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December 1, 2011 | 5:11 am
The Minister of Absorption vs. American Jewish “foolishness”
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Sofa Landver (Wikipedia)
Israeli Minister of Immigrant Absorption Sofa Landver is furious. How can anyone not like the campaign aimed at bringing back emigrant Israelis? How can anyone not understand its true motivation and meaning?
Yes, she heard that there’s a growing amount of criticism directed at this campaign (I wrote about it yesterday). She heard about the Jewish Channel report, and about Jeffrey Goldberg’s harshly disapproving post. Her office is in charge of the advertisement campaign in a couple of American communities “that warn Israeli expatriates that they will lose their identities if they don’t return home”, as Goldberg described it, or to “call on Israeli emigrants to come back home”, as the minister describes it.
Goldberg wrote: “I don’t think I have ever seen a demonstration of Israeli contempt for American Jews as obvious as these ads”. And she says: Do I really have to respond to such “foolishness”?
Landver later calls the criticism (while not mentioning Goldberg by name, it’s obvious she’s aiming mostly at him – and in that regard, maybe this post’s headline is a bit of a stretch) “out of touch”, and “tzimmes”, and talks about a “journalist with zero understanding”. As I’ve said, she is angry. Every journalist, she tells me, “needs to have some intelligence”. (Post continues below video clip)
I spent a fair amount of time on the phone with the minister this morning, and I’m afraid to say that she doesn’t quite get it. She doesn’t understand why anyone would be upset with the ads and the videos and the message. “We took upon ourselves to try and connect with Israelis abroad, this has nothing to do with American Jews for which I have the highest respect”, she said. The American Jewish community is “dear to our hearts”, she tells me, but at the same time, it’s not her issue of concern. “Minister Edelstein (Yuli Edelstein, Minister of Information and Diaspora) is the one who needs to communicate with the Jewish Community”, she says. “I’m in charge of returning Israelis”.
That is one bureaucratic explanation that wouldn’t fly with critical American Jews. The minister, though, finds it hard to believe that many such critics exist. She’d agree with the report in the Boston Globe, three weeks ago, in which it was explained that “The message of the Cambridge billboard… is that Israelis who linger too long in the Diaspora risk losing their Jewish roots”. Israelis – not American Jews. In fact, this position of the minister does make sense: Second and third generation Israeli emigrants are in higher danger of assimilation that American Jews in general, because they often lack the ties to a strong and vibrant Jewish community.
She didn’t expect all this criticism, and up until two days ago was very happy with the campaign (she says she’s still happy with it). Her bottom line: The response from Israelis is great, “more than one hundred thousand” have looked at the videos on the ministry’s website in the first week (her spokesperson later gave me the current number: 155,000). We managed to “touch all the right emotional buttons”, she says. That is, the right Israeli buttons. The Israeli government had made the decision to try and lure more Israelis to come back in May 2010, and 14,000 have since responded to the call and returned, according to data provided by the ministry. “How would you like us to highlight all those things important to Israelis” without doing such a campaign, without arguing that being away from Israel might cause one to lose their identity?
During the conversation it was quite clear that Landver doesn’t bother to make the nuanced distinction between “Israeli” and “Jewish” identity. “We wanted to address the things that every Jew feels”, she says. Well, obviously it is not “every” Jew. Yet again – as I wrote yesterday – this little misunderstanding is a contemporary manifestation of the tension created by the classical Zionist position on relations between Jews in Israel and Jews in the Diaspora. It was always a point of disagreement between the two greatest contemporary Jewish communities.
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She does not get it because she is correct and you are wrong. I am the son of yordim. Among tens of my peers I am the only one who speaks Hebrew. My dad has two sisters who came to America; so far I am the only cousin who married Jewish, let alone speaks Hebrew. And, I became religious.
The facts are all around me, in my family, in Bergen County NJ, in Manhattan, in Queens, etc. Nothings stays the same. The children of yordim will be different! Either more religious, or more secular, or intermarried.
Regardless if you consider this a religious issue or cultural issue - the kids of yordim will be different!
The historical statistics of intermarriage are staggering (and I dont have them, except for anecdotal). Dont be naive, dont deny. You might be offended, but this is reality.
AT least some american jews are very insulted:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/12/01/israeli-government-tells-israelis-not-to-marry-american-jews.html?j48
Adler is 100% correct. A grave mistake is being made to exclude religious Jews from the term American Jews. Non-Ortho US Jews are on their last generations… they are in a self-extinction mode with too few children to even replace their grandparents. Moreover, they are mostly Jewishly illiterate. It is true that unless non-Ortho Jews do something to motivate their few children to repopulate and spend on expensive Jewish education, they will be down to insignificant numbers. They will be gone with the boomers. There are no indicators that it is even feasible. So, yes, the only hope that your liberal great-grandchildren will still be Jewish is, well… Aliyah.
What bizarre logic. The secular Jews moved from Israel to get away from Israeli society and it would be unusual for them to have children and grandchildren that did not assimilate into the American Jewish society. But don’t those that intermarry often have spouses that convert to Judaism? It is not the number of Jews or where they live that matters. It’s the quality of the Jew that really matters.
That is the lack of understanding that the Minister of Immigrant Absorption does not understand and why we are disturbed by her arrogance and meddling.
Whow!! Such sensitive souls. It is only Jews who can be offended when Israel makes an appeal to Israelis lost in the diaspora.
Hey Dani: Israelis love their society. They came here to make $. Intermarriage means: without conversion. Nice attempted spin, but it doesn’t work.
I would love to return to Israel. But with Israel’s social-life controlled by religious bigots. Sorry I can’t return.
A Yored myself & father of two, I must attest that Yoram Adler & Abbushuki are correct. Israeliness is nationalistic, history-centered, modern, and forward looking. Traditional Jewishness is captive of a culture created/developed in the Diaspora by/for Diaspora Jewry. It is based on religion ‘cause that was the remaining sole means of cultural expression after the Romans’ destruction of the Temple, which had served as the combined cultic & cultural & legal Israelite. Israelis returning to the Diaspora find they need to create expat groups, but usually join local Jewish orgs, Synagogues, Temples, etc, to partly fulfill their cultural needs.
Ct’d: The Minister is correct in her statement that to retain modern Israeliness, the expat Israeli needs to return.
Yochanan: In Tel Aviv or Eilat you can paint your body, go almost naked, be gay as you like, make up your own culture and however else you want to waste your life. No one will even notice, let alone control you. What kind of fantasy have you also created about Israel that you agree with the world’s anti-Semites, that the ‘JEWS’ control everything. On the other hand, if that’s what you believe, maybe you belong in the P.A. (But first you have to declare you are not a Jew, because they won’t let Jews in and watch out, they will really hurt you if you are not a straight Muslim.) Good luck.
You know you are having a discussion with Jews when no one can agree on the facts: Israel is modern; Israel is controlled by religious fanatics; Israel is secular; Israel is controlled by non-religious Jews; Tel Aviv is a sinful city; Tel Aviv is a modern thriving metropolis; Arabs are discriminated in Israel; Arbas are free to serve on the Supreme Court, in the Army and go where they want. These contradictory statements can go on. Guess what. They are all true.
Interesting that the Minister makes an assumption that all Israeli ex-pats are Jewish. When this is not the case.
Jayne: Do you think the Israeli Gov’t would spend $1m to bring back goyim to Israel? It’s aimed at Jews only. And yes, young Israelis are marrying American Jews and non-Jews who know little or nothing about Israeli culture such that it will wipe out a big chunk of ex-pat Israeli children from Israeli I.D. Those who can’t perceive the issue may be part of the problem!
Are you all missing the point? Is Israeli culture better than American Jewish culture? Do you yordim believe that a Jew living in Israel is better than a Jew living in the USA? You don’t get it. We American Jews are insulted that the Israeli government would post billboards and videos telling yordim that Israeli culture and nationalism is better than our culture. THOSE ARE NOT JEWISH VALUES AND MORALS. It seems an attempt to get Jewish numbers to fight and die for the “Cause.” It makes me ashamed of you critics and THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT MINISTRY that proposed this.
I lived in Israel and taught there as well as served as a anesthesiologist in the October ‘73 war. I intended to move my family there. I found that we could not afford to live there. (Check out the physician strikes.) My two sons made “aliyah” and stayed less than four years each. One left because he could not stand the excessive smoking and the other because his fiancée returned home to the US. That is the other side of the coin.
Dani El - is an apple better than an orange? the point is to say come home. Return to YOUR culture. What is culture? language, TV shows, music, food. An example of culture is that Dunkin Donuts did not fit into Israeli society. Better or Worse is matter of opinion; and we all have plenty of those.
Do you get upset when you see an ad for Tide but you use Clorox?
This is a simple ad campaign intended to touch the emotional comfort zone of Hebrew-speaking, garinim-spitting, loud-yelling yordim.
Dani: Is one culture is better than another? It’s like asking is Christian ‘better’ than Jewish; Sephardic ‘better’ than Ashkenazi? ‘Different’ doesn’t imply ranking: the big thought blunder of this whole brouhaha.
Israeli culture is a pastiche of distinctly different ones, e.g.: Tel Avivnics with tatoos vs. black hats in Mea Sheorim/B’nai Brak, etc. Each is a distinctly different culture. Most Israelis want continuity of their own micro-culture whatever it is via their progeny and not a spouse’s alternate culture. The ads indicated that intermarriage with secular U.S. Jews or non-Jews endangers that goal. No aspersions intended.