WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Is there a tool with which we can measure over time and maybe strengthen when needed (like now) the attitude of grassroots American Jews toward our people’s homeland of Israel? I think I found one. Come see.
Then and Now … Measuring (and Affecting) the Feeling of Us Grassroots American Jews Toward Our People’s Homeland of Israel
So how would YOU measure over time the attitude toward our people’s homeland of Israel of grassroots American Jews? Synagogue membership? Intermarriage? Belonging to Bnai Brith, Hadassah, Ort (not to say ZOA)? In those constant words heard on Fox News – None of the above! Over, say, fifty years, get yourself every couple of months to your Jewish neighborhood’s friendly public library’s used book sale. Peruse the floor-to-ceiling shelves containing “Judaica.” These “used” books there aren’t the library’s discards. They’re current donations by private owners, well, often heirs of private owners, of volumes no longer wanted. Do they, changing over time, tell us much about what these books’ former owners found worth reading, more revealingly, worth keeping, worth displaying on book shelves in their homes? I think so. Come see.
Six Day War Books
My first job in my fraternal order Brith Sholom lodge in the mid-1960’s was chair of its “Israel” committee: “Instill in the more indifferent of our members a greater sense of ‘Zionism,’ of support for our people’s homeland of Israel.” My budget for the lodge year: Fifty dollars. By chance, I hit that month’s library’s used book sale. What a supply of just-now Six Day War memoirs! What bargain prices! In giving my monthly reports, I just stood up and handed out to eager red-blooded middle-aged grassroots American Jews a steady stream of free exciting Six Day War books. I was a popular chairman.
Alas, two obstacles soon intervened. The first was that I used up my fifty dollars. No matter, urged on by the enthusiasm greeting my reports, I invested my own funds. At least, now I could keep for myself the best of my finds (commencing my building my, ok, “used” Israel history books personal library now, eons later, approaching a thousand). The latter obstacle proved more of a problem. All of a sudden one month, the books about Israel were each a dollar more than all of the other books. “Anti-Semitism!” I cried to the librarian. “Nonsense,” she answered. “It’s supply-and-demand. Some Nut is buying them all up.”
(If you want to read a Six Day War book today, I commend to you Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate. It’s not a full account of the war, but riveting first person accounts conveyed in his aim to get you “in the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmet.” He succeeds. But most crucial, in light of all of today’s Jewish support for the “Two-State Solution,” are the book’s first-person accounts of what that war’s liberation of Judea-Samaria and supremely historic Jerusalem (Old City, City of David and all) meant and means to Israelis.)
Zionist Classics
After the excitement of the Six Day War which we all experienced wore off, a different genre hit the library book sale’s Judaica shelves. Our parents’ generation was dying out. Their children, my generation, donated their parents’ old, handsomely bound, English translations of Zionist classics, frequently bearing a pen-and-ink “library of” signature of their former owner. I gobbled them up – Hess’ Rome and Jerusalem, Herzl’s Jewish State and Old-New Land, a number more. If you’re a Jew, a copy of Herzl’s Jewish State belongs on your bookshelf. Naïve, in a way, but it launched a thousand ships (all right, most of them British destroyers).
Works of Israel’s Founders
The next wave of “Judaica” books to hit the library’s used book sale shelves included the works of Israel’s founders. I picked up a first edition of Chaim Weizmann’s autobiography, Trial and Error, stuff by Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin’s The Revolt. These men were Israel’s Washingtons, Jeffersons, Franklins and Paines. Consigned to “used book sales”?
One month, my eyes fell on a slim volume on the “Almost Give Aways” table – the Sermons & Addresses of Rabbi Louis Wolsey of Reform Congregation Rodeph Shalom of Philadelphia. I’d been bar-mitzvahed and confirmed at RS, and many years later served a term as one of the men’s club’s vice presidents. I knew that Rabbi Wolsey had been a founder back in pre-Israel State days of the anti-Zionist American Council For Judaism, but it offended me that even such a rabbi’s life work should sell for ten cents. I forked up the dime. A long time later I opened the book. Featured therein was what I later learned had been a well-publicized address he’d made to the Rodeph Shalom Men’s Club, May 15, 1948, “Why I Withdrew From the American Council For Judaism.” He said that he was on that day neither a Zionist nor an anti-Zionist, but that all Jews should support newly independent Israel, which its homeland Jews were defending with great courage. It was a good investment I’d made.
I was in the second or third grade of a Philadelphia public school when Rabbi Wolsey gave that May 15, 1948, talk to his Men’s Club. Two years before, as my public education commenced, my father, Max, had bought me an encyclopedia set, “The World Book.” It was handsomely bound, so I have it still. In the 1970’s my son Max, doing his Sunday School homework, came up to me with a long face. “There’s something wrong with your World Book. The State of Israel’s not in your World Book.”
Books on the Struggle for Israel’s Rebirth
A disappointing book, alas typical of the lot, that I picked up at the library’s book sale just this year 2023 March month was of a fictional conversation between an Israeli and an American Jew, each expressing not entirely fictional dissatisfaction with the other. I’m most of the way through it, but I contrast it in my mind with a stirring book, Murray Greenfield’s The Jews’ Secret Fleet, about that supreme moment of joinder by American Jewish WW II vet volunteers in Palestinian Jews’ Aliyah Bet struggle to bring home to the homeland, against the will of the British, the Holocaust’s survivors and partisans. There were books in these sales about this for years.
Long ago, when my sons were young and attending Sunday School in the then “Suburban” annex of Rodeph Shalom, instead of schlepping back and forth twice over just a couple hours, I’d spend the morning alone with the librarian, reading an American-Jews-For-Israel book (that today, I guess, might be in the Restricted Section). One of them was Lova Aliav’s moving Voyage of the Ulua. Every Sunday, 11 AM like clockwork, the Congregation President walked by, greeting in passing the librarian and me “Good morning.” One Sunday, he paused before me: “May I ask you a question?” “Certainly.” “Just what is your job here?” I guess I was a little unique.
A Disappointing Picture Today
After a not-entirely-Covid-caused suspension of these decades-long library book sale visits, I returned this month to these hauntings. It wasn’t the same. I forced myself to spend a few bucks (which still goes a long way there), but, for instance, the one book that I found in the Judaica section on Palestine’s history expressly “focuses on the Arab majority of the population.” Nothing wrong with that as such, but not, of course, what I’d have as the sole offering to lay readers in book shelves of “Judaica.”
And I encountered only one Arab-Israeli wars’ offering, by a West Point-graduate career U.S. Army officer, professionally analyzing each period of the long struggle for Palestine, but obsessed with “Occupied Territory,” concluding that “the Arabs will not accept as an honorable peace anything that does not return to them (including the Palestinians) all of the territories occupied by the Israelis in 1967.” Better a Judaica section had an Arab-Israeli conflict book stating that Arabs in their 1948 invasion occupied parts of the land of Israel that Israel liberated in 1967, and that Palestinian Arabs are the majority in Jordan, sitting on 78% of the Palestine Mandate, and how’s that for partition of Palestine. But that’s what had been donated.
What’s At Stake
Ok, one Jewish neighborhood’s public library’s book sale offerings is hardly a sampling from which one can derive three-sigma or more confidence in grassroots American Jewish book donors’ current attitude toward our people’s homeland of Israel. But I subjectively suspect, in this instance at least, it reflects it.
And what’s going on is disquieting indeed. American Jews are involved today in an emotional confrontation in Israel that this week has even liberal American Alan Dershowitz gravely concerned. See Jewish Press, Thursday, March 16, 2023, “Dershowitz vs. Kontorovitch on Judicial Reform: A Surprising Agreement, Not a Debate”:
“Alan Dershowitz raised the most important point at the beginning of the discussion, the only reason there are protests in the streets is because the reforms were brought up by this government. If these reforms had been brought up by any other Israeli government (which discussed them in the past), no one would care. He said the protests against judicial reform is a surrogate for ‘we don’t like Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.’ He criticized American Jews for even getting involved.” [emphasis added]
Ok, collector that I am of almost a thousand (mostly “used”) books on Jewish homeland history, ancient and modern (and a few in between), I’m fixated in the belief that if more grassroots American Jews read more about what’s written in the most moving of these books, they’d be more fully supportive of our people’s right to our homeland – historic Jerusalem, Judea-Samaria, Judicial Reform, Bibi Netanyahu and all. Alevai.