JEWISH WORLD

By NAAMA CIFRONI I sraelis have changed: they no longer have an existential need to define themselves as cut off from Jewish civilization in the Diaspora, and they no longer divide clearly along a left-right fault line. Yossi Klein Halevi points out that the present Jewish communities in Israel and the United States would have been viewed as miraculous a hundred years ago. He explains why the potential in this period following the bursting of illusions cannot be realized until these two Jewries achieve a more accurate under- standing and deeper appreciation of one another. Yossi Klein Halevi was born in Brooklyn in 1953. As a child, he used to imagine himself inhabiting a hole like the one in which his father survived in a Hungarian for- est during World War II. As a teenager, he was active in the Soviet Jewry movement (including a sit-in at the Moscow emigration office during Pesach of 1973, fol- lowed by arrest and detention that was brief, thanks to the visit of a group of American senators in Moscow at the time), after which he graduated (“or devolved,” in his own words) to the Jewish Defense League. He writes about this peri- od in his book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist (1995), whose unfortunate publication date, two days after the Rabin assassination, “ensured its quick death, even though the book documented a complete recovery from the extremist mentality.” In 1982, Yossi and his wife Sarah moved to Israel, where he continued writing for the Village Voice and Moment Magazine. By 2000, he had become a devoted analyst of post-’67 Israeli society. His pursuit for over a decade of the characters who participated in the conquest of the Temple Mount and their spiritual and social worlds, culminated in Like Dreamers , which won the 2013 National Jewish Book Award. The book’s heroes – including Hanan Porat, founder of Gush Emunim, and Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, the movement's dissident, poet and songwriter Meir Ariel of Kibbutz Mishmarot, artist Avital Geva, one of the founders of Peace Now, and prominent businessman Arik Achmon, represent the right- and left-wing sides of the contempo- rary post-’67 Israeli political debate. During his years researching the biographies of these archetypal Israeli protagonists, Yossi lectured widely on Israel in various U.S. communities. His back-and-forth between the Israeli and American Jewish scenes has afforded him a unique angle for examining the relationship between these Jewries. In this interview, Yossi Klein Halevi addresses what the American and Israeli Jewish com- munities can – and must – learn from and about one another. What does American Jewry look like to you, and what do its mem- bers want to know about Israel? Maybe I’ll take it a step back and first speak a little personally about my complicated relationship with American Jewry. I grew up on the fringes of the American Jewish community. I was in the right-wing Beitar Zionist youth movement as a kid, and of the entire American Jewish community, there were maybe 100 of us in Beitar. After that, I joined the Jewish Defense League, which was really the fringe of the fringe. I always saw myself in opposition to the main- stream American Jewish commu- nity, both as a militant Zionist and son of a survivor. My father was a very angry survivor, angry espe- cially at American Jewry. He blamed the American Jewish com- munity for betraying the Jews of Europe for not pressuring President Roosevelt to try to save them. So I grew up with all of that baggage, and when I made aliyah in 1982, it really was with the feel- ing that I’m not going back . . . that emotionally, I’m really cutting off my ties. But things didn’t quite work out that way for me, for several rea- sons. For one, I realized that my audience is primarily American Jews. When I came here I was still writing for the Village Voice and Moment Magazine, two publica- tions identified with the left, and later, for The Jerusalem Report, and I took upon myself the mission of explaining to liberal American Jews about the “new” Israel creat- ed by Menachem Begin’s coalition with Mizrachim, settlers, and Haredim. The books that I’ve written have also been primarily for an American Jewish readership. And so I found myself deepening my relationship with American Jewry, and I’ve come to love the American Jewish community with its creative powers, and to deeply appreciate its pluralism and its openness to other Jews and to the Liberal American Jews believe that all we need to do is stop building in the settlements and sign a peace agreement. Across The Great Divide Author Yosi Klein Halevi: Time for Israel and U.S. Jews to come together 8 JEWISH WORLD • JANUARY 26 - FEBRUARY 1, 2018 INTERVIEW U.S. Birthright participants at the Western Wall. Yossi Klein Halevi says that American Jews and Israel need each other for both to thrive. Yossi Klein Halevi in his days as a teenaged American Jewish activist/firebrand in the early 70s, and as he appears today, a gifted writer uniquely qualified to assess the U.S. Jewish perception of Israel.