By Gil Troy, Jerusalem Post, 12-17-09

On Wednesday, 490 parliamentarians, diplomats, government officials, activists, academics, community leaders and clerics from 50 countries gathered at the Knesset for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ two-day Global Forum against Anti-Semitism.

While unhappy about missing two days of Hanukkah vacation with my kids, having attended two previous Forums I know I am going to enjoy myself. I will meet interesting, insightful idealists, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who care about fighting injustice. I will reunite with friends from the earlier conferences. We will eat lavish dinners, listen to compelling presentations, and hopefully make useful suggestions. Still, I will feel guilty. Fighting anti-Semitism should neither be so much fun nor so routine.

I understand that an event hosting dignitaries must be elegant, and the Foreign Ministry under the leadership of Aviva Raz-Shechter and her under-funded Department for Combating Anti-Semitism do a great job hosting. But as we politely follow academic and diplomatic protocols at our sessions and cocktails, I will occasionally think of a beheaded Daniel Pearl, a tortured Ilan Halimi, rotting in their graves.

Daniel Pearl, a 39-year-old, Stanford educated Wall Street Journal reporter, was kidnapped and slaughtered, his head cut off and his body hacked into ten pieces by Islamists in Pakistan in February 2002. Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old French salesman, was kidnapped in January 2006 by an anti-Semitic gang, tortured for three weeks, then dumped with burns on 80 percent of his body, which he did not survive. I will also remember the hundreds of Israelis murdered by Palestinian suicide bombers perverted by the torrent of harsh anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli images emanating from Palestinian mosques, Palestinian leaders and the Arab media. And I will recall Elie Wiesel’s teaching during the Palestinian terror wave that sometimes, the most rational response to evil is anger.

Anger is the active ingredient in the success of movements, be it Civil Rights, feminism, gay liberation, anti-Communism, Soviet Jewry or Zionism itself. When successfully channeled, anger can put oppressors and moral slobs on the defensive, adjust common language patterns, heighten people’s sensitivities and change history.

For starters, we should shake up and wake up the Jewish community, teaching that fighting the New Anti-Semitism requires going beyond business as usual. The Jewish world has been stymied because too many feel guilty about the false charge that Jews squelch criticism of Israel by crying “anti-Semitism.” This charge is particularly ludicrous considering the intense criticism leveled against Israel in Israel, the Jewish world and the world over, along with the stunning lack of self-criticism within the Arab world. One rarely hears criticism of the lack of Arab or Muslim self-criticism while Jews and Israelis are constantly criticizing themselves, while also criticizing themselves and being criticized for not being critical enough.

The New Anti-Semites go far beyond reasonable criticism of Israel. The BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement is guilty of Exclusivity - meaning singling Israel out – and Essentialism – meaning attacking Israel’s existence, not Israeli policy. Both are marks of bigotry. Nevertheless, recently the Board of the San Francisco Jewish Federation could not bring itself to approve this resolution:

The S.F. Jewish Federation will not support events or organizations that defame Israel. Nor will it support organizations that partner in their events with individuals or groups that call for boycotts, divestment or sanctions (BDS) against Israel.”

In fairness, the Board condemned the BDS movement (what the Toronto Federation has rechristened the blacklist, demonize and slander movement), but this clearer resolution failed.

Nevertheless, this resolution should be tabled at every major Jewish organization as part of a broad campaign repudiating BDS. And we should be clear. This is not a “Free speech” question or an attempt to muzzle debate over Israel. The resolution opposes subsidized speech, using Jewish community dollars, which like all charitable funds are sacred, to finance harsh blacklist proponents attending Jewish film festivals or mounting borderline-anti-Semitic plays.

Second, the fight against anti-Semitism, against blacklisting and for Israel begins at home, in the homeland. Israelis can be the most effective ambassadors in the fight against BDS - this fight for survival should transcend most political divisions and harness the kind of ingenuity Israelis bring to more conventional battlefields. Israelis must understand that, despite their “Start-up Nation” Hi Tech inventiveness, if the European Union boycotts Israel, the economic impact would be devastating. The threat is real - but is dismissed and usually seen, unfortunately, through a left-right prism.

Moreover, Israeli critics of Israeli policy must understand that in an age of instant communication, what they say “within the family,” echoes throughout the world. Israel’s harshest critics quote Israelis incessantly. No Israelis should be forced to change their politics, no matter what opponents would choose to do. But ALL Israelis should watch their language, understanding that false Nazi/Apartheid/Racism analogies feed Israel’s enemies, who wish to exterminate the state. There is a rich bank of historical analogies and words Israeli critics can use to criticize Israel. They must learn how harmful the Nazi and Apartheid analogies are and how they are used against Israel’s right to exist.

Third, we need a “Let Israel Live” anti-BDS campaign, built on the style of the Soviet Jewry movement, mounting a legal but in-your-face grassroots attempt to delegitimize Israel’s delegitimizers. We should shout down Iranian diplomats for representing a country with genocidal designs on Israel. We must confront Saudi, Egyptian and Palestinian diplomats when their official news organs spread harsh anti-Semitic caricatures. We should put left-wing BDSers on the defensive, showing how Essentialism and Exclusivity perpetuate prejudice, particularly traditional anti-Semitic patterns.

Last week, in Ottawa, during a break in testimony at the hearings of the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism, I confronted some pro-boycott union officials. I asked why they attacked what one of their resolutions called (ungrammatically) “the apartheid nature of the Israel state” rather than making specific criticisms of Israeli labor policy in the territories, as the union president had done during testimony. One of the activists admitted they were distancing themselves from the apartheid formulation because “it wasn’t effective.” Not “effective” means generating too much pushback.

Pushing back isn’t polite and it isn’t always nice. For all our justifiable anger, it should be channeled strategically, constructively. And, yes, when necessary, we should put on suits, eat nice meals, and build coalitions with dignitaries. But while networking, let’s remember the ugly realities that demand fixing not because “the Jews” demand it but because justice does.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University on leave in Jerusalem. He is the author of Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today. His latest book The Reagan Revolution:  A Very Short Introduction, was recently published by Oxford University Press.

By Gil Troy, Jerusalem Post, 12-6-09

Excerpt from a testimony I will give on Monday at hearings at the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism.

Allow me a personal note – I hate this topic. I take no joy in pointing out the ugly anti-Semitism afflicting our world today. That the problem is so serious it merits an inquiry of Canadian parliamentarians, violates the post-Auschwitz covenant the world made with the Jewish people after the Holocaust – and into which I was born in 1961. This was supposed to be yesterday’s problem, a stale relic of the old world in Europe. And yet, today, in the new world of the Americas, too many (not all) Jews feel tense on campus, especially if they dare to be pro-Israel.

Today, in the New World, my kids – and others – have had to pass through security guards or other elaborate security systems to enter their Jewish day schools, in Westmount, in Cote St. Luc, otherwise among the world’s safest neighborhoods. Today, in the New World, synagogues have been defaced, graves desecrated, people harassed, for the sole crime of being Jewish. So, I thank you for taking the time to explore this problem. I wish you not only Godspeed but real speed. Please complete your work quickly, solve this problem clearly and make your commission and this whole topic irrelevant, anachronistic – an unpleasant ghost from the past – as swiftly as possible.

Alas, it won’t be so easy. Although this commission has not even issued any recommendations, you are being falsely accused of squelching genuine criticism of Israel and support for Palestinians by invoking the powerful pejorative term “anti-Semitism.” Your critics want us to believe that we cannot distinguish between being critical of Israel and anti-Semitic. They hide their ugly bigotry behind some of the noblest impulses in Canada and the world today, namely the fight against racism. Too many anti-Semites today cross the line while obscuring the line, camouflaging rank bigotry, an aggressive Jew hatred, behind a smoke screen of human rights rhetoric.

Israel and Zionism do not deserve special treatment – just equal treatment. The singling out of Israel, the demonizing of Zionism, have all too frequently descended from the realm of the political to the pathological. It is hard to explain the obsession without mentioning anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionists are honest if not consistent. Too many show their true colors, expressing traditional Jew hatred – throwing pennies at Jewish students during the Concordia riots against Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech on campus in 2002, firebombing a Montreal Jewish day school in 2004, targeting synagogues while supposedly “only” criticizing Israel. Anti-Zionists have repeatedly crossed the line despite their rhetorical attempts at delineating the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

So, no, it is not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, to question Zionism. However it is not “just” criticism of Israel, but reeks of anti-Semitism when the criticism is disproportionate – the obsession about Israel continues the West’s historic obsession with “the Jew.” And it is not “just” criticism of Israel, but degenerates into anti-Semitism when Israel is demonized with traditional anti-Jewish tropes, really tics, exaggerating the power of the Jewish lobby, making the Jewish state the one pariah nation, transforming the old big lie of “Christ killer” into the new big lie of apartheid or Nazi-style racist.

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And it is not “just” criticism of Israel, but resonates with the historic anti-Semitism when Israel is the only nation in the world delegitimized.

ZIONISM IS Jewish nationalism, the idea that the Jews are a people, a nation, not just a religion, tied to one historic homeland Israel, even while being spread out and serving as loyal citizens in countries around the world. That in a world where nationalism remains the major vehicle for organizing polities, nation-states, only one form of nationalism – Jewish nationalism – is rejected reflects the deep-seated bias distorting the debate.

And it is not “just” criticism of Israel, but becomes the new anti-Semitism when the BDS – boycott, divestment sanction movement – actually the blacklist, demonize and slander movement – wants to ostracize Israel, again, alone among the nations of the world. The burden of proof is on the blacklisters. They must explain: Why exile democratic Israel from the family of nations, not dictatorships like Libya, Iran, China, Sudan?

Underlying all this is an essentialism familiar to scholars of anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice. People poisoned by hatred denounce the actor not the act. To criticize Israeli actions regarding the Palestinians can be justified, but why leap from criticizing actions to negating Zionism and Israel’s right to exist?

Here is the double double standard. First, Israel is held to an artificially high standard and denounced disproportionately. Then, key groups violate core ideals in their zeal to denounce Israel. Gays overlook Muslim homophobia, feminists ignore Arab sexism, liberals forget Israeli libertarianism, to bash Israel. Academics override their professional mission to tell the truth and acknowledge the world’s complexity by caricaturing Israel in simplistic terms. When (some, not all!) gay activists, feminists, liberals and academics violate defining values – and their own group interest – to malign Israel, they are doing what bigots do, leaving the realm of the logical for the pathological.

ALLOW ME to focus on two practical suggestions for fighting this scourge.

First, within the academic world, we need leadership not censorship. When violence erupts, universities have failed. Professors, as the moral authorities on campus in regular contact with students should step in, from across the political spectrum, and foster civility.

Moreover, academic freedom must be preserved, but professorial bullying over politics is “academic malpractice” and must be stopped. The government can help universities establish procedures teaching students what to do when their own professors fail to act professionally in classrooms.

And second, let us fight anti-Semitism by fighting bigotry all over.

Wouldn’t it be great if this commission generated a Citizenship 2.0 curriculum teaching young people how to fight hatred on the Web – and in general cultivating a sense of citizenship on the Web?

Both these suggestions show that the fight against anti-Semitism is a subset of a broader struggle against hatred. I’m an historian. I know there will always be haters, bigots and, yes, anti-Semites. But I also know that civilization relies on good people who are willing to fight the poison, and not just say no to anti-Semitism, hatred and bigotry, but to say yes to higher ideals of democracy, civility, liberty, as you all have done – and are doing.

The writer is professor of history at McGill University on leave in Jerusalem. Based on testimony being given Monday at hearings at the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism, consisting of 23 members of Parliament and one senator from all four parties in the House of Commons, held in Ottawa.

By Gil Troy, Jerusalem Post, 11-26-09

Just days after, in all probability, the first Jew since the oppressive Soviet Union collapsed was arrested for wearing a tallit and carrying a Torah, the outrage has dimmed. We have moved on to the next headline. But the Israel Police’s obnoxious overreaching at the Western Wall last week was outrageous. The arrest of Nofrat Frankel in the women’s section of the Wall, and, if reports are correct, the fact that she was held in custody for two-and-a-half hours, insults all Israelis who believe in the rule of law and freedom of religion, no matter how religious or non-religious.

What charge did the police consider while holding her – illegal enveloping in a prayer shawl? Premeditated praying? Unlicensed layning (reading of the Torah)? Now, the police claim they detained her for her own safety. But someone detained for her own safety would be held for two-and-a-half minutes at the Jaffa Gate police station, far from the Wall. Moreover, when extremist hoodlums attacked Elazar Stern, the IDF’s human resources chief, and his family, at the Wall following the Gaza disengagement four years ago, the police showed they know the difference between protecting and arresting someone.

Yes, the situation is complicated. I would not encourage my daughters to parade in a tallit and carry a Torah in the women’s section of the Western Wall, just as I would not encourage my sons to walk onto the women’s side, despite the fact that for centuries Jews prayed at the wall, with men and women mingling freely. I support the compromise whereby women and mixed groups of men and women can pray at the Southern Wall - under Robinson’s Arch, while the Western Wall Plaza follows the protocols of an Orthodox synagogue.

I believe the egalitarians got the better deal. I was bar mitzvahed at the Wall, and remember my mother and grandmother straining to watch. My daughter read Torah on the Thursday before her bat mitzvah under Robinson’s Arch, and we all enjoyed an equal view. Moreover, the Western Wall plaza is sanitized, cleansed of its rocky, rubble-y history to accommodate thousands. The Southern Wall area feels more authentic, historic, with debris from the destruction 1900 years ago seemingly frozen in mid-fall. The compromise works - although freer access to the Southern Wall, and a greater effort by non-Orthodox Jews to visit this equally holy site would validate it more - even though I appreciate the current limited number of visitors preserves the shrine’s charm.

It is unfortunate but understandable that Judaism’s holiest site divides rather than unites. Both sides must remember that we are the product of our history, of the warring ideologies that still have not found a uniform resolution of the profound conflict between tradition and modernity. Still, while I would counsel Nofrat Frankel to respect the Orthodox side of the Wall, I remain appalled that the police used one of the state’s ultimate powers - the power to suspend a citizen’s freedom – when Frankel simply was asserting one of her inherent freedoms, that of religious expression.

Last spring, when Cambridge police arrested Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates after an unfortunate confrontation, the president of the United States himself stepped in and asserted leadership. After first addressing the issue in a hasty, unproductive way, Barack Obama invited Gates and the Cambridge police officer who arrested him for a healing beer at the White House. Race flummoxes Americans as much as religion flummoxes Israelis. As the first African-American president, and Gates’ friend, Barack Obama had particular insight and empathy. In Israel’s fractured political system, with too many small parties holding the government hostage, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu - or any other leader - did not dare to wade into last Wednesday’s mess.

This dodge is triply unfortunate. On religious questions and other issues, Israel badly needs the kind of moral leadership the President of the United States - of either party - frequently provides. Israelis must encourage their leaders, both through substantive political reform and a more subtle mandate, to tackle controversial issues and lead. Moreover civility cannot be assumed in a polyglot democracy with people originating from dozens of different countries, with varying political cultures. Civility must be cultivated. Political leaders can either serve as noxious weeds in the democratic garden or, when really effective, Miracle Gro.

Finally, the questions of religious freedom, separation of church and state, respect for women in Judaism, loom large in Israel-Diaspora relations - particularly among the most engaged non-Orthodox North American Jews. Rather than alienating them through foolish police actions, Israel should be working with them to establish strong multi-generational, cross-Atlantic ties.

Perhaps, then, with the Prime Minister shirking his duties to lead, the mediation should be left to the capable Diaspora Affairs Minister, Yuli Edelstein. Edelstein is a mensch, an observant Jew, with a commitment to religious freedom cemented by time in Soviet prisons. Perhaps he can reconcile both sides.

Meanwhile, the police officers - all along the chain of command - responsible for this stupid, outrageous arrest should undergo American-style sensitivity training - with a Jerusalem twist. I would sentence them, among other educational undertakings, to a Shabbat or two at Jerusalem’s egalitarian synagogues, a short walk from their Jaffa Gate headquarters. Let them experience the joyous, skilled, female-led singing at Shira Chadasha during kabbalat shabbat, the easy equality among tallit-clad women at Moreshet Avraham or Kol HaNishma, the expert women’s Torah readings, especially by bat mitzvah girls, at a growing number of Orthodox synagogues such as Yedidya. Perhaps, rather than just learning that women wrapped in prayer shawls and carrying Torahs should never be arrested, these officers might be inspired to embrace the model of dynamic, committed, pious joyous, egalitarian Judaism Nofrat Frankel was defending - and so many Israeli Jews and Diaspora Jews find so meaningful.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University on leave in Jerusalem. He is the author of Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today, and The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction.

By Gil Troy, Jerusalem Post, 11-19-09

The great Israeli disconnect is the chasm between what you experience living in Israel day to day and what you read about Israel in headlines day after day. Life in Israel is far calmer, safer, smoother and lovelier than the media coverage - pro or con - suggests.

The constant bleating about peace or war, Palestinians and Israelis, legitimacy or illegitimacy, religious and non-religious, fails to convey the realities most Israelis experience while living their lives. Even pro-Israel activists must be wary not to succumb to journalists’ and diplomats’ pathologization of Israel. It is far too easy to see Israel as a case to be defended, a society embattled by cruel Palestinian terror, biased UN reports, and absurd Shabbat riots. In fact, 68% of 500 adult Israelis surveyed last week by Sderot’s Sapir College deemed Israel the best place in the world to live.

For those from abroad who cannot hop on a plane and see, hear, taste, feel and smell Israel, in normal repose at work and play, try watching Israeli television via the Internet. But do it right. Resist the lure of the hypnotizing, “beep, beep, beep” that has conditioned Israelis and their supporters to turn on the radio or watch the news at the top of the hour. Instead, watch the second half of news shows, the lighter-than-air morning shows, and the sitcoms, reality shows and dramas cluttering the airwaves.

If, because of many Diaspora communities’ stunning failure to teach Hebrew, language is a problem, it is never too late to learn. Moreover, television is a visual medium usually programmed for easy viewing, transcending language.

Anyone watching Channel 10’s morning show this Sunday would have experienced an Israel unfamiliar even to many Israel jocks in the Israel advocacy community. The day’s big story was the wave of motorcyclists jamming the highways to protest the Finance Ministry’s license fee boost. I remember during the days of Arafat’s wave of terror how Israelis yearned for a time when traffic jams - or weather - would dominate their headlines.

One story, called “love without borders,” showed Israel has entered the Age of Oprah along with its sister democracies. It featured a wife 19 years older than her husband. She said they met when he was 17 and a half. He felt compelled to note he was only 17 and a month, but had already experienced three “very serious” relationships. As we would witness anywhere else today on Western TV-land, the pretty-boy-and-girl anchor duo mastered that Oprah-esque earnestness necessary to facilitate viewers’ voyeurism. The interviewers appeared sympathetic, even fawning, while leering at the spectacle and clearly hoping their empathetic postures would coax hotter revelations from the renegade lovers.

Another story covered the auction of some of Bernard Madoff’s possessions. Here, the anchors offered that characteristic media mix of apparent social criticism leavened by envy, greed and materialism. Cluck-clucking at each Rolex on display, at every indulgence now for sale, it was clear that they - and the viewers back home - understood their script. Social conventions demanded they disdain Madoff’s materialism, while secretly craving such luxuries. From a Zionist perspective, it was striking that the story did not mention that Madoff was Jewish. This was a deliciously non-neurotic moment, focusing on Madoff the amoral money-maker without feeling compelled to distance this crook defensively from the Jewish community.

My favorite story that day, however, covered the Israeli town of Shfaram’s effort to make the world’s largest tabbouleh salad. Tabbouleh is a wheat-and-herb salad of Lebanese origin. Treated on Channel 10 as simply a typical Israeli town, Shfaram consists of approximately 10% Druse residents, 35% Christians, and 55% Muslims.

Recently, rumors about a video disparaging a Druse leader triggered Christian-Druse violence. Two community leaders, seeking to heal, indulged in a form of culinary therapy. Hoping to get everyone working together, they decided to outdo the Lebanese, who recently made a three and a half ton tabbouleh salad. The result was a record-breaking tabbouleh of more than 4 tons - with 700 kilograms of cucumbers, 700 kilograms of tomatoes and vast quantities of bulgur wheat, parsley and olive oil.

The hundreds of residents who participated took this very seriously. The process was documented to the Guinness Book of World Records’ specifications - a decision is pending. All cooks wore gloves and face masks. Once they finished the salad, the residents ate about 3 tons of it - before donating most of what remained to charities.

This kind of conflict promised a taste of normalcy with just the right Middle East flavor. The town residents saw themselves as competing with the Lebanese on this - and on other, recent competitions - regarding the world’s biggest hummus and the world’s biggest kebbe (a mix of minced meat and cracked meat). The anchors expressed Israelis’ “national pride” in these citizens’ triumph - without ever calling these non-Jewish Israelis anything but Israelis.

True, the story of the more than 4-ton tabbouleh, like the other morning show segments, walked that fine line between depressing idiocy and charming normalcy. But this daily carnival of the offbeat was so refreshingly benign, so wonderfully non-political, it was downright therapeutic.

Despite the world’s obsession with the Middle East, few journalists reported this scoop of the great tabbouleh showdown. A Google search of the terms tabbouleh, tons and Shfaram yielded 25 hits; searching the terms weapons, tons, Israel and Iran yielded 1,610,000 hits - most referring to the Israeli navy’s recent seizure of 500 tons of Iranian weapons being smuggled to Hizbullah.

Journalists and citizens must monitor stories about serious threats like the arms shipments. But these stories must be put in context. The media is a great validator, not just a great magnifier. We should hear more about efforts at gastronomic diplomacy - and culinary showdowns - remembering that Israel is a normal, functioning state, not a state of siege.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University on leave in Jerusalem. He is the author of Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today. His latest book The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, was recently published by Oxford University Press.

By Gil Troy, Jerusalem Post, 11-12-09

November 10 marked the 34th anniversary of the UN General Assembly’s passage of the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution. That day, noting that it was the 37th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazis’ countrywide pogrom on “the night of broken glass,” UN ambassador Chaim Herzog denounced the resolution.

“I stand here not as a supplicant… For the issue is neither Israel nor Zionism,” Herzog said. “The issue is the continued existence of this organization, which has been dragged to its lowest point of discredit by a
coalition of despots and racists. The vote of each delegation will record in history its country’s stand on anti-Semitic racism and anti-Judaism. You yourselves bear the responsibility for your stand before history, for as
such will you be viewed in history. We, the Jewish people, will not forget.”

As he concluded, remembering how his father, Palestine’s chief rabbi in the 1930s, protested the British White Paper restricting Jewish immigration, Herzog ripped up his copy of the resolution.

Herzog could tear the resolution to tatters. The UN could rescind it in 1991. Yet 34 years later this new Big Lie, the Soviet and Nazi roots of which historian Bernard Lewis uncovered­, sitll persists. Jews, long victimized by racists and disgusted by racism, have been tagged as racists.

Israel, the Jewish people’s collective entity, has been compared to apartheid South Africa, with the Palestinian-Israeli national conflict cast falsely as a racial conflict. And just as anti-apartheid activists once
nobly agitated to boycott South African products, divest from South African companies and sanction South African racists, an ignoble BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions for Palestine) seeks to impose similar punishments on Israel.

BDS sounds like a new communicable disease – in many ways it is. It is viral and pathological; we ignore it at our peril.

One of the first sessions held as the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities convened this Sunday in Washington featured speakers who understand what Herzog understood, that this campaign reflects on its perpetuators its perpetrators. It reflects their bias, their double standards, their blindness to the sins of others and their myopic obsession with Israel’s imperfections.

Herzog understood something else too. Israel’s adversaries have given it a gift of sorts by drawing a clear line in the sand. The BDS debate is not about “occupation” or borders or peace processes. It is not about Likud vs. Labor or Meretz vs. Shas. The BDS campaign assails Israel’s legitimacy, declaring it so odious that no one should drink any Israeli wine, no one should enjoy any Israeli film, no one should collaborate with any Israeli academic. This BDS movement is an obscene campaign of blacklisting,
demonizing and slandering, as activists in Toronto have redefined it, understanding we must name, shame and reframe.

So far, the warfare has been asymmetrical. Facing the systematic BDS campaign to delegitimize Israel, Jewish groups have responded sporadically, haphazardly. But there is a growing awareness that the Jewish community needs a sophisticated, coordinated strategy. As Herzog’s UN colleague Daniel Patrick Moynihan would later write:

It would be tempting to see in this propaganda nothing more than bigotry of a quite traditional sort that can,
sooner or later, be overcome. But the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist campaign is not uninformed bigotry, it is conscious politics… It is not merely that our adversaries have commenced an effort to destroy the legitimacy of a kindred democracy through the incessant repetition of the Zionist-racist lie. It is that others can come to believe it also. Americans among them.”

At the session, which I moderated and which attracted an overflow crowd, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, called this fight “the defining issue of our time.” He said the Jewish people, despite our pride in being a tolerant people, must have “zero tolerance for this intolerance.”

Professor Irwin Cotler, the former Canadian minister of justice and attorney-general, analyzed the anti-Israel “lawfare,” showing how the language of human rights,­ the important infrastructure of international law,
­ is hijacked to legalize and legitimize Israel’s delegitimization.

He showed how this unrighteous assault using righteous concepts sought to make Israel today’s “new anti-Christ.” Cotler, a noted human rights activist, also reported that when he was invited to join a UN human rights inquiry whose biased anti-Israel mandate predetermined a guilty verdict, he said no. Cotler refused to be “a Jewish fig leaf” for a corrupted, anti-Israel, human rights-lynching, unlike his colleague Richard Goldstone.

The remainder of the session provided reports from the field of useful tactics to combat the Israel-haters. The Jewish community cannot do this alone. Relationships must be nurtured, grassroots must be tended to
establish common cause against the forces of hatred. We must be proactive not reactive, nimble and subtle, mastering the insider lingo of each special interest group involved in a particular fight.

When boycotters targeted the Toronto International Film Festival, Hollywood heavyweights mobilized, not just to defend Israel, but to fight blacklists, which are anathema in that community. Corporations must realize how much money they will lose if the world market becomes a politically correct, divestment-strewn battlefield on which the world’s despots target Israel, the perennial whipping boy, or some other perceived enemy.

And soldiers fighting terror all over the world must realize that if Israel’s anti-terror squads are prosecuted in international courts one day, America’s or England’s or Canada’s war heroes could be next.

The pro-Israel community can make lemonade from these BDS lemons. In Toronto, when the BDSers boycotted Israeli wine merchants, they triggered a wave of Israeli wine purchases; when they protested a Dead Sea Scroll exhibit and the Toronto International Film Festival’s tribute to Tel Aviv, they guaranteed sold-out events.

More broadly, we should seize this opportunity to reframe the debate away from the messy complexities of Israeli politics and Israeli-Palestinian disputes to the simple question the blacklisters-demonizers-slanderers raise about accepting or repudiating Israel’s right to exist. And we should recall, that just as 40 years ago the prospects of freeing Soviet Jewry seemed dim, just as a century ago the dream of a Jewish state
seemed impossible, sometimes the good guys win, conditions improve, grassroots movements shape historical earthquakes.

The time to forge coalitions of the righteous against the hypocritically self-righteous has come. We need a sustained, effective, movement against the delegitimization of Israel, understanding that in defeating this
Orwellian inversion of all that is good, we will restore the world’s moral balance while defending the Jewish state, the Jewish people, and democracy from despots and terrorists.

The writer is professor of history at McGill University on leave in Jerusalem and the author of Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today and The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction.

By Gil Troy, Jerusalem Post, 11-3-09

In her recent Jerusalem Post Magazine column, in which she gave Israel a ”Democracy Check” fourteen years after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Naomi Chazan ominously failed her own test.

In analyzing Israel’s “ongoing democratic malfunctioning,” Professor Chazan offered such one-sided and exaggerated examples that her article was actually detrimental to democracy. Faced with, alas, far too many examples of violence, intolerance, hysteria, or insensitivity from across the Israeli political spectrum, she only saw the Right’s abuses. I am always amazed at partisans’ inability, both Left and Right, to engage in self-criticism - even to build credibility. But preaching about democracy in such a myopic manner deforms democracy, reducing this delicately balanced mechanism to just another bludgeon for bashing your enemies.

Most outrageously, in lamenting the “persistent inability to distinguish between freedom of speech and incitement,” Professor Chazan failed to distinguish between violent crimes and honest disagreements regarding strategy or policy. “Peace movements and activists have been a favorite target” of unhealthy incitement, she observed, correctly. But then she added: “The bombing of Prof. Ze’ev Sternhell’s home, Moshe Ya’alon’s depiction of Peace Now as a virus and Ambassador Michael Oren’s innuendo that J Street is promoting positions that are not in Israel’s interest are just three recent examples.”

Say what? I read that obscene absurdity three times to make sure I wasn’t misreading it. Equating, in any way, Ambassador Oren’s decision not to address a lobbying group - but to send an observer - with the evil violence perpetrated against Professor Sternhell is unconscionable. And using a term like “innuendo,” reeking as it does of McCarthyism, is itself a McCarthyite technique. It suggests that Professor Chazan failed to understand the argument she advanced so eloquently; that democracy requires what she called “self-restraint” that accepts “diversity” along with civil “disagreement” - acceptance of the idea that fair-minded, intelligent people may arrive at different conclusions. And such failure, under the guise of honoring Yitzhak Rabin’s memory, profanes that tragedy’s profound lessons with partisan bile.

In an overlooked lesson from his thought-provoking new book, one of America’s towering intellectuals, Norman Podhoretz, explains the myopia Chazan - and so many partisans both Left and Right - display. Podhoretz asks Why are Jews Liberals – a query that from an Israeli perspective should read, “Why are American Jews Liberals?”

I hate Podhoretz’s answer - because he may be right.

American Jewish liberals’ self-justifying myth preaches that American Jews are liberals because Judaism IS liberalism - if you have any doubts, study Isaiah, or learn about Tikun Olam. Podhoretz, who of course is no longer a liberal, rejects that argument, especially because the most pious Jews tend to be less liberal, and today’s less committed Jews frequently place their liberalism ahead of their people’s self-interest.

Podhoretz explains that over the last two centuries, as American Jews passed from the Old Country’s oppressions and deprivations to the New World’s freedom and prosperity, liberals were the good guys - and conservatives were the bad guys. In his book’s first part, “How the Jews Became Liberals,” Podhoretz’s lightening-quick guided tour illuminates the intertwined histories of anti-Semitism and enlightenment, delighting the reader with his skill despite the depressing picture he paints. For decades, anti-Semitism festered on the Right more than the Left, culminating with Hitler. As a result, Podhoretz argues, in Part II, “Why the Jews Are Still Liberals,” American Jews remain wired to love liberalism, even as today’s ugly anti-Semitism finds too welcoming a home with too much of the Left.

Seeing American Jewish political behavior through the historic prism of anti-Semitism explains why for decades the American Jewish Committee survey has found Americans Jews far more worried about American anti-Semitism than necessary. Applying the argument globally, one could say that in Israel, the Left is so insanely Left, and the Right so insanely Right, because each draws strength from its own reading of the Jewish encounter with Jew hatred.

I hate the argument. As a post-Auschwitz Jew, born a decade and a half after the Holocaust, I want to believe that the world - and my people - have moved beyond anti-Semitism. I wish the ADL was anachronistic. Alas, recent events have proved that the new, post-Auschwitz strain of anti-Zionist anti-Semitism is invigorated by the dangerous toxin of left-wing self-righteousness.

The profound - and mostly overlooked – part of Podhoretz’s argument gets to the essence of what political identity is - and why partisans like Professor Chazan can view the world in such warped ways. With his atavistic, essentialist explanation for liberalism, Podhoretz suggests our political stands are not transactional positions we arrive at rationally and adjust casually. The depth and dimensionality of our political identities explains the visceral disgust too many partisans feel for those who dare disagree with them.

In a recent New York Times column, “The Young and the Neuro,” the always thoughtful David Brooks introduced readers to the burgeoning field of “social cognitive neuroscience,” meaning how “biology, in the form of genes, influences behavior” and “how social behavior changes biology.” Brooks implicitly pushed Podhoretz’s historical explanation into the realms of psychology and biology. Lo and behold, Brooks noted, Reem Yahya and a team from the University of Haifa discovered that “Jews were more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than their own.”

As an historian, I recoil from monocausal or deterministic explanations. I draw on the first book of Podhoretz’s I ever read, Making It, to explain American Jewish liberalism further. Beyond whatever scars we may carry from centuries of anti-Semitism, American Jews are also driven to “make it.” The sociological corner in America wherein we have most thrived is the Ivy-covered, bicoastal liberal cosmopolitan post-modern “shtetl.” No wonder most of us embrace the identity of our new best friends who have allowed us not just to become one with them but define them.

Podhoretz - and Brooks - help explain how Chazan and so many partisans are frequently so unreasonable even when preaching about being reasonable. Still, no matter how far “social cognitive neuroscience” advances, no matter how resonant we find the insights of Podhoretz or others, we should never get so bound to our atavistic or scientific models we forget humans’ near divine ability to transcend.

Democracy trumps biology and history. Civility can calm the collective soul and send the individual soaring. We must strive harder to achieve such transcendent leaps of faith, for all our sakes, in Israel and America, on the day we commemorate Yitzhak Rabin - and every other day, too.

By Gil Troy, Jerusalem Post, 10-25-09

Although life in Israel is, overall, delightfully safe and calm these days, these are sobering times for the pro-Israel community abroad. Israel-bashing is all the rage in the Arab world, in European salons and at the UN. It is also becoming an increasingly popular pastime on campuses and even among some “progressive” American Jews, who confess to “Israel exhaustion.”

Smart analysts like Rabbi Daniel Gordis, author of Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End, point to structural and ideological shifts that explain why so many more young Jews throw up their hands in exhaustion rather than raising their voices in unison not just to defend Israel, but to celebrate Israel.

“The issue isn’t Israel, or utopia,” Gordis recently wrote in The Jerusalem Post. “It’s America, and the ‘I’ at the core of American sensibilities.” Challenging the community for “basically doing nothing” Gordis concluded: “Try to list the serious Jewish educational enterprises addressing this challenge, asking how American Jewish education can counter America’s unfettered individualism, or what Israel could do to help. Can you name even one? Neither can I.”

Although I have never played poker with my friend and role model Rabbi Gordis, I will see him, and raise him, on his analysis. Not only do too many North American Jewish enterprises fail to counter American individualism, careerism and materialism - too much North American Jewish life fosters individualism, careerism and materialism. We need think-tanks analyzing this problem, educational, communal and religious institutions countering the problem, and the entire community embarking on a twelve-step program to end our collective addiction to the modern paganism of selfishness, individuation, acquisitiveness, hyper-ambition and greed.

Yet we must do this subtly, moderately, because North American individualism, careerism and materialism are also keys to North American Jewish liberty, creativity and vitality. To get the right balance, to find the right mix, we must blend in Jewish values, spirituality, textual learning, an appreciation of history, Zionist passion, a love of Israel, the power of community and the sheer fun of living Jewish, loving Jewish, doing Jewish.

Fortunately, the day school movement in North America has flagship schools, including Akiva School in Montreal and Gann Academy in Boston, that are succeeding with this North American Jewish recipe.  Moreover, modern Jewry and the pro-Israel community have an ace in the hole: Taglit-Birthright Israel, the single most successful Jewish communal innovation of the last decade (probably longer, but it is only ten years old). Birthright Israel exhilaration counters the Israel exhaustion of the blame-Israel-firsters, the my, my, my, now, now, now individuation of the all-American me-firsters, and the “whatever” alienation of the too-cool-to-be-Jewish, Jewish hipsters.

Birthright Israel’s free ten-day trips to Israel invite Jewish students to press the reset button on their Jewish experiences, their Israel connection, their Zionist identities, their personal worldviews and individual paths. Birthright participants engage Israel through sites and delights, not through politics and problems. They learn to appreciate the power of community, Jewish and otherwise, because - in the spirit of the Minyan, Jewish communal prayer - they get a free ticket to join 40 others on this journey, not simply to backpack across Israel alone. And they are welcomed not hectored to continue, to pursue their own Jewish journeys. The “no strings attached” promise of birthright - meaning no demands for payback, financial or ideological - reflects  the program’s educational openness, integrity and effectiveness - contrary to caricatures from the left for being too heavyhanded and from the right for being too namby-pamby.

The Birthright trinity of land, history and people leavened with friendship, a family feeling, 24/7 intensity, and fun exposes Jewish students, on the cusp of adulthood, to an Israel they never read about in the newspapers and, I regret to say, often a quality of Jewish life they never experienced back home. The timing is perfect. Students 18 to 26 are making the life-decisions about career, quality of life, and love that will shape who they are for the coming decades. Moreover, the tone is just right. Clearly, birthright has a pro-Israel, pro-Jewish, pro-Zionist perspective. But smart educators know that today’s youth cannot be bullied or guilt-tripped into believing or belonging. Despite all the troubles, slanders and terrorism of the decade, 220,000 Jewish students have participated, with the overwhelming majority thrilled, and many returning to their communities ready to be the passionate Jews - and Jewish leaders - of tomorrow.

And yet, in a reflection of stunning, unconscionable, communal myopia, not every student who applies can go on Birthright. The Jerusalem Post reports that this winter alone, “more than 13,000 young, mostly unaffiliated Jews from around the world were turned away” due to lack of funding, and that “80% of wait-listed birthright applicants never reapply.” Here a program with a proven track-record responds to the great communal challenge of our time by inspiring young Jews, yet somehow not enough individual Jews and communal institutions have decided to fund it yet.

My parents report that among their “golden age” peers, grandparents are always saying how “wonderful” Birthright is. I wonder, do any of them decide therefore to take some responsibility and send another deserving youngster - or 40 on a bus - or 100 from a community - as thanks? People love to ask Birthright’s founders Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt “how can I ever repay you?” Bronfman and Steinhardt probably are too polite to answer: “by donating generously to send others.”

Birthright began as an act of guerilla philanthropy - as Messrs. Bronfman and Steinhardt rushed ahead, before all the proper committees met, before all the Jewish communal protocols were followed - and they succeeded. This act of guerilla philanthropy should now be rewarded - when the crunch is on - with a massive display of grassroots giving. People should give what they can, raise more from others, and demand that their Federations increase support. And no one who reads this essay can ever say, “no one ever asked me to help” - I just did.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University on leave in Jerusalem. He is the author of Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today. He just became the voluntary Chairman of the Taglit-Birthright International Education Committee.

By Gil Troy, Jerusalem Post, 10-16-09

Dear Jeremy Ben-Ami,

Allow me to respond to your open letter to Ambassador Michael Oren with an open letter of my own.

I share your worry “that the connection to Israel for a large number of Jewish Americans has become strained over time.” I love your statement to the Ambassador, and presumably to the entire pro-Israel community, that “what J-Street shares in common with you far outweighs that on which we disagree.” As someone trying to figure out how to sing a new song of Zion for the next generation of Jews and as someone who champions “big-tent” Zionism, like there was during the movement’s early days, it sounds like you’re singing my song.

Alas, when I examine what you advocate and what you ignore, when I read your statements, surf your website and look at your conference program, I am troubled. For starters, I do not see the use of the word “Zionism” anywhere. I wonder if that is tactical or ideological.

I wonder if you would display on your website the following statement:

Year after year, century after century, Jews carried on their traditions, and their dream of a homeland, in the face of impossible odds…. And I deeply understood the Zionist idea – that there is always a homeland at the center of our story.”

Those are the words of then-Senator Barack Obama, spoken on June 4, 2008, the day after he clinched the nomination.

Or what about this:

My starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves.”

Obama again. If President Obama is not afraid to affirm Zionist ideals, why do you seem to be?

Note on your website the comment that:

The Palestinian people are likely to continue to nurture an anger that leads some to armed struggle as long as there is no mutually accepted resolution to the underlying political conflict.”

True, Palestinian anger must be acknowledged. But why do I hear nothing about the other phenomenon that must be acknowledged, Israeli anguish? Why do I hear nothing from you about the 850,000 Jewish refugees expelled from Arab lands, decades of Arab rejectionism, Palestinian anti-Semitism, the fact that withdrawal under Oslo and after the Gaza disengagement has only fed more violence, or the pain of Israelis whose blood has been spilled over the years? Why have I not heard a J-Street statement as passionate as this one:

The first job of any nation-state is to protect its citizens…. If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

That, too, was said by President Obama, during his visit to Sderot in July, 2008. Without the assurance that Israel’s pain is felt, without understanding that Israel faces a series of untenable choices when defending its people against terrorists who hide among civilians, without noticing that Oslo and Disengagement triggered more violence, the “peace of the brave” we all seek is reduced to a delusion – or an anti-Israel mugging.

I understand your desire to be evenhanded, and believe there is room in the pro-Israel and Zionist movements for voices such as yours. I hope that from your “J-Street” address you can see the Golden Path to a solution. My fear, though, is that you can only see Israeli sins and not Palestinian crimes; that your mythical address prevents you from seeing the facts on the ground we see in Israel, on campus, in the UN and elsewhere. I would love to see progressive voices lead the fight against the ugly campaign to de-legitimize Israel. We need civil rights activists who fought against apartheid to repudiate the libel falsely comparing the Israeli-Palestinian nationalist conflict to South African whites’ ugly racist oppression. We need people with impeccable progressive credentials willing to confront the Arab dictatorships, condemn Muslim homophobia, racism, and sexism, and to denounce terrorism.

Instead, I see a conference program more comfortable with finger-pointing at Israel. Why not call your “Messaging ‘Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace’” session “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace and Anti-Delegitimization,” acknowledging how much the rejection of Israel harms the peace process (just as most Israelis learned in the 1990s that denying Palestinian nationalism is counter-productive)? Will “Israel on Campus,” address the dilemmas so many students face: Attacks on Israel are so extreme, they fear any constructive criticism of Israel they utter will be used as fodder to continue demonizing their homeland – and all too often, their people?

And I would be more comfortable with the Americans for Peace Now session “West Bank Settlements: Obstacles on the Road to Peace,” if anything in the conference program acknowledged the “Obstacles on the Road to Peace” constituted by the Hamas charter, terrorism, demagoguery in mosques, rabble-rousing on the Temple Mount, harassment of Palestinian moderates, refusal to acknowledge Jewish rights to the land, Arab anti-Semitism, etc.

I hate to sound so unwelcoming. I believe there is no inherent contradiction between being progressive and being a Zionist, that Israel represents a remarkable attempt to establish liberal, democratic and Jewish values in the Middle East. We need a broad coalition of pro-Israel forces. But my sense is that Ambassador Oren senses what I sense. You find it easier to bash Israel than to criticize Israel’s adversaries. Maybe the burden is on you to establish some street cred by fighting the anti-Israel delegitimizers, the anti-Semitic anti-Zionists, who are affronts to what you so eloquently call “the values we bring to the table as Jews and as Americans.”

In friendship,

Gil

By Gil Troy, Jerusalem Post, 10-11-09

Nobel-Prize-award week was yet another split-screen week for Israel, emphasizing the gap between Israel’s noble achievements and its adversaries’ ignoble aims, as well as between Barack Obama’s worldwide popularity and his unpopularity in Israel. Israel must do more to ensure it is a country filled with people like Ada Yonath, who won Israel’s ninth Nobel prize, and the first Chemistry Nobel for a woman since 1964. But Israel must also bridge the growing gap between Barack Obama’s saintly status in Europe and the skepticism he generates in Zion.

Israelis giddily celebrated Yonath’s extraordinary achievement; further proof that this little country has disproportionate impact in bettering this world, in revolutionizing science. The headline of one Jerusalem Post article noting that nine Israelis had won the prize (counting two Sveriges Riksbank Prizes in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel), read: “Closer to a Nobel Minyan.” The piece echoed my (and so many others’) Jewish parents’ questions when we came home from school with a 97: “Where are the other three points?”

Simultaneously, headlines speculated about a third intifada; rather than collecting Nobel Prizes, Palestinians were collecting stones to hide in wheelbarrows on the Temple Mount and building up rage over imagined insults. The latest trigger was the visit of French Christian tourists whom demagogic Palestinians decided were Jewish militants. The Israeli authorities had banned Jewish groups to keep order, but that did not stop the rabble rousers, led by Sheikh Ra’ed Salah, who cries: “if Zionism isn’t eliminated, there will not be peace.”

Fortunately, peace reigned throughout most of Jerusalem, as tens of thousands thronged the Old City for Succot festivities. But once again, it seemed we needed a corollary to Golda Meir’s cliché. Meir supposedly said: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” Peace will also come when the Palestinians are more passionate about building their state and society than destroying ours.

More ominously for Israel, the morning President Barack Obama received his Nobel Prize, Ha’aretz warned: “US administration angered over Israeli incitement against Obama.” The Nobel Prize is a collective European thumbs-up for Obama – and yet another “flip of the bird” – as we used to say in Queens – to George W. Bush. In 2002, Jimmy Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize reflected European disdain for Bush’s unilateral War on Terror.

Seven years later, the counter-reaction against Bush persists. “Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee declared. “Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.”

The more the world deifies Obama, the harder it is for Israel to defy him. Obama, despite all the hype, is only human. Adulation is addictive. The more he is worshipped, the less open the world’s wunderkind will be to criticism from Israelis – or anyone else.

Yes, Obama won the prize prematurely. Even the pro-Obama New York Times called the award “a decidedly mixed blessing … a reminder of the gap between the ambitious promise of his words and his accomplishments.”

Yet give Obama his due. The hope his election unleashed worldwide was amazing. “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” the Nobel Prize citation says. During this dark recession year, America’s single greatest export has been the hope Barack Obama transmitted to billions of the disillusioned, the oppressed, the discriminated against throughout the world. This achievement may be Nobel Prize-worthy.

Alas, even with Obama in office, the world remains menaced by ignoble characters who disdain his noble aspirations. The jury is still out whether Obama’s politics of hope and diplomacy of engagement can work in a world of al Qaeda killers, North Korean dictators, Iranian madmen, Iraqi insurgents, Taliban fanatics, Afghani warlords, Pakistani generals, Russian strongmen, Saudi Sheiks, Sudanese slaughterers, Guinea rapists and Hamas terrorists. Moreover, hope is like a balloon: if properly inflated it soars into the sky, dazzling, delighting and elevating, but if overblown, it pops. Historically, rising expectations have preceded revolutions, both constructive and destructive.

The contrast between noble societies that invest in science and ignoble societies addicted to terror, between noble political cultures that produce hope-generators like Barack Obama and ignoble political cultures that produce mass killers, remains daunting. Obama’s fate as president will not be determined by any Norwegian committee; it will be determined by how he reconciles his lofty hopes with the world’s ugly realities.

In dealing with Obamania, Israel faces a conundrum. It is not easy to stand out, to defy the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom, especially in Europe, has been wrong before, and is wrongheaded now, trusting a UN that has degenerated into the “Third World Dictators’ Debating Society.” Without that ability to think outside the box, the Zionist revolution never would have reestablished the Jewish state, nor would Ada Yonath have ever realized how antibiotics bind to ribosomes.

Professor Yonath recalled this week that experts warned her: “You won’t make it, what you want to do others have tried and failed, so it won’t happen.” Fortunately, she persisted. Eventually, her inspiration and perspiration paid off. Israel has no choice but to persist scientifically, diplomatically, militarily. This ugly world witnesses miracles every day. Ada Yonath ultimately succeeded. A self-described “skinny guy with a funny name” became a 48-year-old American president and Nobel Peace Prize Winner. Perhaps, with all the wisdom in this country, Israel can figure out how to make peace with Obama while achieving a true peace that is mutual, realistic, and brings out the best of all the peoples in the region.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University on leave in Jerusalem. He is the author of Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today. His latest book, The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, was recently published by Oxford University Press.

By Gil Troy, Jerusalem Post, 10-8-09

With Israel best known for generating headlines about its troubles, its joys are too frequently overlooked. To be in Israel for “the hagim,” the High Holidays, including Sukkot, is a blessed, underreported privilege. From the shanah tovah greetings everywhere to the antacid commercials responding to bouts of holiday overeating, the holiday spirit is pervasive. But this is not simply the Jewish version of the Christmas season three months early. It is striking to an outsider how seriously so many Israelis take the Yamim Noraim, truly making them Days of Awe.

Especially in Jerusalem, the engagement with repentance feels ubiquitous. In North America, the ten days of penitence frequently divide into three holy days (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) and seven scrambling-to-catch-up-at-work days. In Israel, many people carve out the time for spiritual reflection, following the journey from self-evaluation to redemption our ancestors mapped out for us.

Affirming the Zionist idea that returning to the land would make us whole as a people, the spirit is in the air; the spirituality has a geography to it too. School kids hum Adon HaSlichot, the Lord of Forgiveness, a multi-stanza piyyut, poem, as they scamper about. High school students have all-night tours in the neighborhoods around Jerusalem’s Machaneh Yehudah market, culminating in pre-dawn “slichot” penitential prayers, as the magic of the night and the romance of the place enhance the prayers’ power. And for people of all ages, there are classes galore, in schools and synagogues, in community centers and private homes.

My twelve-year-old son, starting this year at the Shalom Hartman Institute’s High School, had one such all night marathon. It began at 11 o’clock with a class for parents, too. Surprisingly, impressively, my son’s teacher immediately engaged the bleary-eyed parents who showed up. The class began with a contemporary Ehud Manor-Matti Caspi song, “Slichot,” about the challenges of seeking forgiveness and the mutuality needed for it to work.

“I don’t know what to say, I didn’t want to hurt you,” the song begins, sounding like a typically sappy pop-cult lament. But, as the teacher’s literary, historical, and spiritual tour de force demonstrated, the song echoes the Talmud, the 12th century rabbi Maimonides, and Israel’s Nobel Prize winning novelist, S.Y. Agnon. Even more impressive than the teacher’s mastery of the sources was the sincerity of his engagement with the process, with these spurs for each individual to use this highly ritualized collective time to make personal, challenging adjustments.

The next night, my wife and I joined fifty thousand others at the National Stadium in Ramat Gan to hear Canadian music legend Leonard Cohen. The 75-year-old graduate of Montreal’s Herzliah High School fit right in with Israel’s addictive, characteristic, old-new mix. Cohen’s entrancing three and a half hour performance culminated with his invoking Birkat HaKohanim, the priestly blessing.

Still, as moved as I was by Cohen’s wry, impish, sensitive provocative worldview, as fascinated as I was to see how he transformed his Jewish learning and his own spiritual wanderings into popular poetry for the masses, his message was jarring. “Who by Fire” updates the stirring Unetanah tokef prayer, a High Holiday highlight. Inspired by the terrifying “Who shall live, who shall die,” riff, Cohen asks, “who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate… who in mortal chains, who in power/ And who shall I say is calling?” A Jewish prayer affirming God’s power, and prescribing “repentance, prayer and righteousness” to “avert the severe decree” becomes a modern mirror of alienation and hedonism, tempered by a dash of social criticism. Unetaneh tokef, “We Shall Ascribe Holiness to this Day,” affirms order, virtue, and authority in the world; Leonard Cohen’s “Who by Fire” ascribes randomness to this universe.

Nevertheless, Cohen’s karma proved contagious. After the concert, as thousands pulled out of their typically Israeli haphazard parking spots – it took us more than 45 minutes to leave the complex – a modern miracle occurred: I did not hear one shout, one sustained beep, one impatient “Nu kvar.” As we traveled back from Cohen’s world to the Jerusalem bubble – unsure which is real, which is right – we hit traffic jams at 1 a.m. – as hundreds thronged the streets, taking last-minute penitential tours of Machaneh Yehudah, Nachlaot, the Old City.

It all peaked with Yom Kippur, which concentrated the collective power of millions engaging with God, engaging with themselves, repenting, changing, fixing the world. The atmospherics outside again enhanced the piety, literacy, authenticity, intensity of the experiences inside the synagogue. Leaving the Kol Nidre prayers into the silence of a world without cars – in the center of the city – is amazing, as is the warm, communal feeling, as people promenade up and down normally hazardous streets like Emek Refaim. With the bicyclists and the pedestrians taking over the city, religious and secular mingle freely, easily, sharing the delight in the voluntary ban on driving in the Jewish people’s capital on the Jewish people’s holiest day.

The holiday season culminates now with Succot. The oft-neglected holiday in the Diaspora – with people desperate to return to work – is a national holiday here, with all schools closed. Succot blossom everywhere, lovely unexpected flowers jutting out of the urban concrete jungle. With camping trips and mass priestly blessings at the Wall, soap box car races, all day learning fests, and a 70,000-person Jerusalem parade featuring Christian Zionists from all over the world – Succot truly becomes zman simchateinu, “the holiday of our joy.”

Few moderns can relate to our ancestors’ joy during the harvest. But as meaning-seeking creatures, with all of us on some path trying to understand what life is all about, Succot’s joy derives from its proximity to Yom Kippur. Having grappled with eternal questions, struggled to improve our souls, what better way to assert our humanity and our Jewishness than through celebration? And for those of us in Israel, how lucky we are to experience this all at the point of origin, our ancient homeland, and in sync with so many others. Such joy, such spiritual satisfaction may not make headlines, but it makes life worth living.