How Not To Keep Israel Jewish

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The Daily Beast:

The great airlift is on. Around the time I tap out the last word of this post, a plane will take off from Israel carrying South Sudanese refugees—the people whom Benjamin Netanyahu calls “illegal infiltrators”—back to their home country. The “infiltrators” must go, the prime minister explained in the cabinet, lest they “inundate” Israel and “largely put an end to its character as a Jewish, democratic state.”

The Hebrew word for “infiltrator” connotes people slipping across the border to perpetrate terror. Nonetheless, such rhetoric puts Netanyahu on the mild side of his party and coalition.

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Niot Project Update–My Visit to a Test Anxiety Workshop

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Haim Watzman

Niot at his high school graduation

One student slouched, another grinned. Two girls focused intently while one gazed at the facilitator skeptically. Five students from Boyer High School in Jerusalem took a break one afternoon this week from basketball, studying, and piano lessons to attend a test anxiety workshop sponsored by the Niot Project. Anxiety has become a huge problem, especially for younger generations thanks to the huge pressure they are under to perform academically. Xanax, a drug used to treat anxiety disorders, is the most prescribed medication in the US. Some people don’t like to take drugs like Xanax because of the chemicals used in it that alter the chemistry of your brain. So, Anxiety sufferers look towards CBD products from places similar to Blessed CBD to help with their anxiety.

It was the third out of six sessions. Yehiel Asoulin, the psychologist who led the workshop, spent the first part of the hour teaching a study skill. He gave the students a short article to read and asked them to sum up each paragraph in turn, as they read it, in the margin of the pages. One participant claimed that it was too time-consuming, but others agreed that it had helped them focus on the content and made it easier to recall.

The second part of the workshop was devoted to relaxation exercises, designed to help the students relax when they encounter stressful situations while studying for or taking exams.

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Structurally Flawed

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

Before July 1, five apartment buildings in a West Bank settlement will be cut from their foundations and dragged over the hilly terrain to a new location elsewhere in the community. That’s Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan, anyway.

From an engineering perspective, the idea is “delusional,” as one expert put it. That’s an understated evaluation. If the three-story buildings are moved and survive, it’s reasonable to assume that they’ll be riddled with visible and unseen fissures—just like Netanyahu’s Likud party, his ruling coalition, and the jerrybuilt legal underpinnings of Israeli settlement in occupied territory. The interesting question is which of these flawed structures will collapse first.

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Samson, the Real Story (Guest Post)

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The biblical figure Samson is often called Shimshon Hagibbor, “Samson the hero” in modern Hebrew. Writing in Hebrew for Netivot Shalom’s weekly publication on the Torah portion, my son examined what the biblical text actually thinks of Samson through a close comparison with the figure of Judah (Yehudah). Netivot Shalom has now posted  an English translation, reposted here:

Yehonatan Avraham Gorenberg

“And the woman gave birth to a son and called him Shimshon”

(Judges 13:24, from the Haphtarah of Parashat Nasso)

The story of Shimshon’s adult adventures begins with his departing his parents’ home: “And Shimshon went down to Timna” (Judges 14:1). Our sages were puzzled by this description, because in the story of Yehudah (Bereishit 35:13), Tamar is told that “Behold, your father-in-law has gone up to Timna”.

The midrash (Bereishit Rabba 5:13) offers several explanations for the seeming contrariety. Outstanding is Rabbi Simon’s solution: “Going up for Yehuda from whom will come kings; going down for Shimshon who betroths a gentile woman”.

Rabbi Shimon’s solution itself demands explication. The Bible tells us that from Shimshon’s very beginning, hidden processes are at work (“For this is from God” [Judges 15]), whereas the hidden processes affecting Yehuda – from whom came kings – is only hinted at, in Jacob’s blessing of Yehudah, and its meaning becomes clear only later on in Scripture, in the stories of Shmuel, Ruth, and Chronicles. And just as Shimshon married a gentile woman, so did Yehuda marry a Canaanite woman, something forbiddened to the Patriarchs. His very going to Timna led him to seduction by Tamar, his daughter-in-law who had disguised herself as a harlot. The Babylonian Talmud solves this contradiction with a more general formulation: “Shimshon was disgraced through her; therefore, in his case it is written went down. Judah was elevated by her; therefore in his case it is written “went up“.

It would seem that comprehension of the midrash lies in a wider comparison of the Yehuda and Shimshon narratives, one which establishes Yehudah as a hero but raises questions about Shimshon.

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Israeliness and the Art of Mountain-Climbing

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at the Daily Beast:

The news photos of Nadav Ben-Yehuda arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport from Nepal shows a gaunt-faced young man with one hand bound heavily in bandages. Ben-Yehuda became a hero, one could say, because he chose not to conquer the mountain.

I feel personal gratitude to him.  Ever since I read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air—more precisely, ever since I mainlined the book’s horrors directly into my nightmares—I’ve believed, or wanted to believe, in the theoretical certainty that an Israeli mountain climber would act as Ben-Yehuda did. Three hundred meters from the peak of Mt. Everest, he turned the theoretical prediction into reality.

Before I talk about Ben-Yehuda, a word more about Krakauer’s book. As you may remember, it’s a first-person account of the disastrous 1996 climbing season on Everest. Too many people reached the top during the same opening in the weather, which  ended in a savage storm. Nine climbers died while Krakauer was on the mountain. Several people made desperate efforts to save others, even dying in the attempt.

This is just the setting of the nightmare. The nightmare, as Krakauer unflinchingly relates,

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Unorthodoxies

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Why simply cutting subsidies to haredim will cause suffering, not employment

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

In our last episode, dear viewers, we watched as Israel’s main opposition party, Kadima, sold out its centrist voters and joined Benjamin Netanyahu’s government—thereby providing the prime minister a reprieve of over a year before he must face the voters. This allows Bibi more time to raise regressive taxes, evade negotiations with the Palestinians, and deride diplomatic efforts to solve the Iranian nuclear issue.

But perhaps there’s a bright spot in this dark plot line. To paraphrase a question I’ve heard repeatedly over the last couple of weeks: Since the new coalition is broad enough to maintain its majority in parliament even if clerical parties walk out, can it finally end one of the strangest and best-known aberrations of Israeli life? Can it end the bizarre pork-barreling that allows most ultra-Orthodox men to spend their life in religious studies rather than working?

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Jerusalem Disunited: What’s Missing From the Celebration

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at the Daily Beast:

Out for my morning bike ride Sunday, I looped up the ridge to Kibbutz Ramat Rachel on the south edge of Jerusalem. Two flocks of teenagers were coming down: the first dressed in white shirts, dark pants and crocheted skullcaps, the second in knee-length skirts and modest blouses. They carried many Israeli flags that waved in a cool mountain breeze, the kind of breeze that is much more common in myths about Jerusalem than in real life and that seemed to have been ordered up special for Jerusalem Day, which is all about myth and not reality. They headed toward the center of town, presumably for the procession into the Old City—a Jerusalem Day custom observed mainly by youth from the religious Zionist right, who inherit hand-me-down Israeli mores when everyone else but right-wing politicians tire of them.

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Little Secrets– “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

“Don’t look,” said my friend Alon. “But the former Shin Bet chief just sat down at the table to our right.”

I gazed intently into my soy latte and then, without moving my head, squinted over in the direction of said table.

illustration by Avi Katz


“All I see is a blur,” I said. “I think I need to get my peripheral vision checked.”

“No, that’s really the way he looks,” said Alon.

Alon is a correspondent for one of the major dailies. I’d called him in desperation on Saturday night because I had a column to prepare and had no idea what to write. Alon knows everyone and everything and I figured he’d be able to slip me a scoop.

“Meet me at 10 a.m. in the Aroma Café on Arlosoroff Street,” he told me. “We’ll brainstorm. And it’s a good place to pick up a tidbit or two.”

The cafe was buzzing at mid-morning. Nearly every table was taken, and at least one person at each table was a familiar face. Over the bar hung a large sign with large letters: “Aroma Arlosoroff: A Quiet Spot For Intimate Encounters.” The morning sun flooded in through the plate glass windows that made up three of the café’s four sides.

“It’s where I meet my most confidential sources,” Alon whispered as we walked through the door. “If you come here, you gotta know how to keep a secret.”

“I see there’s free WiFi,” I said.

“Hey, stop staring,” Alon hissed.

“But that guy over there, surrounded by the paparazzi,”

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Elections? Ooh, That’s Scary. Let’s Not.

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column, now up at The American Prospect. Enjoy. And please help keep the Prospect publishing.

Talk about a quick campaign. The latest one in Israel lasted about a week, and there wasn’t even an election at the end.

Just last weekend, local political commentators were enthusing about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tactical brilliance in deciding on snap elections more than a year ahead of schedule. The opposition—particularly the centrist Kadima party—was unprepared. Polls purportedly proved that Netanyahu’s Likud would be the only party holding more than a quarter the seats in the next parliament; all the rest would stand in line to join his coalition. An cabinet press release on Sunday named September 4 as election day.

Two days later, the nation awoke to news that Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz had cut a deal with Netanyahu to bring his party into the current coalition. Elections can wait till late 2013, as originally scheduled. Political commentators enthused again, this time about Netanyahu’s brilliance in co-opting one potential rival and frustrating others. Foreign analysts wondered whether Netanyahu’s deal with Mofaz, a former general, would promote or hinder an Israeli strike against Iran.

Brilliance, schmilliance.

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Shouting Points: The Stand With Us Method

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at the Daily Beast:

I found the pamphlets on a table at the Hillel house of a West Coast university. They’d been left by a representative of Stand With Us, the Los-Angeles based member of the “Israel advocacy” family of organizations. The booklets, entitled Israel: Pocket Facts, were the size of missionary tracts of yesteryear—small enough so that you can always keep one with you to consult when your faith is challenged.

On its website, Stand With Us says it aims at helping people “educate their own local campuses and communities about Israel.” Putting “campuses” first appears intentional: Fierce arguments about Israel are more likely on campus than at the average workplace, and some donors worry that Jewish kids are besieged on the quad.

On each page, in large type, Israel: Pocket Facts provides a few easy-to-memorize shouting points with which pro-Israel students can respond to the equally simplistic slogans of anti-Israel students while everyone else wanders off in disgust. Some of the factoids are footnoted. The authors apparently hope that students won’t follow the footnotes to the sources, or learn anything else about Israel, or think with complexity about the issues.

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Please Help The American Prospect

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Gershom Gorenberg The American Prospect, my journalistic home for the past 10 years, is in danger of closing. The magazine operates as a non-profit, and will only be able to keep publishing with the immediate help of donors. The Prospect is an invaluable source of reporting and progressive political analysis. The loss of the magazine … Read more

Argument Is a Jewish Ideal. With No Exemption for Israeli Policy

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Gershom Gorenberg

And here’s my new column from Moment Magazine:

The incident repeats itself with small variations. A rabbi somewhere in America writes to ask if I’ll come speak to his congregation about Israeli politics and my recent book, The Unmaking of Israel. Afterward I receive another email: At a meeting of the Israel Committee or the board, he has encountered worry that inviting me could offend right-wing Jews. He asks how I respond to such concerns. Here’s one abridged version of my reply:

Dear ___,

Oy.

Your note reminds me of the apocryphal story about the new rabbi of an American Orthodox congregation who asks the shul president what he should talk about for his first Sabbath sermon. The president says, “Something to do with yiddishkeit.”

“Maybe I’ll talk about Shabbos,” the rabbi says.

“Well,” says the president, “a lot of our members drive to shul. They might take offense.”

“All right, I’ll talk about kashrus,” says the rabbi.

“Actually,” says the president, “some of our members eat in Chinese restaurants. Maybe you should skip that.”

“Fine. I’ll talk about taharas mishpuche,” the rabbi suggests, referring to the laws regarding ritual immersion for women.

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