An array of ideologists has been busy telling us what form the relations between Israel and American Jewry must or must not take, on pain of a variety of predicted penalties. Be that as it may, it seems clear that the ties between American Jewry and Israel will be continuing, various, and close: and all would agree that a first step towards a sound permanent relationship would be for both parties to understand each other better. It is towards this end that Arthur Hertzberg contributes this description and explanation of current attitudes of Israeli Jews, some of which have puzzled recent American visitors, both Zionist and non-Zionist.
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“Why don’t you stay in Israel? Why didn’t more Americans come to fight? Why don’t you send us more money? What are you American Jews like anyway?”
Almost as soon as the plane landed at Lydda airport I was in the midst of this argument, and the discussion continued until I walked past the customs barrier on the night of my departure.
Mine was not an isolated experience. Every fellow tourist from America had comparable tales to relate. Perhaps we brought much of the discussion upon ourselves. We were all rather pathetically eager to hear a word of commendation for our past efforts and to feel an acceptance of our continued role as partners in the building of Israel. Possibly we forced the Israelis to think about American Jews more than is usual—though even without the stimulus of tourists it is clear that we are very much on Israel’s mind.
Perhaps, too, it was a bad time for this particular discussion. At the beginning of the summer the last truce with the Arabs had not yet been signed, the ruins of the war were all around, refugees were pouring in, mainly from North Africa—and UJA dollars were very scarce. Tempers were a little short, for the country so obviously needed money, initiative, and competent people, not visiting firemen in search of gratitude or “a philosophy of Jewish life.” Yet, granting all this, certain attitudes toward American Jews were revealed of probably more than passing significance.
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When I arrived early in July there was a perceptible and increasing bustle about the military parade that was to be held on Sunday, July 17, in honor of Herzl’s yortseit There was some complaint by the Orthodox about marking a yortseit with a parade and even more muttering against desecrating the period of mourning of the Three Weeks, particularly since David Ben Gurion was to give a festive diplomatic reception at the end of the day’s exercises. The thunder on the Left spoke of the expense involved: Al Hamishmar, the organ of Mapam, asked whether the money would not be better spent on refugees or housing, trying hard, as any opposition paper anywhere will do, to embarrass the government. But the people of Tel Aviv seemed to agree with the powers-that-be that a parade would be helpful, possibly necessary.
It was not a case of providing a circus in place of bread. The always restive Arabs would perhaps be impressed by a display of disciplined and well-equipped Jewish military might, and the foreign diplomatic corps might report home on the increasing stability of the new state. There was another reason for the parade, perhaps even more important. The first attempt at such a display in May, on the anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence, had ended in a fiasco that the coffee-house wits were still bitingly comparing to Chelm and Kasrilevke. The foreign press, too, particularly the American, had featured the failure. Now the American tourists’ Broadway in Tel Aviv, Ha-Yarkon Street, was jammed with visitors of varying importance and the opportunity was at hand to lay the ghost of Menachem Mendel.
The festive day was hot and sunny. A parade ground had been leveled off north of the city, wooden stands had been erected, and the scramble for tickets became rather intense in the last several days. The bleachers were to a very great extent occupied by people who had lost close relatives in the war. The reviewing stand was packed with dignitaries, including enough machers from the United States to hold a fair-sized Zionist convention, UJA conference, or rabbinical assembly. Hebrew predominated in the bleachers, but English was quite definitely the language of the grandstand.
Everything came off with considerable precision. There were sobs as the flag was lowered to half-mast in memory of the fallen, and then the regimental colors came by. Ben Gurion spoke briefly of Herzl, twelve heroes were decorated for valor (four posthumously), and the formations began to pass in review. It was a military performance complete even to the comments of a recently demobilized captain from the Palmach near me as to the greenness of the rookies. Finally even the nurses had marched in review, their white uniforms still amazingly unwilted despite the hot sun (a less hardy American lady of prominence had already suffered sun-stroke in the stands), and the equipment began to move—tanks, guns, mobile kitchens, and machine shops, with three bombers and four fighters buzzing the scene from above. The grandstand began to hum with tales of how these various implements of war had been acquired.
There was the proud glow of self-congratulation on the faces of several Americans who had played roles during the war in the complicated finagling to get these weapons to the beleaguered Israeli Army. One of them started to tell his story—the story of “his” tanks that he had secured—to an Israeli officer by his side. He did not get beyond the first few words. The officer turned to another soldier and began talking about the current activities of some comrades on secret or discreet army purchase and supply missions in various places in the world. It was, even if not consciously intended, a snub.
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After the last bit of free gazoz had been distributed and as the little circles of street-corner military experts began to disperse, I finally got back to my room on Ben Yehudah Street. My landlady, Mrs. Fein, the widow of a founding father of the Histadrut, was waiting impatiently. As soon as I walked in the door, she burst out:
Nu ma ata omer achshav? Lo yavou?—Well, what do you say now? They won’t come?
“They” meant the American Jews, about whom we had been arguing almost from the moment of our meeting ten days before. She was convinced that all American Jews ought to come, indeed would come, to Israel, and nothing I said had shaken her certainty. Now her own victorious army had just passed by the balcony and she was sure that there was no more room for argument “If only they had seen this parade, if only they had seen the parade,” she kept repeating.
Mrs. Fein had been landlady to other Americans who had come for a visit and then gone. Indeed, living a short block from Ha-Yarkon Street, she could not help but be aware that of the thousands who had come to visit very few had remained or returned as permanent settlers. For all that, she was certain that they ought to and would come. In part, perhaps, she was so sure because of her own history, for she had left Palestine for a few years in the 30’s only to find life in the Galut impossible. I could never explain to her that most Americans would find it hard to adjust to a new country, for she was an old halutza who knew that the only way to love Israel properly is first to suffer. “It wouldn’t hurt you Americans, either,” she assured me often with the mixed wisdom of a mother and pioneer. “You will be all the better Israelis for it.”
The one time I tried to win the argument by asking whether Israel could absorb five million American Jews, she looked at me a little contemptuously and simply repeated the phrase “absorptive capacity.” I knew what she meant. How could I, a Jew, dare mention “absorptive capacity”? Hadn’t the British committed untold crimes in its name? Why think about such things? Jews would come, things would be muddled and a little painful for a while—but really not so bad, for the Americans would bring much money with them and yihye tov (“it will be good”), everything would be leseder gamur—“OK.”
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Money is, of course, part of the key to understanding the Israeli view of American Jewry. But it is more than a problem of philanthropy or investments: psychological factors and the whole matter of the morale of Israel are involved.
Zionism, at least as expressed in Israel, is certain that what is important in the Jewish present and significant to the Jewish future is being fashioned on the hard and narrow Eastern shore of the Mediterranean. Two generations of Israelis, one of them native-born and bred, have by now come to accept themselves as the chosen vanguard of the Jewish people, without any doubt whatever. Those still in gola (“exile”), as every child in Israel knows for certain, are physical or spiritual DP’s, whom it is one’s duty to save for their own good and the good of the state.
This conviction accounts, of course, for the élan that fashioned the many good deeds of recent memory. However, when turned towards American Jewry in the present, it becomes something of a complex.
One hates to be a poor relation. It is all the more difficult for people who are constantly assuring themselves that they are proud, free, and victorious. Israel’s reaction to American Jewish aid seems startlingly similar to the mood of England towards America and the Marshall Plan. Israel occasionally accuses the American Jews of having sat out her war just as England sometimes recalls rather bitterly that she fought Hider alone for a year and a half. Like England, Israel wants more and more aid and yet wants to be on her own as quickly as possible. Neither is very eager to render precise accountings of gratitude, with the important difference that Britain’s demeanor has about it a tinge of the lordly disdain of a grand duke receiving alms in his cherry orchard, while Israel is more like the almost adult son who dislikes discussing his allowance with the insufficiently generous old fogies in the family.
The reality remains that Israel must still have outside help for its economic existence and survival, especially in the face of the cutting Off of Arab markets and of Europe’s desire to import as little as possible. Yet for psychological reasons—and of course because the refugees are a visible problem while unavailable markets are not—the average Israeli will maintain in conversation that the country needs aid only for the refugees. These, they insist quite correctly, are at least as much a charge upon the conscience of American Jews as upon the strained resources of the young state. The truth of the argument is incontrovertible. It is, however, also significant of the need of popular opinion in Israel to insist on financial aid without feeling inferior for taking it—to feel independent in its dependency.
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This picture is not complete unless one takes into account the variant reactions toward American Jewry of the bourgeois and capitalist groups in Israel on the one hand, and the more precisely formulated doctrinaire viewpoint of the Left on the other.
The middle class has been waiting impatiently for American investments to increase the tempo of economic endeavor. Being politically General Zionist, it looks to like-minded Americans to strengthen free enterprise in Israel, thus providing not only more capital but also a bulwark against further socialization. As you go up the economic scale to the comparatively few people of real wealth, the tone increasingly changes. The industrialists want to be rid of the present strict government regulations and are hopeful that the Americans will break the hold of the new bureaucracy. They seem to want to identify themselves as part of the world of men-of-affairs, with Tel Aviv a main stop on the route of trade and with New York as the headquarters. For this kind of thinking, the American Jew represents the only hope that Israel will escape being a backwater country.
Perhaps there are native General Zionists. I can only report that I did not meet a single one. The middle class seems middle-aged and foreign-born. On the other hand, the Left seems younger in age and the farther left one goes the more sabra seems to be the atmosphere. In these circles the attitude is entirely different.
It was the young secretary of a new kibbutz who assured me with complete certainty that the American Jews were simply tools of capitalism interested in keeping down the Israeli working class. To the usual evaluation of American Jewry as deficient in Jewish national feeling, he added the Hashomer Hatzair exegesis about the class structure of Jews in the Diaspora which has made them bourgeois and thus the enemies of socialism in the homeland. As a bourgeoisie, so ran his argument, it was prone to ally itself with religious reaction and was thus incapable of understanding the new secular life being built in Israel. Reaching a hortatory pitch, he concluded that the task before the world-wide halutz movement was to save the young for a new life in Israel.
He knew as well as I that every kibbutz, including the one I was visiting, begins with a taktsiv, an initial subvention for its capital investments granted by the Jewish Agency, which receives the bulk of its funds from the United States. I asked the question: “But isn’t it a peculiar kind of enemy of the Israeli worker and his new life who pays the bill for launching it?” Immediately came the answer, a re-play of the theme of refugees: “You’re helping us so that we can absorb refugees, because you don’t want them in America.”
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Yet despite the variant attitudes toward American Jews, there is a unanimous desire for immigrants from America. Those who have been coming in lately are the North African Jews, who are quite foreign to Israel in a variety of ways. They are Oriental, Sephardic, and Orthodox in a simple-minded way, whereas Israel is Occidental, Ashkenazi, and increasingly unreligious. I cannot quote them directly, but “off the record” men in government express real fear that the present wave of immigration will go far towards depressing the cultural level of the new society. Some of the more excited are even making dire predictions of a predominantly Levantine state in a generation.
The country still feels the cleavages between older communities of various national origins. Everyone who has been to Israel knows the inevitable witticism about Nahariya—“es bleibt doch immer deutsch.” The Yemenites, even after a generation, are to this day pretty much an island to themselves, even though there are sporadic cases of intermarriage with Jews of European origin. The recent influx from the DP camps of Europe, though culturally not foreign to the majority of Israelis, poses a problem of a different sort because of scars left by the searing experiences which most of these newcomers have undergone. There is therefore a desire for a stiffening of the population with more healthy Occidental types, who will contribute to the Western tempo that characterizes Israeli life. The greatest reservoir for such a contribution is America.
Add to this a real note of concern for the future of the Jew in America. Pessimism about the future of the Jewish minority in a Gentile world has always been central to the ideology of Zionism—not alone a fear of spiritual disintegration by way of assimilation but also a sense of imminent danger from anti-Semitism. The overwhelming majority of today’s population of Israel has arrived after the grimmest possible demonstration of the precariousness of Jewish existence in the Diaspora. After the disasters suffered in their native lands, most Israelis can scarcely understand the security that most American Jews feel in the United States. After all, they argue, it happened in Germany. Why are the Americans so sure that it can’t happen there?
Any counter-argument involves trying to prove to the Israeli that America is really different. Sometimes he is half-convinced—and then he shifts ground and preaches aliya, immigration to Israel, as a moral commandment rather than a physical necessity. Often, however, he simply disbelieves the assertion. The average Israeli regards the world of the Gentiles as of one piece, characterized everywhere by greater or lesser degrees of Jew-hatred. The Marxists of Mapam usually complete this train of thought by admitting that the United States is still some distance from the advanced stage of the disintegration of capitalism at which Europe has arrived. Nonetheless, by definition, capitalism must collapse everywhere, America included, and during the crisis which will mark the disintegration of the old order a murderous and devastating anti-Semitism will be the chief weapon of reaction. Safety can only be assured in Israel.
If one points out that a world in which American Jews were unsafe would almost certainly be a world at war and one in which Israel would be in equal danger, the Israeli answers by pointing out the difference between his own wartime experience and that of European Jewry: “At least we could fight on our own soil, as we have been doing for years. A minority in a Gentile country will simply go to the slaughter.”
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For all this long-range pessimism about America there is yet a great admiration for American achievements and culture and a desire to learn and emulate. Though there are still faint traces of an early adolescent mood of knowing better than anyone else—the last echo of Menachem Mendel’s frequent assurance that he could advise Rothschild on high finance—American Jewish technicians are looked to for guidance.
The influence of America is also very perceptible in other than the technological fields. Leonard Bernstein is very welcome as a conductor of the symphony orchestra, which is soon also to have Serge Koussevitsky as its guest. Harold Clurman was called last year to direct the Habimah production of Montserrat, and two of the current great successes of the young Chamber Theater are Dear Ruth and Born Yesterday. The dance orchestras at various cafés play much American popular music along with the staple Central European waltzes. Among the large number of books now appearing in translation, particularly in the new paperbacked series for popular consumption, there is a high proportion of American volumes. Damon Runyon and Erle Stanley Gardner, along with many a recent best-seller, and of course the writings of Bartley Crum and Robert St. John on Israel, are all available in Hebrew translation.
Despite this American influence, what is markedly absent is any major contact with the culture of American Jews. There are three kinds of Jewish literary expression on the soil of the United States, in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. But none of them, for various reasons, seems to have anything important to say to the Israeli. For the sake of completeness, as well as their own intrinsic merit, the usual galaxy of American Hebrew poets and one or two novelists and essayists are usually represented in the anthologies and mentioned in the literature classes in the high schools, but they are not taken very seriously. The only two Americans who are really considered in the swim of modern Hebrew literature as understood in Tel Aviv are Reuven Grossman and Simon Halkin—but both are now citizens of Israel. The purists of literary gossip sessions allow a certain classicism to the language of the New York group, but this is not approved of as a virtue. On the contrary, it is taken to show a lack of touch with the more slangy realities of modern Jewish life.
The subject matter, too, of our American Hebraists is not regarded as relevant. Israel has little time to sentimentalize the East European ghetto that is now dead, and anyway that has already been done in classical form by Sholom Aleichem in Berkovitch’s masterful Hebrew translation, which is required reading in all the schools. The attempts made by Efros and Lisitsky to bring the idealized Indian into Hebrew poetry are no more than strange curiosities to a society which has just been fighting Arabs. The only American creations in Hebrew that seem to be at all widely known are a couple of devastating pictures by Halkin of the American Jewish community, which are taken as expert testimony to the correctness of the accepted Israeli opinion that all is over for the Diaspora.
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Yiddish is in an even more anomalous position. The most recent DP immigration is to a great extent Yiddish-speaking. For all the protests from some circles in the United States, no Yiddish daily has been established in Tel Aviv. The melting pot is being made to work at forced draft. However, the Histadrut itself, seemingly under some pressure from its Yiddish-speaking section in America, has recently established a serious literary quarterly in Yiddish with the participation of writers from Israel, America, and the rest of the Diaspora. It is edited by the first-rate Polish Jewish poet and ex-partisan, Abraham Sutskever. One night at a literary soirée I engaged him in conversation about the future of Yiddish in Israel. He was of course aware that it is disappearing as the language of the younger generation of Israelis, perhaps even more rapidly than it has vanished from the mouths of the American-born first generation. For all that, he believes passionately in the importance and future of Yiddish both in Israel and elsewhere in the world. I asked him how he could maintain that faith and he looked at me with some annoyance and great intensity and said: “Ich gloib—I believe.”
I asked friends among the Hebrew literati about Sutskever and his Yiddishist position. They all liked and admired Sutskever as a poet and were rather impressed by his devotion—“a stubborn Litvak” was one comment—but they saw no place for the language in Israel. Yiddish is ghetto and Israel exists to forget the ghetto. That is why Habimah’s great production of the Dybbuk is increasingly foreign to Israel and is, indeed, under attack from popular opinion, which seeks expression of its own actual life. The Yiddish writers of America are translated occasionally and read insofar as they reflect the sorrow and anger of the Jewish soul at Hitler’s death camps, but their usual themes of the Poland and Russia of their youth are not the mood of the new state.
American Jewish literature in English is just as foreign to Israel, though for different reasons. There is no language barrier; after a generation of the British mandate, English is the second language of Israel, and for those who do not read it there is no lack of competent translators. What is foreign is the problems of our intellectuals and the life to which they are related.
The Israeli does not read our many novels about anti-Semitism because to their authors he would answer brusquely: “Stop tearing yourself to pieces and become a whole person again in Israel.” The attempt presently being made by our avant-garde to search out the meaning, and indeed the virtues, of “alienation,” sounds outlandish when mentioned at Negba, the kibbutz which saved the Southern front during the war, or at a table in Tel Aviv’s literary café, the Kasit. The Israeli is passionately engaged in the enterprise of feeling native and indigenous and sees no virtue in standing outside society. He may agree that certain ultimate metaphysical problems will eventually have to be considered again by his literature, which is at the moment almost totally concerned with the immediate problems of his country. But he will insist that the Israeli mind intends to face outward towards the world and the heavens from within the boundaries of a strong national consciousness. If our avant-garde is right in regarding Kafka as its hero, it is quite revealing that Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, who lives in Tel Aviv, is seldom mentioned except by those who grew up in Central Europe. There are younger writers in Israel who are now attempting to write like the early Hemingway, with indifferent results, but to my knowledge no one over there is imitating Kafka.
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Despite the prevailing stereotype that American Jewish life is disintegrating, there are quite perceptible stirrings not too far beneath the surface of an intense interest in what is actually going on here, on the other side of the Atlantic. There is today a quite significant contingent of Israeli young men and women in America or on their way here in order to complete their education. The various delegates of the hdutz movements and many other Israelis in America on government business will no doubt take home with them a greater understanding of the American Jewish community—and perhaps a deeper respect.
On the cultural level, various leaders of opinion desire greatly a broadening of contact with American Jewish life. Much of what is published in America is read very eagerly in many of the leading circles. On the desks of at least two of the Cabinet ministers and a half-dozen of the officials immediately below Cabinet rank, I saw any number of current American Jewish periodicals, including a fair sampling of the various Zionist publications and the most recent issues of COMMENTARY. The interviews, in fact, were a bit unusual in that I was asked at least as many questions about various matters that were being discussed in these journals as I was permitted to ask questions about the current life of Israel. Within the last few weeks Dr. Jacob Horvitz, the literary editor of Haaretz, Israel’s leading daily, has visited the United States, chiefly in order to find ways of increasing the knowledge of American Jewish life in Israel.
Yet, on the other hand, as leadership in government is assumed to a greater extent by men now around thirty, who largely staff its middle echelons, the sense of apartness from American Jewry is perhaps, at least for a while, likely to increase. These hardened veterans of the youth movements and the war, most of them either native-born or educated, do not have the ties to the Diaspora of their elders now in the cabinet. As one of them said to me: “Unlike Ben Gurion and the others, my generation has not had a lifetime of experience in the World Zionist movement as leaders of its international sections. We have not had long nights at Zionist congresses working together or arguing with leaders from the Diaspora. I don’t know these people, for I spent my formative years in the kibbutz, the Jewish Brigade, and the Haganah.”
I am quoting here from a long conversation in a press-office car on our way to the Galilee. That day, about noon, we stopped at a tent city of new arrivals and stepped out of a Chrysler into squalor and misery. This was the one aspect of Israel today for which, this ex-captain and I had both agreed, Israel and American Jewry were equally responsible. He had certainly done his share in the recent blockade-running days when he had worked in the illegal immigration and I could remember at least some personal participation from America in that effort. We got out of the car to ask the way to the office of the commander of the camp. The first three refugees whom we attempted to stop looked us over, eyed our clean shirts, the cameras slung from our shoulders, and the big car behind us. They glared at us and silently walked away.
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