I am done with Bibi. I’m also done with Purim, which means that I’m even more done with the various editorials analyzing Bibi’s references to the Purim story in Congress.
At its root, however, my frustration lies not with Bibi himself, but with the answer that we have given to the question: How should we, as Diaspora Jews, fashion our Jewish identity with the advent of the Holocaust and the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948?
I’ve written before about the myth that one consensus issue, one person, or one organization can claim to speak for American Jews, but that myth continues. This myth is not just perpetuated by people like Bibi, who purport to speak with the best interests of the world’s Jews at heart while delivering a speech to Congress merely two weeks before elections where he stands to lose power. We diaspora Jews also perpetuate this myth by lending Bibi and Israel our ears then defining ourselves as for or against Bibi’s speech.
And even when we define ourselves as against Bibi’s speech or against the policies of a politically and socially right-wing Israeli government, we are still, at least to a certain extent, defining ourselves in comparison to Israel. Israel still matters to us because we are Jewish. We need to find something new to center around, a new cornerstone for our identities. That is not to say that our relationship to Israel should not be part of our identities — it most definitely should be— just that it should not be the only issue around which we diaspora Jews define ourselves. As a Zionist, I see value in a Jewish State and a state for the Jews, but do not see that as the defining issue through which I engage Jewishly. I have an equal — if not greater— responsibility to my Jewish home in the diaspora as well.
Our problem extends not only to debates within our communities and blogs, but also to the ways in which we prepare ourselves and our communities to be advocates for Israel, to absorb and love Israeli culture even while living in America. It means that our day schools and Hebrew schools teach us Modern Hebrew but not Biblical or Rabbinic Hebrew, which are far more important to building literacy and fluency with Jewish texts, because of the importance Israel has to our Jewish education. It means that we place such great importance on sending our students to be advocates for Israel on college campuses, often without giving them the tools needed to effectively engage in the kinds of dialogue needed to create any sort of change on their campuses.
It means that we instill in them the idea that being Jewish means being perpetually persecuted, and that the only solution is Israel, the one place for all Jews, even though Israel not a utopian place for all Jews, even though it has its own social and political problems, and even though there are some Jews who are no safer in Israel than in America.
And yet we continue propping Israel up as the de facto solution to the Holocaust and now to any instance of anti-Semitism we might witness as the one thing to which all Jews can identify. We do this because Israel is supposedly the one and only answer to the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe, the one way around which we can center our identities as Jews.
Perhaps the time has come for us to create a new myth around which we should all purport to center our identities, be it social justice or education or providing Diaspora communities the support they need to continue building strong, vibrant communities. When we focus solely on the State of Israel and the Holocaust as the cornerstones of our identities, we create an identity which focuses solely on surviving persecution and creating a vibrant life elsewhere, often to the detriment of the communities in which we live now.
There is a vibrancy to Jewish communities that can only exist in the Diaspora where we are a minority living in a world that does not always take us, our culture, and our identities into account. That vibrancy is suppressed when we center our identities solely on persecution and the de facto solution that has been created.
This is not a blog post about Bibi, or about his speech, or about why we need to strengthen our relationship with Israel, or why we should care whether Bibi speaks for us or not. This is a blog post about why we need to move away from the hype over whether Bibi does speak for all Jews, whether Bibi can speak for all Jews, and whether or not Bibi should speak for all Jews. This blog post is about the exact opposite: now is the time to strengthen our identities as Diaspora Jews, showing that we can center around more than just persecution and salvation. Now, we must find ways to express our Judaism in ways that strengthen our identities as diaspora Jews.
Amram Altzman is a student at List College.
