Wines and Bottles
By Leonard Fein
Dinner the other evening with a young man, scion of a most distinguished American Zionist family. He is an accomplished person, in his mid-30s, and is just back from his first major trip to Israel. His take on the country was curiously clinical, leading me to ask whether he'd felt viscerally engaged. "Not at all," he replied. I've heard such denials in the past, and never entirely believed them. Most often, they've seemed to me an effort to insist on ideological universalism rather than an accurate representation of feelings, as if to confess to an emotional connection with a faraway place would be ideologically incorrect. So I asked: "A bomb goes off in Tel Aviv, a bomb goes off in Chechnya. Any difference?"
"None at all," came the answer, stated and expanded upon with sufficient conviction to persuade me that this was an honest statement both intellectually and emotionally.
Anecdotes are not evidence. The most they can do is to suggest paths for further exploration. Whether M. is representative of anything or anyone beyond himself I cannot say. And it's possible that if I knew nothing of his lineage I'd have hardly noticed his distancing disclaimer. Still, I wonder whether we grasp the full extent of the much-remarked shift in the sentiment of a new generation with regard to Israel. True, the Birthright program, which offers free trips to Israel to young people, seems to be off to a roaring success - at least so far as interest is concerned. (It will be some time before we know whether the subsidized trips to Israel are more than a romp, leave a lasting impression on the participants. We don't yet know how to interpret the interest. Suppose alongside Birthright there were the option of a subsidized trip to Ipanema, or to Athens. Would we hold our own?)
So much for the bad news, which may not be as bad as all that (or may be still worse). From another quarter, there comes equally anecdotal news, the goodness or badness of which is subject to debate. The news comes from an Israeli civil libertarian, a radically secular Jew of whom it might be supposed that were he asked to identify himself as either an Israeli or a Jew, he'd choose "Israeli." In a recent conversation with his (Jewish and non-Jewish) co-workers in Israel, a conversation focused on the need to view each other as sharing a common citizenship and even a common destiny, one of the Israeli Arabs in the room turned and asked a blunt question of my friend: "You can save only one person - and two are in peril, an Israeli Arab and an American Jew. Which do you choose to save?"
My friend reports that much to his surprise, he heard himself unhesitatingly say, "American Jew." (Later, thinking that he'd perhaps chosen as he did because his work brings him in touch with so many American Jews, he put the same question to a more insulated circle of friends in Israel. They all made the same choice as he'd made.) The Israeli Arabs in the room, disappointed but not surprised, remarked on how far Israeli Jews, even the most liberal among them, have yet to go if Israel is to be, genuinely, a state of its citizens. And the discussion, touching on all the obvious points - "one saves family first," and so forth - did nothing to repair the breach the forced choice had set up.
May we infer that Israeli Jews, despite their sometime protestations, actually do have "a thing" for us, actually do regard themselves, when it comes down to it, as Jews? Perhaps. But note that "when it comes down to it" is a pretty hefty qualifier. Most days, my friend's Jewishness is, in his view, a residual category. It doesn't inform his tastes, his choices, not even, as he sees it, his values.
And the Israeli Arabs who heard him make his choice? This was, after all, their friend and colleague, one who'd many times done battle on their behalf. So they heard the remark as adding insult to injury.
Yes, there's something reassuring in discovering that being Jewish counts, that at least in extremis, we are one, still. Even though we'd wish for a more substantive connection, a connection less visceral - roughly the opposite of our wish for the young American of the first paragraphs above - it's nice to know we still matter to them, as they still do to many of us. But the awkward truth is that if the peculiar connection that has bound us together is to be sustained, refreshed, extended, then new modalities must be developed to give it contemporary expression. Those modalities will have to take into account the acute complexity of the Israeli's choice, with all its potential and actual implications for the 20 percent of Israel's citizens who are Arabs, as also the complexities of the American's studied indifference to the claims of Jewish peoplehood. My two friends, the one American and the one Israeli, really do have very much in common, and the irony is that neither sees those commonalities as arising out of their Jewishness. Might that observation not suggest the kinds of new modalities that are needed?
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