Rest in Peace, Brewster Chamberlin 14 Nov 2020 12:59 PM (4 years ago)

My favorite story about Brewster Chamberlin tells how we came to be friends, and how it wasn't obvious we would. In 1993 I was appointed director of the archives at Yad Vashem. A few years earlier Brewster had been appointed to set up the archives at the United States Hololcaust Memorial Musem (USHMM) in Washington DC. So you might say I inherited him as my American counterpart, but of course it was trickier than that.

Yad Vashem was founded in 1953 when Israeli Shoah survivors and politicians were spooked by the intention to create a Holocaust Museum in Paris, at a time when there was no such instituion in Israel. Organizational memory being what it is, it wasn't surprising that the Carter Administration's intention to set up a large Holocaust Museum on the National Mall across the street from the Washington Memorial was greeted with some consternation in Jerusalem. By the time I arrived, the two instituions were pretending to collaborate but looked mostly like two wary cats circling each other and spitting.

The two archives were notionally sharing efforts to identify and microfilm archival collections in European archives, so that each would send teams and funds to different archives, and then they'd exchange copies of what they'd filmed. In reality the collaboration hadn't been smooth. My predecessor, Dr. Shmuel Krakowski, was a fine man (my Hebrew-language obituary of him is here), but he and Brewster came from different worlds. Krakowski was a Shoah survivor, then a staunch communist officer in the postwar Polish army until he was purged in the antisemitic wave of 1968, at which point he made his way to Israel, where he was competely cured of his communism while adding yet another layer of skepticism. Brewster was a straightshooting WASP. He and I started out wary, because that was the setup, but soon recognized each other as fellows who don't do bazzaar haggling. Our reports to each other were sincere, our intentions to live up to the terms of exchange were candid. We spent six or eight years doing our best to collaborate in good faith, until Brewster left the Museum and was replaced by an Eastern European Jew who had grown up under a communist regime. He used to send me long professions of brotherly friendship and comradely allegience, but never once was I convinced that I should believe a word he was saying.

This all happened 20 years ago. Not long after he departed the Museum and went to live on Key West, of all places, Brewster sent me a small booklet he'd published called A Piece of Paris, which he intended as a chapter from a longer book about Paris. It was a whimsy but wonderful travelogue about the 14th Arrondissement of Paris, containing a cafe-by-cafe description of which artists poets or authors frequented which locale, what they did there, who else they met there, and what cultural significance each nook and corner had. Clearly his years being an archivist of the Holocaust had never been his only interest in life; indeed, his ability to walk away from a decade of professional effort now seemed more a determination to spend his years doing things that gave him pleasure than a professional abdication.

So we stayed in touch. Some years later I left Yad Vashem. Of all my many colleagues and friends, I stayed in touch with a mere handful, and lost contact with all of my erstwhile coleagues at the USHMM. Meanwhile, Brewster would send me lively, detailled and richly informative descriptions from trips to southern France (art culture and wine) or from summer seminars in Greece. He churned out a long list of books which tended to reflect the breadth and depth of his cultural and historical erudition. (And of course he tracked down Hemingway stuff, what with living on Key West). Some I read, tho I admit I was too busy to get to them all. From time to time he would send me a brown envelope with cuttings from the NY Times, or the New Yorker, or wherever, on Jewish matters, or German-Jewish issues, or interesting book reviews. "Abba", my daughter used to say, "who is this friend of yours who reads real newspapers and sends you clippings?" The last envelope he sent was on September 17th this year, and it's still on my desk even tho I've already responded to it. Recently I must have written something about Van Gogh and southern France, and in response he sent me this link. I wrote back that Van Gogh would have loved it, had he lived to be 150.

Brewster once told me he was a descendant of Elder William Brewster, the religious leader of the Mayflower community. Which means his forefathers had been in America for hundreds of years as the Europeans developed modern antisemtism and persecuted their Jews. Not only was he undecipherable to Krakowski; he dedicated some of his years to dealing with Europe's demons out of what I imagine must have simply been a fundamental decency: it wasn't his story, but it was an important story, so it behove him to face it.

I will miss him, but I'm glad I knew him, and am honored that we were friends. Hopefully now he's introducing himself to the sprits of all those departed artists and characters, and having a beer with Ernest H.

His website is here, and includes the full list of his books, not including the ones he was still writing all the way to the end. Choose one and order it. You won't be sorry.

Nitai Stern's Playground 7 May 2019 6:33 AM (5 years ago)

When I was a schoolboy, fallen soldiers were a special kind of grownup. Usual grownups went to work and had meetings, whatever those were, or they drove buses, worked in stores or taught us in school. Fallen soldiers were different. They had lived in a different sort of world, dressed differently, behaved differently, and did exciting, adventurous and rather mysterious things like in the movies. They weren’t alive anymore, but unlike ancient great grandparents who had been very old, fallen soldiers had been heroic, larger than life, but not old at all. The grownups always talked about them in somber tones. They even talked that way about the families of the fallen soldiers, as in “Mr. Rotschild’s son was killed in the war, that’s why he cries each year when he leads us at Ne’ila, at the end of Yom Kippur”.

As I was nearing the end of high school, fallen soldiers were people we’d personally known. Jacob and Sariel, killed on Yom Kippur on the Golan Heights; or Moshe, killed in the Sinai. Yisrael even left a younger brother who was two years behind me in school. That’s the extent to which they were hardly that much older than us. Yet they, too, had that aura of the soldier, the warrior and the hero.

In 1982 it was our friends who were dying. Shlomo had danced at our wedding three weeks before he was killed, and Avi went through school with me. Ram was someone’s kid brother who sometimes hung out with us. The world of the army was no longer mysterious, and frankly, it wasn’t exciting or adventurous, either. We knew from years of our own experience that it was mostly grease and sweat, with interludes of intense exertion among long periods of tedium. Was there heroism? Yes. Sometimes. Much more banality and occasional stupidity, though.

As life lengthens, the perspective on the fallen soldiers keeps changing. Noam, for example, was a student of mine. Unexceptional at school, he was apparently quite exceptional as an intelligence officer. Aviad, killed in 2001, was the son of a friend. At about that time I often found myself sharing bus-rides with Reuven as we commuted home. Our youngest sons, Achikam and Nitai, were at school together, and used to sleep over; they would talk for hours after bedtime. My oldest son, Meir, was approaching his military service and Reuven already had a soldier son. We had long talks about the army in our day and the army of those days, the parents we had unthinkingly left at home and the army-parents we were becoming. I confided with Reuven that the thought of my sons’ enlisting was far more frightening than the thought of my own mobilization had ever been. The young are thoughtless, and ignorant.

Meir saw the skirmishes of the 2^nd Intifada. In 2009, however, Achikam want into combat with his tank unit in Gaza. They massed against the fence for a few tense days. Then one afternoon he called to say they were shutting off their phones. It was my task to carry on as if life was somehow as usual. A few days later – it was the ancient day of mourning of the 10^th of Tevet – someone called to tell that Nitai had been killed. Later that afternoon I listened to Reuven’s anguished words at his son’s graveside, and that evening posted them on this blog:

Near the end of the ceremony Reuven, Nitai's father, got up to speak. What does a father say on the grave of his son? What can he possibly say?

He read Psalms. The ones about warriors, and the ones about mourning. His voice was strong despairing and clear. Then he said "I'm going to sing now, and you can sing with me"
תהה השעה הזאת
שעת רחמים
ועת רצון
מלפניך

The final prayer of the Yom Kippur service:
May this hour
Be an hour of mercy
And a moment of goodwill
From You

That was more than ten years ago. Two days ago, babysitting for Achkam’s son, we went to a playground near his house. There’s a contraption there that’s designed to look like a pirate ship, with ropes and ladders and slides. He likes the higher slide. At one point I glanced over at a large stone slab near the edge of the playground.

In memory of Nitai Stern

A youth with a glowing smile and infectious laughter

A peace-maker and lover of peace

Studious, inquisitive, knowledgeable

Warrior and commander

True friend, dear brother and beloved son

Fell in battle in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead

And he was 21

My grandson gurgled happily as he rode down the slide on the playground named for a friend of his father whom he’ll know, at most, as a mythical figure.

Netanyahu's Quandry (Mid-November 2018 version) 15 Nov 2018 12:31 AM (6 years ago)

Spare a moment to reflect on the hardship of being Binyamin Netanyahu this week. Actually, don’t. He’s a very powerful man and deserves none of our emotional support. Still, the position he finds himself in is quite instructive, far beyond the impact of the present news cycle.

As a leader of the opposition Netanyahu routinely taunted the government by promising that when he returned to power he’d act decisively and effectively against Palestinian violence. Israeli social media is full of his erstwhile plans for Hamas in Gaza, which he promised to rout once and for all. Yet here he is, starting the week by authorizing the transfer of millions of dollars from Qatar to bolster the rule of Hamas in Gaza, then sending the IAF to carefully bomb a series of pre-marked targets in Gaza, then accepting a cease-fire with Hamas, then watching his coalition crumble. His political allies and rivals will use all this to attack him for his indecisiveness.

Part of this is that Netanyahu truly dislikes sending soldiers to their deaths. I once saw this close up, and wrote about it here. Yet there’s an important structural explanation which needs elucidating, and that is the darker and often overlooked side of the vaunted “managing the conflict” policy.

Arguably, this policy has been the central plank of Israel’s behavior since the failure of the Oslo Process. If one assumes the most Israel can offer the Palestinians is considerably less than the minimum they demand in return for ending the conflict – or, vice versa, the most the Palestinians can offer Israel is less than the Israelis demand to hand over full control to a sovereign Palestinian State – then there’s no chance of peace. Or at least, there’s no chance until one of the sides changes its fundamental position. The goal then becomes managing the conflict with a minimum of violence, not trying to end it. Most Israelis, with the exception of the political extremes, subscribe to some version of this policy. It may well be that a majority of Palestinians also accept it, probably hoping that someday Israel will tire and waver. Well-meaning foreigners such as Barack Obama and John Kerry keep on hoping to break this model, and they keep on failing.

But there’s a snag: managing means you don’t make a dash towards peace, which is unachievable. It also means, however, that you never convincingly defeat your enemy. Managing is predicated on the enemy’s permanence. You can’t reach an agreement that will make the enmity go away; but nor can you take military measures that will make the enemy go away. As Netanyahu knows, the IDF could conquer Gaza and kill most of the leaders of Hamas. And then what? Would Hamas’ ideology of hitting Israel until some day it collapses, also go away? It wouldn’t. Would a new chapter of Israeli rule in Gaza do anyone any good? Most certainly not.

And so Netanyahu the Prime Minister does the opposite of what Netanyahu the opposition leader said he would. He tries to contain Hamas and limit its harm, while bolstering Hamas so that it bears responsibility for Gaza; better they than we. His gamble is that most Israelis understand what he’s doing and grudgingly agree: and they’ll give him yet another electoral victory sometime in 2019.

Things one needs to know about IDF snipers 20 May 2018 1:55 PM (6 years ago)

A number of weeks ago a video about an Israeli sniper went viral. The film appeared to show the sniper celebrating a shot that injured a Palestinian approaching the border between Israel and Gaza – hardly a war crime, but admittedly not admirable behavior. It then transpired that the celebrating film had been done by someone else, not the sniper. In the general hullaballoo most people didn't seem to notice the real significance of the film, which documented the deliberation and care taken by the sniper and his commander in identifying the target, ascertaining its legitimacy, and shooting only once all the relevant questions had been satisfactorily answered. In order to understand that one would have had to know Hebrew, and most people who stridently proclaim about Israel's actions don't know Hebrew.

Then an IDF reserve officer, Kinley Tur-Paz, came back from the field and posted his experiences on the Times of Israel website. This one was in English, and while it didn't go into great detail, it repeated the same message: IDF snipers are very careful, to the extent that every single shot they make must be entered in an Excel spreadsheet file so as to be accounted for.

Over the weekend Yochai Ofer published the most detailed description of all, in Hebrew in Makor Rishon. Here's a synopsis of his article:

IDF snipers are hand-picked for their ability to stay calm under pressure. They are given special training, which includes the ability to remain still and stable for protracted periods, and to synchronize their breathing with the operation of their weapons. They never shoot in anger or excitement, only after deliberation and careful identification of their targets.

The weapons they use are chosen for the mission, and different contexts require different rifles.

Before shooting they will have carefully measured distances and the force of the wind. Mistakes can happen and live shots can go astray, but every reasonable precaution is taken that they won't. The snipers are to identify specific targets, and hit only them.

The snipers work in teams, rotating between them to prevent shooting in a state of physical discomfort or exhaustion. Each team is commanded by an experienced sniper armed with powerful binoculars.

Each shot must be authorized by a colonel.

Prior to the events of the Gaza fence the locations were visited by the Military Attorney General, General Sharon Affek, who was briefed on the preparations and authorized them. We are not told if he made corrections, but given his record he well may have. Affek, it might be worth noting, was recently promoted to full General, and became the first openly homosexual officer to reach that rank.

The men targeted by the snipers on the Gaza border were either engaged in harming the border fence or leaders who had been identified for exhorting others to so do.

So what does all this tell us? It doesn't prove that no mistakes were made, and that 100% of the shots made by the IDF never hit the wrong people. But it goes a long way to explain how tens of thousands of demonstrators who remained back from the fence went home unharmed at the end of each day of demonstrations; and it explains why almost all of the casualties were members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. It also begs the question as to the identity of other casualties; if it is true, for example, that a 14-year-old was killed, do we know the specific context of his actions as he was shot? Was he standing 300 yards from the fence waving a flag, or was he perhaps trying to cut the fence? Were the snipers able to know his age?

You read the furious denunciations of Israel for its massacre of innocents, and you know how the IDF operates, and you ask yourself how it's possible to bridge the two narratives and if it's not possible, what to learn from the chasm.

Koolulam: Startup Nation meets Secular Prayer 18 Apr 2018 8:42 AM (7 years ago)

One place to start this story would be the dark years of the 2^nd Intifada, when Israelis tried to leave their homes as little as possible because visiting supermarkets, riding busses and walking down the street were all life-threatening activities. Jerusalem was perhaps worst-hit of all, and people from the rest of the country stopped coming. Then, as the security forces figured out how to block the suicide murderers, life slowly returned to normal. In Jerusalem a new phenomenon appeared, with thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of regular Israelis traveling there on the hot summer nights of August and September to participate in tours of old neighborhoods, synagogues, then finishing late at night at the large open square in front of the Western Wall, the Kotel. The highpoint of these pilgrimages are the final nights before Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar; in recent years the number of people cramming onto that square easily surpasses a quarter million each night, and their cumulative number exceeds 1.5 million. Once they're there, they sing slichot – medieval texts asking God's forgiveness. All together. Like this.

In early 2017 Or Teicher, a secular Israeli producer, saw that clip and wondered if he could bring together ordinary Israelis, strangers to each other, and get them to sing together with some sort of fervor. So he tried. He collected some talented people around him, they collected 400 people in Tel Aviv, and on April 15^th 2017 they sung together. Here, watch them:

On September 7^th 2017, as the Jewish High Holidays approached, they collected 600 people in Jerusalem. Their technique was getting better, and it was a smashing success:

On December 17^th 2017 they gathered 600 mostly secular Israelis in Tel Aviv and sang about believing, in English. Another roaring success.

There's logistics in there, and organizational ability on multiple levels. There's musical creativity in spades. The cameras turn a crowd into a sea of identifiable and fascinating people with faces. And of course, there's that astonishingly charismatic young man with the dreadlocks who pulls everyone into a seamless many-layered choir in a single hour, even as most of them have never previously sung a single chord with the others. So they upped their ante. On Jan. 1^st 2018, they organized 2,000 people in a gigantic tent in Tel Aviv, and proved the model worked with larger numbers, too.

On February 14^th 2018 they pulled together 3,000 people in Haifa, and sang Matisyahu's One Day in three languages, Arabic English and Hebrew. If you haven't been paying attention, concentrate on the faces, their diversity, and of course, their intensity:

Later that week was International Women's Day, so they had an event by and for women only, 2,000 of them. The endlessly energetic Ben Yeffet, not being a woman, wasn't there. They all had a great time.

They have no website, if you're wondering, and no swanky marketing operation. They're propelled by the excitement they're generating, as ever broader swathes of Israeli society take notice of this new cultural phenomenon sprouting among us; they announce their next events on a Facebook page.

On April 2^nd 2018 they tried something new, with 7,500 people singing simultaneously in five different cities: Jerusalem, Ashkelon, Dimona, Rishon Lezion, and Kiryat Motzkin. The genius was adding Kiryat Motzkin, a scruffy town no-one has ever even heard of unless they live there; it turns out the locals know how to sing as well as everyone else.

Then they turned deeply serious. For Yom Hashoah in April 2018 they collected dozens of Holocaust survivors and three generations of their descendants, and together they prayed Ofra Haza's song I'm Alive. If you can watch this one without being moved to tears, you're a lost case.

This week (April 16^th 2018) they unveiled their largest event so far: 12,000 people, joined by Israel's President Reuven Rivlin, singing Naomi Shemer's immortal paean to the beauty and wonder of this flawed land we live in. If this isn't a new form of mass devotion, I don't know what might be.

How to prove you don't have a sister, or The insidious assumptions of Israel-critical journalists 16 Apr 2018 6:01 AM (7 years ago)

The first half of that caption is a common hebrew saying, noting how it can be impossible to disprove baseless allegations. After all, perhaps when your father was 16 and drunk late one night he had an encounter which ended up in your having a (half) sister you've never heard of? How could you possibly prove otherwise?

Earlier today a journalist sent me a series of questions about stuff that happens at the Israel State Archives, of which I'm still the boss until the end of next month. The first question or two were informative, if not particularly well informed, as a short visit to our website could have shown. But then she got down to business, with questions that already contained her theses; and her theses contained fundamental assumptions not only about the ISA, but also about how things work in Israel in general.

Here are her questions and my answers. Judge for yourself.

· Is the State Archives open to people to visit in the reading room or are all documents only accessible on line? What happens if a person is looking for a document or documents that are not currently digitized?

As a general statement access to the archival holdings of the Israel State Archives (ISA) is via the archive's website, which has two interfaces, one in Hebrew and one in English, each of which uses the same search engine on the same collections. Individuals who demonstrate a specific need to see the original files can view them in the archives office building, in a specially designated room which you might call a reading room, except that most days it's empty because few people see the need to visit it. Files which have been partially redacted, for whatever reason (security, privacy, copyright), can be viewed only digitally as the redaction is done digitally. Whenever anyone requests to see a file which has not yet been checked or digitized or both, the file is sent immediately to be digitized and then to be checked; upon completion the scan is uploaded to the website and an announcement with the link is sent to the person who made the request. The file remains thereafter online for everyone. On average 10-30,000 newly processed pages go online every night.

· Is there an online catalog they can use to see what documents are housed by the archive?

Of course. Right here. For obvious reasons most of it is in Hebrew, irrespective of the language of the documents themselves.

· In the future might the Reading Room re-open?

It is of course conceivable that a future State Archivist might decide to re-open the reading room, thus incurring significant hassle to serve the needs of 15 people a day, even as the website serves 1-3,000 people on most days (365 days a year). Since checking the files for security/privacy/copyright issues is done on the scanned version of the files, it's hard to see who might benefit from such a move; as noted previously, individuals who can explain why they need to see a specific file may see it, if there are no redacted sections, even now.

· In the case of materials from 1948 War of Independence, are some files classified because of “privacy” of the Palestinians who may have been harmed in the battles? I.e. civilians who may have been raped or injured?

I don't know. As a general statement, privacy rules make no distinction between ethnic groups, citizenship or anything else. If the redactors deem a piece of information as requiring protection, it will be redacted irrespective of any other consideration. I have never come across a single case, nor heard of one, in which privacy rules were applied according to any such criteria; nor have I ever heard of any directive to do so. Were such a practice to be demonstrated, the courts would undoubtedly forbid it – but I've never heard of such a case so it's never gone to court.

· In the past (when the archives were accessed through the Reading Room) some Palestinian and Israeli Arab historians and researchers have said that when they have requested information on 1948 related unclassified files in person they were told they were blocked from accessing file. They claim it was bias by the archivists who did not want to give information to them because they were Palestinian or Israeli Arab. Do you have any comment on this?

I have never heard of such a practice. It would of course be illegal, and highly unlikely that an archivist on the staff of the ISA would take upon himself (or herself) to do such a thing, knowing that it could not be defended were there to be a complaint. If you'd like to supply me with specifics, rather than vague and unspecified hearsay, I would be happy personally to look into each case. I would add that in the current system, whereby requests for files come in from the website, there is no way for the archivists even to know who ordered which file, what country they are in, nor what their gender, ethnicity, age, profession or anything else might be. The most they can see, if they make the effort (which they rarely do because there is no significance to the fact), is an e-mail address and whatever name the person invents. I myself have invented multiple fictitious e-mail identities with which to submit requests and test our systems and processes. No one has ever tried to ask me who I am (who I are?).

Some reflections after AIPAC's 2018 Pollicy Conference 10 Mar 2018 12:59 PM (7 years ago)

Last week I had the honor of presenting a small collection of State Archives documents at AIPAC's Policy Conference 2018, in Washington DC. I also participated in a fun panel with my American counterpart, Chief Archivist David Ferriero. In spite of some differences in scale of the archives we run, his being rather larger than ours, it turns out we've got similar challenges and similar positions on them. But I'm not here to talk about archives, rather about some impressions I garnered at the conference.

1. AIPAC has awesome organizational capbilities. They had 18,000 participants in their conference; I have no idea how many people are neccesary to make it all happen but they've got to number in the multiple thousands. There are hundreds of sessions, and even more hundreds of micro-shows such as video segments or backdrops to talks. Someone had to serve 150,000 meals (I'm guessing), lay the infrastructure for dozens of different types of activities, put everything in place on Thursday and Friday, have it all running Saturday afternoon, and all dismantled and shipped out by Wednesday. They need to tend to politicians, a whole series of classes of donors, gaggles of media, and all of this is essentially just a prop to their main business. So far as I could see there were no hitches that impacted the conference for more than 2.5 minutes. If that.

I've been working (a bit) with AIPAC for almost 15 years, and I've always told its folks that I'm awfully glad they're on our side; this past week significantly reinforced this conviction.

2. It wasn't clear they had any immediate agenda. They were striving mightily to be bi-partisan, and for all I know they were succeeding, but that's ultimately a pre-requitsite, not a raison d'etre. I suppose it's great that the American-Israeli relationships currently has no major issue for AIPAC to have to address.

3. They're not all Jews, but I don't think that's new. Someone told me the delegation from Idaho was made up of a rabbi and ten non-Jews. On that point, I think probably one of the single most important things AIPAC does is to bring thousands of Americans from diverse walks of life to meet Israelis. The experience apparently make a difference in the lives of some of the visitors.

4. The greatest eye-opener for me was a development that's been in the making for quite some time, but I'd never been aware of its extent: the death of the Checkbook Zionism and its replacement with what I'll call, for lack of a better title, Israel of the shared values Zionism. Of course, AIPAC needs its members to be donating funds to itself, so preaching the sale of Israel Bonds, say, was never to be expected at their Policy Conference. But that doesn't explain the meta-narrative about Israel which was broadcast pervasively and incessantly: that Israel is a powerhouse, a fountain of diverse innovation in multiple walks of life and a country which makes the world a better place. Since these are all componants of American exceptionalism (which I mean as a positive thing), their centrality to Israel is the fundament of a bond between two sister nations - of unequal size, of course, but still.

(4.5 I think there's a parallel Israeli shift in the perspective of America. While every rational Israeli understands how crucial it is that the US is our closest friend, the centrality of this in Israel's cognition may be receding. But that's a topic for another day).

5. The lack of cynicism is, to this Israeli, frankly astounding. Yes, I expect that every single statement about Israel's achivements and those of its citizens made at the conference was probably true. Moreover, it would probably be healthy for Israelis to remind themselves from time to time how very successful they really are. But most of the time Israelis aren't into celebrating their successes, but rather bemoaning their limits and the endless obstructions they pile in front of themseves on the way. No Israeli can spend more than 32 seconds listening to these peans of admiration without rolling their eyes in exasperation and trotting out the (equally true) lists of things we're doing wrong, or where we're being idiotic, and certainly about how the other Israelis are being maliciously idiotic. One afternoon I asked a young AIPAC employee if he and his colleagues really believe all this stuff, and I fear he was offended by my very question. "What, isn't it true?' he asked, and when I confirmed that it probably was, he wanted to know why then shouldn't they be believeing it. I don't think I gave him a very good answer, and afterwards I sort of regreted being mean to him.

British military maps for conquering Palestine 11 Dec 2017 6:16 AM (7 years ago)

British General Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem exactly a century ago today, on December 11th 1917, after his forces conquered the town two days earlier.

Before going through the Jaffa Gate he dismounted from his horse and entered on foot, as a sign of respect for the ancient city he was taking control of.

If city is the right word. All of Jerusalem could have fitted into one of London's larger parks in those days. This is brought home when you take a look at the military maps which Allenby and his troops used as they conquered the area they called Palestine from the Ottomans (who didn't call it that) from the Negev in the south moving ever further northwards. If you haven't seen those maps, here they are.

(Technical note: the best way to see the maps is by starting from that link, then choosing the specific area you're interested in from the list in the lower left corner of the screen. Once you've chosen a map, the way to see it in high-quality is to use the "full screen" button, the one with the two little arrows, in the upper right corner. Note that when you zoom in and out the thumbnail map in the lower left corner shows what part of the map you're seeing).

Take the map of Jerusalem (obviously), and you'll see why Allenby enteerd the town at Jaffa gate and not, say, at the Calavatra bridge near the present day entrance to the city, some miles to the west: Because the site of the future Calavatra bridge was an empty field far to the west of town. According to the map, Jerusalem was the walled Old City, and that's almost it.

Should we visit Tel Aviv? The name of the British map is Jaffa, and about the only part of modern Tel Aviv you'll find is Sarona, and miles to the north the tiny Arab village of Sheikh Muannis, where Tel Aviv University is today. Also, the map helpfully notes the sand dunes at the center of today's Tel Aviv.

But wait. That's actually a bit odd. Tel Aviv was founded in 1909; at least a small version of it ought to have been on the British military maps printed in May 1917? Well, I recommend looking at the bottom right corner of the map, where it says that it's a reprint made in May 1917, from... The Palestine Exploration Fund maps, surveyed in 1878!

This makes these maps even more interesting, because they tell us two very interesting things. The first is that when the British military map-makers needed to prepare maps with which to conquer Palestine, the most recent ones they had at hand were 39 years old, but they weren't troubled because they knew that not much had changed between 1787 and 1917. Moreover, they were able to use the maps because their assumption about the limited change was basically correct. Here and there some changes had been made on the ground, such as the founding of the Jaffa suburb of Tel Aviv; but these changes weren't significant enough to bother the military planners.

The second thing is that this series of maps, put online just last week at the website of the Israel State Archives, shows what the country looked like immediately before the beginning of Zionism. The earliest prot-Zionist attempt at settlement, in Petach Tikva, was in 1878; the first successful wave of modern Jewish settlements began in 1882. (The Zionist movement was founded as a movement in 1897).

Was it an empty land? Of course not. Quite sparsely populated, however. And the Jews aren't visible on the map at all. Even in Jerusalem, where there was already a Jewsih majority in 1878, the names on the map are Arabic. The British archeologist surveyors in the 1870s didn't see the Jews at all, or if they saw them they didn't notice. Which is the opposite of what we're told these days, abut how the colonial Brits did't see any Arabs, and neither did the Jews.

I think it's a valuable set of maps. Go yee and navigate.

What does Trump's recognition of Jerusalem tell Israelis about their place in the world? 7 Dec 2017 9:01 AM (7 years ago)

President Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital has done more than upend 70 years of American policy. It has underlined how far the Jews still are from international acceptance on their own terms, rather than as others would have them. It indicates that this lack of acceptance is still fundamental to how the world relates to the Jews.

There has been a raging argument between archeologists these past 30 years about how much historical truth there is in the Biblical stories. A consensus has slowly emerged that King David was a historical figure and that he lived in Jerusalem 3,000 years ago; the argument still rages around the question if his Jerusalem was a small and insignificant village or perhaps something much grander. Some historians insist the Jews emerged as a real nation with their own culture only once their elite had been exiled to Babylon, where they collected, collated and edited the Biblical stories for the first time: those would be the people who claimed "By the rivers of Babylon/there we sat down/there we wept/as we remembered Zion" – Zion being one of the names of Jerusalem. There is no way to make sense of the New Testament unless one accepts that Jesus was preaching and died in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jews. In the 2^nd century Hadrian ploughed Jerusalem and built a Roman town in its stead precisely because he assumed that would put an end to the pesky Jews.

Yet at no point in the past 2,000 years of history did any significant political power ever see the real city of Jerusalem as a Jewish capital. In one of history's remarkable twists, British forces conquered Jerusalem exactly a century ago this week. At the time a majority of Jerusalemites were Jews, and had been for at least 40 years if not 80, yet the British carefully gerrymandered all municipal elections to ensure there'd never be a Jewish mayor. During 30 years of British rule there were a number of proposals to partition the land; none of them ever suggested Jewish control over Jerusalem. The partition plan eventually adopted by the UN 70 years ago last week invented an unprecedented departure from the universal principle of sovereignty, the Corpus Separatum, to ensure the Jews – still a majority of the city's population – would not control Jerusalem. Deliberations on implementing this oddity went on at the UN years after Israel and Jordan had divided the city between them.

After the Six Day War Israel's leaders assumed the Christian world, which the West could still have been considered to be, would refuse to accept Jewish control of the city. They were talking about religion and its expression in Western civilization, not about international laws.

The near-universal rejection of President Trump's recognition of the plain fact that Jerusalem is Israel's capital looks far more sinister than a mere disagreement over the best way to promote a notional peace agreement. This is reinforced by the blatant flimsiness of the reasons for the rejection and their distance from reality. It looks to this Israeli as a continuation of an ancient insistence that the Jews must be what the others say, and that for them to be accepted they must behave as the others demand. It can't be that Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish State, because that would mean that the Jews really have returned to national normality, and that they are a nation and state as all the other 200 states are.

The louder the howls are, the more pervasive the condemnations, the more it seems to many regular, middle of the road Israelis that our place among the nations is still not yet finally accepted nor sincere.

Postscript: the cool response of some American Jews to the recognition is also a worthy theme for analysis. Not today, however.

On Being Jew-ishy 30 Sep 2017 1:25 PM (7 years ago)

Dr. Devorah Baum of Southampton University may be more connected to some form of traditional Judaism than she lets on in her New York Times op-ed published on the evening of Yom Kippur. So perhaps she herself isn't the problem in her piece at all, but rather the Times editors who welcomed her article and its timing, and the many readers who heartily agree with her theses. The thesis, in a nutshell: Jews are the uprooted, the outsiders, a minority whose identity is unclear but it's not that of the majority. Above all, they're a sensibility (her word).

Well, no. Baum's prime examples are Franz Kafka (died 1924), and Lenny Bruce (died 1966). In the meantime it's 2017, and the State of Israel is gearing up to celebrate it's 70th anniversary. A country invented to end Jews' condition of minorities looking in, is now home to half the world's Jews, and the younger and growing half. So there's that.

I read Baum's op-ed yesterday, then went to shul for Yom Kippur. I love Yom Kippur, but this time I read the machzor with her strange words in the background. I inherited the book itself from my father, but the words themselves we both inherited from centuries of our forefathers. In it are sections of the Pentateuch, which even skeptical modern academia admits has been with us for 2,500 years (the text itself claims it's almost a thousand years older). The commandments founding Yom Kippur come with the whiff of the desert. Isaiah makes an important appearance. He lived in Jerusalem in the 8th century BCE, so there's an echo of the original city on the hill. There are long and detailed Talmudic descriptions of the Temple, harking back from the late Second Temple era, when Jerusalem was larger than it ever was again until the 19th century.

There are blood-curdling descriptions of the Roman persecution in the 2nd century CE, calling to mind the Mishnaic Galilee. There are medieval supplications for mercy, calling to mind the great rabbis of Spain and France and their end; then of course there's Amnon of Magenza, though no more than one German in 10,000 knows that Magenza is Mainz, refusing to budge from his religion even while his limbs are being chopped off. (The poem may actually have been written many centuries earlier, in Israel, but a popular belief of 800 years has power of its own).

Recent centuries - prior to the 20th - didn't add much to the texts, except to parts of the Yizkor, but they added melodies, so that the Ashkenazi ones and the Sphardi ones are quite distinct. Then, once Israel was created it added new layers, and 30 years later, after the Yom Kippur War, yet additional ones. In recent years some Israeli rabbis are trying their hand at creating a combined Ashkenazi-Sphardi version, on the one hand, and secular teachers and thinkers are trying their own versions to fuze the ancient and priceless with the modern.

One can brush all this aside and insist that Judaism is feeling good about welcoming refugees into our midst, or fixing the world to fit a Progressive agenda. By the end of the 21 century, or perhaps long before, there won't be many Jews of that sort left as Jews. Or one can return to what was obvious and banal for a few thousand years: the recognition that Jews have been creating their culture all along, layer on layer, ever richer and deeper.

Jews aren't a sentiment. Jews are the ones who participate in the vibrant ongoing ancient Jewish conversation.

Helmut Kohl Visits Yad Vashem – June 6th 1995 (German original - below) 18 Jun 2017 12:39 PM (7 years ago)

Helmut Kohl, former (and important) Chancellor of Germany, died yesterday. I met him once, for 70 minutes, when he came to visit Yad Vashem on June 6th 1995. I was the highest-ranking official at Yad Vashem who spoke fluent German, so I used to accompany German-speaking VIPs when they came to visit. That evening I wrote a letter to some German friends, describing my interaction with their fellow. Looking back, I had some ambiguous thoughts about the experience and about the man. This afternoon I dug up the old file and translated it into English, and here it is: 22 years old and never published.

Helmut Kohl at Yad Vashem

The Germans bury their dead for a limited period. 10, 20, perhaps 25 years, depending upon the plans of the local officials, the ability or willingness of the family to pay, and the amount of land which can be allocated to cemeteries. Now and then a bulldozer comes by and pushes the old dead aside so as to make room for their children, until someday place will be needed for their grandchildren. Some Germans prefer to be cremated so as to spare their children the effort – or, perhaps unconsciously? – to spare themselves the embarrassment. Is it really merely a coincidence that back in the days when they wanted to dispose of millions of dead, they used cremation?

Only a few are allowed to rest forever. Important folks such as bishops, knights, prominent politicians, fallen soldiers even if they fell in the wrong sort of war… and Jews. It's ironic. Almost all the truly old cemeteries in Germany are Jewish cemeteries. Travelers might be forgiven for thinking the Jews were the only ones who lived in Germany for centuries. If you know where to look you'll find an old Jewish cemetery in practically every county in Germany; almost always, the newest gravestones in these cemeteries are older than the oldest ones in the regular places.

Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl came to visit us at Yad Vashem this morning. I accompanied him throughout his 70 minute visit. We began in the Valley of the Destroyed Communities, a sort of cemetery of cemeteries. Once the Jews were gone, their cemeteries began to die, so they've been symbolically transplanted to Jerusalem where the Jews still live. I had intended to suggest some of these ideas to him, but he wasn’t interested. "Yes yes, I understand", he said, and moved on. Not that he didn't observe his surroundings. The gigantic stone blocks of the Valley reminded him of his beloved Rhineland, and he told me about the beautiful cathedral in Speyer, and how the setting sun makes it glow.

That's how it went the entire time. He never saw Yad Vashem, and even less what it means. I told him a thing or two that could have made him reflect, but he didn't. Mostly he saw similarities to his own story, or to the story of Germany – his grandfather had had a similar experience, you know? At one point we came upon a group of German tourists. He spotted them immediately, and went over to shake hands. "It's good that you're here", they told him. "They also are Germany" he remarked to me afterwards. I concurred.

As a professional politician, he cultivates the people around him. He wanted to know who I am, and where my German comes from. (Should I have told him I learned German to understand you people? No, I shouldn't have – and didn't). Then, as he stood before the TV cameras, his entire demeanor abruptly changed. He seemed somehow smaller, and he spoke about shame, memory, and the future… but you saw him on the evening news, no doubt. A minute later it was over, and he carried on his friendly chatter with me. Is this important? The millions of viewers saw his shame and remorse, and only I know that right in the middle of his visit to Yad Vashem he found the opportunity to tell me that he had thinner hair than his father (or was it the other way around?)

Yet the millions probably aren't that stupid, either. I suspect he consistently wins elections precisely because he's the sort of person who can walk through Yad Vashem as if he's strolling through Central Park: intelligent, charming, and untouched. Ah, and ever thinking about his homeland. In Central park or in Yad Vashem, the things he'll take note of are the things that remind him of the beauty of home. I have no doubt that Herr Kohl loves his country, most likely without needing to hate anyone else – and with no need to trouble himself with things that are past and gone.

* * *

Late in the afternoon I took the kids to an open air music performance. It was a group of locals singing the canonical Israeli songs, shirim ivri'im: about birds, mountains, about the very act of singing. Patriotism of the best sort; not directed against anyone. A way of thinking (or feeling) that forges community out of many individuals and creates identity. It was a fine experience, and a piece of culture which Israelis don't have in common with most Germans, certainly not those who relate well to Yad Vashem.

I expect Herr Kohl would have empathized fully.

Yaacov Lozowick
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Following the publication of this post a number of German-speaking readers asked for the original version. So here it is.

Kanzler Helmut Kohl besucht Yad Vashem, 6. Juni 1995

In Deutschland wird man beerdigt fuer eine begrenzte Zeit. 10 Jahre, oder 20, oder 25, je nach Entscheidung der Beamten, Faehigkeit oder Wille der Verwandten zu bezahlen, und die Grosse der Flaeche die die Verwaltung bereit ist fuer Toten zu bezeichnen. Ab und zu kommt ein Bagger und schafft all die Alten ab, um Platz fuer deren Kinder zu haben, bis die Enkel alt werden. Manche bevorziehen die Einaescherung, um der Gebliebenen die Muehe zu sparen - oder, vielleicht unbewusst? - sich die Schmach zu ersparren. Sollen wir uns so wundern, dass als man damals Toten millionenweise bei sich hatte, hat man sie verbrannt?

Nur Wenige duerfen in Ruhe liegen. Ehrenbuerger - Bischoefe, Ritter, Politiker - gefallene Soldaten, auch wenn sie einen falschen Kreig gefuehrt haben, und Juden. Ironisch: die einzige alte Friedhoefe die es in Deutschland gibt, sind Juedische. Beinahe konnte man glauben, allein die Juden sind schon jahrhunderte da. Wenn man nur sucht, findet man so einen Friedhof in fast jeden Kreis Deutschlands. Fast immer sind die juengste Grabsteine aelter, als die aelteste Steine bei den Friedhoefen der Deutschen.

Heute war Bundeskanzler Helmut Kohl bei uns in Yad Vashem. Ich habe ihn begleitet waehrend der 70 Minuten seines Besuches. Es fing an im Tal der zerstoerten Gemeinden: eine Art 'Friedhof der Friedhoefe'. Nachdem man die Juden verbrannt hat, sterben nun ihre fruehere Friedhoefe, und sie werden symbolisch weitergepflegt in Jerusalem, wo die Juden noch leben. Ich wollte einen Bruchteil der obigen Ueberlegungen vorstellen, aber er hatte keine Interesse daran. "Ja ja, ich verstehe schon", sagte er, und wir gingen weiter. Wobei er doch was gesehen hat. Die Steine haben ihn erinnert an das Rheinland, seine Heimat, und er erzaehlte mir wie wunderschoen der Dom in Speyer um Sonnenuntergang ist.

Es ging so die ganze Zeit. Er hat Yad Vahem nicht gesehen, schon gar nicht das was Yad Vashem beduetet. Ich habe ihn Einiges gezeigt die einem nachdenklich machen koennte, er wuerde es aber nicht. Meistens sah er irgend eine Verbindung zu seiner eigenen Geschichte, oder zu Deutschland: bei seinem Grossvater sei es auch so gewesen, usw. Unterwegs traffen wir einige Deutsche Touristen, die zufaelllig zur selben Zeit in Yad Vashem waren. Er merkte sie sofort, und ging hin. "Gut, dass Sie hier sind", haben sie ihm gesagt; danach merkte er mir, stolz auf seine Landesleute: "Das ist auch Deutschland". Ich habe bestaetigt.

Wie ein guter Politiker, der die Leute kultiviert, wollte er ueber mich wissen, und woher ich mein Deutsch habe. (Haette ich ihm die Wahrheit sagen sollen: ich habe es gelernt als Versuch Euch Deutsche zu verstehen? Nein, ich haette es lieber nicht sagen sollen, und tat es tatsaechlich nicht). Als er vor die Kameras stand, aenderte sich ploetzlich seine Koerpersprache, er wuerde irgendwie kleiner, sprach ueber Scham, Erinnerung und Zukunft - aber das habt Ihr ja gesehen, bei den Nachrichten. Eine Minute spaeter war es erledigt und vorbei, und er erzaehlte mir freundlich weiter. Ist das wichtig? Die Millionen haben gesehen, dass er sich schaemt, und nur ich weiss, dass er mitten in Yad Vashem Gelegenheit gefunden hat zu erzaehlen, dass er noch weniger Haare habe als sein Vater sie hatte (oder war es umgekehrt?).

Aber die Millionen sind wahrscheinlich auch nicht so dumm. Ich vermute, er wird immer wieder gewaehlt, gerade wiel er so Jemand ist, der durch Yad Vashem gehen kann genau wie er durch Central Park gehen wuerde: intelligent, nett, unberuehrt. Na ja, und sich an seine Heimat denkend. In Central Park, oder in Yad Vashem, er wird die Sachen merken, die sich an das Schoene seiner Heimat erinnern. Ich bin ueberzeugt, Herr Kohl liebt sein Land, wahrscheinlich sogar ohne Andere zu hassen - und ohne sich stoeren zu lassen durch den was vorbei ist.

* * *

Am Abend ging ich mit den Kinder in die Stadt. Es gab so ein Open Air Concert, von einer Gruppe die Israelische Lieder singt. Patriotische Lieder, Shirim Ivri'im, ueber die Voegel, die Berge, ueber das Singen selbst. Nationalismus der besten Art, gegen Niemanden gerichtet; eine Denkart die aus vielen Einzelne eine Gemeinde schafft, eine Identitaet hervorrufft. Es war ein schoenes Erlebnis. Und ein Stueck Kultur wo die Israelis mit den Deutschen nichts gemeinsames haben.

Moeglicherweise, haette gerade Herr Kohl es verstehen koennen.

Yaacov Lozowick

Is the $15BN sale of Mobileye to Intel anything to celebrate? 13 Mar 2017 11:17 AM (8 years ago)

Earlier today we were told that technology giant Intel is about to purchase one of Israel's largest tech firms, Jerusalem-based Mobileye. The initial reaction in Israel was one of glee. During the afternoon I had the opportunity to talk with a fellow who understands more about the matter than most of us, and he didn't seem unequivocally exuberant. Here's the gist of what he had to say.

The Sale of Mobileye is a Good Thing:
1. Great for the tax man. If you assume balancing the budget is good for everyone, injecting a billion $ into the treasury coffers from somewhere else is fine.
2. Great for the ego. Somebody just forked out $15,000,000,000 for the brainchild of some of our neighbors, what's not to like?
3. A whole bunch of locals are going to get dollops of dollars in their bank accounts.

The sale of Mobileye may not be such a Good Thing.
4. Until this morning, Mobileye was a Jerusalem-based company with hundreds of employees, most of them probably reasonably well-paid. Selling to a foreign firm could mean that down the road the new owners pull out whatever they can, knowledge and talent, and Jerusalem will have one less successful employer.
5. The buyer, Intel, used to be one of the world's top 2-3 tech giants. Then it missed a couple of important developments, such as the rise and spread of smartphones, and nowadays it's still very large but not very-top-tier.
6. More worrisome, Intel does not have a good track record of moving into new fields beyond its original core business; driver-less cars look a lot like a new field beyond its original core business.
7. Most regrettable: until this morning Mobileye was one of the very few Israeli tech firms which was bucking the Israeli tradition of inventing something Really Cool and selling to a larger, non-Israeli firm which then makes long-term profit off the original idea. Many of us think it's time some of these brilliant Israeli start-ups should stick around and become a successful Israeli giant. Mobileye was on our short-list; and now it's off.

The sale of Mobileye is a bit odd:
7. Since 2014 the company has been on the NASDAQ. Moreover, many of the worlds` leading car companies have been beating tracks to its doorstep. Why buy back the stock and sell to some other company? The valuation of the present sale is higher than the NASDAQ value, but still?

So, my interlocutor hazarded the following explanation.
8. The industry of driver-less cars is heating up, and looks like it's on its way to being a multi-trillion $ field; as such it's going to attract everyone and their cousins. Mobileye is well placed at the moment, but with everyone else pouring in, it could be forgiven for being a wee bit apprehensive. Intel is way bigger, and perhaps it's more likely to survive among the giants if it's part of a giant itself.

Which brings us back to the original question: seen from the perspective of Jerusalem and Israel, how good is this transaction. Having rained on my parade for a few minutes, The Fellow then drew an optimistic scenario:
9. Intel already has a large presence in Israel, including one block away from the Mobileye offices. It knows how to make the best of what Israeli tech has to offer. So it won't have any particular incentive to extract what it can and go elsewhere. If acquiring Mobileye proves to be part of a successful strategy to migrate into a new field, and a gigantic one at that, of driver-less cars, Jerusalem may end up a very important center of development for that field. Now that would be something to kvell about!

Postscript: those of us Israelis old enough to remember President Jimmy Carter can tell that Israel once had a car industry of its own - well, sort of. There was a factory which produced local cars called Susita; their defining character was that they were made of cardboard. Honestly. Well, if not cardboard, maybe fiberglass. They were light, cheap, came in two colors (Yellow-ish tan, and dirty yellow-ish tan), they crumpled upon impact with anything sterner than a cat, and they weren't exactly proof of our global industrial significance. We also remember, and will swear to the truth of the legend about the bored camel who once ate one of them in a parking lot in Beer Sheva. Here you can see an article in Hebrew with lots of pictures of the last few specimens, which have survived into the 1980s and beyond because they have crazy owners who feed them chicken soup every evening. The article, from 2013, includes pictures of a camel who was brought to the annual meeting of Odd-Owners-of-Susitas, and the contention is that since the 2013 camel refused to eat any of them, the original story must be false. Hmmpf, I say.

Seen in this context, today's story about Mobileye is science fiction, no less.

Matti Friedman's Pumpkin Flowers 4 Mar 2017 1:02 PM (8 years ago)

Matti Friedman's haunting description of his time in Southern Lebanon, and ours, begins with the daily transformation of night to day, the hour before the world wakes. Armies know this to be a time of grogginess, so they purposefully enact procedures to ensure alertness; in Friedman's day it was called konenut im shachar, which he translates as Readiness with Dawn. Correctly, he opens his memoir by describing how the days began - and how his days, almost 20 years later, are still formed by them:

Sometime first light would reveal that the river valley had filled with clouds, and then the Pumpkin would feel like an island fortress in a sea of mist - like the only place in the world, or like a place not of this world at all. There was a mood of purposefulness at that hour, an intensity of connection among us, a kind of inaudible hum that I now understand was the possibility of death; it was exciting, and part of my brain misses it although other parts know better....
Readiness with dawn ended up being a time for contemplation. Look around: Where are you, and why? Who else is here? Are you ready? Ready for what? So important was this ritual at such an important time in my life that this mode of consciousness became an instinct, the way an infant knows to hold its breath underwater. I still slip into it often. I'm there now.

So the first compelling thing about this book is the report about a strange and almost forgotten time in our history and how it's still present for the men who were there. I read somewhere that war novels or memoirs have a standard format. Innocent young men go to war, kill and watch friends be killed, conquer demons and collect scars that will remain with them forever, and return home wiser. Not long ago I read Karl Marlantes's Matterhorn, about Vietnam, which is a fine specimen of the genre. Then I read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, which fits the template less and was noted by many reviewers for its departure from it. One reviewer of Pumkin Flowers describes it as the Israeli version of Things They Carried. Yes, perhaps.

The second thing about the book is its claim that the odd little war between Israel and Hezbullah in the 1990s, repressed as it was at the time, mostly forgotten ever since, and always unnamed, was actually the harbinger of the larger war which has since overrun the region and sent tentacles across the globe. The IDF generals at the time, he remembers, were still preparing for the big wars with the tank divisions; the civilians were focused on the big peace which was certain soon to arrive.

So civilians in Israel were thinking about the new Middle East, and the army about the real war, but nothing came of either - it turned out that what was happening in Lebanon was both the new Middle East and the real war. Something important was afoot while everyone looked elsewhere, and marginal events turned out to be of the most significance. This is often the case.

Then there's another paradox, which he describes well but never fully spells out. Israel's war in the Security Zone in the 1990s was a stupid war, but the political and military leaderships were committed to it so it took a major effort of sections of civil society to convince the voters to convince Ehud Barak to run in the 1999 elections on the promise to leave, which he and we did in May 2000. By the end that year the pervasive Israeli expectation of peace was destroyed. So the war of the Security Zone ended because Israeli society had had enough of futilely spilling blood, but the stage was now set for what looks to be decades of off-and-on violence and further rounds of war. A dialectic result if ever there was one, compounded, to be honest, by the uncertainty of the wisdom of allowing Hezbullah to assume it had won. If the coming 40-50 years see no further wars between Israel and Hezbullah, we'll be able to say the war of 2006 corrected the false message sent in 2000; if there are, the withdrawal of 2000 will look less justified. Historical perspective takes time.

Until then, Friedman's book is a moving guide to those confusing days, and a poignant memorial to the soldiers that survived it and to those that didn't.

Matti Friedman, Pumpkin Flowers, a soldier's story.

Michael Herzog dissects John Kerry having a go at Israel-Palestine peacemaking 2 Mar 2017 12:59 PM (8 years ago)

Michael Herzog is a serious fellow. A retired brigadier general in the IDF intelligence corps. The son of Chaim Herzog, commander of the IDF intelligence corps and eventually President of Israel; nephew of Yakov Herzog, a top-tier official in the 1960s who died young after besting Arnold Toynbee in a discussion about Jews and their place in history; also a nephew of Abba Eban, Israel's legendary foreign minster in the 1960s. He's the older brother of Yitzchak Herzog, the current leader of the Labor Party. He's been involved in just about all the rounds of Israeli-Arab negotiations over the past 20 years or so, in one capacity or another. So when he describes the most recent failed attempt to forge peace between Israelis and Palestinians, of which he was part in an advisory role, he's worth listening to. He knows Israel from its center to its edge; he's been observing Israel's Arab neighbors for 50 years; and he has as much experience of dealing with putative American peace-makers as any Israeli.

John Kerry's chapter of the decades-old off-on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations garnered much less attention than some of its predecessors, such as the Camp David negotiations run by Bill Clinton in 2000 or their Hail-Mary-pass edition in December 2000, or even the Olmert-Abbas negotiations of 2008. Most observers on all sides seem to have resigned themselves, some more and others less, to the futility of such attempts, and anyway the minutiae involved doesn't easily lend itself to Twitter-style reporting. Yet in Herzog's telling, Kerry's chapter was as serious as its forerunners, and its failure is as instructive.

Herzog doesn't tell us who offered exactly what and what was extracted in return. Rather, he tells about the dynamics. They're not that surprising to seasoned observers of the genre, but they're instructive; I think they're important.

The Palestinians first. It's well known they regard their acceptance of Israel in its borders of 1967 to be their final offer; they've made all the compromises required for peace, and the purpose of negotiations is to bring them sovereignty in the entire West Bank,Gaza, East Jerusalem, along with a resolution to their Right of Return, and Historical Justice. It's the historical justice which you've got to keep in mind, as according to Herzog, in the Kerry negotiations as in all earlier attempts the Palestinians put immense weight on being accorded justice as they define it.

The demand for justice is unusual in the annals of international peace negotiations, which usually focus on more concrete issues; also, negotiations generally involve give-and-take; when one side insists it has finished giving and is at the table only to take, negotiations won't succeed.

The story Herzog tells about Netanyahu is a bit surprising, though not earth-shattering. As he tells it, Netanyahu actually demonstrated seriousness and eventually also flexibility towards reaching an agreement. Herzog quotes him once as telling Kerry that a compromise must hurt both sides, and he was willing to accept hurt. The Palestinians, not: see above. Herzog cites American negotiators who agree that Netanyahu eventually showed significant flexibility.

Which raises an interesting question. The Netanyahu and Obama governments didn't get along so well, as we all noticed, even up until the final days of Obama's administration. If Netanyahu had actually moved significantly towards where Kerry wanted him, what was that final bitter speech in the State Department in January 2017 all about? I pose this question for future investigation. Something doesn't add up.

The pattern of end-run Israeli flexibility and Palestinian recalcitrance is not new ; it has actually been the norm for at least 16 years. Which makes the American part of the story so odd. Herzog credits Kerry with investing endless time in the negotiations, including daily conference calls from whatever country he might be in. Man, was he serious about this! Serious, but inept. He missed details of major destructive power, such as not noticing the distinction between an Israeli willingness to free convicted Palestinian murders from prison, to the Palestinian insistence they be sent back to their hometowns, where the Israelis expected them to stir up trouble. He also missed things that weren't details at all, such as being in constant touch with Netanyahu to ensure he didn't backtrack, while not being in similar touch with Abbas, not realizing he wasn't on board, and eventually watching him jettison the process for yet another empty agreement with Hamas. Most damning, in my reading, was the apparent American assumption that it was Netanyahu whose positoins needed eroding, while Abbas was taken for granted: if we deliver Netanyahu Abbas will make the deal and won't need cajoling of his own. Or, as Herzog puts it: Kerry felt his positions were closer to those of Abbas.

Except, of course, the Palestinian positions were never what Kerry thought they were, which is why irrespective of how much Netanyahu grudgingly moved, no agreement was within reach at any moment. If you read too much of the New York Times and not enough of the Palestinian sources, you'll end up believing in a reality which doesn't exist.

Here we are - Hinenu 22 Jan 2017 11:51 AM (8 years ago)

I mostly don't write about books I dislike. Jonathan Safran Foer's new novel, Here I Am, will be an exception, for reasons which actually have to do with some of the themes of this (mostly dormant) blog.

The late Jacques Barzun taught me, in his magisterial From Dawn to Decadence, that the task of literature is to enlighten us about the complex lives of people. Well, Foer's book didn't do it for me. None of the protagonists were appealing to me as people, nor, even at the end of almost 600 pages, were any of them particularly familiar. Though I don't read much literature, so maybe the fault is mine.

I wonder whether the book will age well. Portions of it take place in an online game called Other Life, which may have millions of players, and may be forgotten in ten years. There is a section written as a text-exchange - a form of communication which may gone by the end of the decade for all anyone knows. A pivotal event hinges upon breaking the code of a cell-phone, which may seem a quaint curiosity five years from now, when we all use DNA-related wave-length to secure our phones, assuming phones don't go the way of the fax machine. Great literature takes the particular and demonstrates its universality; I'm not certain particular technology does that.

The book is overtly Jewish - in an American way. It's extremely verbal. Its Jews are talkative, virtuoso and compulsive players of sophisticated word-games; it's exhausting. Not long ago I read John William's Stoner - a short, taciturn novel that hits Barzun's target fully - which couldn't remotely be about Jews. Foer's Jews aren't taciturn. But what are they? Part of the story is that none of the children see any sense in Judaism; I didn't find much in the stories of their elders to change their mind. Thus begging the question: what's Jewish?

And then there's the Israel Thing. May I please request of American Jewish writers that they desist from describing Israel with stuff about Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir and Jerusalem of Gold? How credible would it be to describe early 21st century America by mentioning President Hoover, General Marshall or square dancing? If Foer's American characters were shallow and unconvincing, his portrayal of Israelis is beyond silly; it's offensive.

But that's not the worst of it. The book presents itself as the story of an American Jewish father whose family is disintegrating until a cataclysm in Israel forces him to find himself (Here I am) in relation to something larger. The title of the cataclysm is "the destruction of Israel". Now I'm not one to say that Israel is indestructible, but if you're going to use that as the conceptual framework for a 600-page novel, common courtesy to the real Israeli's would be to flesh out some remotely plausible scenario, one that somehow addresses Israel's real flaws or vulnerabilities. Foer can't be bothered enough even to flesh out any sort of scenario at all. The destruction of Israel is mentioned, from time to time, as a minor distraction on the TV screens that flicker in the background of the more important events at the front of the stage.

Unless I missed the true point of the book, which is that for American Jewish parents who can't think of any compelling reason their children should care about being Jewish (the best they come up with is "this is what we do"), the destruction of Israel is no more interesting than the real-life destruction of Syria has been these past six years: not at all.

Political discourse in perspective 1 Jan 2017 10:40 AM (8 years ago)

There's this e-mail list I'm on, made up of gray-haired Israeli men who all served together in the Armored Corp in the 1970s, then served together as reservists for twenty-some years, and now get together only rarely as a full group to swap stale tall tales about times long past. (There's a Whatsapp list too: we're technically competent. No Snapchat, tho. There has to be a line somewhere.)

Anyway, one of the fellows has taken to broadcasting his hard-core Right-wing political opinions. Earlier today one of the other fellows responded thusly:

Dear Y,
I love you dearly, as you well know. We've been like brothers for more than 40 years. But please, take me off the mailing list of your idiotic screeds. As you well know, I'm a bleeding heart Lefty, and at my age, there's nothing you might say to make me change my mind. On the contrary, if you and your God Almighty have to keep on sending your silly arguments, all that says to me is that you're both insecure. So from now on, stop bothering me with the spam.
R.
PS. Next Friday at the usual place, obviously.

I recommend these sentiments to those of my occasional readers who are losing the ability to talk to their political rivals. Chill.

Tusheti - a beautiful place you've never heard of 22 Oct 2016 2:16 PM (8 years ago)

We recently returned from a hiking trip to Georgia (the country, not the state). We had gone expecting great mountain hikes; we found the closest thing I've yet seen to Shangri La. This post, quite unlike the rest of the blog around it, tells about the remote and fascinating Tusheti area in north east Georgia, and why you want to go there.

Tusheti is the green corner north-north-east of Tbilisi.

To reach Tusheti you travel to Tbilisi, the center of which is a jumble of churches, castles, ultra-modern structures, and communist era monstrosities. The overall feeling is post-communist, even though it's been 25 years since Georgia achieved independence from the Soviet Union. I didn't see many traffic lights, nor drivers who seemed to miss them, but there was WiFi.

The next morning it was off to the mountains. For about two hours we traveled on reasonably paved roads through rural areas that looked even more post-communist than Tbilisi. Then the road petered out, and we were on gravel. Then the gravel became narrow, and then there was a rapid river beneath us, and then even the river disappeared, to be replaced by treetops in the gorge below us. Quite a way below us. It dawned on us there was a reason our guide had mentioned a full day travel – not that it was so far but that the road was for inching along. Many hours of inching along.

Mostly without a security railing.

Eventually we reached the pass at the top of the road.

And then we went down the other side, then up again. 72 km of unpaved mountain road, alongside a chasm almost the whole time, and no sign of human settlement anywhere. Until eventually we arrived in Tusheti.

So the first thing you need to know about Tusheti is that it's beautiful, but the second is that there's only one single road into it (and back out), and it's not one you want to drive. The locals have been going up and down that pass for centuries, and they start driving it after a childhood of riding it, sometimes in big six-wheeled trucks. They know what they're doing and they don't fall off the cliff. Others sometimes do. So have a local take you up, and don't even think of doing it yourself.

Beauty is actually not the only reason to be up there, but it is a compelling one.

What makes Tusheti different from other beautiful mountain ranges are its people. The Tushetis. There are a few thousand of them, and they've been there for at least 1,600 years. They've got their own dialect. They're spread over the slopes of four valleys, surrounded by 5,000 meter mountains. The winters are ferocious, so they spend them in the lowlands, migrating up for the warm half of the year with their cattle, horses, and many sheep. They also raise crops, though with the advent of four-wheel-drive pickup trucks they've been focusing more on livestock and cheese-making, importing the rest from below.

The rest of Georgia has been changing political overlords incessantly for as long back as memory goes; Tusheti, secure behind that rampart of mountains, only twice, once by Tamarlane. Even the Greek Orthodox Church, present everywhere else in the country, had a hard time making it up the pass, and to a surprising degree never fully made it: the Tushetis till this very day, are polytheistic. They're Orthodox and also pagans, simultaneously. There are more than 50 small villages and hamlets in Tusheti; only three have churches, and even they are built alongside the sacrificial altar that most of the villages have. Both are active.

Only in one village - Dartlo - was the church constructed on the site of the altar, rather than alongside it. A few decades later there was an earthquake and the church was destroyed. This is a fact, make of it what you will.

The gods, by the way, are apparently two sets of dieties, one benign and the other malicious, and the Tushetis appeal to the benign ones for protection.

Today's Tushetis all come together for their annual holiday in August, where they offer sacrifices and celebrate, then they break up into subgroups by valley, and continue with local sacrifices and celebrations. Even those who no longer make their living from the land and don't spend the whole summer in the mountains, come up for the month of celebrations. Thus, the slight ghost town sensation visitors can have in some of these villages must be greatly reduced in August.

Not fully however. If a family ever runs out of male descendants, the family home will be abandoned; it is now accursed, not to be used ever again. Each village has a few "dead' homes, slowly disintegrating. Another ancient tradition is that woman may not approach the altars, nor the stills where ritual beer is prepared. If you wish to respect the locals, when entering a new village you'll ask where not to go; the locals will appreciate your sign of respect.

On the way up that pass I'd noticed a few rusty pylons.

What are those about, I asked our guide, as we walked between villages unadorned by any electric poles? The Soviets, she said. The Soviets were against the Tusheti way of life. So they forbade families to come up each summer, but insisted the menfolk do; each one was assigned a production quota of livestock or cheese. This was so important that even during WW2, when the Soviet Union was in a state of total war, the Tusheti men were left alone to fill their quotas. They were administered from Omalo, the "big city" (population 812, if you ask me), near the entrance from the road over the pass. The administrators got electricity. And then, I asked? As soon as the Soviets left, she said, some locals stole the lines and sold the metal. And yes, the other locals saw this happening, and no, no one dared stop them in the lawlessness of the time.

So the Soviets had threatened the very existence of the Tusheti way of life, but they'd left behind a (somewhat) improved road and the memory of electricity. A few years ago a Czech NGO began installing a limited number of solar panels in some of the villages, so that the guesthouses offer hot water showers early in the evening, and you can recharge your cellphone batteries – though in many cases you won't be able to make calls with them. The solar panels are 21^st century progress over the long-gone electric cables of the 20^th century; cellphone connectivity is a 21^st century scourge, thankfully limited up in the mountains.

While the Soviet Union is gone, Russia is very close. When hiking along the Alazani River, which we did for parts of three days, it's right there, at the top of the snowy mountain ridge. To be precise, Chechnya is to the north and Dagestan to the east. During the first round of the Russian-Chechnyan war in the 1990s, Tusheti served as the back base for the Chechnyan rebels. (There's no road across the steep ridge, but if you're in good physical shape and don't suffer from altitude sickness you can climb across it). Nowadays, so we were told, the Russians are at the top of the ridge and will shoot if anyone comes too close. Elsewhere along the border, where there's no natural line such as the top of a ridge, Russia is apparently constantly moving the border deeper into Georgian territory – not that this is anything that gets reported in the Western media.

One morning we encountered a horseman trotting along who, unlike all the other locals I met, refused my request to take his picture. Our guide explained that he's Chechen, not Tusheti; a religious Muslim. Apparently there's a handful them who have remained permanently on the gentler side of the mountain ridge.

Upon probing a bit deeper, I got the impression that spending a thousand years over the hill from the Chechans and other rough Caucasus tribes has involved a degree of friction. Cattle rustling, say, and perhaps the random clash. This would explain the impressive defense towers each and every hamlet offers. They wouldn't be much use against a Tamerlane intent on destruction, nor against Soviets intent on re-inventing society, but for offering sanctuary until the cattle rustler moved on, they were fine. For tourists with cameras they're great.

Don't let the towers fool you, however. These are not the castles of the aristocrats, built by the serfs. Throughout its many centuries, even as the Europeans to the west had rule by the few over the many, the Tushetis lived in a mostly egalitarian society. Success at farming was important, but each tribe or village demanded of each family that they work hard enough to succeed, with no allowances for slackers. Some wise old men were consulted for being wise, and in the village of Diklo we saw the remains of an ancient court of peers which resolved local disagreements. No one was truly rich, so no-one was poor, either. Sounds as close to being free as most of history had to offer, and you had to come all the way to this remote corner of the Caucasus to find it.

One of the major products of the area is Tusheti cheese, famous, apparently, throughout the country and beyond. One day we asked to see the process close up. Of course, said the cheese-maker; by all means.

On Shabbat we didn't do any hiking; yet simply sitting in the small village of Girevi was instructive: the villagers were busy. Laundry is done by hand. Wood is chopped by hand. Cows are milked by hand. Goats are slaughtered on the track next to the hut, then quartered and processed, all by hand. Three men down the lane spent the whole day putting a new roof above a veranda, apparently preparing a new guest house. The horses need tending.

The houses the Tushetis live in are rough hewn (a stronger word than 'rustic'). Sometimes there's a solar panel; every now and then we saw satellite TV receptors, almost always disconnected. There are no paved roads. I assume they've got running water since that's easy to have, simply by running a pipe from a nearby stream. They often own a battered second-hand van or pickup truck, but quite a few travel by horse, often bareback. Riding at night, our guide assured us, was never dangerous, unless one be lulled by a local evil spirit to leave the track; it wasn't entirely clear how serious she was.

They are hospitable. One day the most elder member of our party was tired, and the first vehicle that passed immediately took him and his daughter a few miles down the track to the next village. When we arrived it turned out that two young mothers with small children, whose husbands were afield, had taken them into their living room/dining room/kitchen; when we came by they welcomed us in too, so that we could have our lunch in the shade (it was a hot day). Who ever heard of such behavior in our modern world?

The most striking thing about their life style, so far as I could see, was the joy with which they gather together each evening and sit around talking and laughing. It's a hard life, physically, and a meager one financially; yet again and again, in different villages, I was impressed how they'd sit and laugh.

They're probably at a historic crossroads. In past centuries when they felt a mountainside was overgrazed they'd dedicate it to the local spirit of the mountain, so it became forbidden for grazing, and Nature would retrieve it. Hunters asked for the blessing of the Goddess of Hunting, but were careful not to anger her by harming young females and their offspring, thus ensuring sustainability. Hunting is no longer essential, and even grazing is slowly declining; more Tushetis come up for the month of August than for the entire season. What is rising, slowly and tentatively, is tourism. Being the sparely inhabited land it is, tourists inevitably have an impact, and leave a footprint. In the most remote villages we reached, at least one or two families had put up a primitive sign declaring their guest house or restaurant (fare: meat, cheese, simple vegetables, local bread, Georgian beer brought up from the lowlands in large jars, and Chacha, the national (very) alcoholic liquor. This young man and his wife and infant live in a hut and graze their flock; and they've put up a sign declaring it to be a café.

Given the remoteness, that challenging road, the rusticity and the appeal of such a land only to tourists who're into roughing it in magnificent places, the locals are unlikely to be overrun anytime soon by air-conditioned busses and tourists who insist on Starbucks. Yet change is afoot, and a degree of commercialism may be inevitable. So don't wait too long.

Logistics: Our guide, Tiko Ididze, is the best you could wish for. Her English (and apparently her Spanish) is flawless, her guiding ability is high, she's knowledgeable, she's young enough to be quite free of the mannerisms communism inculcated in its citizens. Living in Tbilisi she's just what you'd expect a young Western urban professional to be… except that she's Tusheti herself. Which means she knows all of them either personally or to the second degree, knows all of their history and is generally a trove of information. I don't generally do advertising on this blog, but if this post has done anything to convince you, talk to Tiko. Tinikoididze at Gmail.

Finally, a word about our group: we were organized by Yedidya and Susan of Koshertreks. If you're into hardworking treks in fantastic remote places, and you care deeply or at least don't mind kosher food while being there, Koshertreks is an outfit you should know about.

A Hassidic athiest Chabad socialist folk song 14 Oct 2016 4:23 AM (8 years ago)

One of the notable sections of the service on the evening of Yom Kippur is Kachomer Beyad Hayotzer, Like clay in the hands of a creator. After the service this week our Rabbi, Rav Benny Lau, told us the startling tale of the melody and its second career. Anyone who knows Israeli culture and has gone to an Ashkenazi synagogue on Yom Kippur ought to have noticed it; but I don't know many folks who have. I certainly hadn't.

Kachomer seems to have been written - words and melody - by Shalom Charitonow, a Chabbadnik in the early 19th century. Or not. I've seen different versions (the Internet can be a confusing place) as to whether Charitonow wrote the words, or perhaps merely the melody, and then the two were connected only in the 20th century in Israel. In any case, they've been connected for decades, if not centuries.

Charitonow lived in Nikolayev, a shtetel in what today is the Ukraine. Many years later another young Jew from Nikolayev, Emanuel Novograbelski, was about to be sent to exile in Siberia for his Zionist leanings, but instead was exchanged with the British for some Russians who'd been arrested in Manadtory Palestine; so in the mid 1920s he arrived here and joined the pioneers. He even joined the Labor Brigades for a while until his health forced him to be a city-dweller. Even then, however, he joined the Haganah, and the events of Summer 1929 found him serving with his unit in Tel Aviv. And that's where he was when news of the birth of his first son reached him.

Flushed with the personal excitement of being a new father, and the national tension of the first major round of Jewish-Palestinian violence, Emanuel, who by now was mostly known by his pen name Emanuel the Russian (because he wasn't one?) wrote a lullaby for his son: Sleep son, your mother is with you, tomorrow there's lots of work to be done, the fields at Beit Alpha are burning, one must never never succumb to despair, sleep son sleep son sleep. Lacking the time to compose a melody, he borrowed a niggun from the Old Country.

And ever since the tune has had two separate lives. If you're aware of the Israeli cannon of songs, Shirim Ivri'im, you'll know Shchav bni - rest, my son, as an early part of the culture. If you've ever gone to an Ashkenasi shul for Kol Nidrei evening, irrespective of Hassidic or Misnagdic, you'll know Kachomer Beyad Hayotzer. And if you're both (some of us are), you'll recognize both, but never both at the same time. Or rather, both as being the same thing.

Here's the melody:

Here's Arik Lavie, an important performer of cannonical songs, demonstrating how basic this one is:

Here's a band of chabadnicks doing it the Chabad way:

Here's Aya Corem, demonstrating that young contemporary singers still hold the early parts of the cannon to be their own.

Finally, here's someone who definitely knows the whole story: secular, cannonic, creative, and deeply connected Chava Alberstein, tying it all together.

Anita Shapira on David Ben Gurion 11 Oct 2016 4:55 AM (8 years ago)

Anita Shapira, perhaps the single most important historian of modern Israel, has a short, new-ish biography: Ben Gurion, Father of Modern Israel, which I recently read. It's a fine way to get an overlook of his life without delving into the endless minutiae of political infighting in Mandatory Palestine, 20th century Zionism and the first few decades of the State of Israel. I came away from it with a number of new insights.

First, while Ben Gurion is the towering figure of 20-century Jewry (neither Sigmund Freud nor Albert Einstein contributed much to the history of the Jews), he wasn't clearly destined for greatness. Yes, he belonged to the near mythical generation of the 2nd-Aliya immigrants who came to Ottoman Palestine at the turn of the 20th century and formed the wellspring and leadership of Zionism for decades - but no, he played no significant role at the time. Actually, he remained mostly unknown or at least unremarkable even to most Zionists until as late as 1942, when he became a major proponent of the Biltmore Program which explicitly strove to create a sovereign Jewish State.

Second, his greatness expressed itself mainly in the decade between 1942 and 1953, when he repeatedly saw better than others both the dangers and potentials of the situation, and mostly succeeded in wrenching events in the direction he felt was best. This included wresting leadership of the Zionist movement from Chaim Weitzman, in a profound change from a political movement which sought political and diplomatic progress, to a national movement which focused mainly of facts on the ground. He recognized that the real enemies were the Arabs, not the British, and facing them would require a modern army, not a militia. He understood the need for arms to be acquired and prepared so as to arrive in Israel immediately after the British departure. He saw the historic significance of bringing close to a million Jews into Israel, even though the majority were Mizrachi Jews from the Arab world, and not the familiar Yiddish speakers from Europe, most of whom had been murdered in the Shoah, and even though the effort required of Israel's citizenry were gigantic and prolonged. And sundry other achievements.

Third, as he grew older (he was 62 when Israel was founded) he became a bit of a bore or a crank, and while he remained at the helm until 1963 (with one year off in 1953), the heroic ability to forge reality was gone. Indeed, from 1960 onward, until the end of his political career towards the end of the 1960s, he seems to have been quite an oddball, furiously feuding with his party and many others over a series of issues in which, according to Shapira, he was probably right, but who cared and why was it worth all the arguments? He reverted to a father of the nation figure only in his final, post-politics years (when we all referred to him as Hazaken, the Old Man, a moniker no-one ever thought to apply to Shimon Peres, say, who died at 93 compared to BG's 87).

Only after he left politics, and since his death, has memory of those final bitter years dissipated. Who today remembers Pinchas Lavon, say, or the Rafi party? No one under the age of 55, I'd hazard to guess, and not even most of them.

A great yarn, a fascinating story, and a wonderful opportunity for some enterprising young biographer who's willing to spend a decade or two writing a full-blown biography.

Carmit Feintuch: A Rabbanit in Jerusalem 8 Oct 2016 12:09 PM (8 years ago)

Just the other day Yair Rosenberg and Yedidya Schwartz published a list of interesting Israeli rabbis. One, Rabbi Benny Lau, is the Rav of the congregation to which we belong (tho I admit I go to other synagogues in the neighborhood, too). For whatever reason they omitted to mention the biggest story about him this year, the fact that he brought about the appointment of a woman as his colleague.

The Ramban congregation in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Katamon prides itself on being a mainstream orthodox synagogue with a difference. Unlike some of the congregations in its vicinity which have an agenda above orthodoxy, most famously the egalitarian Shira Hadasha, say; and unlike the many "regular" orthodox places in its neighborhood which simply do their thing with little intention to make any statements (Ohel Nechama, say, or Nitzanim, to mention two of the larger ones); and quite unlike the Erloi Yeshiva around the corner, which is solidly Ultra-orthodox - Ramban under Rav Benny thinks hard (and publicly) about what it's doing. About a decade ago we had a three-year discussion about the role of women on Simchat Torah. We never moved as far on Bat Mitzvas as some progressive orthodox shuls have. We like to tell ourselves that since we're not revolutionaries, when we do decide on some change it's because that's where the mainstream is moving to.

This year we decided to hire a woman as the Assistant Rabbi, or perhaps the Spiritual Leader, or maybe something else. There was a long complex and multi-layered process in which anyone who cared to voice an opinion was encouraged to do so, with considerable disagreement as you'd expect from any group of opinionated Jews. Till this day there is still disagreement about what the job is meant to be and how we got here; but since last month we've got Rabbanit Carmit Feintuch on the job.

Here's an interview with a fellow about the appointment; here's Rav Benny writing about it; here's the Jerusalem Post reporting on it.

I'm here today to report on some personal initial impressions of my own, a month or so later.

First, there's the irrefutable fact that Ms. Feintuch represents something new in Jewish history: an orthodox talmida chachama. True, over the centuries there have been rare Jewish women who knew as much about the ever-growing library of thousands of books which made up the full repository of Jewish culture up until the modern era. But they were always alone in their society, if not alone in their century. Carmit Feintuch, probably 40-ish, I'd guess, is of the first generation where there's an entire cohort of highly educated women fully conversant in that library. I'm an old codger, true, but as recently as when I was younger, they didn't have those sort of women, nor the institutions where they could learn and then teach. Now we do. Young girls as eager to study all the traditional texts as their brothers, and men and woman scholars to teach them. Since books and learning are totally central to traditional Judaism, this is probably the single most important development in contemporary Judaism, a change which will reverberate for many centuries and one to be pinpointed as beginning towards the end of the 20th century.

(Well, perhaps not the single most important development: that would be the return to Israel and the creation of sovereignty. But those two were essential for this one, and all three are closely tied together).

Second, Rabbanit Carmit truly is a scholar. For lack of precedents I don't know if she's called a talmidat chachamim, or a talmida chachama; we'll have to wait and see how the language deals with the new reality. Just this afternoon I found myself arguing with a fellow congregant about the lecture she gave this morning, as to how learned she is - the mere fact of the discussion proving my point, as my interlocutor wasn't saying she's not learned, but rather he was kvetching that she wasn't using her knowledge to best effect. I decided not to plea for his patience by saying that she's only been at it for, what, 20 years, and her entire group not more than 30, while the menfolk have been at it for 2,000 - because that would have weakened my position. As recently as 15 years ago it would have been inconceivable for me to have a discussion with a rather conservative-minded orthodox man critical of a woman scholar for not being as totally in control of her Torah materials as any other rabbi.

Finally, the most interesting thing about Rabbanit Carmit's talks before the congregation are not that she knows so much, but the way in which being a woman and a mother (of six) seem to give her a different perspective on the same texts. The other day she took a refrain often used in the Rosh Hashana service - Hayom Harat Olam - and built her talk around the obvious but often-overlooked fact that the words mean, literally, this is the day of the conception of the world. Though she never said as much, conception is a thing women can talk about better than men. She simply demonstrated it, by talking about theological aspects of conception. This morning both she and Rav Benny, in two separate talks, took note of a rather minor aspect of Yom Kippur, a miracle whereby a red cord in the Temple used to turn white at the climax of the day's service. He used this to talk about social matters; she used it to talk about the personal ability to reach for communication with God.

Perhaps the novelty will wear off. Perhaps it's not a woman thing at all, merely a Carmit thing. It's early days, and I don't know how all this will appear a year later, or three. Yet no matter how things play out at the Ramban synagogue in Katamon, there's some major change afoot. The traditional Jewish conversation in those 30,000 books has been going on for more than 2,000 years; bringing into it the half of the community which wasn't part of it cannot but change its tone and content in unpredictable but significant ways. At the very least, it will be a richer conversation.

National sovereignty: the very first thing Jews did with it 3 Jul 2016 11:17 AM (8 years ago)

The Brits just upset everyone by voting to put their sovereignty above their obvious economic well-being. Or maybe it was something else. I admit I don't know what they were thinking with their Brexit vote, and unlike most pundits, I don't have the foggiest notion how the decision will look a year from now, a decade from now, or 25 years from now. (I chose the word foggy advisedly).

It just so happens, however, that over the Brexit weekend I was struck by a thought I hadn't previously had about the time the Jews reclaimed their sovereignty after some 2,000 years without it. Recently I completed the reading of Zeev Shaerf's classic book "Three Days" (written in Hebrew in 1958), describing May 12, 13 and 14 1948. The book looks at the battlefields of the final three days of the British Mandate in Palestine; at the first engagement of a formal Arab army (Transjordan's British-led Arab Legion) in the campaign to prevent a Jewish State, and the last-minute half-hearted attempts by the international community to stave off a war by preventing the creation of Israel; at the political and administrative efforts of the Yishuv to launch an independent state; and many other things that were crammed into those last three days.

The British Mandate was to terminate at midnight between May 14th and 15th. As the date approached, the Jews realized they had to declare their sovereign nation then, or perhaps never. Then, however, would have been the night between Friday and Saturday. Declaring the state on the Sabbath wasn't an option, so the declaration was brought forward till Friday afternoon, technically eight hours before the end of British rule.

It's hard for us today to remind ourselves how momentous a decision it was. Declaring Jewish sovereignty for the first time in some 2,000 years; and declaring sovereignty at a moment of intense international confusion and tenacious Arab determination to destroy the new State before it managed to find its feet and begin to function, killing as many Jews as it might take.

Yet even before doing all that was the decision to respect the Sabbath by not waiting for the official end of the Mandate. Zionism, a movement of mostly secular Jews who had given up on the religious project of waiting for the Messiah, chose to respect the Sabbath as its very first act of sovereignty.

Brexit and the Jewish Question 24 Jun 2016 4:48 AM (8 years ago)

Back in 2003 Tony Judt, an otherwise important historian, took to the pages of the New York Review of Books to explain why Israel was destined to disappear:

The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.

The part about exclusive privileges etc was of course always nonsense, as the good professor knew perfectly well even at the time. The part about the end of nationalism in favor of all that international verbiage could, if you squinted hard enough, just have seemed plausible enough for an ivory-tower academic to have toyed with its implications.

A mere 13 years later it seems the announcements about the death of nationalism may have been a bit exaggerated and premature, and the celebration of the international world order of border-less communities of gooey-eyed-human-rights-and-general-nirvana was, well, totally wrong. It didn't take 13 years, either; Judt's thesis was always wrong but it's been glaringly so for a number of years already.

Which brings me to a second and related point. About the time Judt was being celebrated by the NYRB readers for his prescience and courage of his opinions, it was rather common for European intellectuals and Left-wing Israelis to dangle the prospect of EU membership in front of Israelis and Palestinians who were stubbornly not behaving well. Any number of times I was asked by well-meaning European colleagues (many of them Germans, because those were the folks I often dealt with in those days) if we didn't think that making peace would be an excellent step towards Israel joining the EU. They always meant well, my interlocutors, and were proud of themselves for offering us such a valuable prize; surely I would appreciate the great honor and recognize the advantage of relinquishing a handful of anachronistic habits and geographic baggage. I always thanked them for their sentiments but said I could think of no reason why, after 2,000 years without sovereignty, we would straightaway chuck it out. Invariably they were a bit offended though I assured them no offense was intended.

Some decisions made by one generation will form the world in which following generations live their entire lifespans. The terms of peace which Israelis and Palestinians will someday agree on will be like that: they'll create borders and conditions which will be solid for a very long time (assuming the peace holds). Creating a viable and long-term peace will be sufficient justification for those arrangements; adapting to a passing historical fad is neither a justification nor a motive. Imagine if in 2002 Israel had agreed to jettison its interests in the name of being part of the Zeitgeist of the future, without waiting to know if that particular future would happen.

(PS. Tony Judt died a few years ago and didn't live to see the Arab 30-years-war, nor the collapse of freedom of movement in the EU, nor tens of thousands of refugees perishing just outside its locked borders, terrorist forcing curfews in European capitals, the rise (so far) of Donald Trump, nor, obviously, Brexit. Yet before he died I made my peace with him and we even had a cordial e-mail exchange. He was a fine historian even if a poor pundit).

Politics and wars are about emotions 14 Jun 2016 10:34 AM (8 years ago)

Bernie Sanders never made much sense. He may have had appealing ideas about some of the wrongs of American society, but the rational numbers of his proposals never added up, and you didn't need to be an economist to know it. Yet he racked up, what, 12 million votes? Quite a number.

Trump doesn't make any rational sense, not if you keep in mind the extreme complexity of running the United States and being the single top figure in international politics. Yet here he is, the presumptive nominee of the Republican party, which, like it or not, is one of the most important political parties in the world and in history, along with the Democrats. Observed rationally, there's no contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Yet given the numbers of votes cast, clearly there is.

The idea of Brexit is ridiculous. There's more or less total unanimity among economists that the UK leaving the EU would be a bad idea, one no sensible person would entertain for more than 3-4 minutes if it was early morning and they were still a bit groggy. Yet so far as we know, the voters of Britain are about to vote to leave, just next week, a prospect the polls are now giving more than an even chance of happening. (UK polls, as in other countries, can be seriously wrong).

Most people don't vote because of the numbers. Not on the Left, not on the Right. They vote mostly for emotional reasons of one sort or the other. That's in the venerable and functional democracies, of which the UK and USA are the two sizable oldest. So they can't be swayed by rational arguments, either. Marketing 101 will teach you that, and if it doesn't, go to sales 101.

All of which is generally forgotten when people discuss the Arab-Israeli conflict. Then, suddenly, the calm and rational outsiders look at the warring locals, tut-tut, and admonish them to be reasonable and rational just as they, the observers, are; and to make calm and rational decisions, since those are the only kind possible. Whenever we, the locals, try pointing out that the conflict we're embroiled in isn't about rational matters at all, it's about other and much more powerful issues, the observers roll their eyes and proclaim that we don't understand how reality works.

Neveh Dror - the town of the datlashim 6 Jun 2016 12:29 PM (8 years ago)

The crazy kaleidoscope that is Israel is about to become just a bit crazier, with the creation of Neveh Dror, a new town which is being marketed to the datlashim.

No, datlashim wasn't a word you missed in Sunday School or when you were learning just enough Hebrew to squeak by your bat mizva. It's not really a word at all, or wasn't until quite recently. It's the initials of DATiyim LeSHe'avar, formerly religious. By which is mostly not meant people who grew up Haredi and became secular. Datlashim are the children of national religious (i.e. the Israeli version of Modern Orthodox) who have become, well, secular, sort of, in a way. Had they become fully secular, they would be secular. And they sort of are, secular, but with the added twist that their orthodox background still plays a significant role in their secular lives. Hence they need a moniker; one I think they themselves invented. It's not pejorative, and not even particularly judgmental, at last not in the way Israelis like to be judgmental.

How do they know they're it? Or how do the rest of us know? It's hard to say, but it's not at all insignificant. I think of two of my colleagues, one roughly my age and thus technically too old to be a datlash, a term invented over the past 10-15 years. Yet even today, probably 40 years after he left the fold, every now and then he'll refer to "us", meaning not us but those of you whom I used to resemble and still have a special affinity for and whom I rather resemble every now and then, when we all look askance at the secular Israelis who don't have our cultural baggage. Even tho he doesn't carry the baggage most days of the year. The other is about a decade his junior and thus a decade less into the secular fold, but she really has left all the baggage behind: she's not a datlash because she'd never regard herself as part of the old world she left behind, and she seems to have acquired some of the cultural ignorance she didn't grow up with.

So now that's all crystal clear, right?

Anyway, the forces of the market being the very delicate and perceptive mechanism that they sometimes are, someone has figured out there's money to be made by developing a real estate project aimed specifically at the datlashim, promising them a community where they'll feel just like everyone else: confused in their special way, which is recognizable, shareable, and distinctive. People with other confusions should go live in other communities.

I have no idea if this is a Good Thing. But clearly, it's a Thing.

Jerusalem Day and Yoga 4 Jun 2016 12:35 PM (8 years ago)

It's Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day. According to the Jewish calendar, 49 years since Israeli troops took East Jerusalem, including the Old City and the Temple Mount.

Someday someone needs to write the story of Jerusalem in the past half century. Who knows, perhaps I'll even do so myself if I find the time. One of the most complicated parts of the story is the relations between Jews and Arabs. They've never been particularly good, yet as I've repeatedly written, beneath the headlines about terror and inequality, animosity and enmity, the past 10-15 years have also seen a growing sort of partial and halting and mostly undeclared integration.

For example: The proprietor of the Yoga institute I go to recently mentioned that the assistant who runs the administration is an Arab woman, and though her efforts there is a growing number of Arab Yogi at the center, to the extent that next year they may even open an Arab-language group; in the meantime she's about to launch a marketing campaign, which will be tri-lingual.

Of such materials are larger, historical developments made.

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