By Elliott Abrams
The Palestinian rejection of two Israeli prime ministers’ peace offers, one more generous than the other, transformed the Israeli view of relations with the Palestinians. These rejections — by Yasser Arafat of Ehud Barak’s offer and by Mahmoud Abbas of Ehud Olmert’s — plus the terrorist violence perpetrated by the PLO after the 2000 Camp David summit, persuaded Israelis that no amount of concessions will ever be enough and permanently weakened the Israeli left. The Palestinian rejections killed the old “peace process,” leaving the building of a Palestinian state from the bottom up — institution by institution — as the only alternative.
Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, was deputy national security adviser in charge of Middle Eastern affairs in the administration of President George W. Bush.
By Bernard Avishai
In May 2006, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway ponied up a cool $4.5 billion to buy an 80% stake in Iscar, Israel’s brilliant maker of cutting tools, founded by the legendary Stef Wertheimer. The company — which blends cutting-edge robotics, metallurgy and advanced business culture — is as profitable as any global software maker, and it anchors a lovely new town in an entrepreneurial region in the north of the country: Israel’s best future in microcosm. The partnership with Buffet exposed Israel’s inevitable globalization. The missiles raining down on Iscar just two months later exposed a country in need of regional collective security agreements, not just deterrence.
Bernard Avishai, an adjunct professor of business at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the author of “The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last” (Harcourt, 2008).
By Abraham H. Foxman
September 11, 2001. The events of that day changed life as we knew it for all Americans. It had special significance for Jews in the United States and throughout the world. Not one day after the terrorist attacks, word spread that Jews and Israel were responsible. The “Big Lie” took root around the globe and remains alive and well, especially in Arab and Muslim countries. Meanwhile, Jews, Israelis and their institutions have become targets from Mombasa to Mumbai, Casablanca to Istanbul, LAX to Seattle. The threat of terrorism, long a problem for Israelis, now touches us all.
Abraham H. Foxman is national director of the Anti-Defamation League.
By Jonathan Freedland
For a Jew living in London, a depressing change these past 10 years has come in the assumptions other Jews make about you. One visiting American Jewish organizational official greeted a British counterpart (a friend of mine) with a tearful hug, “You’re going through what my grandmother survived with the pogroms.” This is the view that in Europe it’s 1938 all over again, with “Islamofascists” standing in for Hitler. Nonsense. Sure, there are moments of strain, but Jewish life is flowering in Britain — from the rise of our Jewish schools to the globally admired Limmud festival. Still, the perception otherwise has become an irritating fact of our collective lives.
Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for The Guardian and The Jewish Chronicle.
By Dara Horn
Until very recently, the American Jewish public prayer experience was, for lack of a better word, pathetic. Prayer in many Reform and Conservative synagogues was a spectator sport, while Orthodox davening was a gossip-fest, especially for women seated behind bars. But the explosion of independent minyanim has radically changed the possibilities in American Jewish prayer. Most discussions of these minyanim focus on their youth, their traditional liturgical choices, their impressive growth and the challenge they present to established synagogues. But for the person who grew up amid pathetic davening, the most astounding aspect of these communities is the simple fact that nearly everyone in them is actually praying.
Dara Horn is the author, most recently, of the novel “All Other Nights” (Norton).
By Edward I. Koch
When Israel attacked the Hamas forces controlling Gaza in December 2008, it was seeking to end the daily firing of rockets into southern Israel. The Hamas terrorists responded by hiding among Palestinian civilians, resulting in collateral injuries. As a result of Israel’s war against terror, Israeli civilians today walk in relative safety. Israel did what every country seeks to do in war — break the will of the enemy so it stops its attacks. Unfortunately, as we’ve learned from the world’s response — reflected in the Goldstone report — Israel isn’t judged by the same standards as every other country.
Edward I. Koch, a partner in the law firm Bryan Cave, served as mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989.
By Elisa New
In books growing shorter as the decade wore on, Philip Roth, our Tolstoy, our Melville, our precious Jeremiah, picked off his alter egos, one by one, and dispatched them to the cemetery. As they fell into their graves — Zuckerman and Kepesh, artist-perverts and soldier-boys, naive stamp collectors and reclusive nymphet-collectors — Roth shoveled the illusions of humankind’s most deadly century after them. Sexual liberation and race blindness, the pastoral bliss of suburbs and the safety of American exceptionalism, Mom, the shiksa goddess and the promise of higher education: all so many clods on the coffin.
Elisa New, a professor of English at Harvard University, is the author of “Jacob’s Cane: A Jewish Family’s Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore — A Memoir in Five Generations” (Basic Books).
By Jonathan D. Sarna
Amid ongoing, year-long commemorations of 350 years of American Jewish life, a news item of immense historical significance passed practically unnoticed. On May 10, 2005, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics announced that the country’s population of self-identifying Jews had reached a grand total of 5,550,000. The closest parallel number for Jews in the United States (where the figures are admittedly less precise and more controversial) is 5,290,000. With this news, an era that began following the Holocaust, when America emerged as the undisputed center of world Jewry, came with little fanfare to a close. Israel overtook the United States as the largest Jewish population center in the world.
Jonathan D. Sarna, the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, is serving this year as senior scholar at the Mandel Leadership Institute in Jerusalem.
By Rachel Sklar
Has it ever been easier for Jews to tell the world what we’re thinking? Never shy about expressing opinions, we now have social media for sharing, posting and kvetching. But social media is also a powerful agent of community, allowing members of our Diaspora to seek each other out — across the world or down the block (and, yes, maybe go for that old cyber-shidduch). Social media has made it easy to kibbitz (remember that Moses Facebook page on Passover, or the “Twitteleh” video?) and has become a critical tool for fundraising, help sorely needed in these tough times. P.S. Elie Wiesel is on Twitter.
Rachel Sklar is editor-at-large for Mediaite.com.
By Alisa Solomon
After years of building slowly, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement has gained real traction. The BDS conference at Hampshire College in November — which drew students from 40 campuses — marked a watershed in anti-occupation activism in the United States. BDS proponents — many of them Jewish — are picking up a time-honored, non-violent protest tool as they seek meaningful action against the 42-year-old occupation. Charges that these are “antisemitic” efforts to “delegitimize Israel” mischaracterize a multifaceted movement for human and civil rights. As BDS keeps growing, the Jewish community is going to have to grapple seriously with the issues this movement raises.
Alisa Solomon is an associate professor at Columbia University’s Journalism School and a contributing editor to WBAI’s weekly radio program “Beyond the Pale.”
By A.B. Yehoshua
During the past decade, a broad Israeli political consensus finally emerged recognizing that the vision of a “Greater Israel,” which had been nurtured since the 1967 Six Day War, has no chance of becoming a reality. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, along with his followers who left Likud to form Kadima, embraced this realization. Now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly acknowledged the need for the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state. It is understood that a Palestinian state, living in peace with Israel, not only would serve Palestinian interests and the demands of the international community; it would serve the essential, existential interests of Israel.
A.B. Yehoshua, a novelist, is a recipient of the Israel Prize for Hebrew literature and a founder of the Peace Now movement.
By Eric Yoffie
When Birthright Israel was launched 10 years ago to provide free trips to Israel for Jewish young adults, there were many skeptics, myself included. But we were wrong. Birthright has changed our perceptions in fundamental ways. It has demonstrated that at a time when commitment to Israel is supposedly withering, even the most disengaged young Jews have a yearning for connection to the Jewish state. And it has proven that despair over the future of our young people is unwarranted: We can, if we are serious, offer them experiences that change their life, foster Jewish identity and draw them into the Jewish people.
Rabbi Eric Yoffie is president of the Union for Reform Judaism.
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In response to Alisa Solomon's celebration of the glorious divestment movement, I was able to obtain a transcript from the planning session for the Hampshire divestment conference she feels is emblematic of the growing success of BDS.
If you Google "Hampshire BDS" it comes up as a majority of links, but I shall provide you easier access here: http://www.divestthis.com/2009/11/clip-show-2-hampshire-sjp-planning.html.
Jon Haber: you wasted my time getting me to look at your link. please say upfront it's a parody next time.
In spite of what Jonathan Freedland said about British antisemitism, the truth about its reality can be found here:
http://cifwatch.com/
and here
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/
btw: no one says that it's as bad in England today as it was in Eastern Europe in the 30's. This is something Freedland made up to justify his continued work in the antisemitic paper The Guardian.
Sorry for leading you astray about Hampshire's divestment event, Norbert. To make up for it, here's a story about an attempt to get the college to divest from Israel that is absolutely genuine:
http://www.divestthis.com/2009/12/hampshire-and-brain-party-1.html
Freedland is exhibiting exactly the behavior that so many of my parents contemporaries reported - things are great, this too will pass, just keep our heads down and the decent people with throw Hitler out.
He is wrong, and as a frequent visitor to Britain, I would say he is demonstrably wrong as you can see simply by walking the streets of London, reading the press, watching television, and listening to the radio. There is a jihad being launched in Britain against Israelis and Jews, aided by the naive hopers like Freedland and evil idiots like Danial Machover. The latest judgment by the Supreme Court declaring that Jews are a "race" has all the hallmarks of the Nuremberg laws.
Rather than suggesting his US visior is wrong, Freedland should ponder the fact that, viewed from outside, we can see the forest rather than trying to hide among the trees.
Remember that Freedland supported Ken Livingstone in the London Mayoral election in 2008. Livingstone told me three times that Israel should not have been created and the third time lied that the former Chief Rabbi said the same thing.
Now read the truth about the UK in 2009:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1248277944837&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull
http://thejc.com/videos/news-videos/jonathan-hoffman-jeered-soas-meeting
http://thejc.com/blogpost/mcb-how-wrong-can-you-be
The 'establishment' or the 'insiders' are so wrong and annoying comparing any situation to the holocaust or the 1930s. Its dumb, inaccurate and turns people off. The young and the average guy will just walk pass by while you keep on whinning.
You are padding yourself on each and other's back.
Jerry Bauman said: 'This is something Freedland made up to justify his continued work in the antisemitic paper The Guardian. '
AKUS: '...has all the hallmarks of the Nuremberg laws.'
Overstated, Sensationalised...blah blah bla.
Get a grip people.
Thank you Steven for a sane response to the nonsense -- something rare on Forward on-line forums these days.
And thank you Forward for a thoughtful way of summarizing a decade -- nice that it's not always the same voices. Of course there are a couple I could live without; but the overall effect of very different voices with very different takes on our times is accurate and even a little sweet.
This is a copy of an e-mail I sent to Alisa Solomon after reading her comments here:
No, the Jewish community will have to do nothing of the sort as long as the motivations of the movement you describe continue to appear pathological. And those motivations will continue to appear pathological as long as nothing even remotely approaching a BDS movement exists on the campuses of this country to combat the two unprovoked, lingering and murderous occupations that America maintains in two far-away countries. The civilian death toll in Iraq is estimated to be as high as 600,000. That in Afghanistan is lower, but is rising with each drone attack. How can proponents of a BDS strategy against Israel be seen as anything other than obsessive deligitimizers of Israel when their own nation's immensely greater offenses leave them so singularly unmoved? Do they imagine that people stopped dying over there when they (as did I) voted for Obama? And while we're at it, are the BDS folks prominent in movements to alleviate the plight of Native Americans? I have no proof, but I suspect not. Sorry, but this movement does seem to be obsessively anti-Israel. I think back to my own days in the anti-Vietnam War movement, when we were more concerned with the abuses of our own country, of which we were citizens, than with those of one thousands of miles away. This movement will always be a fringe movement, deserving of the labels you reject, as long as it is guilty of such immense intellectual dishonesty and of such profound self-deception.
Jon, some people just do not have a sense of humor.
Professor Sarna defines "the undisputed center of world Jewry" as a population issue. Since the Holocaust, that "center" (by such a definition) was obviously in North America. It certainly is noteworthy that the largest Jewish population center in the world is today in the Land of Israel. Probably, in just a few years from now, there will be an item in the newspapers heralding that more than 50% of the Jews in the world are living in Israel. Yet, what I find disappointing in Prof. Sarna's contribution to "A Look Back at What a Decade Brought" is his simplistic definition of "the undisputed center of world Jewry". A center is not just a bureaucratic statistic; rather, a center refers to an evaluation of significance in the course of Jewish history - and to an evaluation of Jewish cultural impact. There is no question in my eyes that the rather small population of 600,000 Jews in the newly founded State of Israel in 1948 had become "the undisputed center of world Jewry". The rise of a Hebrew culture - not a culture of an intellectual or academic elite, but the culture of the public in general - is a very impressive social reality. It stands in total opposition to the cultural reality of America in which a Jewish language (the mark of a distinctive culture) was being abandoned. The rise of Jewish independence, indicating the existence of an organized Jewish society at the highest level of communal involvement and obligation, is a significant historic development that has left its impact on all of Jewish existence in the world. That is the definition of "the undisputed center of world Jewry". The rise in the population of Israel is a result of its having become the center - not the other way around.
Nice to see extremist American Jews doing what they always do - telling Jews in other countries that aren't in lockstep with their ideology, (UK, Israel, you name it) that they don't know anything about their own lives.
Oh, I'm sorry, of course you VISITED there and read a blog. Fool that I am, that makes you all experts.
England has become the most antisemitic country in Europe today.
See "The Trials of the Diaspora" by Anthony Julius
http://blog.z-word.com/2009/11/anthony-julius-trials-of-the-diaspora/
"“No less than Philip Roth describes the book as an “essential history…written by a man with the extraordinary fluency, staggering erudition, scholarly integrity, intellectual acumen and moral discernment of Anthony Julius.””
Why would the Forward feel that it's a journalistic duty to give a platform to those calling for a boycott of Israel? A Jewish newspaper should be the forum for expressing criticism, or for making constructive suggestions within the Jewish experience. It's not the forum for hostility against other Jews. Generally, all opinions are worthy news items; however, those who call for boycotting surely shouldn't complain if their own ideology becomes the victim of boycott (i.e. if the Forward prefers to refrain from publishing them). Lastly, a respected newspaper should not allow itself to be exploited for propaganda. It is just a propaganda ploy to claim that the boycott is gaining "real traction". It's simply nonsense.
Well, I am so disappointed in the Forward that it would feel that the boycott idea is a real item of the last decade, worthy of its attention. Hence, I shall become a boycott movement of a single reader, and I shall refrain from reading the Forward.
Dara Horn writes in The Power of Prayer: "But for the person who grew up amid pathetic davening, the most astounding aspect of these communities is the simple fact that nearly everyone in them is actually praying".
How utterly boring. The "pathetic davening" she is referring to is the zietgiest of the traditional shul, the beis medrash, where things are happening, the bazaar of Jewish thinking and the place to report it all. Prayer!that's too American, too homogenized, too clean.
People really pray only at independent minyanim . How odd! When I conduct services at my congregation I must be imagining that people are praying. They seem to be. When we say Kaddish people say it with a full heart. Mishaberachs, prayers for recovery, are done with true feeling. Parents shep Nachas at Bar and Bat Mitzvah's. At my conservative shul there is no idle talking only communal singing. Independent minyanim may be nice but they will not help shul's survive