lines that divide religious from non-religious folk in Israel—lines that determine not only different opinions but entirely different formulations of issues and different ways of approaching them. When later discussion lifted up the need cited by Professor Glazer, to build bridges between secularists and religious, this exchange demonstrated amply some of the reasons why this need is so hard to satisfy.
Rabbi Moshe Zemmer of the Reform movement criticized not only the exclusivity of Orthodox control of religious life in Israel, *but also the failure of the Orthodox to provide moral and spiritual leadership. Zemmer asserted that Israelis have grown distant from synagogue and rabbinate because neither rabbis nor the synagogue have demonstrated their importance to living a full Jewish life. In Israel, he charged, there is a polarization rather than pluralism: a rigid orthodoxy in control, an apathetic secularism unrelated to Jewish tradition, and a "huge spiritual no-man's land in between." He believes there would be fewer secularists in Israel if there were alternatives to Orthodoxy. And he complained bitterly about the silence of the Orthodox rabbinate in matters of moral and spiritual importance.' "We don't need a Sanhedrin to say it's not Jewish to throw stones—especially on Shabbat. But the Chief Rabbinate is silent on this issue," he said; "here we have religion related only to ritual life, detached from spiritual and moral life."
Rabbi Edelman responded that European rabbis are contractually obliged to rule only on ritual matters. "Why must Orthodox rabbis give spiritual guidance?" he asked. "All elements of the community," he argued, "must sit down together" to work out solutions to moral problems.
Avraham Shenker's response to the problem of moral leadership came surprisingly close to Rabbi Edelman's. Shenker observed that the rabbi is not the "respository of moral values"; "the whole community is the
18 maker of moral norms," he said, "and the bearer of Jewish traditions." Thus, he argued, secular communal institutions play a vital role in linking religious and non-religious elements in the community, so that the voice of the whole community may emerge.
One suspects that the source of moral leadership may be an issue on which both Israelis and Americans could usefully talk further. Mr. Shenker's confidence in secular institutions to perform this function, however, was not echoed by many of the American participants. Ques tioned about the ideological "substance" of secularism, Mr. Shenker could cite no one more recent than the classical Zionist writer Ahad Ha- ,Am, who believed that a secularist culture would draw "out of tradition that which is compatible with modernism, humanism." But others spoke of the "spiritual exhaustion" of secular Zionism, of the need for secular institutions to confront the questions raised by religious history, of the need for renewal within secular institutions, and of the failure of secularism to sustain Jewish continuity.
Still others wondered more specifically whether the Federations and other secular communal organizations in the diaspora could really serve as sources of moral or ideological leadership when their goals are so thoroughly pragmatic. Yehuda Rosenman observed that secular Jewishness has "rjothing to transmit to future generations"; indeed, he charged, many children of Federation leaders in the States are assimilating. Thus the UJA doesn't seem to be an effective substitute for an "internalized Jewish identity," he concluded.
Clearly, both the "how" and the "what" questions raised by secular ism are as important now to both Israelis and Americans as the moral, theoretical and ideological questions that rise from this subject. Several speakers looked to secular institutions to perform specific functions within the community: to connect religious with non-religious Jews, to offer moral leadership, to help tradition adapt to modernity, to offer a Jewish base for modern men and women who are alienated or estranged from religious belief. But, with a few small exceptions, no one could imagine ways in which these necessary functions could be performed--or conceive institutions capable of performing them on a scale large enough to counteract the spreading effects of assimilation in America or of religious dominance and polarization in Israel.
More moving, perhaps, was the muted but profound personal question raised by secularism: how can one be a secular Jew, or as one artist put it at a later session: what does it mean to be a secular Jew? These are intensely felt concerns voiced by Israelis at kibbutz, by artists at the Jaffa seminar on culture, and by individuals in many different social situations this summer. Many American Jews, of course, are asking exactly the same questions. Beneath them may lie a common concern for Jewish survival, for continuity. But more likely, one suspects, the deeper motives are not historical, philosophical, or sociological—but existential.
19 Perhaps in a time when many of us feel estranged from traditional beliefs and observances, when lighting candles or blessing the wine or praying three times a day no longer serves to express our sense of ourselves as Dews, both Israelis and Americans need to talk about ways of living Oewishly, of being Oewish. If so, then the issue of secular ism would need to be reformulated in future conversations, to emphasize the specific personal questions embedded in it and to provoke thought about pragmatic communal responses to the felt needs of individual modern 3ews.
20 Jewish Cultural Creativity
Friday, Dune 22, 1984
Speaker: Dr. Janet Burstein, Drew University
Israeli guest artists: Dov Seltzer, composer; Zvi Avni, composer; Arthur Goldreich, architect and professor at Bezalel; Daniel Reisinger, graphic artist.
For this seminar on Jewish cultural creativity we travelled to old Jaffa where the academics met, informally at first, with four Israeli artists on the splendid rooftop terrace of the Horace Richter gallery. One of these informal conversations led naturally into the seminar itself. Before the session began, Dov Seltzer conjured up three important issues of the session by describing from his own experience the curious blend of parochial and international influences that work on Israeli artists who enjoy, as he does, freedom to travel and rootedness in a Jewish culture. The tension he felt between Jewish and non-Jewish influences on his work, his concern with the effects on art of life in Israel, his determination to acquire worldliness and sophistication in his work without sacrificing the cultural security of living within a Jewish matrix—these subjects were central to this dialogue.
Dr. Janet Burstein opened the formal session by setting forth the problem of culture in general and of Jewish culture in particular. We need to see culture as a kind of lens, she suggested, for the world we see is always modified by the culture through which we perceive it. And we need to recognize our dependence on culture, for it "tells us not only what the world is, but also who and what we are, and how we're doing." Thus, when cultural signs are weak or confused in their media tion of experience, we lose our sense of place, of function, of role -- in short, our grasp of our own identity.
For Jews, she continued, this dependence on culture has been problematical since the haskalah, for traditional Jewish culture since that time has been diluted by alien cultures. And to this problem of Jewish culture, three voices have offered solutions that do not promise to satisfy our need. First, Ahad Ha'Am, whose classically Zionist solution is resonant still in many contemporary writings, argued that only the renewal of Jewish culture in the homeland could sustain the vitality of a culturally weakened diaspora. But, Burstein observed, we have today such a renewal in Israel, and "we are not always nourished Jewishly by it because Israeli art is not always recognizably Jewish or fully accessible to a diaspora audience" unfamiliar with traditional images and the Hebrew language.
A second response to the problem of diaspora Jewish culture was offered in 1969 by George Steiner, who argued that the very afflictions
21 Dews suffered in the gaiut engendered their astonishing creativity. Political impotence, social and cultural marginality, Steiner insisted, have freed Jews of the restrictions imposed by a shared language, by traditional religion, and by nationalistic allegiances. And the tensions and ironies of their liberated, universalist condition have become symbolic of the human condition in general. Thus Marx, Freud, Levi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky are "fruits of our malaise in an alien world."
One vivid reaction to Steiner's thesis, Burstein suggested, appears in Bernard Malamud's most recent novel. Maiamud's early protagonists fulfill all of Steiner's requirements, but the latest novel reveals the hopelessly repetitive self-destructiveness of universalist optimism in a world that neither understands nor sympathizes with it. As the world begins again after a nuclear war, Maiamud's most recent hero, a Jewish universalist named Calvin Cohn, is murdered by non-Oews he has tried to befriend.
Maiamud's apparent withdrawal from the qualified universalist optimism of his earlier work, The Assistant, into a rather dark paroch ialism is amplified by Cynthia Ozick, who calls repeatedly on diaspora artists to fashion a specifically Jewish art. Such an art, she says, will command the moral imagination and speak in a communal voice. It will also fuse traditionally Jewish ideas with ideas drawn from the surrounding culture. Burstein questioned, however, both the wisdom and the efficacy of making such demands on artists. She believes that "we are alienated by languagelessness from recognizably Jewish Israeli artists like Agnon; alienated by fear of assimilation from native American cultural influences; and alienated by distance and ignorance from traditional Jewish sources. And I'm not sure where we go from here," she concluded.
In response to this paper, each artist spoke briefly; their responses—though consistently personal and deeply engaged—reflected a surprising measure of agreement. All, for example, rejected the demand to create a Jewish art according to prescription. Partly, as one would expect, they resisted the notion of binding artists by systematic demands. But their more important reservations were rooted in the nexus of culture and Jewish identity that Burstein had described. They all felt uneasy about attempting to create a Jewish art because they felt profound uncertainty about the meaning and nature of Jewishness itself.» Dan Reisinger, for example, asserted that Israelis don't know yet "who we are"; "we know what shtetl Jewishness is," Selzer observed, "but we don't know yet what Israeli Jewishness is." Zvi Avni too believed that no one knows now "what it means to be an Israeli, nor what is the spiritual connection between Israeli and Jewish; we will disappoint you if you look to us for answers," he said. Arthur Goldreich agreed: it may be cold comfort, he said, but "your dilemma is ours too; we are all refugees, distant from our heritage."
Beyond this strong, initial sense of shared uncertainty about what "Jewish" means in our time, the artists noted that Israelis are, as Ahad
22 Ha'Am predicted, probably better situated than diaspora Oews to work on that question. Seltzer said, "outside Israel, Oewish artists need Oewish subjects; but inside, everything we do is Oewish" because our lives are rooted in Oewish symbols even if--like Chagall—our art is international. Goldreich argued more specifically that Israelis are helped in their confusion about Oewish identity by "our place and our language." "In this place," he said, "we may be corrupted by conflict, not by comfort." Here, "we have had no respite from conflict, from suffering, no time for recovery." Thus the sense of what is Oewish may be "purer" here than in the golah. Also, he observed, we can't escape the roots of words here. For example, the sense of ceremony that abides in the Hebrew word for doorpost, mezuza, partly because its root --aziz -- means to "walk through" is lost on non-Hebrew speaking Oews. "You haven't the context," he said, "in which Oewish signs become significant because you haven't the language." His argument lifted again two seminal issues raised in our first session; he was not only asserting the effect of language on experience, self-image,and art—a subject worthy in itself of further exploration--but also insisting on the difference between Israeli-Oewish and American-Oewish identity because of the difference Hebrew makes to one's sense of a Oewish self.
A third major theme for the artists illuminated the emergence in art of £wo subjects that bridge and might help to define American and Israeli Oewish experience. Both Goldreich and Avni described the importance of urbanization as a subject now for Israeli art. Goldreich pointed out that Zionism had provided no ideology for urban life; thus, contemporary art needs to explore the nature of urban experience, the relationship between modern Oews and their physical environment. For American Oews also, of course, the givens of urban experience throw pale shadows on Oewishness: from holidays that celebrate the bringing of the first fruits, and from prayers that plead for former and latter rains, both American and Israeli Oews may feel estranged because their urban lives no longer expose them to the rewards and severities of agri cultural experience.
A final link between the two communities and between this session and the program in general appeared in Avni's poignant observation that the most important question for him now was "how to be a secular Oew." At the previous seminar Professor Glazer had observed that the world most of us know is secular—partly because, one suspects, it is so completely an urban world. Thus urban experience as a subject of contemporary art opened easily into the sensitive question of secular- Oewish identity.
Discussion among the Americans highlighted the problem of uni- versalism raised both by Burstein and the Israeli artists. Perhaps, one speaker argued, the neurosis produced by cultural marginaiity is essentially Oewish; perhaps marginaiity is—as George Steiner had argued —essential to our creativity. Another speaker responded that Oewishness, in his view, is not just historical mishugas—even in the diaspora. Clearly, confusion about the meaning of Oewishness came to the table with Americans as well as Israelis. Still another speaker
23 asked whether we can safeiy assume that art rises most readily among those who dwell in the bosom of an integrated culture, who don't experience the tensions of "refugees" who have lost their sense of "at homeness" in the cultural world. Perhaps, for ail its failings, Steiner's thesis leads us toward a recognition that creativity flowers most fully when cultures are disintegrating.
On the whole, then, this session allowed us to acknowledge openly common confusions, common needs, and--finally--a shared hope. Dan Reisinger pleaded that we abandon the demand for a sustaining dose of dewishness in Israeli art. Reisinger asked us instead to enter what he called a "spiral of hope" that dewish artists, left free to experiment, would "create what is creatable" for them, and thus—perhaps—discover what it means to be dewish in this time.
24 Issues In Aaerican and Israeli Jewries: Similarities and Differences
Sunday, dune 24, 1984
Speakers: Dr. Gary dacobsohn, Williams College Dr. Gideon Shimoni, Hebrew University
Israeli Discussants: Ya'acov Aloni, Institute for Leadership Development
Arie Carmon, Israel-Diaspora Institute
No single session revealed more fully than this one both the difficulty and the rich potential of dialogue between Americans and Israelis. From the beginning, the formal presentations showed how different perspectives can transform single questions. Like the Orthodox rabbi and the secular Zionist considering the question of cinema Qlosing on Shabbat in the earlier seminar on secularism, the American and the Israeli political scientists found two related but different questions embedded in the issue of dissent from Israeli policies. And the ensuing discussion diverged sharply from the ground of both initial presentations.
At the outset, Dr. dacobsohn reminded us that many of the speakers we had heard during the two week program had encouraged us to "speak out with respect to Israeli policies." And he suggested that "many American dews would like to criticize Israel," citing a recent poll that showed American dews, by almost two to one, to be "often troubled by the policies of the current Israeli government." But he believes that two "dilemmas" inhibit criticism.
The political dilemma, he said, is first that a united and sup portive dewish community can more effectively apply pressure for policies favorable to Israel. And second, "disillusionment" with Israeli policies can, when made public, "feed into more profound critiques of Israel which go to the heart of the legitimacy of the State. The moral dilemma, he observed, touches the detachment of the American critic, who tries to "influence policies in Israel without having tQ bear any of the direct burdens of specific actions." He quoted Moshe Ahrens, for example, who said that "when it comes to determine how Israel should best defend its people.... dews living outside Israel should defer to our opinion." Though dacobsohn did not agree that "deference" should mean "acceptance of any policy," he did agree that critics should reflect on the harm their criticism might inflict on the State before they go public.
25 Oacobsohn analyzed some of the reasons why American dews might criticize Israel's policies, citing self-interest, moral considerations, and the "nebulous" feeling of "quasi-citizenship--perhaps second-class citizenship" tfat many American Jews feel for Israel. Perhaps, he said, as quasi-citizens Diaspora Jews do have a "critical obligation" to dissent from Israeli policies, but they must always keep in mind the special-ness of their relationship to the State.
Oacobsohn closed with a final reservation about criticism. While Israelis and Americans in Israel can and do dissent freely and publicly, outside the State—where Israel's legitimacy may not be taken for granted, these critics feel reluctant to speak out. They must, as Lincoln taught, always take the political context into account before they criticize. He asked also that critics outside the State inform themselves fully about the issues, that they be wary of rhetorical appeals, that they consider carefully "where, when, and how" they raise questions, that they arm themselves against the divisive assumption that, as Mordecai Nissan argued, Oewish and American ideals and tradi tions are antagonistic to one another, and that they not apply insights gleaned from the American experience of pluralism directly and sim- plistically to Israeli phenomena. "Prudence is essential," he said; "we need to discover what is compatible in the best of our two traditions," for at the point where both cultures converge one will find the "basis for informed criticism."
Dr. Shimoni's talk developed two themes that Oacobsohn had intro duced. He emphasized first the inapplicability of American experience to the Israeli situation, and second the danger of oversimplifying American and Oewish traditional ideals. He described several "major dissimilarities in American and Israeli societies" that make impossible the simplistic transposition of an American value system into an Israeli context. First, he argued, the American concept of "national belonging" is very special, for it rests on a "contractual," rather than an "organic" social relationship. In America, people of different ethnic origins enter into a national consciousness by "contracting into" it. But "the Oews are in many ways par excellence an organic national identity": "you can't contract into Oudaism so easily. There has to be at least a pretense that a person is becoming converted in a religious sense in order to opt into the Oewish nation."
Second, American and Israeli pluralistic societies cannot be directly compared, for one is a "laissez-faire" while the other is a © more "compulsory" form of pluralism. In America, he observed, we have "an over-riding cultural milieu and certain possibilities for cultural supplementation on the part of ethnic groups." We have voluntarily "parallel systems of language, schools...from birth through university." But in Israel there is a "dualistic system," a "prescriptive difference" between Arabs and Oews. And this system existed long before the State of Israel was created. Thus citizens expect different things of a pluralistic society in these two countries: "...in the United States you accept the idea that people are entitled to supplement the educational system...but at their own expense. You don't expect the state to
26 provide it. But in Israel the State provides segmented separate institutional structures in education and everything else for both groups."
After amplifying Jacobsohn's reservations about applying American experience to Israeli phenomena, Shimoni addressed two other issues raised by the earlier paper. He spoke first about the question of compatibility between the American and the Jewish traditions, a com patibility denied by Mordechai Nissan and affirmed by Jacobsohn. Shimoni argued that Nissan's reading of both traditions was oversimplified, for "the essence of a tradition in any culture," he said, "is surely that it contends dialectically with the basic human dilemmas. Judaism has contended with those dilemmas, but it hasn't developed one answer to them. Neither is there an American tradition that is one monolithic direction; it is in constant process of contending with the basic human issues." Thus one cannot say that "Torah" has only one interpretation. And both Americans and Israelis should feel themselves to be "involved in the same kind of process..•the same dilemmas...."
One big difference in their reactions to those dilemmas, however, is .engendered by the constraints under which Jews live outside the land where, as Jacobsohn pointed out, criticism "glibly moves into absolute delegitimization of our very existence." Under such constraints, Shimoni* said, he would feel "stifled and unnatural." But he believes that as long as Jews anywhere care for Israel and see "the tremendous significance Israel has for the future of the Jewish people," there will be common ground between them.
Though Shimoni closed with a strong condemnation of Gush Emunim and its belief in "Jewish exceptionalism," the next speaker, Arie Carmon, returned to the original question of dissent, asking what perspective American Jews adopt for their criticism of Israel? Do you speak as Americans, he asked, for whom Israel is a political asset? Or as people who "feel a sense of responsibility for what is going on here?" One should judge Israel, he argued, "only in the light of what one believes is the existential purpose of the state."
Thus the ground of conversation shifted gradually: what strikingly had begun as a comparison of the political and moral problems of dissent inside and outside the state became a question of whether and under what circumstances criticism from outside was valid. And the shift aroused both Israeli and American defenses.
For example, one participant enumerated the factors in his rela tionship to Israel that gave him the "right" to criticize. First, he said, "the government of Israel often speaks in my name, in the name of world Jewry." Second, no other country "solicits my financial support every year;" "I can never remember receiving such a request from France or Portugal," he observed wryly. Third, a "disproportionate amount of my tax money goes to Israel." Fourth, he "cares more" about Israel than about other countries in the world. And finally, he is openly critical of most governments, not just Israel's government.
27 Though no one spoke directly to this argument, subsequent comments by other American participants indicated agreement with it in substance if not specifics. One American, for example, asserted that her com mitment to liberal universalism made her critical of Israel's treatment of its Arabs. Another argued that liberal, universalistic values and Jewish values were "one"; the "same values which apply to Soviet dews," he said, "ought to apply to the human rights of Arabs under Israeli rule." Clearly, this conversation moved gradually from the mode of analysis established by the presentations into the mode of polemic.
One can identify the probable sources of this mutual defensiveness. Israelis were probably uncomfortable with our assumption that their policies called for our criticism. We were clearly uneasy with their insistence on our inability to judge them from our own perspective. This mutual uneasiness turned the discussion into a path divergent from both initial presentations.
Instead of the questions of similarities and differences, the focal issue became, again, Gush Emunim. Gush ideology—"not terrorism" -- was defended by one American participant who argued that Jewish excep- tionalism was peculiar not only to Gush adherents but also to liberal Jews who believed that Jews should be more universalistic and liberal than anyone else. We had heard such insistence at a much earlier session when another participant said simply that he expected Israel to be "different and better" than other countries. The Gush case, ac cording to its American advocate, was not simply based on divine sanction, but reflected a valuable understanding of the inseparability of God, people, and land in traditional Zionist thought. A second American agreed. For him, Gush ideas were linked to those Zionist themes which stressed force, the need to settle the land, and the need to overcome Arab resistance with power.
Both Israelis spoke passionately against this position, differ entiating Gush philosophy from traditional Labor Zionism by their differing emphases on land on one hand, the redemption of the Jewish person on the other. They insisted that only the dire necessity of a homeland justified early Zionist tactics. We cannot expand the original claims of hunger, Shimoni said, to the claims of mere appetite now; the existential need which legitimized the earlier use of force against Arabs is not appropriate now .
Much of this debate recapitulated earlier discussions of terrorism, nationalism, and treatment of minorities. But as one reviews the session one is haunted by a sense of missed opportunity, for there were openings here that none of us noticed at the time into potentially fruitful areas of discourse. Now, one would want to ask Shimoni how Israel's current treatment of her Arab minority meets his criteria for the "good society." And how does his image of that society differ from ours? One would want to reassure Carmon about American-Jewish concern for Israel's welfare and ask why he doubted it? And one would want to probe much more deeply his notion of "the existential purpose of this
28 state"; indeed, one cannot imagine a richer subject for American-Israeli conversation. None of these opportunities is open to us now. but perhaps--like skiers watching the bright flags that warn of broken, dangerous ground—others who seek to engage in dialogue can benefit from seeing in mutual defensiveness one impediment in that process.
29 Ideas for Cooperative Efforts
Sunday, June 24•
Discussion Leader: Yehuda Rosenman, Jewish Communal Affairs, American Jewish Committee
Israeli Discussants:^ Avraham Shenker, WZO Zalman Abramov Mordechai. Baron Avi Ravitzky
The final session of the program *looked both backward—to the disappointments and hopes of the American participants—and forward, to possible options for future programs. Yehuda Rosenman suggested this double focus for the meeting in his opening comments. He compared this program with the other Academicians' Seminars sponsored each winter by the American Jewish Committee, and described the special intentions that had shaped this program. Ordinarily, he said, our participants are "first timers" in Israel; the purpose of the winter seminars is "to help Jewish academics to understand the country and to learn, through a first experience in Israel, about themselves as Jews." But for this program he had selected a small group of alumni of past seminars and invited them back to Israel. This group had two purposes: "to engage in dialogue with Israelis if possible, and to uncover issues that underlie Israel-Diaspora relations."
Seen through the lens of these two purposes, the creating of dialogue and the finding of issues, the session was extraordinarily fruitful, though it opened unpromisingly with a recitation of complaints that demonstrated how hard it had been to create dialogue between Israelis and Americans. The first cluster of American comments dwelt on problems of the dialogue, airing frustrations of the two weeks. Some speakers blamed Israeli rigidity for the difficulties we encountered. "Positions have hardened here since my last trip," one speaker observed; "now there is little playfulness and flexibililty on crucial issues.« Another speaker charged Israelis not with rigidity but with self- absorption--a perception to which virtually the entire group subscribed. "Dialogue doesn't seem to work here—except with artists," he observed; "only Israeli subjects are interesting to Israelis." Others observed that Israelis ask "too few questions"; indeed, only one question about American-Jewish experience had actually been asked at a formal session in the two weeks of talk.
Other American speakers sensed a discrepancy between Israeli and American expectations of dialogue. Though Israelis often tell us, one
30 American commented, that they want to engage in dialogue with Americans, they don't actually "show any responsive interest in problems that diaspora Dews feel keenly. They seem to expect instead that dialogue will mean sensitizing us to their problems and their perspectives." Moreover, another speaker charged, Israelis speak readily about thor oughly Israeli issues—like Jewish terrorism, or the problem of ter ritories, or relations with Arabs. But vexed questions of mutual concern, rising out of the relationship between us, are "prohibited." The yordim, for example, or the negation of the diaspora, or Israel's continuing dependence on a vital American-Jewish community seem to be excluded from the field of the dialogue.
Despite these provocative comments, the session did not deter iorate. Instead, each Israeli guest responded directly, sensitively, to the charges —each response so different from the others that collec tively they revealed the inadequacy of generalizations about "Israelis." Indeed, from one point of view, as an exercise in subverting "we-they" patterns of thought and speech this session succeeded brilliantly.
For example, hearing the charge that certain subjects had been "prohibited," one speaker retorted that no subjects were "prohibited" here, though we might have felt "inhibited" from bringing them into discussion. Indeed, he added, a pamphlet dealing with exactly the issues we had been unable to talk about had just been published in Israel (Zionut Hevratit) and would be available in the United States in translation. Denying, then, the accuracy of one American perception, he validated our larger complaints by explaining and also justifying what had appeared to us as Israeli self-absorption. He believed that Israeli energies now were absorbed in what he called a "grand debate about the physiognomy of the Jewish state." Will it be bi-nationai? Jewish? What would become of Jewish identity in a bi-national state? Until these questions are resolved, he concluded, the issue of frontiers will continue to pre-empt our attention here.
These comments implied that one could not reasonably ask Israelis to concentrate on Diaspora problems while their energies were directed toward solving more pressing—perhaps also more important—problems at home. He also raised in our minds the issue of potential American participation in this "grand debate"; was there any role for concerned American Jews in the shaping of the Jewish state? Though no one asked that question, the next Israeli speaker developed it explicitly. Like the previous speaker, he justified Israeli self-absorption by pointing out that "everything Israelis do now will have long consequences for the Jewish people." Israelis, not American Jews, were working on the most important questions, for "it's easy to be ethical when you don't have to fight," he said. Thus Israelis "are deciding now what Judaism will be transmitted to the future."
Clearly, neither of these speakers conceived of Israeli and Diaspora issues as balanced. Nor were the relative roles of Israelis and Americans balanced. He believed that Americans should play a part in the making of decisions about the future of Judaism, but not a role
31 "symmetrical" with that of Israelis. There is a difference, he said, between "authority" and "responsibility." Unfortunately, no questions pursued the distinction he had made, but this assertion is clearly heavy with implications for Israeli-Diaspora dialogue in particular and for Israeli-Diaspora relations in general.
The third Israeli speaker enlarged and deepened our perspective on the problem of Israeli self-absorption by revealing it as a mutual problem. Yes, he agreed; there was an "inward turning in Israel now"; was there, he asked, perhaps a similar process at work in American Jews? Demonstrating the superiority in dialogue of question to assertion, three American responses quickly defined a continuum on which the process of self-absorption does seem to work in Americans.
One participant described the effects on his life at home of his "conversion experience" on an earlier trip to Israel. Another described his deepening tendency toward Jewish observance at home. A third noted her increasingly sharp awareness of diaspora problems. Two of these speakers concluded by criticizing Israelis for either their lack of interest in American problems or their apparent disconnection from American religious and cultural norms: one noted, for example, that his initial fascination with Orthodoxy in Israel had diminished, for "they are going crazier and crazier here."
After listening carefully, a technique as fruitful and almost as rare in dialogue as the asking of questions, the Israeli speaker acknowledged that he was "troubled" by what he had "heard here." He believed there was some "inward turning" on both sides of thea table, and in part he understood it. For Israelis, he said, this moment was especially tense because of the Lebanese situation, elections, etc. but he believed there was also at work here a strong tendency to revive the doctrine of the negation of the galut—largely, he suspected, because of Israeli insecurity engendered by proliferation of the yordim, among other things. Such a revival could only injure Israeli perceptions of the diaspora. Then too, he believed that "instrumental interest" in American Jewry was declining now in Israel because financial support was coming principally from the American government, not from the U.J.A. Given these strong negative forces at work in the relation of Israelis and Americans, he was concerned about the future of that relationship. Dialogues, he said, touch only the small intellectual community here; beyond the borders of that community there is bigotry and prejudice toward American Jews among people who are not touched by dialogues or press reports. "We have a lot of work to do here," he concluded.
Perhaps no speaker In the entire program made a stronger or more positive impression on the participants than this man, who acknowledged and explained—without justifying--one obstacle to dialogue that had provoked considerable frustration in the group. And perhaps his most impressive achievement lay in his power not only to help us understand Israeli self-absorption, but also to help us see our own "inward turning" as one source of the frustration.
32 The fourth Israeli speaker, however, again changed the perspective in which the issue of Israeli self-absorption could be seen--by sug gesting that it didn't exist. This speaker doubted that Israelis were, as we had charged, uninterested in American-Jewish problems. He believed that what looked to us like a lack of interest was really a gap in communication created by the transformation of ideas as they moved from one frame of reference into another. Like the Shakespearian "sea change" that transforms the common place into "something rich and strange," the subjects we wanted to discuss looked different to our Israeli colleagues because they were looking at them in an entirely different cultural context. "Subjects change when they come up in American and Israeli contexts," he pointed out. "Jewish continuity, religion, and secularism mean different things in a Jewish state than they mean in American-Jewish society.". Thus our perceptions of Israeli responses to these issues may have been clouded by our inability to perceive the shapes they assumed for our Israeli counterparts. We need to explore these shifts in meaning, he asserted, in order to facilitate conversation.
Furthermore, his experience on the executive committee of the World Zionist Organization had convinced him that Israelis were far from self-absorbed; he saw them, instead, as deeply concerned with both the problems and the needs of the diaspora. Indeed, needs that had long been top priorities for the Jewish establishment here were now being displaced by the needs we were so sensitive to us as Americans. Jewish education in the diaspora, for example, was becoming a more urgent issue than aliyah or Soviet Jewry or the absorption of immigrants. These budgeting discussions, he said, clearly contradicted our impression that Israelis weren't interested in our problems.
Of course no conclusions could be drawn at the time from these serious and divergent responses to our complaints. But in retrospect it is easy to see that once the air had been cleared, once we had voiced our frustrations and heard their responses, we could move together to the second subject of this meeting, the question of issues for future programmatic use. We agreed on the need to develop wider awareness of the diaspora in Israel; on the need to study the changing faces of familiar subjects in American and Israeli contexts; and on the need to consider revisions of old priorities within the world of Jewish affairs. We also believed it would be fruitful to look more closely at secularism from an existential rather than an ideological point of view, and to explore the effects of language on Jewish attitudes and images. We suspected that "special education" -- a high priority now in the kibbutz movement -- would be an excellent subject for joint discussion, for both Israelis and Americans were now concerned with the process of Jewish identity building and with the roles played by family and school in that process. We were also enthusiastic about the possibility of further exposure to Sephardic Jews through a program that could bring American academics to teach for a summer in development towns like Sderot.
On the whole, then, a session begun in the recounting of old frustrations had moved at its close to a tentative reaching forward to
33 future opportunities. Beyond the opportunities for mutual activity, moreover, each party to the dialogue could have left this meeting with its own agenda. One cannot speak for the Israelis in this regard, of course. But the Americans heard in this session one deeply provocative question that touches both our understanding of ourselves as dews and our potential for survival in this diaspora. One Israeli had asked, simply, whether American dewry was really determined to perpetuate itself? Could the obvious inadequacies of American-dewish education, for example, really be attributed only to the high priority given to Israel in the allotment of funds? Or might some failure of the will to survive be implied by our neglect of this vitally formative and sustain ing element in the complex dynamic of dewish cultural life?
Echoes of this question, one suspects, will live a long time in the minds of those who heard it. For can we hope to survive if we cannot say what "American dewry" means? Do we see any more clearly than the Israeli artists which elements of "dewishness" we would wish to per petuate? And do we share a sense of what those elements are? Perhaps such questions will need to be clarified more fully at home before we can undertake further dialogues in Israel.
At the end, Yehuda's closing words "placed" precisely both the evening's discussion and the two weeks of dialogue. As is common in evaluation sessions at the end of seminars, he said, expressions of frustration may suggest that our expectations were unrealistic. He suggested that this evening's conversation alone would indicate that the program had been worthwhile --if only in terms of its exploration of Israeli issues. But he believed that in the long run this special seminar would prove to have been among the most successful of such programs sponsored by the American dewish Committee.
I087/el/ls/gn 3/26/85
34 List of Participants
Americans
Dr. Gerold S. Auerbach Wellesley College
Dr. Janet Burstein Drew University
Dr. Penina Glazer Hampshire College
Professor Morton Horwitz Harvard Law School
Dr. Gary Jacobsohn Williams College
Dr. N. Gordon Levin, Or. Amherst College
Dr. Arnold Offner Boston University
Dr. Robert G. Weisbord University of Rhode Island
Mr. Yehuda Rosenman Jewish Communal Affairs, AJC
Israelis
Zalman Abramov Institute on American Jewish- Israeli Relations
Ya'acov Alonl Jewish Agency
Zvi Avni Composer
Mordechai Baron Institute on American Jewish- Israeli Relations
Mordecai Bar-Oz Gush Etzion Yeshiva
Arie Carmon Israel-Diaspora Institute
Rabbi Moshe Edelman World Zionist Organization
Yehuda Frankel Oz v'Shalom
Arthur Goldreich Architect
Alouph Hareven Van Leer Institute
Dr. Simon Herman Hebrew University
Dr. Ronald Kronish Melton Center for Jewish Education
35 Dri Mordecai Nissan Hebrew University
Dr. Avi Ravitzky Institute on American Jewish- Israeli Relations
Daniel Reisinger Graphic Artist
Dov Seltzer Composer
Avraham Shenker World Zionist Organization
Dr. Gideon Shimoni Hebrew University
Dr. Penina Talmon Hebrew University
Rabbi Moshe Zemmer Israel Council of Reform Rabbis
85-750-24
1087/Is 3/28/85
36 Single Copy $3 April 1985 Quantity prices on request