JustASC

Marjorie Ingall, parenting columnist for Tablet, caused a stir last year when she wrote about her ambivalence about Israel and what to teach the kids about it. (I responded in a column).

One year later and guess what? She’s sending her kid to a Zionist summer camp:

Last year, Josie returned from camp as joyful as I have ever seen her. She belted out the songs I’d sung at my own camp. Her Hebrew had improved by leaps and bounds. She made us Israeli salad, refusing all offers of assistance, dicing tomatoes and cucumbers into tiny pieces. It took her 45 minutes. (We learned to plan ahead when Josie was making Israeli salad.)

The Zionist camp Josie attends fosters what I think is a particularly American sort of Zionism, one that says that Jews are a people defined by both religion and ethnicity. It isn’t boosterish. It allows for nuance. Even an 8-year-old can understand nuance. And even an 8-year-old can understand Jewishness is more than demanding an Elsa Peretti Star of David necklace for your bat mitzvah, because everyone at camp has one.

She hasn’t exactly fully comes to terms with Israel (“I hesitate to talk about Israel with my children, and I feel a visceral anxiety upon seeing an Israeli flag,” she writes). But her choices are admirable in that they reject the either/or thinking of an Allison Benedikt.

Here’s the liberal Zionist’s dilemma: Voice your anxieties about Israeli security policy, and the Right calls you self-hating and worse. But acknoweldge support for Israel as an Idea and a Fact, and the Left calls you a sell-out and a collaborator.

Ingall celebrates the place in between, one that allows for nuance and acknowledges that Zionists understand the ”values of diversity and pluralism,”  and that Israeli counselors hold “perspectives on Palestinian statehood [that] vary from hard left to hard right, just like actual Israelis do.”

There’s been an intense debate over Allison Benedikt’s essay about falling out of love with Israel, to which Jeffrey Goldberg and Rabbi Andy Bachman, among others, have written strong rebuttals. But Goldberg posted something — a response to a defense of Benedikt by Andrew Sullivan (I know — confusing) – that resonated strongly with me, an American Jew devoted to Israel but eager for it to resolve the dire issues that will inevitably erode its standing as a Jewish and democratic state.

Here’s Goldberg, explaining his pique with Benedikt:

The outrage [at Benedikt] comes [from] the fact that many of us — I would dare say most American Jews — believe that you just don’t get to walk away. I believe — not just me, this is one of the messages of the Passover seder — that all Jews are responsible for each other. This means when you believe a Jew (or, say, a Jewish state) is going astray, you are duty-bound to intervene. Abandoning Israel, abandoning the Jewish people, is abandoning your own family. As Andy Bachman noted, it is a rabbinic dictum that, “all of Israel (read, ‘the Jewish people’) are responsible for one another.”

Nearly half of the world’s Jews live in Israel. They are the descendants of refugees from the pogroms; from the great Arab expulsions; and from the Shoah. They are our brothers and sisters. We may not like what they do. We may find them, as Allison Benedikt clearly does, aesthetically displeasing. But they are ours. We don’t abandon them. This is one of the reasons I admire groups like J Street the New Israel Fund. Their members could have made the decision to wash their hands of what they see as a terrible mess. But they haven’t. They understand their responsibilities as Jews, to Jews (and to the world, which is the great, difficult balancing act of being Jewish: Caring specifically for Jews, and caring specifically for the entire world, at the same time). I might not agree with many of the positions these groups take, but they are fighting for their vision of Judaism and Zionism.

Allison Benedikt, on the other hand, has given up. She revels in her alienation, which, as she freely admits, was provoked by her non-Jewish and quite hostile husband.

I would add this: Benedikt, like too many of Israel’s critics, treats it as an Idea, not a Country of 7 million. They’ve soured on the Idea, and now wish that it disappear, like a once fashionable diet plan or a teenage infatuation with Goth. Goldberg is arguing that we engage with the Fact of Israel, not the Theory. Not every facet of that fact is pretty or defensible, but we don’t have the luxury of wishing away that discomfort. If we care enough to be discomforted, then we should care enough to choose and to support those who are advocating the changes we would like to see — and acknowledge, as mature and thinking adults, the real-life challenges that make those changes so difficult to bring about.

Supporters of Israel are constantly told to “buy blue and white” — that is, help Israel by buying its products. Now the shoe is on the other gas pedal.

From the Detroit Free Press:

A Jerusalem think tank has proposed to the Israeli government that it gradually replace its fleet of 50,000 vehicles – currently comprised primarily of Japanese and European cars – with American ones, thereby demonstrating Israel’s solidarity and support for the U.S. economy.

The suggestion comes from the Jewish People Policy Institute.

As if Israel didn’t have enough problems:

“Lack of funding, membership and focus on Israel’s overpopulation issue will make Israel ecologically barren and socially untenable.”

– Prof. Alon Tal of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s (BGU), in a report on “Israel’s Environmental Movement: Trends, Needs and Potential,” presented to the Knesset.

There’s more than a hint of controversy here: Tal’s report says that Israel’s pursuit of “vigorous pro-natal and pro-immigration policy” — cornerstones of Zionism — is the “elephant in the room” when it comes to Israel’s environmental future.

This is the weirdest thing. That’s my son on the left. That’s a still from a McDonald’s commercial on the right. Uncanny, right?

Yahoo! News has a haunting photo essay on the abandoned Grossinger’s hotel (see more here).

Clearly, someone didn’t take my advice.

Today is the summer solstice — the annual holiday in which English majors admit their ignorance of the basics of astronomy. Here’s a primer, from Arthropolis.com:

SOLSTICE

SUMMER SOLSTICE: The first day of the Season of Summer. On this day (JUNE 21 in the northern hemisphere*) the Sun is farthest north and the length of time between Sunrise and Sunset is the longest of the year.

WINTER SOLSTICE: The first day of the Season of Winter. On this day (DECEMBER 22 in the northern hemisphere*) the Sun is farthest south and the length of time between Sunrise and Sunset is the shortest of the year.

*In the southern hemisphere, winter and summer solstices are exchanged. Summer: December 22. Winter: June 21.

EQUINOX

Two times of the year when night and day are about the same length. The Sun is crossing the Equator (an imaginary line around the middle of the Earth) and it is an equal distance from the North Pole and the South Pole.

SPRING EQUINOX: The first day of the Season of Spring – and the beginning of a long period of sunlight at the Pole. In the northern hemisphere: MARCH 20 (the Sun crosses the Equator moving northward). In the southern hemisphere: SEPTEMBER 22 (the Sun crosses the Equator moving southward).

AUTUMN EQUINOX: The first day of the Season of Autumn – and the beginning of a long period of darkness at the Pole. In the northern hemisphere: SEPTEMBER 22 (the Sun crosses the Equator moving southward). In the southern hemisphere: MARCH 20 (the Sun crosses the Equator moving northward).

Here’s a Jewish summer solstice ritual, as if we don’t  have enough rituals already.

The Washington Post’s Dana Millbank calls out Joe Lieberman for enteraining the idea of attending Glenn Beck’s rally in Israel:

Joe Lieberman, first Jew on a presidential ticket, was embracing Beck, the leading purveyor of anti-Semitic memes in the mass media. One of the most visible Jews in America was making common cause with a man who invoked apocalyptic Christian theology in promoting his rally in Israel.

I admire Lieberman, and I’ve defended him over the years when he defied party and faction. But if he shares a stage with this creature, he will surrender the decency that has defined his public life.

Millbank points out that Beck’s rap sheet includes:

hosting a guest on his show who describes as “accurate” the anti-Semitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; likening Reform rabbis to “radicalized Islam”; calling Holocaust survivor George Soros a “puppet master,” a bloodsucker and a Nazi collaborator; touting the work of a Nazi sympathizer who referred to Eisenhower as “Ike the Kike”; and claiming the Jews killed Jesus.“Obviously,” Lieberman said after I presented some of this to him, “that’s troubling stuff.”

From the Asian Tribune:

[Critics of shariah law] forget that American courts are governed by American law, which has long provided that parties to contracts can provide for alternative dispute resolution mechanisms (such as arbitration). As noted last year by Andrew Silow-Carroll, Editor-in-Chief of the New Jersey Jewish News, among those alternative mechanisms is the beit din, or rabbinic law court. Every day Jews go before batei din to arbitrate real estate deals, nasty divorces, and business disputes. “In fact, according to the Beth Din of America, Jewish law does not allow a Jew to be a plaintiff in a secular court without first obtaining permission from a Jewish court. Permitting people to settle their disputes in their own religious courts is not a ‘replacement’ of American law, but a time-honored expression of religious freedom and accommodation.”

The Asian Daily is apparently the work of K.T. Rajasingham, described by WikiPedia as “a minority Sri Lankan Tamil journalist.”

Anton Goodman points out the obvious logical and tactical fallacy in calling for a boycott of Scotch whiskey in response a Scottish regional council’s call for a boycott of Israel:

I am left feeling that there needs to be a well-thought out response to this troubling local decision in Scotland. However the decision of the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs to boycott the Whiskeys from the region is not that. If we have a criticism of blanket boycotts; then let’s not demonstrate that by starting our own boycott of an unrelated industry.