This Week’s Guest: Yossi Shain

The reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel changed the Jewish people, giving them a place to live in their historic home, if they wanted it.

But what about the Jews who remained, and still remain, in the Diaspora: did Israel change their condition, and, if so, how? Yossi Shain, a professor of political science at Tel Aviv University and a member of Knesset, is the author of the new book The Israeli Century: How the Zionist Revolution Changed History and Reinvented Judaism. In conversation here with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver, he argues that Israel is now the most important point of reference in the consciousness of the Jewish people, no matter where they live.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript:

Jonathan Silver:

The establishment of sovereignty in Israel changed Jewish history, and it changed the Jewish people. Of course, it changed the material and civic—and for many, even spiritual—lives of the women and men who lived there, and it nourished the hopes of untold millions who longed to depart from their exiles and return to the land of their fathers, while Israel would also function as a safe haven for Jewish refugees exiled from the states they had been living in sometimes for years, sometimes for centuries.

For Jews the world over, whose vector pointed towards Zion and for the residents who lived there, sovereignty allowed them to take collective national responsibility, to act in history, to exercise moral judgment on a national scale. In the Politics, Aristotle says that a person who has no need of a city is a therion or a theos, either a beast or a god. And from the perspective of Israel’s Zionist architects, the Jews of the exile were less than fully realized human beings, lacking the ability to exercise that special capacity for politics that is unique to mankind.

Israel changed all of that. But what about the Jews who intended then and the Jews who still now intend to remain in the Diaspora? How does Israel change the condition of Diaspora Jewry? How do Israel’s dilemmas and vulnerabilities and triumphs affect the Jews of Paris or Melbourne or Buenos Aires or Chicago? Well, today’s guest argues that Israel is now the single most important reference point in the Jewish consciousness anywhere in the world. “We’ve entered,” he argues, “the Israeli century.”

Welcome to the Tikvah Podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Silver. My guest today is Yossi Shain, whom I first met many years ago as a professor at Georgetown University, where he spent roughly half the year, each year, before then returning to teach at Tel Aviv University. He’s one of the authoritative scholars on diaspora politics. Several years ago, he went emeritus at Georgetown, relocated to Israel full time and he was recently elected as a member of the 24th Knesset. Yossi Shain, welcome to The Tikvah Podcast.

Yossi Shain:

It’s a great honor to be here, Jonathan.

Jonathan Silver:

Congratulations on the book. The book makes a very bold political, cultural argument, but the method of argumentation is really grounded in history. So I was hoping you could just maybe explain to begin the main contention of the book and why it’s so essential that you bring the reader through so much Jewish history to make the point.

Yossi Shain:

Jonathan, we live in a very peculiar time in Jewish history. This is, I think, the first time in Jewish history that the majority of the Jews live in a sovereign state and this sovereign state basically defines, and will define, almost everything Jewish. The center of gravity has moved from a diasporic life to a sovereign life, almost in contrast to what’s happening to other nations to some extent. And this is such a dramatic development in so many ways. We see also, in terms of population, how Israel is growing and soon enough the vast majority will live in the sovereign state of Israel. But it’s not only a matter of population. It’s a matter, as you said, of culture. It’s a matter of defining the interest of the people. It’s a matter of how to transform religion, how to transform the thinking about history, about the vision into the future, about how we read, I would say, our ancient books. It’s a matter of everything that we do and how we basically recreate our abilities as a people, while enjoying the fruits of the Diaspora and them as sovereign people. These are such phenomenal developments that we are witnessing here in Israel in the last few decades. That stands in sharp contrast to what is happening in Jewish communities in the Diaspora, what we call outside the state of Israel. So this is one point I’m making.

The second point I’m making is that, to understand this dramatic development, one needs to understand Jewish history and what happened. I decided after many, many years of studying it—and as you know, I’ve written extensively on diaspora politics and the nation state—that I have to go back to history and see what happened in junctures when Jews had sovereign power, when Jews lived in the Land of Israel controlling their own fortune. What happened? And I saw that this is exactly what happened to them. That this type of living, when they control their own lives, when they have power, when they make decisions in a moral sense, for example, that are driven by the necessities of sovereignty and of powers and of boundaries, and the us-versus-them—like friend-and-foe identity issues—this changes their lives. This informs their lives.

I just came back today from Hebron. Just few hours ago, I visited Hebron, m’arat ha’makhpelah [the cave where, according to tradition, the forefathers and foremothers are buried], with the security and foreign-relations committee. And I constantly look at this land and I see what is happening. I’m not making it as a triumphant statement, but it’s certainly something which one thinks, historically speaking, is really incredible. And so what I was trying to do [in the book] is to explain to myself and to others what happened to the Jews in terms of sovereignty and the rupture of sovereignty. Now, given the fact that sovereignty has been so short in Jewish history, it is indeed important, incumbent on us, to see what happened during these short-term existences in politics, in their own control of politics, especially in light of the fact that Israel is also constantly asking the questions, “Is our existence temporary? Can we sustain the threats that are looming from the Iranians?”

From the beginning [of Israel], after the Holocaust and after what happened to the Jews, and regardless of the success of American Jewry, this was a unique moment and we were uncertain about it. Some are still uncertain about it. And I write about those diasporic sources saying, “It’s not going to hold.” But in my opinion—and it’s not just because I’m a Zionist and a great believer in the state of Israel, a division of Jewishness as a nation—first and foremost, zera ha-kodesh is something different than zera Yisrael. The seed of Israel versus the holy seed, [a concept] which transforms, as I write about, in Babylon. And I say to myself, we have to explain it to the readers, to take them through the journey. When people read today, younger and older do not really have the entire picture. So I became maybe too ambitious. I said, “I will explain Jewish history through this lens of sovereignty.” And I could not resist, and eventually started to dig into it. It took me five, six years to complete this venture, but I think it was worthwhile because when I started to discover that interesting comparisons can be made in terms of what happened in the Hasmonean period, in terms of what happened during the Agrippa period. We had glimpses of the return to Zion during [the times of] Ezra and Nehemiah, [when the Jewish polity] was not sovereign; it was, as I say, autonomous under the Persian rule. So I wanted to give the audience a picture of this nation from the point of view of nationalism and statehood and sovereignty and power. How they are somewhat intertwined with the issues of morality, of religiosity, of culture, of transnationalism, etc., which became so predominant in the times of modernity. And I think that’s what I was trying to do—maybe too ambitious, but I think, I believe, I have done a good job.

Jonathan Silver:

There are so many interesting threads to follow through with what you just said. Yossi, to begin with, you mentioned that this claim that the entire consciousness of diasporic Judaism is changed once sovereignty is reclaimed in the Land of Israel and the subsequent strengthening of the Jewish population in Israel, that what we see here is something that is unlike what happens in other diaspora communities. What is that?

Yossi Shain:

First of all, one has to understand there is no necessity here. I’m not saying it had to be. Early on, prior to the Six-Day War, the big question in Israel was, who would be the last to turn the lights off? Because of the fear of extinction. Because sovereignty didn’t only bring us prosperity and power and a huge place among the nations, as we have now, but it also brought us calamity. I talk about the Bar Kokhba revolt and the destruction of the Second Temple and so on. So the legacy of the Jews was that sovereignty in fact is a threatening mode. That’s why halakhic [ḥaredi] Jews tried to forget about sovereignty, forget about the Tanakh, and they wanted to put sovereignty away in terms of the ethos of the people, and to concentrate on the Talmud and studying the Torah, rather than holding to power, because they said power leads us to calamity, to destruction.

The state of Israel therefore was born with the legacy of what we call the cycle of exile and return and destruction, and I say that we now live in the end of history, in that there is no more option for Israel to be destroyed and for Jews to go into exile. This is because of the strength of Israel. If something happened to Israel, God forbid―and we’re not in 1967 or 1948―this will reverberate throughout the world. We are now almost 10 million people; this is a big country. We are the fastest growing nation among the OECD countries, and that’s aside from the growing GDP per capita, and the rich uncle from New York of the past becoming the rich uncle from Tel Aviv today.

But I’m not just painting a rosy picture. I’m painting also the challenges of this country in terms of religion and state, in terms of drawing the boundaries, in terms of the minorities. And I’m now a member of the Knesset and I see the shifts. Keep in mind, it’s quite remarkable that we in the coalition, from left to right, from [the current prime minister Naftali] Bennett to [the far-left party] Meretz, and with Mansour Abbas in the coalition, [representing] Arab Israelis, [who] recognizes that this is a Jewish state. And 54 percent of Arab Israelis are saying, “We are proud Israelis.” Now, it doesn’t mean they’re Zionist, but it means that they also understand the gravity of statehood and the power of it and what it can give them.

This is quite remarkable. Now this needs to be constantly nourished, and we have a terrible political system and rivalries, etc. So I’m also always cautious, but I’m saying that in comparison to Diaspora life, where ethnicity is so difficult to sustain unless you are religious, especially in the American scene, where communities are so difficult to sustain because Jews are part of what we call assimilation, it’s tough to maintain it. It’s a hard labor to keep your kids Jewish. In Israel, it’s not hard labor, it’s natural labor. Let alone the language which was revived.

I’m also making the point that Israel is the only country that produces Jewish culture in such an intensive fashion. There’s a whole chapter about the fact that American Jews do not write literature. They do write literature, but there is no more in the same sense Jewish literature, as you used to have in the 20th century with Saul Bellow and others. It’s not there anymore. You have distinguished artists and creators who are Jewish, but Jewish culture emanates from the state of Israel, and we have a tremendous number of successful authors and successful playwrights and musicians and filmmakers and many series, Fauda etc. In the Knesset I created this whole law for enhancing Israeli culture among other nations, like the British culture. And this is remarkable, what’s happening. I’m raising a huge amount of people who came from all walks of Israeli culture and arts and architecture, and you could see how powerful it becomes and how it reverberates, because this is a very intense place. This place really creates not only news, but it creates excitement because of difficulties also.

Jonathan Silver:

I want to just to say to readers, you’ll correct me, Yossi, if you think I’m mistaken, but I think it’s appropriate to signal to readers that this is not a triumphalist book. Of course, Yossi is a proud Israeli and now a public servant, though you were not a member of the Knesset for most of the years you were writing the book. So now this is the culmination of a career, based on long-standing beliefs maintained over many decades. But my point is, this is not a triumphalist book that is only about how wonderful and amazing and great Israel is. Now, Israel is wonderful and amazing and great, but that’s not the flavor of the book. The book is trying to make an empirical argument that whatever you think about various things in Israel, the fact is that they are now more central to global Jewish life than what’s happening in the Diaspora.

Yossi Shain:

When the book came out in Israel, it was a huge success. I’m glad to say it was a huge bestseller. It was titled The Israeli Century and the Israelization of Judaism. That’s the title. I was in France for two years, and I was in England. I wrote about it all over the Latin America, etc. I show how for Jewish life in the Diaspora, wherever Jews still flourish—and they do not flourish in many places, one has to understand, for a variety of reasons, whether it’s anti-Semitism or it’s the communities being depleted—the component of Israel—whether you like Israel or dislike Israel, it doesn’t matter—is essential for keeping the community intact or dealing with the community or the magazines. Israel generates the debates and the essence and the culture through which Jews are relating to the Judaism in many ways. This is a very interesting component.

Jonathan Silver:

The argument is that Israel is central to the constitution of the Jewish consciousness everywhere. Not necessarily that Israel is so wonderful, though both of us think that it is. Let me ask you, and this is what I was getting ready to say. For most of your career, you were a very distinguished political scientist. I want to press one of the dominant political-science concepts of the last many years, this idea of the end of history. The idea of the end of history was first advanced to great prominence by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, and it referred to a condition of global politics whereby liberalism, a system of government based on rights, was the final culminating form with the victory of the United States in the cold war. This was the form and the direction that history was going. His argument was never that automatically all regimes looked like that, but that there was no great argument that the most serious people would ascent to anything that looked otherwise. I think that that’s more questionable today than it was for many of the years when that idea had great prominence. But is it fair to say that you are advancing a version of that sort of argument in this book?

Yossi Shain:

I advanced a version of that, kind of in a Jewish sense. In 2004, I guess there was a book, a very important book that came out in America by Slezkine, called The Jewish Century.

Jonathan Silver:

Yuri Slezkine from [the University of California, Berkeley].

Yossi Shain:

Yes, The Jewish Century, in which he presents three alternatives for Jewish life in modernity. One was the Soviet Union alternative. The other was the American alternative. And the third was Israel. And for him, it was clear that the American alternative was the triumphant one, and that the Israeli alternative was an aberration of sorts. It’s too nationalistic, atavist, whatever the words are—it cannot be leading the Jewish people intellectually, in other words. I think the more you understand what happened in Israel, you see that Israel’s global riches, and Israel’s universal understanding and its transnational power is because of having sovereignty, not the other way around. The Israelis are incredibly transnational.

There are many people here in Israel who are very parochial, who are sitting and all day and are halakhic [ḥaredi] and don’t want to do anything with the world. But yet there are many others who are the engine of this society, the engine of its economy. Today I met with one of the leaders of Israel’s cyber community. He told me something, which is amazing, remarkable. In 2021, the cyber output in the world for Israel was 41 percent, more than for America. This is mind-boggling. And now it’s moving into AI and this translates to dollars and it translates to what we call unicorns—these are the mega, mega companies that are on NASDAQ and other places. And this translates to the way the army is working. When you see that all the youngsters in Israel, not all, but many, many youngsters are coming already to the army who have finished math at the highest level in university, and they’re only eighteen when they finish.

So we are going through certain transformation. There are huge gaps in Israel between rich and poor, between what we call center and periphery. We have a tremendous number of corrections to make. We are also confused in terms of morality, in terms of what we do with the Palestinians, in terms of our position between religion and state and so on. I am watching the debates in the Knesset, which are, I would say, poisonous sometimes, and nevertheless, I say, these are huge transformations, also of globalism. And the power of globalism is there. If you look at Bennett as our prime minister, what he exudes is this idea of a small kippah, of a man who already made an exit from business, and he knows transnationalism, and he all also has some American roots, but he was also a commander of the elite units in the army, and the minister of defense at a young age. These are very interesting components that somewhat testify to where we are.

So the model that I present about Israel into the future, and especially what I call the lack of alternative models that are now being created and developed in the Diaspora, lead me to the conclusion that the Israelization of Judaism is here to stay. Now, one has to remember that modernity created various models of Judaism, and I deal with all of these models; the German Jewish model, the Russian Jewish model, which we know what happened to it. By the time of the pogroms in the late 19th century and even after the pogroms in the late 19th century in Eastern Europe, Russian Jews comprised about the same number of Jews as in Israel now. This is quite remarkable.

Jonathan Silver:

If I understand, the argument then is that because of Israel’s growth and Israel’s dynamism, it has so lodged itself into the consciousness of Diaspora Jewry that it’s inescapable and you don’t see other models for dynamism and energy and growth and founding something genuinely new. Now, something genuinely new could be founded, but not without reference to that. Let me ask you this, because I think that there’s another argument, which I find so arresting, interesting, which is that there is a claim that even on an individual level, as well as a communal level, sovereignty is a way to think about oneself as a Jew, that through the lens of sovereignty one thinks about oneself Jewishly. Now, when you take a step back from that claim and look at the alternatives, one could think about oneself religiously, halakhically. One could think about oneself ethnically, one could think about oneself in a variety of ways, but in your view, the establishment and growth and success of Israel means that more Jews think of themselves through the lens of nationalism. So why is that?

Yossi Shain:

Because of the power of the state. Look at the ultra-Orthodox in Israel, they are part and parcel of the state, even though they don’t join the army. They’re sitting in the government and have ministers. They speak the Hebrew language, less and less the Yiddish language that they used to speak in order to avoid the state. They cannot avoid the state. They have to take positions. When you travel [to ḥaredi enclaves], to Modi’in Illit, to Betar Illit—I travel the land—you see they’re Israeli pure and simple. They’re becoming nationalistic, even though they’re halakhic. And you see also how the chief rabbis are coming here and how in France, everybody’s being instructed from the Consistoire from Jerusalem. And look what happened when I spoke to [Ephraim] Mirvis, the chief rabbi of Britain. And he tells me that all the rabbis in Britain who used to be trained in Britain are now trained in Jerusalem.

You cannot avoid [the state]. Religiosity is being dominated by the debate in Israeli religion. In America, of course, Reform Judaism is going through a tremendous crisis of its own. This is a huge issue I deal with in the book, and Jewish liberalism itself is wrestling with it. I have a long chapter in the end, the transformation of American Jewry, which created America in a way, as I make the point. All the way to Ruth Ginsburg, the last icon of American liberalism, of Judaism. That’s why when President Obama said we are all Jews, it means that all Americans are Jews. She represents Jews, but does she really in that respect? And who’s she being criticized by? She’s criticized by Jewish Currents, by the left, which said, “She no longer represents us. In many ways, we are looking for something new,” but what is this new [thing]? Can it avoid Israel? Can you ignore Israel? Can you create an American Jewish model without being religious or without having nationalism or without having ethnicity? How you keep ethnicity intact? What do you do? These are very big issues.

Jonathan Silver:

This is I think, a really good example, the reference that you just made to the magazine, Jewish Currents, some of whose work you analyze at the end of the book, especially. And this is really an effort to try to articulate a sort of authentic Jewish consciousness without any reference whatsoever to Israel. And that’s what it would look like. It would take on the characteristics of intensive Yiddish culture, leftist politics, and so on, but without reference to Israel.

Yossi Shain:

How many of these young people speak Yiddish? They want to be like Hermann Cohen, the Jewish liberal of Germany. But Hermann Cohen was religious. Even if they want to adopt clear trust, whatever. These are people who were rooted in Jewish traditions, and they were in Jewish communities, they were part and parcel of Jewish communities. And then they left. So you cannot really recreate it. Still, you have anti-Semitism, which is always a good motive to go into the community and to hold onto the community.

Jonathan Silver:

Yossi, I want to come back to anti-Semitism, and I also want to come back to your reference to the Ḥaaredim in a minute, because I think that that’s another very interesting case to see how it fits into the way you think about Israel and the Diaspora. Where I want to go next is a claim which is made by a former student and colleague and friend of ours, Neil Rogachevsky, who recently reviewed the book. And he makes the case that you are just explaining to us how Israel is playing a greater role in the religious life of global Jewry. You are saying as an example that the many important rabbis in the Diaspora are now trained in Jerusalem. Whereas in years past, they may have been trained in other places. Neil responds to you by saying, “I concede, but isn’t it also true that Israel is becoming more Jewish? That the Jewish quotient within Israel is also increasing into areas that is an advance upon or change in complexion from the socialist and secular ethos of earlier Israeli decades?”

Yossi Shain:

Undoubtedly, Israel is becoming more traditional, I write about it, and more Jewish among many sectors, but all these segments have to do with sovereignty. [The ultra-Orthodox are] joining the Israeli army, and creating even Naḥal ḥaredi, which is the ultra-Orthodox combat units. So they have to do with sovereignty. And indeed sovereignty is informing everything they do. We saw it during COVID, how the whole state is taking care of this business. They cannot ignore the state. There are also many studies which show that even though halakhic Jews object to the Supreme Court or to what they call the liberal tendencies, many, many more are going to study law, and they’re becoming lawyers. When they become lawyers, they practice the law of the land. Now will they lead us to adopt a new law, which will be a halakhic law, God forbid, something like that, a halakhic Jewish state, I don’t know. I don’t think so, I think they understand the importance of a modern state, the modern state with the rule of law with, and they constantly look at how now when we have a scandal of people are penetrating our phones, how they constantly come for human rights. So there is a debate there.

Judaism is there mostly in terms of tradition because also of Mizraḥi Jews. While Ashkenazi Jews run between secularism and halakhic [ḥaredi] Jews, this is like a continuum. For Mizrahi Jews we discovered there is nothing like that, [separating the] secular and religiosity. There are rather levels of religiosity. They’re all traditional. And this is what Israel is fast becoming as others have shown. They’re all traditional, they keep traditions, holidays, and it’s enmeshed with the nationalist ethos of the state. Now for haredi Jews who are so afraid of becoming part of the modern life of Israel, sometimes they are holding onto the so-called ghetto life, but sometimes you can see how the youngsters cannot escape it. I travel the land so many times and you see how they’re becoming more and more Israeli in terms of the language and the customs and what they’re asking from the state.

Jonathan Silver:

There’s a refinement of the story on both sides here. There is a hope, I think on the part of secular Israelis—I’m going to exaggerate this just a little so that I can make a point—that if we were able to get Haredim into military service, the military would serve the purpose that it has served for many Israelis, which is to make them Israeli, to homogenize them in some sense, to acculturate them to the ways of life, the civic traditions of Israel, that it would take Haredim in and put Israelis out.

But what we see is something not exactly that because as Ḥaredim come in, you just referenced them a moment ago, Ḥaredim belong to their own units, which do not often have female commanders and have a different kind of kashrut certification and so on. And if you take the symbolism of that, it would suggest that it’s not that Haredim are becoming Israelized, but that Israel is becoming more Jewish or the Jewish complexion is deepening.

Yossi Shain:

You’re familiar with Israel. We always talk about a tale of two cities, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, etc. We don’t know what’ll happen. On the one hand, we see that the number of kids, and I’m sitting on the education committee in the Knesset and deal with these questions all the time, of the kids now entering elementary schools, 30 percent will be ḥaredi. The ḥaredi population is already 16 percent of the state and the fastest growing community by far, just to give your audience an understanding of it. A seventy-four-year-old ḥaredi man will have on average 48 offspring, a secular or what you call traditional person will have maybe ten, eleven, if he’s lucky or she’s lucky. And yet the big question is where it will all lead us.

We talk about power; on the one handthe numbers of rich Israelis are growing in terms of the people who make money in this country because of the high-tech sector, but the Ḥaredim are not coming in. They understand. Ḥaredi women are coming into the workforce more and more. And we see they’re working, already 70 percent of ḥaredi women are supporting ḥaredi men. Many ask how long it’ll last, that ḥaredi women will sponsor ḥaredi men who sit and study without working? These kinds of, let’s say contradictions perhaps, I don’t know what you want to call them, but unique circumstances, we’ll have to do something. And we see there is a lot of breakdown of communities, breakdown of morality and so on. Or the cell phone that we hold—very big issues. How much they will be able to retain in terms of leadership in the haredi community? Who speaks on behalf of the Ḥaredim? You see the ruptures that they’re causing. Will they also have autonomous cities that will be removed from Israel, let’s say, as they do now in various places, and they’re completely disconnected?

These chapters are yet to be written, and as will the impact on the political arena. So these are now developments that we are witnessing with new generations coming to full understanding, empowered, and indeed that’s what makes Israel such a laboratory of shifts on all Jewish levels. Everything Jewish is happening here. It doesn’t mean the good or ill in the sense, but this is what is really happening. All the questions are being raised here. The boundaries of Judaism, the morality of Judaism, halakhah versus modern life, questions of the place of women. Israel on the one hand have a halakhic community which is growing, and yet Israel is so I would say liberal in terms of gay communities and gay couples, adopting kids and surrogate motherhood, it’s remarkable what’s happening here. So many contradictions are existing at the same time, including members of the right-wing who are representing overlapping identities of this nature, traditional, and yet gay traditional. This could not be part of religiosity in the old days.

Jonathan Silver:

The point of all this is that all of the dynamism that you’re describing, all of the inner tensions and arguments, most nations experience this kind of working out of different sub-communities that have to live together. And Israel’s experiencing that too. But the claim here is that whatever point of view one takes about any of these debates, the debates that are settled in the Land of Israel will now have decisive ramifications for communities outside of Israel.

Yossi Shain:

Yes. And for Judaism itself, they will define the boundaries of Judaism. They define the boundaries of Jewish history. They define the boundaries of Jewish memory. Think about Israel negotiating with Poland on memory. No one has the voice to negotiate with Poland over memory. No one, only the leadership of Israel. Who speaks on behalf of the Jews and with what authority? I’m asking this question in the book.

Jonathan Silver:

And now I come back to the subject you raised earlier, the subject of anti-Semitism. In the United States, in the Diaspora, in Western Europe and Eastern Europe, different places have different faces of anti-Semitism that challenge the Jewish communities there. And the question is what role Israel now has. If we are to accept your argument, that in terms of the lodestar of Jewish identity is centered in Israel, gravitational force pulls us to the land of Israel, the state of Israel. What responsibility do you think Israel has for the physical protection of Jews in these other places?

Yossi Shain:

Let me tell you, there are several layers here. On the one hand Zionism was built on the notion that anti-Semitism is the proof that sovereignty is necessary. And of course the Holocaust was the culmination of anti-Semitism. Herzl dealt with the question of anti-Semitism in his vision of Jewish statehood, as you very well know. And eventually of course, people made the point that you will have to come [to the Land of Israel] because of anti-Semitism, whether it’s Soviet anti-Semitism or whether it’s Latin American anti-Semitism or whether it’s Arab anti-Semitism in its own kinds of variations. American Jewry always kind of had the idea that, “We are the successful ones. We don’t have anti-Semitism. We have freedom in a sense, we have ethnic life. We are empowered in the state. This why this is the goldene medine.”

And indeed even the Zionist architects, including some great thinkers, including [Ḥaim] Arlosoroff. I write about him traveling in America in the 20s, and we have Ben-Gurion, and even Aḥad Ha’am of course in a different fashion thought here, America is a huge alternative to nationalism because the Jews could achieve everything there. They could retain their identity, they could be powerful, they could retain their religiosity, everything. And they could also avoid anti-Semitism because America doesn’t have the problem of anti-Semitism. And lo and behold, as I quote [Peter] Beinart, when he wakes up and he sees anti-Semitism he said, “I never thought it will happen here.” So this shows you the paradox that indeed anti-Semitism is perceived by many Jews as a threat. And indeed some in America have sustained huge blows in the last few years.

Now, what should we do? Israel for many years, looked at it as not Israel’s business. There were many other organizations that dealt with anti-Semitism, the American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, they all dealt with anti-Semitism. Every conference was on anti-Semitism, the Anti-Defamation League and so on. In fact, they dealt with anti-Semitism emanating from anti-Zionism. That, as I showed, now anti-Zionism is becoming not so relevant. How many companies are anti-Zionist when we have peace with all the Arabs? I was just sitting with the head of the parliament in Abu Dhabi who tells me, “Yossi you know what’s our big problem?” That’s what he said. “That we don’t know how to tell the narrative of our peace in Abu Dhabi because people think it’s not deep enough, but it’s huge.” So this is mind boggling to speak like that in our region. There are still forces who do not like us, who hate us, whatever it is. But the biggest issue is what we do about Diaspora Jewry.

Legally speaking, Israel sees itself, in the penal code, Number 13, as responsible for the wellbeing of Jews, wherever they are, if they’re being discriminated or attacked because they’re Jewish. Of course this is an extra-judicial responsibility, which we do not use, but we do use it a little bit because even the Mossad was helping defend Jews in Europe in France in other places from attacks. So we have a responsibility. We decided also to put more money into it. We are seeing ourselves as responsible much more than before, because before we were asking for assistance from the Diaspora, but we are in a different phase in our life. Israel has to take care of the Diaspora rather than the Diaspora taking care of Israel.

Jonathan Silver:

You have this metaphor that you use, the transition from the rich uncle in New York to the rich uncle in Tel Aviv, that there was a time when Israelis were the grateful recipients of American generosity. That’s the rich uncle in New York paradigm. But now there’s a rich uncle in Tel Aviv paradigm.

Yossi Shain:

There is, and many Israelis have to get used to it also. They have to develop a certain empathy toward American Jews and others. Many of them do not, many of them look at them and say, “They can come here.” And indeed, many have moved to Israel. One of the things that I point out is that indeed we have now more immigrants than Israelis who are moving away. Even when they move away to Palo Alto and elsewhere, they remain transnational Israelis and develop Israeli diasporic organizations, like the Israelis in America who are hosting annual conferences such as the IAC. But this is a small group of people. Certainly, Israel has to take care of these communities. We do certain things. I don’t think we do enough. And I think we don’t because many people, especially on the right in Israel, have made the point that these liberal Jews have no future, and in any case they’re kind of hostile to us and they’re also assimilating. Why should we take care of them?

There is a huge debate among religious-Zionists about it, when the editor of the Makor Rishon, a religious-Zionist newspaper, wrote about it, and said that we have to let them go away. Rabbi Druckman, a major leader of the religious-Zionists said, “Do you want our brothers and sisters to drown when you see them already in the water?” And this was kind of a metaphor for where you [Americans] are, of our kinship-responsibility, of the whole idea of kol Yisrael arevim zeh l’zeh, [the talmudic dictum that all Jews are responsible for one another], the mutual responsibility that we have. And I write a lot about it. What does it mean, kinship-responsibility today?

I’ll give you another example. During COVID, Israel closed its borders because of the disease. Only Israelis could come back. Israelis means Arabs and Jews. But many Jews who were not Israelis could not come to Israel and they were locked out, and many of them were so upset because Israel also has a law of return, which allows every Jew to become citizen. But if someone wasn’t [a citizen], he or she was not allowed to come to Israel during COVID, when Israel was providing much better care, or they were suffering in France or England. I spoke to many of them, they said, “How did you abandon us?” And I said, “We acted as a sovereign state, we had to close our borders and we had to give priority to our citizens” and they said, “But to give priority to Arabs over Jew?” Yes, that’s what happened because 20 percent of the doctors in Israeli hospitals are also Arab doctors. So that fueled lots of tensions that exist already, but I hope we will continue to be responsible and help Diaspora Jewry on issues of anti-Semitism that we are always so concerned about also, that I am concerned about.

Jonathan Silver:

The point of this argument, in Makor Rishon, shows that there is a psychic shift in global Jewry from a playing field where there’s a diversity of centers, a multipolar universe to a unipolar universe, to Israel being the center. And therefore the questions and dilemmas outside of Israel’s borders are somehow felt on the shoulders of Israel itself. Let me ask you finally, if we’re now in Israeli century where the center of Jewish consciousness is there and not in the Diaspora, as it in part had been, most of the Diaspora is in the United States, so what do you want American Jews in particular to think upon reading the book? It’s not exactly an argument for aliyah. It’s wrong to read the book like that.

Yossi Shain:

I agree with you. It’s not an argument for aliyah. It’s an argument of saying, “Look, you are now witnessing a lot of challenges, American Jewry, in terms of retaining your Jewishness, in terms of retaining your Jewish family with your offspring, unless you are religious or Orthodox and so on.” And in the face of modernity, in the face of dislocation and so on, Israel can be an instrument through which you can increase your ethnic-religious identity. For example: by speaking Hebrew, by being connected to the Hebrew language, by being connected to Israeli culture, which many Jewish Americans became after the 1967 War. You can send your kids here, not as a way of just sending them away so that they will live there, that’s what Birthright Israel has done. So by keeping certain tenants of Israel, as a way of generating and sustaining your own American identity, and also creating the kinship ties and balancing the kinship ties, this is what needs to be done.

I think many are doing it. Many are moving away, but many are also debating it on a religious level, on an ideological level. But I do not give any advice to American Jews. I don’t want to sound, God forbid, patronizing. I lived in America. I raised kids in America. But I understand also the difficulties of keeping it [Jewishness] in America. And I have many Israeli friends and family who are in America, and they understand also what will happen when the kids grow up, how they will grow up. They constantly ask me this question. So I say there are no other sources from which you could draw. While before you lived in Jewish neighborhoods, can you keep now Jewish neighborhoods in America? So at least keep these ties, the transnational ties. And there’s so much to draw from, the well is really very rich with Israeli culture, with Israeli books, with the language and universities, and so much you can draw on, religiosity, summer camp, whatever it is, so keep the ties with Israel and that will help you to keep your own identity abroad.

I think French Jewry has done it for the last few decades. You see a totally Israelization of French Jewry. British Jewry, of course, every single young Jewish boy or girl, when they’re in high school they come to Israel, that’s it. They come to Israel. I’m not talking about Latin American Jews, Argentinian Jews, of course. And these are the biggest communities. Of course, Ukrainian Jews, Russian Jews already moved to Israel, American Jews and some Canadian Jews. These are of course the big centers of Jewry that are now side by side with Israel. And I think they should draw on Israel.

Jonathan Silver:

What do you make of the criticism that sometimes is made that there is a sort of idolatry made of Israel as a replacement for deep Jewish faith and halakhic engagement and traditional Jewish study and so on.

Yossi Shain:

I don’t know if it’s idolatry, think about the Jewish people. They were first a people before there were a holy seed, as [Rabbi Aharon] Lichtenstein said. If I was today in Hebron, Abraham and Sarah and Jacob and Leah, they were Jewish by ethnicity, before religion was part of the Jewish tribal life. I don’t think it’s idolatry. I think it’s the understanding that the component of nationalism has come to play a major role once again in Jewish life, and we’re coming full circle.

Nationalism is not idolatry. Nationalism is something which holds people together. It creates patriotism. It can create a sense of kinship. It creates responsibility. It creates a new sense of history, a vision for the future. One should not look down on it because universal values do not create it, they create maybe something else, but they do not create it. I have a huge chapter about Jewish morality, as you know. And I talk about Jewish morality, and I said Jewish morality, the way American Jews have envisioned it, is morality without power. When Israel deals with morality, they deal with morality with power. What do you do with 2000 Gazans who are trying to cross the borders or 2000 Syrians will cross the borders, what do you do? Will you shoot, will you not shoot? This is day-to-day life for Israelis, who are making moral decisions of life and death situations, while for American Jews, with all due respect, they are not taking life and death decisions. There are universal moral questions, but the decisions of morality, the hardest decisions on morality are being taken in the sovereign state.