Charting the Minefields

?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.

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