by joshua brandt
correspondent
To illustrate the often quixotic relationship between American and Israeli Jews, author Liel Leibovitz hit upon a seemingly incongruous analogy: the classic children’s tale of “The Prince and the Pauper.”
As Leibovitz explains it, he saw a movie version of the book when he was a 6-year-old living in Israel. The movie, he told the audience during a lecture at San Francisco’s Bureau of Jewish Education Jewish Community Library on Oct. 4, caused him to have an “existential” crisis. Why, he asked himself, should two children that were blood relatives have completely different fates?
That crisis became manifest when Leibovitz, the author of “Aliya — Three Generations of American-Jewish Immigration to Israel,” visited his American cousin in Margate, N.J. When Leibovitz saw him enjoying White Castle hamburgers, big-screen color televisions, and processed orange juice, he figured that his cousin was living the life of the prince, while Leibovitz was consigned to live out life as a “pauper” in Israel.
Then, the unfathomable happened. His cousin and his family made aliyah.
“Why would they move away from paradise?” Leibovitz asked himself. That question forms the crux of his book.
The first premise of the book is contained in the title: The book deals exclusively with American immigration to Israel. The reason, according to Leibovitz, is fairly straightforward — American Jews have little reason to immigrate. As a corollary, Leibovitz gave an example of French Jews suffering from anti-Semitism and poverty-stricken Ethiopian Jews. The author called this the “push-pull” factor. So what exactly was the factor “pulling” American Jews to Israel?
“Zionism” as a catchall answer is too facile, the author claimed.
The book relies on three different groups of people to exemplify what Leibovitz said has been a historical shift that also portends internecine conflict to come: the debate over the “state of Israel” versus the “land of Israel.”
Of the three main sets of characters discussed in the book, the first two fit the former category. Marlin and Betty Levin immigrated to Palestine in 1947. Marlin Levin was a World War II veteran who had seen European Jewry wiped out by the Holocaust, and was adamant about fighting for a Jewish homeland.
Similarly, Mike Ginsberg, who made aliyah in 1968, was thrown out of a window in the wake of Martin Luther King’s death because the civil rights leader’s death was blamed on the Jews. When Ginsberg approached a rabbi, the rabbi told him to “wait things out.” So the 13-year-old Connecticut boy ran away from home — all the way to Israel.
Both the Levin family and Ginsberg located their Zionism in a devotion to the state of Israel — that is to say, an overriding belief that there must be a homeland for the Jews, but that the desire for a homeland has to be tempered with political realities.
This was not the case for Danny and Sharon Kalker, who immigrated to the West Bank in 2001. For them, what was important was the land of Israel, a swath of desert that was promised to the Jewish people by God.
That seemingly intractable conflict has been simmering for a long time, Leibovitz said, and it shows no signs of abating any time soon. Further complicating matters, Leibovitz said, is when noted Israeli intellectuals (such as writer A.B. Yehoshua) claim that Jewish “identity” in the diaspora is an oxymoron.
Leibovitz told the audience that he occasionally felt like a “fraud” while writing the book, especially given that he’s now pursuing a journalism career in New York City. (Leibovitz currently writes for the Jewish Week.) This point was driven home when he was in Israel a while back, and a grimy soldier, caked in dirt, sweat and mud, called out to him several times in Hebrew.
Leibovitz continued walking until the soldier finally said, in a perfect New Jersey brogue, “Whatsa matter, dude, you don’t talk to your cousin anymore?”
“That was really like closing the circle for me,” Leibovitz said, “but I really shouldn’t have been surprised, because Israel is the biggest irony factory in the world.”
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California