[First posted 2013; this is from our MUST READ/MUST OWN The Jewish Mystique by Ernest van den Haag. Keep in mind that this book was published in 1967 so it’s interesting reading in hindsight, knowing the history of the modern state of Israel today, almost five decades later. Related posts you might want to check out:
Highlights and reformatting added—Admin 1.]
Jews and the Promised Land
Image from www.plataformamesianica.com
During the many centuries of the Diaspora, Jews all over the world included a fervent prayer as part of the rites of Passover. In no matter what language they said it, the promise to each other was always the same: “Next year in Jerusalem.” For many Jews this prediction has now come true; for others it could be fulfilled should they actually so desire.
- Many Jews went to Israel as soon as it became possible because they wanted to;
- others went because it became impossible to stay where they were—and Israel was the only alternative for them.
- This was the case of many who came from the Near East, and of others who fled Hitler in Europe.
One of the reasons the late Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol put pressure on the American Jews to emigrate to Israel, as Ben Gurion did before him, was that only the United States and Russia have any sizable Jewish communities left within their boundaries.
- The Russian Jews would like to, but cannot go: the government does not allow Jews, or other Russians, to leave the USSR.
- The American Jews could go but do not want to—though those who celebrate Passover may still include the ritual prayer in the proceedings:
“Next year in Jerusalem.”
But not this year, and probably never. Why?
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In the ten years before World War I, during the period of the first great Jewish immigration and settlement in what was then Palestine, only a bare handful of Jews went there from the United States.
- By 1948, when the State of Israel was established, there were under 10,000 American Jews out of a total population of 650,000 Jews.
- Today, the figure may be only 20,000 or 25,000.
No wonder Mr. Eshkol and his predecessor, David Ben Gurion, were disturbed, however diplomatically.
- The American Jews will send their dollars—and they have been generous.
- Their hearts may be in Israel, but not the rest of their bodies.
- Yet the Israelis want Jews, body and soul, not just money.
- The American Jews are the most educated and skilled, and they are the most useful and needed ones.
- But they prefer to visit.
- The very dollars, which they send so freely to Israel, keep the American Jews in the United States.
- They are not only too prosperous, they are too happily settled down into that great middle estate, which is the ambition of the greater part of the human race, to want to rock the boat—or to take one.
Reluctance to emigrate to Israel is reinforced by unhappy experience. Those rare American Jews who do go to Israel and like it stay there and thus do not come back to propagandize. And when they write back, it is to brag about the hardship they are willing to endure.
Those who go to Israel, and do not like it, do come back. They talk about the hardships they were unwilling to endure. Like lovers who somehow feel cheated by the beloved, they are very verbal their disillusionment.
“The problem for an American who emigrates to Israel,” said one such returnee, “is that he’s got it in the back of his mind that he’s leaving a culture in which he has been taught that he has inherited the world—even if he’s a Jew, he’s inherited it by virtue of being an American as well. Now he’s coming to a country which, clearly more primitive, materially at least, than the country he left, nevertheless feels itself morally superior to his old country and therefore to him. He went to help them; they feel—and make him felt—that they are helping him. [Both are right, perhaps. But they don’t feel comfortable with each other.]
“He wants Israel—his new country—to be better than his old one. After all, that is why he is leaving the United States. For a better place, he thinks. But he doesn’t want his new fellow citizens to be or feel morally superior to him. But they do.”
Americans in Israel are ever so slightly patronized as spoiled children, people who don’t understand. They haven’t been through the Nazi persecution, the liberation, the Arab wars. Neither their capacity to suffer nor their capacity to fight has been tested as that of the Israelites has been. They are just rich. Richer, indeed, than the sufferers and the heroes. Which somehow seems wrong.
And more, the American Jew, poor fellow, doesn’t even speak Hebrew, the language of Israel. And like most Americans, and unlike many Europeans, he doesn’t have a knack for picking up languages quickly and easily. The result is that in the end he comes to feel that he traded the comforts, the ease, and heimischness of America for a less comfortable country where instead of being admired for his idealism in coming, he is looked down and treated—well, the way newcomers often are treated anywhere. But Americans find it particularly hard to be patronized. Above all, once they are abroad they discover how American they are. In America, they may feel that they are Jews. But in Israel, they feel they are Americans.
“The Americans who come to Israel,” says an Israeli medical student at Columbia, “know that there is one thing more precious than anything in the world. Their blue-green American passport. No matter how fired up they are in the beginning about Israel, they always keep that ticket back home firmly in their pocket.
They are very romantic about Israel, and so, naturally, there is a counter-emotion that soon sets in. A disillusionment. They begin to swing between the two worlds, traveling to and from, up and back. They come to Israel with stars in their eyes, but soon discover that Israeli pioneering is nothing like the technicolor movies of the American West which shaped their dreams. They then decide to go back to the United States. But once there, they begin to get fed up with the life there—the process which brought them to Israel to begin with.
‘There is no idealism in America,’ they tell us. ‘You don’t feel you’re one of a people, building something together.’ And in Israeli eyes, there are valid criticisms of the United States and its economic system.
“And so they make their second trip to Israel. Back and forth they go, an entire colony of people who all know each other, at home in both countries and really not at home in either.
Maybe the problems with the American Jew is that, unlike almost any other Jew in the world, he is not forced to go to Israel, and if he does decide to go there to see for himself, again unlike all the other poor Jews in the world, he is not forced by economics to stay there. The American Jew can always buy himself a ticket to go back, and he has country which will take him back. It is this lack of commitment in the American Jew which makes him seem like a dilettante to us.”
Nor does this would-be emigrant get much encouragement from his Jewish friends in the United States. “Maybe it’s because they are all guilty themselves for not going,” says one Jewish boy who has switched from studying medicine to agriculture to prepare himself for a life in Israel after graduation. “Whenever I tell my friends that I am going to live in Israel, they look skeptical or laugh at me for being an idealistic nut. When I told my mother, she looked as if I’d said I was going to marry a shiksa. ‘But it’s so far away,’ she cried. ‘And those Arabs, they’re always making wars. It’s dangerous there. Why don’t you wait a few years, and then if you still feel like it, go. But right now?’ But I don’t want to be like those people, the only way you know they’re Jews is that they eat lox and bagels, and go to Miamiin the winter. If I’m a Jew, I want to be a Jew, and that means going to Israel.”
An American who has lived in Israel for over a year and who is back to pay a visit to his parents, speaks of his difficulties in adjusting to life in Israel:
“It’s like here in America, where there is a whole bunch of people who used to say, ‘Don’t say anything against [Joe] McCarthy. The guys will think we’re all Communists.’ Or, ‘Jews shouldn’t march in the civil rights parades, because the bigots will seize on them for the worst persecution.’ In Israel, there is a whole party of Americans who always feel that the Israelis have their eyes on the Americans, waiting for them to do something ‘American’ and therefore foolish. And they’re not entirely wrong.
Jerusalem, for instance, most of the time, has a marvelous climate. But don’t let the tourist posters fool you. It gets cold in the winter. And the Israelis—you ought to hear them bitch about it. One day, I was in someone’s house—an Israeli couple I had gotten to know. They spoke English. I said something about the cold. And a French girl, Jewish, but French—she spoke English, too—turned to me with a terrible look of contempt. ‘Well, of course all of us weren’t raised with central heating,’ she said. ‘We poor peasants have had to grow up used to the cold.’ I was stunned. After all, the Israelis themselves spend an awful lot of time complaining about the cold. But an American is not allowed to. Everybody there is so suspicious of Americans, so jealous, I suppose, of American affluence, that they are always looking for reasons to dislike us. For the past two thousand years, the world has been suspicious and angry at the Jews because they were supposed to be so rich. Now the Israelis feel the same way about the Americans.
“But if my Americanness separates me from the Israeli Jews, where am I? Who I am? But worse than that, this separation keeps me from making the final commitment, and giving up my American passport. And that is the very thing that will end this separation for all time. The very thing, but the only thing. It’s like contemplating a marriage. You both want to and you don’t, and you keep holding the girl’s hand but delaying the ceremony.”
An Israeli businessman speaks about why Americans are so often viewed with something less than admiration by Israelis.
“I think what I object to is their particularly American moral earnestness. They have a desire for renunciation, for assuming guilt, that I think is a blend of the worst aspects of both Jews and Americans. For instance, when the militant black nationalists in America make speeches saying,
‘We hate Jews, give us money so we can buy guns to shoot our enemies,’ the American Jews all applaud and raise funds, and Jewish lawyers fight to get these men out of jail.
“So the Americans come here—I’m not talking about the rich tourists who have not really come to Israel, I mean those Americans who are seriously thinking of emigrating. They come to Israel, and they want to fight the Arabs, they want to suffer in the desert. They cannot accept the relatively few, simple pleasures available to them here. And so when we tell them there is no war at the moment, that they are ill-equipped for the desert, they become hopeless and despondent and very often go back right then and there.
“The rest, slowly, get used to it. Their money is usually running out after a while, so they have to. They get used to our diet—so different from the rich American diet. They get used to our inexpensive pleasures. Talking to friends. Going to a concert. They begin to feel they are really getting into Israeli life. After all, this is kind of renunciation of American pleasures, isn’t it? They think it’s charming not to have hot water. They brag about learning how to repair a leaking kerosene stove. They are still playing at suffering, you see. They enjoy the picture of themselves doing without decadent American material pleasures.
“After a while, they go into their next stage, if they stick it out long enough. They stop being American, and they stop thinking it charming to be cold or hungry or blistered by the desert. They get mad at it—like us. But we can do nothing about it, except stay mad at conditions and work to improve them. However, the American, when he suddenly realizes that this whole experience is not his Junior Year Abroad, that it is the rest of his life, and that the discomfort will never stop—he suddenly remembers he has another choice. And so he goes home. To the United States. Except those, of course, who can afford to move into luxury apartment buildings, and so on. Oh, Israelis who can afford to do so—they move into those places, too. Why not? But if you want to live in luxury apartments, with all the implies, why come to Israel to do it? You might as well stay in New York.”
Here’s another opinion on why Americans come to Israel.
“They come because they want controls,” says a tourist official. “They think they want to work for the common good, for a national purpose. But they don’t. They want to be told what to do. You can’t blame them. The United States is perhaps the most anarchistic country in the world. There is no social organization, no fraternity in the United States, merely peace treaties between various groups and individuals—treaties that are always breaking down because the people have a philosophy which tells them they have nothing really in common but this abstract idea of Americanism.
“And anarchy is the most frightening thing in the world. So Americans glamorize the kibbutz life: order, continuity, communality, and the cows must be milked seven days a week, no matter what. Above all, in my experience, the Americans glamorize the idea of no private property on akibbutz. No people in the world have a better idea of the destructive power of private property than Americans.”
Israeli statistics show that only a very small proportion of those who came from the United States work in the kibbutzim. Most Americans who go over tend to remain in their old professions. Doctors remain doctors, architects put up building, lawyers set up practice again as soon as they are licensed.
“They come on some dream,” says the sabra who is studying medicine at Columbia. “They are not radicals who want a new society. They are not religious, not dedicated to the idea of Jewishness. They have come to bathe in the warm water bath of all they had heard about Israel when they were children. OK, so they didn’t like American materialism. But how are they living here? After all, if you’re going to pursue a career for the sake of pursuing a career, why not do it in the United States where there are more opportunities? And besides—where you already know the language?”
Many of the problems of American Jews in Israel begin with the language. Ironically, Israelis call all English-speakers anglo-saxonim. A Jewish friend of mine told me how he went to see some friends of friends who lived in Tel Aviv. The son of the house, a boy of about eight, was playing nearby, and he and his pal were introduced. The two boys had a conversation in Hebrew, obviously about my friend. When they had left, he asked what the boys had said. There was a moment’s embarrassment, but he pressed for a translation. “Our little boy’s friend asked are you a Jew, and our little boy said, ‘No, he’s one of the anglo-saxonim.’ ”
Throughout Israel, English is the second language, particularly among the government, university, and moneyed classes Americans are likely to meet. Therefore, the need to learn Hebrew is not overpowering. And it is an arduous job to learn not only a new language in which not one single root has a familiar ring, but a new alphabet as well. And why bother to learn the language if there is a sneaking suspicion that one might not stay in Israel after all? Needless to say, not learning the language and the consequent barrier this leaves untranscended to go to reinforce the notion of going back to America. At least one speaks a common language with people there. Communities are built on communication.
“But what turned me off most of all,” says one returnee, “was the situation between American Jewish parents and their Israeli-born children. I would see it again and again in my friend’s houses. It is the principal reason for which I gave up my dream of Israel, no matter how lovely it seemed. The American parents spoke Hebrew, all right. But not well, and not easily. There is a tremendous drive on in Israel for Hebrew, and all children speak it as a matter of course. I remember when I was a child how embarrassed I was—let’s face it—by the broken English my parents spoke. Do I want to raise my children to think of me as a greenhorn?”
The question of Israel—going, staying, returning—is deeper than all this, however. For American Jews, it boils down to whether they actually want to become Jews once more. Are they willing to define themselves as Jews exclusively—not any longer as Jewish Americans? It would mean giving up something known and comfortable for something unknown but certainly uncomfortable. German Jews hesitated to do so even as Hitler came to power and made no secret of his malevolence. Even the ancient Jews left Egypt only under extreme pressure. Jews have wandered all over the world, but never voluntarily. No wonder American Jews find it easier to chant “next year in Jerusalem”—better still to pay someone to chant it for them—than to go. They feel guilty, though. So they pay their debt—with money. They are generous; they are proud of Israel; no doubt they will do everything they can to help and defend it. But leave America?
Not only is there no pressure to make them leave, but America has become positively attractive to Jews who, in numbers far exceeding their proportion in the population, occupy the upper ranks of the class and status system. They are, on the average, better motivated and more intelligent than non-Jews, and, therefore, necessarily rise when there is no pressure to keep them down. Elsewhere this has been an ambivalent blessing; no people is likely, in the long run, to allow itself to be dominated by a group felt as alien. Thus the Jewish rise always produced counter-pressures. But it is not as likely to do so in America.
- On the one hand, American Jews are so assimilated that they are not felt as particularly alien.
- On the other, the American people are not a homogeneous group of tradition-bound natives likely to resent Jewish innovators who recently joined and seemed to take over.
Jews are just one of many groups that make up a heterogeneousAmerica—and they melt into it almost as much as other groups do. Hence, chances of anti-Jewish pressure are small—and so are, therefore, the incentives to migrate to Israel.
In Israel, American Jews would not be brighter than the rest of the population. Israel would mean lower status—status is relative, of course—and in a smaller society to boot.
American Jews are by now accustomed to being Jews within a non-Jewish population—which is different from being Jews within a Jewish population. And in America Jews had to make no effort to be Jewish. The environment did that.
Thus, when it comes to deciding, are you Jewish or American, American Jews answer resoundingly, “Jewish Americans”—Jews who feel as Jews in America and are so felt, but who do not feel Jewish enough to make their Jewishness a legal and political nationality, and to live in Israel. They are an American subspecies now: Jewish, but the habitat is America. And likely to remain so.