Israeli campaign doesn’t add up for local expats
‘Come home’ message was seen as insulting to American Jews
Daddy?
Advertisements
December 5, 2011
Ruth Barbut of Randolph has been in the United States for 11 years. Her husband, Yossi, has been here over 20 years. Yet from time to time they still discuss going home to Israel.
“I want to go back,” she said. “In each Israeli it’s always something he has inside, thinking about going back.”
Israel’s Ministry of Immigrant Absorption was counting on that when it produced a series of billboards and YouTube advertisements that urge Israelis living abroad to come home. What they weren’t counting on were the objections of American Jews.
In one ad, an American granddaughter tells her saba and savta back in Israel that she celebrates Christmas; in another, an Israeli woman’s English-speaking boyfriend doesn’t understand why she is so upset on Israel’s Memorial Day.
After cable television’s The Jewish Channel ran a story on the ad campaign, the Jewish Federations of North America called the ads "insulting" to American Jews, and the head of the Anti-Defamation League said they were "demeaning."
“The idea, communicated in these ads, [is] that America is no place for a proper Jew,” wrote influential Atlantic.com blogger Jeffrey Goldberg.
Last Friday, the Netanyahu government canceled the ad campaign.
Barbut saw the ads on the Internet but thought they “didn’t deliver the right message.”
For Barbut, the disassociation between Judaism and Israeli culture doesn’t jibe with what she’s seen in Israeli families in the States. Nor does the ads’ depiction of Jewish life in America.
Assimilation “can happen but everything is dependent on how you raise the kids,” Barbut said. “It pinched my heart” when Barbut’s daughter heard Christmas carols in class, but her mother felt better knowing she had already been asked by the teacher to come in and explain Hannuka.
And yet, while its American critics say the ads show disdain for the Diaspora, Barbut suggests that they tap real emotions among Israeli expatriates.
“I’m afraid from assimilation,” Barbut admitted. The family does their best to celebrate holidays and “we don’t send out the kids to any programs on Shabbat,” she said. She said there’s nothing wrong with American culture and is a U.S. citizen herself, but she still worries and said she is afraid her daughter will “go to college and bring me a non-Jewish boy…. I would have a very hard time with that.”
Noga Maliniak, executive shlicha, or emissary, of the Legow Family Israel Program Center in Whippany, understands the objections to the ads.
She said the ads, with their negative view of Disaspora life, would make her job of connecting American Jews with Israel a little bit harder.
“They could have taken the campaign to [show] the positives” about Israeli life instead, she said. A “call to action” would have been a better tactic, but she did note that “the fact that the campaign caused such a reaction means it worked. It got people talking.”
Phil Levey saw the ads but feels there is no emotional truth to them. “Like any good advertisement they go to an extreme,” said the Union resident, an Israeli who has been in the United States since 1988. “They’re trying to sell a product, and their product is Israel. It doesn’t reflect necessarily the true life” that an Israeli expat is living, he said. “No Israeli with a little bit of seichel in his brain” is going to move back because of an advertisement, he said.
Levey has U.S. citizenship and has no plans to move back. He visits Israel at least once every year. His son Ethan, 11, a sixth-grader at Golda Och Academy, is fluent in English, Hebrew, and Portuguese; his mother is originally from Brazil.
Levey said the “Christmas” spot may even have had it backward.
“Unfortunately, there are more and more young Israelis [in Israel] who know less about Judaism than Americans,” he said. “The people who live outside Israel have more of a connection to Judaism because that’s what unifies them.”
‘That’s just silly’
Much of the discussion about the ads was driven by Jeffrey Goldberg’s blog, where he complained that the ads suggested “that it is impossible for Jews to remain Jewish in America."
But Adam Oded, a Philadelphia educational consultant formerly of Passaic, said Goldberg had confused their intent.
“I don't think the message is that you can't remain Jewish outside of Israel. That's just silly. I think the message is that you can't remain Israeli outside of Israel,” Oded, the former teen educator at the Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life in MetroWest, wrote on his Facebook page.
Leaders of the JFNA, however, saw no such distinction.
“While we recognize the motivations behind the ad campaign, we are strongly opposed to the messaging that American Jews do not understand Israel,” wrote the federation leaders in a statement. “[T]his outrageous and insulting message could harm the Israel-Diaspora relationship.”
In pulling the campaign, Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the United States, who was raised in New Jersey, said that the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption “clearly did not take into account American-Jewish sensibilities, and we regret any offense it caused.”
Maliniak said the conversation was worth having.
“I’m going to use it in the rest of my shlihut now as a point to discuss…Israelis and Americans and Jewish peoplehood,” she said.
Comments
Michael
December 07, 2011
Clearly the message was; you can’t raise children in America and expect them to grow-up Israeli. The ad campaign was directed at expats Israelis and the American Jewish community’s selfish and self-absorbed reaction is an embarrassingly obvious and a clear vindication of the Campaign’s message.
Israel is a completely different culture than the US and a common religion is not enough to bridge that cultural divide nor does it make you ‘the same” as Israelis; none of my secular friends who volunteered for the IDF stayed after they got out.
So seriously, get over it. Donating money or being politically active for Israel doesn’t buy you a vote there; it shows your principles and ideals here. If you want to have more of a direct impact on Israeli politics, make Aliyah or titnadev to Tzahal. Just sayin’...
milton turoff
December 07, 2011
If you are Jewish not only in name but in heart, no amount of Xmas caroling you hear, or arguments against Israel will deter you. Unfortunately, it seems that many Israelis—I should think a goodly number are young—have gone soft. To these I quote and admonish, “Those who do not heed history are condemned to repeat it.”
Eddy
December 09, 2011
I love this ad campaign. Criticism of it is shortsighted and beside the point. We want this unlikely 60+ year old project in the desert to succeed, right? Let’s put petty perceived insults aside.
Bill Pearlman
December 10, 2011
I don’t see what the big deal is. It is aimed at the Israeli ex-pat community. I don’t know anybody who feel particularly insulted by these adds.
Mitchell Cohen
December 12, 2011
Is is EVERY country’s rights to do what they can to encourage their citizens to come home. I am an American ex-pat who made aliyah to Israel in 1995 and I don’t think Israelis would be offended if America put out ads to lure American ex-pats back to America.
asc
December 12, 2011
Of course they have a RIGHT to make the ads. But having a right doesn’t make something right. What if the ads put out by the United States in Israel urged Americans to come home because they risk getting killed in terrorist attacks? It wouldn’t be inaccurate, per se, but it would certainly anger Israelis.