Perspective

...Yes, the curriculum teaches that we are the State of the Jewish People, that the Jewish People created us, we arose in dissociation from the idea of hopelessness and exile, that we represent a Jewish civilization...

...The way that an Israeli looks at the American Jewish visitor has an element of externality about it—"we" and "they...

...they've never tried it...

...It's not a zero sum game, where whatever we get, Diaspora Jewry loses...

...His reflections appear regularly in these pages...

...I'm very moved by the ideology, I share it...

...And I think we ought to be concerned and preserve some link of involvement...

...It is rather like the embarrassment of schoolchildren whose affectionate uncles and mothers come to visit them at school, with the youngsters hoping that the visitors will behave not too effusively...

...One should stop calling them names, not becuase they don't deserve it, but because our pragmatic aim is to salvage as many as we can...

...Because then that area of intersection is larger and more fundamental...

...I certainly know that the French and the British and the others are rather proud of their scientists or artists who win fame in America...

...And when I say "resources," I include, of course, human resources...

...Sometimes, there is even an element of gentle derision, looking at their golf caps, their bermuda shorts, their cameras...

...A Jew in distress appeals to their solidarity...

...They have a chance...

...At least the yordim are people who tried to make a go of living in Israel...

...I think it's helpful to note here that Israel, because of its negation of the Diaspora, is, in a sense, working against itself...

...In other words, we will live in Cleveland, Ohio, but you've got to live in Israel...

...The noshrim are people who have never tried, and I feel rather more hostile, or at least more antagonistic, to the noshrim than to the yordim...

...Perhaps what we should try to do is increase the common area in the intersecting circles and diminish the areas of separation, but understanding they will never be completely absorbed in us, or we in them...

...On the contrary: If there were to be a real aliyah from them, that would have a stimulating effect on British Jewry and on American Jewry...

...That means that Israelis ought not to get panic stricken if we hear that some resources which Israel has helped to accumulate stay behind in America to build schools or youth centers or libraries...

...In other words: the Diaspora exists...

...It's larger, but if observant Jews live abroad, they have their realm of specific and geographical alleg-ience...

...I think there's a real danger of growing alienation between Israeli youngsters and the Jews of the Diaspora...

...In other words, the classic Zionist ideology never took account of a phenomenon such as American Jewry, or of a Jewish world which is not culturally or physically dependent on the Jewish national center, but which has its own personality—a strong sense of kinship, but without the kinship merging into complete identification...

...Even the word "yeridah" (descent) may be a problem word in that connection...

...Our circles are not concentric...

...Even if we can't claim complete centrality for Israel, we must at least claim priority...

...There should be a constant redistribution which replenishes Israel...

...On the Israeli side, there is developing a different way of looking at life, a different way of looking at the Jewish people, a vision of Jewish history that is territorially oriented, that is very deeply embedded in linguistic particularity...

...If there were a real humanitarian case, if these people were starving in Israel, you could make something rational out of it...

...Does not Israel have a self-interest in those activities of Diaspora Jewry which help make for the confirmation of identity and heritage...

...Given that in the area where the circles overlap—leaving aside for the moment observant Jews—there is an intense but only vaguely defined kinship, but little else—nothing that we might properly call a shared culture, is it not the case that the vacuum is filled by secular Western culture, a culture which we share not because we are together located in a circle of Jewish history and peoplehood, but because of the diffusion of Western culture throughout the world...

...On the one hand, Israelis know that it's there, that it will continue...

...There used to be a great struggle with the UJA, where if we'd had our way nothing would have stayed in America at all...

...That's fine as far as it goes, but then when one has 100,000 or 70,000 or whatever it is in Los Angeles...

...Yes, it is clearly very difficult in Israel today to deal with the various levels of rejection even outside the political sphere, yeridah being one and neshira being a second, and non-aliyah____ Actually, there's more indignation against the yordim than against the noshrim...

...I don't see on what basis they could say that...

...We all have difficulty adjusting to the notion that there are expatriate Israelis who have now joined the ranks of the American philanthropic endeavor on Israel's behalf...

...What is needed is some figure in Israel who will be courageous enough to say that we need a new definition of Diaspora Jews and Israeli Jews—I wouldn't say on the basis of Yerushalayim and Bavel (Jerusalem and Babylonia as two centers)—that Diaspora Jewry is (a) durable, you mustn't bank on its liquidation, and (b) that it has an individuality and a personality and a vision of its own...

...It might, except that it is an historic term, the consequence of aliyah, and aliyah is a very noble vision...

...I would say that if they were fewer, we could afford to say that there is no free country which does not have some emanation of itself outside, and there's nothing basically alarming in that...

...There is a real effort on the Diaspora Jewish side to be accepted, to establish the concept of oneness, and there is something rather pathetic in the desire of Diaspora Jews to be accepted as kith and kin in light of the tendency of the Israelis to regard Diaspora Jews as external to themselves...

...But these are people who could make good in Israel very often, in such terms as we call making good...

...We must say that Eretz Yisrael is the origin and the destiny of Jewish history, and the major and primary function of Israel and Diaspora Jewry is to strengthen the central concentration, not to strengthen the Diaspora...

...We don't behave as if we do...

...There are certain anomalies because the Israeli attitude toward yordim is also caught up in paradox...

...If we are faced with an ideological crisis because the old Zionist theory doesn't describe any reality with which we are currently familiar, and we try to develop a kind of amended Ahad Ha'amism which sets out to describe the reality of intersecting circles, and we thereby acknowledge formally that Diaspora Jewry has a personality of its own and perhaps even a vocation of its own, then we simply encourage yeridah...

...But would it be wise, would it have been wise, to build Israel on the cultural devastation of American Jewry...

...There would be an element of hypocrisy in that...

...We ought to have an interest in insuring, or in helping to insure, that British, American, Canadian Jewry develop a strong sense of Jewish heritage...

...What happens in the public school curriculum...

...American Jews do have an independent tradition...

...But then when the yored becomes somebody of eminence, the tendency is to take pride in him...

...Yet in a certain sense, it is a desirable outcome...

...In other words, there should be a movement of resources from the Diaspora to Israel, and not vice versa—or, at any rate, the balance of movement should be in that direction, and not be equally distributed...

...And without the kinship really implying an ideological overlap, unless one talks about observant Jews...

...Diaspora Jewry has its own centers...

...A person who under those theoretical circumstances leaves Israel need no longer feel that he is abandoning his destiny as a Jew...

...That's one of the reasons, parenthetically, that we've tried to make such an issue, in the pages of moment, of providing translations of contemporary Israeli writers...

...But the ideology of intersecting circles does not find expression in the classic ideology, which was written with Russian Jewry in mind, or European Jewry, in which the only solution seemed to be the liquidation of the Diaspora and the concentration of its emigrants in Israel...

...The word itself reflects the older ideology...

...on the other hand, there is no attempt to be relaxed about its continued durability...

...The Los Angeles Federation organized last year for the first time an Israel division, and it's anomalous...

...The last part of this is a question we touched on when we spoke last...

...After all, the Jewish legacy is mainly a literary legacy, and if the language bridge isn't strong, how can the Jew in San Francisco or Detroit regard as a center a country where he can't read the papers or understand what is being said...

...the Diaspora would be stimulated by the exchange...

...The tendency in Israel is to think that such resources are all wasted, that whatever does not reach Israel is really squandered...

...They're never boycotted at an embassy function...

...And I think that ought to be looked at again...

...Also, it's very hard to say to an American Jew who refuses to live in Israel that he must penalize Russian Jews because they don't want to live in Israel...

...They are a part of American society, although they are less integrated into it, perhaps, than others...

...Intersecting circles have one area in common and another area each separate unto itself...

...The Israelis are hurt, because, frankly, we feel we're being rejected...

...It's not just that the yordim don't know what to do with themselves, but we don't know how to relate to them...

...Now, if that ideology had a stimulating effect on aliyah, I would be in favor of it...

...Our own problem here in knowing what to do with yordim is one concern...

...If we take, then, as our problem, based on the facts of our time, the nature, the extent and the substance of the area of intersection, even there we have serious problems...

...I don't want to mention names, but you know them—the musicians and the actors—and I wonder whether we shouldn't take pride in them...

...And whose ongoing literature he cannot follow...

...My feeling is that it's not healthy to cling to an ideology that has been refuted by historic experience for so long, I think we're still closed in on the Ahad Ha'am concept of centricity, to which I also used to adhere, but frankly, it simply hasn't happened...

...The most absurd thing I've heard in some time was when, at the last meeting of the Zionist Actions Committee, the secretary of one of the Western Zionist federations suggested that if all this campaign to get Western Zionist leaders to go to Israel, to go on aliyah, were to succeed, then Rex House (the British Zionist headquarters) and Park Avenue (headquarters for the American Zionist movement) would be destroyed...

...We are intersecting circles, which is a different geometrical pattern...

...Then it becomes very hard to grant it legitimacy, because it has reached a proportion where it's not really normal...

...I don't think we should be very concerned at the prospect of a depletion of the bureaucracies in those places...

...And then, of course, there is the great discussion in which the Israeli Jew asks: What is the nature of an involvement which doesn't lead to aliyah, and of which the most tangible expression is an economic support which has become relatively marginal even in the economic sphere...

...There's an ideology of rejection and of disapproval...

...Yes, I think there the question of dimension is very important...

...Abba Eban, former Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Israel, is a contributing editor of this magazine...

...Certainly it should not be distributed the way it is now, which is most likely a net loss to Israel...

...Yes, that's a very serious problem, because that operates very much against the Ahad Ha'am doctrine of Israel as a cultural and spiritual center...

...I don't believe that that would necessarily deplete the Diaspora...

...If aliyah is noble, then its opposite is by definition ignoble...

...And may well make good here...

...In the Diaspora there's a young generation that has lived neither the trauma of the Holocaust nor the exhilaration of Israel's struggle for independence, who don't get a twinge in their hearts when they see the Israeli flag because they've never seen an international system without an Israeli flag...

...Is there attention paid to this...

...Now we bring the question full circle...

...Better than that they should be left at the side...

...Israel exists...

...As long as we've not succeeded in keeping them in Israel I think we have an interest in not cutting them off, not taking the view that our grandparents would if somebody had married out, that you sit shiva and you tear your garments and you banish them from your mind...

...but when something doesn't happen, I'm very concerned with the cleavage between ideology and reality...

...We have a language problem...

...There is not a very clear set of doctrines confirming the nature of the Diaspora...

...It shouldn't be there: they ought not to be there...

...the Jewish People should all be concentrated in the land of Israel...

...But that creates the danger of legitimization, because if you want to have involvement you don't pin negative labels on them...

...There would, in fact, be a mutual gain...

...When Israelis look at a busload of American tourists, they look at them with a sort of affectionate curiosity at the best, as people of rather strange habits, excessively sentimental—however sympathetic and useful...

...I think we have to find a formula in which we maintain our disapprobation, but in such terms as do not close the dialogue...

...The problem is how to convince them that Israel should occupy a central part in their concern, responsibility, and preoccupation...

...But what makes the relationship difficult is that at that point we come into the ideology of shlilat ha'golah (the negation of the Diaspora) which I find rather disconcerting and not very useful, because if the basic ideology is that the Diaspora ought not to exist, it's very difficult to affix an affirmative relationship to that which ought not to exist, that about whose existence there is an atmosphere of guilt and defeat...

...So far, so good...

...In other words, Diaspora Jews do have a separate area of concern, of responsibility, affecting them, and the difficulty is that the classic Zionist ideology doesn't grant that right, or else it pretends that this is a provisional, transitional stage which will end up sometime before acharit hayamim (the end of days) in a kind of ingathering of our dispersion from among the nations...

...It's very hard to be the center of something which is not understood at the circumference, and therefore, it's very hard to say, honestly, that Israel is the cultural center of world Jewry...

...Perhaps not logically...

...He is simply trading one circle for another...

...They are concentrated within their own sanctuary, but, after all, they-re going to be affected by what the Congress legislates and what the President says...

...they've given up before trying, and they trample on the visa which was the instrument of their redemption...

...But even there, I come into a paradox, because, having expressed all that disapprobation, I'm not prepared to say to American Jews, "Let them starve in Vienna...