The president of Bard College and a renowned conductor, Leon Botstein will discuss matters related to Jewish life in America. As usual, readers are invited to send in their own questions.
An innovative voice in American higher education, Leon Botstein has been the president of Bard College since 1975. The author of Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture, he has published widely in the fields of music, education, and history and culture.
Botstein is also a renowned conductor who has served as the music director and conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra since 1992. In 2003 he became the music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the radio orchestra of Israel. He has received the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Harvard University’s Centennial Award.
We will discuss issues related to Jewish life in America. Readers can send questions to rosnersdomain@haaretz.co.il.
Although it is frequently said that America and Israel “share values,” I find this to be, in large part, empty rhetoric on the basic question of Israel’s relationship with its own Arab citizens as well as with the Palestinians. My understanding of American values means that I respect civil rights and the rule of law, including international law: this is altogether consistent with my Jewish anchor in social justice, but clashes irremediably with Israel’s policies, which have thus placed themselves outside of my identity as a Jew. Indeed, can you tell me why young American Jews, who take their obligation to pursue justice, should be involved with Israel at all except as advocates for Palestinian rights?
Miriam M. Reik
Miriam Reik’s response points to the need for as non-divisive a way as possible for discussing and moving forward on the issues she brought up. The “shared values” between America and Israel amount to more than rhetoric. They are about basic political premises including the obligation to see that justice and freedom are realized. Despite the complexities of history - how these premises were realized only in part - the basic claims of democracy cannot be dismissed easily. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were at one and the same time powerful instruments of change and also “empty” when those documents came into being, particularly for those who were in slavery, for women, and, for that matter, those without property. The United States hardly has an unblemished record past and present when it comes to social justice and civil liberties. One does not take pleasure in revisiting this country?s treatment of the Native American population or people of color down to this day. And we have our recent failings in our criminal justice system, including Guantanamo Bay. This history of imperfection is not justifiable in terms of ethics, but it can be understood as an aspect of politics and history. Moving from the present moment to the next and changing practice is what we ordinarily call progress. To achieve that progress is what citizenship in a democracy seems to render possible. So as an American, one faces high ideals with pride but also compromised realities, past and present. The present ones demand change. But a little humility as we seek to rectify injustices can be helpful in the process of nonviolent change.
Looking at the situation in Israel, the same can be said to apply. There is, as the writer suggests, a persistent problem of discrimination within Israel toward its own Arab citizens. There is also the problem of Israel?s relationship as an occupier of lands and people that will, I hope, form a viable autonomous Palestinian state. But the injustices that need to be contested and fought are the result of political failures and historical circumstances. There is responsibility and fault on all sides. One doesn?t want to simplify history, but it remains indisputable that Israel came into existence with broad international support. None of its neighbors, however, reconciled themselves to its existence. The idea of a Jewish state was itself a consequence of the late nineteenth century and twentieth-century European politics of national identity and anti-Semitism. The notion of the Jewish homeland and state in Palestine had the endorsement of the European powers. Comparisons do not justify, but when it comes even to the shift in populations during war and immediately following war no one today seriously considers reversing what Stalin achieved without international resistance in Europe during the same decade that witnessed the creation of Israel. Does anyone seriously consider returning people and land in what was once Germany to Germany, and what was once Poland to Poland, or restoring the Germans who were expelled from what is now the Czech Republic and their properties? Our moral compass regarding what is tolerable may have changed, but the consequences of history are not always available for redress.
One needs to move forward in a democratic Israel, just as American Jews in America who share the writer?s politics ought to feel obligated to work using American democracy to advance the causes the writer endorses. That same obligation applies to the citizenry of Israel. Israel is a democracy. There are many Israeli institutions and organizations that are hard at work doing precisely what the writer thinks ought to be done. My point of view is that American Jews can back those causes in Israel that parallel their own fundamental convictions. The tolerance with respect to the ethical imperfections in current practices in America should be extended to Israel. Neither nation is perfect. We should not hold Israel to a higher standard than we apply to other nations or ourselves. The writer believes that American values mean a respect for civil rights and the rule of law and international law. She also believes those are anchored in a specifically Jewish commitment to social justice. I share this point of view, but I then turn a critical eye to the extent to which our society and government really honor civil rights, the rule of law, and international law. We have a long way to go before we make an invidious comparison between Israel and ourselves. By saying that, I do seek to excuse or rationalize the injustices that take place here and in Israel.
But the improvement there involves a complex multi-national, reciprocal process that includes Israel’s neighbors, the Palestinians and the Arab world as well as the international community. Only in a context of security and peace can real progress toward tolerance, civil rights, and the rule of law be achieved. We Americans, September 11 notwithstanding, have enjoyed by any reasonable comparative standard the benefits of security, prosperity and peace, and we still have a long task ahead to realize a nation where the rule of law and social justice prevail without discrimination. So from my point of view, the standards by which we judge Israel ought to parallel those we apply to the United States. Those of us who are Jewish do not agree with each other or speak in one voice, and there is no parallel agreement in Israel either. But the disagreements within the majority in Israel, perhaps more than here, are less about ultimate ends than about strategy. The task in both countries is to work to make democratic ideals realities. Accepting that challenge will inevitably require a willingness to accept change and live with imperfection and compromise, and a capacity to resist demonizing opponents and those who do not remind us of ourselves. These habits seem in short supply both here and there.
Dear President Botstein,
Both the Jewish and the Arab population of Israel/Palestine appear to suffer from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). My 17-year old Israeli niece has already been through a number of wars, experienced being in an anti-gas plastic tent as a baby, in a gas mask as a 12-year-old, and has to listen to endless TV discussions of the Iranian threat. All nine of her great-aunts and uncles perished in the Holocaust. I can’t imagine what any 15-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza has gone through.
It does not look like life in the Middle East will become any better in the foreseeable future. Ha’aretz reported that 11 percent of the 2007 IDF pool of male recruits did not join the army because they are Haredi. This percentage will grow to 23% by 2020. Meanwhile Hamas became the truly representative force within the Palestinian community. In the Middle East they turned the one G-d into two monster-gods battling each other.
Do we, the American Jews, have to consider an alternative to Zionism? Does the possibility still exist now where 10,000,000 Jews and Arabs can live intertwined between the river and the sea?
Respectfully,
Judy Hirsch
The question is a sensitive one. However, I think two issues are being confused. The first deals with what is undeniably the consequence of war, conflict, and violence. In all conflicts, the combatants are the young. Older people send younger people to fight for them. In Israel it is a little bit different, because at least there is the healthy reality of a citizen army with a universal service requirement that goes beyond the traditional age of military service. Nonetheless, an extraordinary toll is extracted from everyone involved. That?s the first issue.
When we come to the second issue?the political solution with the best chance of ending the pattern of conflict and trauma?there is a legitimate difference of opinion. I do not believe that what you are proposing, which is often described as a one-state solution, is promising. One reason concerns the history of Arab?Jewish conflict pre-1948. The second reason is that the point of Zionism is not the arrogant celebration of Jewishness but the rectification of a serious historical tragedy. Until the creation of the State of Israel, Jews were pariahs, people without full and equal political rights. Zionism was designed to create a democratic state in which Jews were the majority.
The same opportunity must be given to the Palestinians. Therefore, in my opinion, the right solution is what is called a two-state solution. To make this two-state solution put an end to the ongoing conflict, a viable Palestinian state has to be put into place that can succeed in economic and political terms. Second, Israel itself must write the final chapter in its own history as a democratic country, reform its electoral system insofar as it is necessary to do so, and draw a clear and unambiguous line separating religion and state. In my opinion, the future will be promising if Israel takes the final steps toward being a secular modern democracy in which religion becomes a private matter and in which equality of citizenship is given to all, even though the majority of citizens are and should be Jewish, just as the majority of citizens in Mexico are Mexicans, those in France French, those in Germany German.
In a world where nationalism and national identity still hold sway, the Jewish nation should have a state where it is not a minority. The world doesn?t seem to be wildly opposed to the effort by the Estonians to suppress the Russian language and discriminate against the huge numbers of ethnic Russians in Estonia. The world seems to tolerate the Estonian desire to have a country in which they are the majority and in which their language reigns supreme. So long as we live in world in which these claims are considered legitimate I support the notion of a democratic state in which Jews are secure in the majority, not by discrimination but by the constructive evolution of their state.
No doubt in the long run we would all be happier if we lived in a world in which we could be ourselves, different and distinct, and not fear discrimination through politics, a world beyond the nation state governed by a peaceful and rational international order where boundaries no longer make a difference. But now we are talking about dreams, utopias, and fantasies. But such things inspire behavior in a constructive way, and I believe the right step forward rests in a two-state solution.
Dear Mr. Botstein,
As a man of culture don’t you think that American Jewry are in desperate need of a new cultural framework for their Judaism? If they will no longer define themselves as secondary to the Jews of Israel - that is, to be Jews that didn’t yet make aliya, or just too spoiled to do so - what is it that makes them a community and an entity in its own right?
Thank you,
Mali Shapiro
In answer to the question and comment from Mali Shapiro, I first should say that I have not thought of American Jews as somehow ?secondary? to Israelis as Jews. In general, I am allergic to hierarchies of identity that suggest that one group is somehow superior, or more essential and legitimate (e.g. more French, American, Russian and the like).
Those who believe that Jews in Israel have a cultural priority implicitly define Jewish history since the first century BCE as possessed of diasporas that proved always to be temporary, and therefore directed toward only one true destination and home. The modern Jewish state then becomes the single stable end point of Jewish history. While much of history has proven the diaspora as ultimately unstable and even fatal to Jews, I believe that a pluralistic, secular democracy, with guarantees of freedom and in which equality of citizenship is obtainable by a process and not only by the circumstances of birth, similar to the one here in America, can be a permanent and vibrant home for Jews. Israel and America offer two long-term solutions to anti-Semitism and the marginalization of the Jew in political terms. They are, however, different, and consequently the culture of being Jewish?beyond the practice of religion will be distinct in each environment.
The cultural framework here is suggested by the benefits of democracy particularly in terms of the extent to which democracy limits the power of the majority. Essential to the culture of democracy where Jews can thrive as Jews is the premise that the principles of justice, freedom, and right are not subject to the will of the majority. The Bill of Rights and the judicial system, in combination with a constitution that makes religion a private matter, are designed to protect individuals from the crowd, and minorities from the tyranny of the majority and public opinion. As a distinct minority, the American Jewish community can choose to stand for values in life that are not measured by the marketplace, money, or profit, such as learning, the pursuit of science, and the arts.
A commitment to study, debate, dissent, and public service, informed by a vast and distinct intellectual and spiritual tradition can lead to Jews as citizens making welcome contributions to the majority culture, helping define in a dynamic manner, the character of American national identity.
A case in point has been the contribution American Jews have made to the modern secular character of America in the 20th century through popular culture, notably music and films. Therefore the ?cultural framework? that is needed is actually not new. It is an old one: the dynamic requirement to maintain and extend freedom, participation, and dissent in a democracy. We cannot afford to fail in pursuing this old-fashioned path of civic responsibility and virtue.
Dear President Botstein,
This one is from one of our readers:
When speaking with American Jews, one gets the impression that in
their eyes Israel is a Jewish community in need of support. In your
message, you too speak in terms of “support” and the debate
surrounding it. However, the conflict is not the only issue of our
lives - and many American Jews simply do not understand the cultural message of Israel. I imagine the reason for this is the poor Hebrew educational achievements in America. Generally American Jews cannot understand what Israel is offering the Diaspora communities in terms of creativity and cultural identity based on our own distinct language. Is there any hope that Israel’s Hebrew culture could be placed on the agenda of American Jewry, replacing to some extent the focus on Israel’s political-military woes?
Before responding to the question Mr. Rosner forwarded to me on this third day, I would like readers to know that this is my first (and probably last) venture into this form of Internet communication. I would not have done it had I not been invited. I never presented myself as an expert on these matters, just as a citizen. Why the responses are so often nasty or sarcastic baffles me. I have found that empathy, civility, and kindness in tone in the face of dissent and disagreement will do just fine.
Someone wrote questioning (or rather challenging) my “Jewish” credentials. The question is frightening in its amnesia and disregard of history. Nonetheless, it deserves an answer, but not the one it seeks. These are my “credentials.” Like many of my immediate family members (two uncles, one grandmother), had I (myself a postwar immigrant “as a small child” from Europe) been alive between 1939 and 1945 I too might easily have lost my life in the Holocaust. Like the three survivors (one uncle, grandmother, and grandfather), I might as well have been lucky and survived, in the Warsaw Ghetto, in hiding and in camp. I would have qualified for extermination under Nazi law and therefore qualify under the law of return. Like my parents, I am a long-standing dues-paying member of a synagogue. Although an agnostic in matters of religious faith, I belong to the congregation of the Conservative Synagogue in Kingston, New York, and am therefore listed and counted in all surveys and census reports as a Jew. Furthermore, I am in my fourth season as music director of a major historic Israeli cultural institution, the radio orchestra of Israel, the Jerusalem Symphony, which will celebrate its 70th birthday next year. And I have written, both in German and in English, on the history and culture of Jews in Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The question sent to me by Mr. Rosner is a good one, and the answer is not simple. The reason the issues of security and peace predominate is because their importance to American Jewry is political, historical, and symbolic. To American Jews, Israel is the “Jewish state” and reflects the only other viable place for Jews to live as full citizens in the world outside of the United States. But the underpinnings of that conviction have changed over time. In generational terms, the early- to mid-twentieth-century European Jews who went to Palestine and, later, Israel between 1880 and 1950 were quite comparable to their Jewish contemporaries who either remained in Europe or emigrated to the United States or South America. In succeeding generations, notably my generation that came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, there was still a strong familial resemblance between Israelis and the postwar generation of American Jews. This was in America the generation for whom Hebrew after-school education was often ineffective.
In my opinion, the situation is much different now. Today there is, as the question posted suggests, a distinct Israeli culture and an Israeli nation whose origins and character are not strictly or even predominately European. And over the same period of time American Jews have followed their own paths in the American diaspora. The twenty-year-old Israeli has less in common with his or her twenty-year-old American Jewish contemporary than would have been the case 25 or 50 years ago. This is what I presume Birthright is trying to address. But the cultural, linguistic, and experiential gap continues to widen as Israel evolves with its distinctive culture, much of it centered on the modern Hebrew language. American Jews are American Jews, and Israelis are Israelis.
I am skeptical that there can be any widespread increase in Hebrew fluency among the vast majority of American Jews. By and large, middle-class Americans are not very good at acquiring languages other than English, and Hebrew remains an unlikely candidate for widespread success. But I’m not sure that everything has to hinge on language. In the American Jewish community, the premise of common identity between Israelis and American Jews as Jews is crucial to maintaining the sense of solidarity. That premise drives political support. People want to see what they’re looking for, so even American Jews who travel to Israel are likely to gravitate to those things that remind them of continuities, not discontinuities. This seems to be problematic since one of the achievements of Israel can be found in the novel, rich, and complex culture that now nearly sixty years of political independence have helped nurture.
Last but not least, the consistent attention to the political circumstances is not unwarranted. Didn’t David Grossman recently write in The New York Times of a state of permanent insecurity? Particularly now, more and more American Jews have become aware that the situation has to be improved, if not resolved, that Israel is rapidly losing international support and sympathy, and risks finding itself veering toward pariah status, especially in the eyes of young people (under thirty!) throughout the world. Israel needs to get out of its status and image as an occupier. It needs to strengthen its vibrant and admirable democratic institutions and character. The last war has shown that more than military prowess is required for a peaceful future. I have no standing or expertise concerning how this might be done, and there is no doubt that the situation is not simple or easy. Young American Jews fear the international isolation of Israel. They fear the ease with which the honorable criticism of the policies of any Israeli government can be distorted into or deteriorate into an effort to delegitimate Israel’s existence or turns into thinly veiled anti-Semitism. But the obsession with the foreign policy issues reflects the desire, quite widespread among American Jews, to see a two-state solution come into being that is secure, just, and the basis of the kind of peace that many in the 1990s hoped would come into being in the not too distant future.
Dear President,
But if connecting to “American political and cultural issues” is
what is important, why do it through Jewish institutions? And what is
it that will make these institutions Jewish if all they deal with are
American issues?
Best
Rosner
My first reply did not imply that that was all Jewish institutions in America should deal with. If they are religious institutions, they will deal with religion. If they are community institutions, they will have more than their fair share of community activities. My point was, rather, to indicate that in pursuing their lives as Jewish institutions they will naturally intersect with American political and cultural questions. The character of the American Diaspora is such that Jews are not segregated. They are integrated. Owing to the relative success of the Jewish community in social, economic, and political terms as a community within American democracy, issues that affect American citizens will come into play. These issues will intersect with Jewish life in America. Among these issues are the quality of public education, investment in science and research, immigration policy, health care, the environment, and the like. There are particular issues, such as the relationship of religion and politics, ethnicity, pluralism and prejudice, and the support of culture and education, that have particular relevance to the Jewish community. So my point was that, in addition to the stated purposes of Jewish institutions in this country, the posture and the openness vis-à-vis questions affecting American life can influence the allegiance American Jews have to their communal and religious institutions. Jewish institutions might, as well, provide leadership on certain questions, as they did during the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Leon Botstein
Dear President Botstein,
A couple of months ago, writing about the JFN conference in Atlanta, I quoted you briefly as saying that “This is no longer an era in which people take pride in hating the synagogue they attend and to which they belong. If you don’t make them love your institution they will not attend.”
So here’s a soft-ball question we can start with: How do you make the people of this era love their (Jewish) institution?
Best,
Rosner
The question of how one “makes” or induces the Jews of America to feel some attachment to the institutions within the Jewish community can be answered only in a fragmentary manner. For those for whom being Jewish is a matter of religious faith, the issues of attachment will remain located in the nature of the synagogue, the temple, its leadership, its liturgy, its rabbi.
But if one asks the question vis-à-vis the nonreligious institutions, the community institutions that speak to an individual’s sense of his or her own identity as a Jew apart from religious conviction, then the answer is complicated indeed.
The vast majority of Jews in numerical terms are either members of the Reform movement or entirely unaffiliated. For them, an attachment to an institution that is Jewish is dependent on the extent to which it coheres in values with issues that are not in the narrow sense Jewish issues, but rather American political issues.
For example, those with conservative and neoconconservative political views who are unaffiliated in terms of a religious domination and are secular will attach themselves to Jewish institutions with positions in American politics, whether in terms of foreign or domestic policy, that reinforce that conservatism.
Likewise those institutions within the Jewish community that underscore values such as tolerance, civil liberties, and other so-called liberal values will find their likeminded partisans within the Jewish community.
The point is that for the unaffiliated, nonsectarian issues, the American political and cultural issues, are more important and define the potential connection to Jewish institutions.
The most controversial aspect of this dynamic is of course the issue of the American Jewish community’s reaction to the issues facing Israel.
It is my view that the Jewish community ought to resist the temptation to act in a reductive and classic manner as a diaspora community, much the way the Cuban and Irish communities have acted in times past and present.
Diaspora communities have a tendency to be out of step and out of date with their so-called original country abroad, and they become defensively reactionary. For anyone who spends a lot of time in Israel it becomes apparent that the Israelis have no difficulty debating among themselves.
The dinner table, the pages of the daily press, and the Winograd Commission are all emblems of the vitality of Israel’s democracy. It is estimated that 80 percent of Israelis would in a heartbeat welcome a withdrawal from the occupied areas in exchange for security and peace.
There is, as well, considerable Israeli movement intent on strengthening constitutional democracy in Israel by urging greater separation of church and state, the creation of a constitution and, for example, the institution of civil marriage. We, as Jews in America, need to mirror the same degree of mutual respect and the range of opinions that exists in Israel among those who, in the end, will stand together at the risk of their lives to defend their country.
One senses a greater level of intolerance here in American and in Jewish institutions to carry on the kind of debate that thrives in Israel. For a large segment of American Jews, loyalty to a Jewish institution here in America would be enhanced if that institution could exemplify the virtues of enthusiasm for dissent, debate, and openness.
What threatens the relation of Jewish institutions and probably the vast majority or American Jews is the frequent tendency among Jewish institutions in America to project a parochial, reductive, and simplified image of what it means to be Jewish or how one can actually be Jewish or in support of Israel.
In the end, a kind of narrow-minded provincialism replete with jokes about “them” and “us,” with anxieties about intermarriage and acculturation, and with a one-dimensional definition of support for Israel will in the end alienate younger and future generations of American Jews and Jewish institutions.
