Advice from a former Scholar-in-Residence, Arnold Eisen. Book recommendations follow the suggestions.
- Increase our knowledge about the Reality of Israel, as opposed to the Myth of Israel.through films, books, magazines, newspapers, on-line sources, and maybe even satellite TV.
- Learn more about the history of Zionism and the development of the State—especially when seen parallel to the modern history of the Jewish diaspora.
- Visit, and when visiting get to know the place better, go beyond touring and vacation (especially if this is not the first visit) to learning more about the place, the people, the society, the culture.
Hebrew. Make a real effort to improve knowledge of the language, so as to get more direct access, if only to prayerbooks and street signs, to one’s people and tradition.
Support partnerships such as Partnership 2000 with Israelis, and possibly Jews from diaspora communities, for work on projects in Israel, US, or diaspora.
Encourage our young people to make Israeli connections of their own, which may be very different from ours, and may result in them getting more attached than we’d (honestly) like.
Join and get active in “friends of” organizations, from relatively non-partisan causes (universities, orchestras) to somewhat partisan causes (advocacy of pluralism or civil rights or environmental action), whether directly or through Federation or New Israel Fund.
Join and get active in overtly partisan efforts: friends of Meretz or Peace Now or Likud.
Lobby—whether at the national level via AIPAC or NIF or among our own Jewisn and Gentile friends and co-workers, who don’t know that we support Israel, or why, or what it means to us.
- Finally, perhaps most difficult, change our attitude towards Israel, our relation to it, to accept the revolutionary change it represents in Jewish history and the nature of Jewish responsibility—for a real state, a highly imperfect state, that includes many kinds of Jews as well as non-Jews, for all of whom the State is responsible—and so for whom, indirectly, we are responsible.
Here is a list of the books and authors I mentioned during the weekend. No doubt I forgot some. But here are a few:
- Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem
- Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civiliation
- Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State: Ahad Ha’am, founder of cultural Zionism—for both of them and more see The Zionist Idea, ed. Arthur Hertzberg.
- Nahum Sarna, commentary on Exodus, for example in the JPS Torah series.
- Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution. He is also the editor of a series called The Jewish Political Tradition.
- Ruth Gavison published her piece on human rights and majority culture in Israel a couple years back (I can find the specific issue if you can’t) in Azure, a journal published by the Shalem Institute.
Finally, the books by me which were mentioned:
- Taking Hold of Torah
- Galut: Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming (out of print, but available sometimes and in libraries) The Jew Within (with Steven M. Cohen).Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civiliation
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