JEWISH WORLD

surrounding non-Jewish environ- ment. There’s something paradoxi- cal about my having developed a relationship with the gamut of the Jewish community – its varied ele- ments and diverse positions – only after I left. In the year 2000, with the out- break of the Second Intifada, I began lecturing to American Jews about Israel, and it was very frus- trating. Until Sept. 11, 2001, when terror landed on American soil, it seemed that many American Jews didn’t have a clue as to what was happening here. Suicide bombers were blowing themselves up in Jerusalem, and many American Jews related to it as a slight delay on the way to the signing of a peace agreement. During that same period, we were going through a historic turn- ing point here in Israel. Our faith in the other side’s willingness to accept us in the region was broken. The events of 2000 reshaped how most Israelis feel about the Middle East and our relationship to the Palestinians. Much of the American Jewish community did- n’t get it. I would speak in different communities and the questions I was asked made me realize that we’re not conveying the reality of what we’re going through here. I remember that Yankele Rothblit, who wrote “Shir La-Shalom,” the song whose lyrics sheet was stained with the blood of Yitzhak Rabin and became the symbol of the Israeli peace camp in the 1990s – this same Yankele Rothblit gave an interview to one of the Israeli papers saying he saw no chance for peace. It was an abrupt, historic change in Israeli consciousness. In a piece entitled “The Messiah Isn’t Coming,” published by Acheret Magazine , I explained that this is the moment when both right and left are exposed as failures. I tried to explain this to American Jews; I felt compelled to act as a simultaneous translator between Israeliness and American Jew- ishness. In some ways, this lack of under- standing continues. When I speak to American Jewish communities, I often feel that I’m living in a time warp. When I speak to right-wing Orthodox communities, I feel it’s the 1970s and the 1980s: Menachem Begin or Yitzhak Shamir are still the prime minister and it’s the good old days of Eretz Yisrael Ha-shleymah (Greater Israel), and all we need is the deter- mination to claim what’s ours. I try to explain to these communities that the First Intifada of the late 1980s was the moment when many realized that there is no such thing as an enlightened occupation, and if you have a civilian population that is in revolt against occupation, you will have to be brutal to sup- press them. And I explain that most Israelis came out of the First Intifada convinced that the price for a “Greater Israel” is too high. When I speak to liberal Jewish communities I find myself in the 1990s, and it’s the optimistic years of Oslo, and all we need to do is to stop building in the settlements and sign a peace agreement. It’s as if the Second Intifada never hap- pened, which was when a majority of Israelis realized that Peace Now is no less of an illusion than Greater Israel. So I try to explain to American Jews that the majority of Israelis today are neither left nor right – we’re a mixture of both, of both “lessons” of both Intifadas. What was conventional wisdom here in Israel 18 years ago, for many American Jews is still a big revelation. It’s very frustrating for me to explain to them years later that the left-right schism that dom- inated Israeli public opinion until the year 2000 no longer works. For Israelis who identify as centrists – and I think we’re the majority of the country – the left-right schism is no longer the dividing line between rival camps; it is the fault line that runs straight through each and every one of us. I have a friend who used to say, already in the 1980s: “Every day, for five minutes, I think like Yitzhak Shamir.” That’s exactly what I say to them. There are mornings when I wake up and it’s a left-wing morn- ing. And I say to myself, “All we have to do is to just get out! We have a fence, and we’ll manage somehow with the missiles that will land on Tel Aviv.” And there are other days when I wake up and it’s a right-wing, Shamir morning. I say to myself: “Are you crazy? Look at what’s happening in the Middle East! Look at our borders!” That’s where most of us are at. And it also explains the mystery of Netanyahu’s success as the second- longest serving prime minister in Israel’s history after Ben Gurion. It’s unbelievable – a prime minister whom nobody likes – not even the people who vote for him. And I think the reason is that Netanyahu reflects what most of us want in a prime minister today. We apparent- ly want an Israeli prime minister who agrees to a two-state solution but is in no hurry to carry it out. And what don’t we know about American Jews? What we don’t know about them is at least as much as what they don’t know about us. Let’s look at the big picture. The situation of the Jewish people today is unprece- dented in its success. We have two extraordinary communities. We have a sovereign Jewish state whose public space we’re responsi- ble for shaping. And in the United States, we have the most successful and accepted Diaspora community in Jewish history, which is wel- come by the non-Jewish majority to help shape the public conversa- tion and to bring Jewish values into the non-Jewish public space. Either one of these two success stories would have been seen by Jews a hundred years ago as miraculous. And the fact that these two commu- nities emerged more or less simul- taneously makes this time the most exciting and most potentially rich period in Jewish history. The prob- lem is that these two communities don’t know each other. And each has developed a different kind of Jewish life that the other desperate- ly needs. What we’ve developed here is a Jewish culture of a major- ity that does not suffer from a “minority complex.” And that is creating new expressions that are unique in the Jewish world. So what do we have to learn from American Jewry? American Jewry has been able to experiment with new forms of reli- gious life – for example, feminism, which has transformed American Jewry in ways that Israelis can’t even begin to imagine. Increasing numbers of congregations are women-led. Women are the rabbis, the cantors and the presidents of many synagogues there. What’s happened is that the fem- inist revolution has saved liberal Judaism in America – because many Ashkenazi males reached the end of the road of their Jewish vitality. The feminist revolution has given half of the Jewish people, which never had a chance to express itself fully as Jews, the opportunity to act. Something else we can learn from American Jews is to take responsibility for shaping our Judaism: that each individual can create a Jewish and religious identity that suits him or her. Here in Israel we have the depth of Jewish history, while they have the expanse. Each has an advantage and a disadvantage. The disadvan- tage of depth is that it can be very narrow. The image that I have of continued on page 10 Right-wing U.S. Orthodox Zionists still believe in “Greater Israel,” and all we need is the determination to claim what’s ours. The feminist revolution in liberal and even Orthodox Judaism in the U.S. could have a positive impact on Israel, says Klein. Second Intifada suicide bombers were blowing themselves up in Jerusalem, and many American Jews saw it as a slight delay on the way to peace. JEWISH WORLD • JANUARY 26 - FEBRUARY 1, 2018 9