‘It never even occurred to me that the Jews were a people.” I had just finished speaking on Shabbat morning at a traditional shul on Long Island. The talk had been about the nation-state and its roots in the Book of Genesis. Along the way, I’d made some comments about the changing nature of American Jewish life today, and the much-reduced role that peoplehood now plays in American Jews’ sense of self.

After services, someone told me that members of the liberal synagogue across the street had come to hear the talk. Ouch. I’d been rather direct about the dangers of liberal American Judaism’s diminishing the role of peoplehood in Jewish life, and worried that I might have offended the visitors.

But it turns out that they were more intrigued than anything else.

One woman said that the idea that the Jews were a people had never occurred to her. Another person remarked that peoplehood was an interesting idea, but warned that if Jews are a people, ” you’re going to cut 40% of my congregation out of the picture.”

Almost without our noticing, American Jewish life is being dramatically redefined. Especially among the young and the liberal, American Judaism is being recreated in the model of American Protestantism.

Christianity is not about peoplehood. “The Christian People” is a meaningless phrase. Judaism, like Protestantism, has become a faith system, a purely personal – and highly individual – means of constructing meaning in our world.

Judaism as a faith system, of course, is nothing new. But from time immemorial, we have also seen ourselves as a people. From the moment that Pharaoh refers to the Jews as “the people, the Children of Israel” (Exodus 1:9), it is clear even to our enemies that Abraham’s clan has morphed into a nation.

FOR MILLENNIA, rank-and-file Jews understood this. We cultivated bonds of mutual obligation, even when we profoundly disagreed, even when our faith wore thin. Kol Yisrael areivim zeh la-zeh, all Jews are responsible one for another, the tradition has long insisted.

And it actually worked. It was peoplehood that got American college students to wage a relentless battle to free Soviet Jews, with whom they had virtually nothing obvious in common.

It was due to peoplehood that IAF pilots flew converted cargo planes into an Ethiopian civil war in order to save people of a different race, a radically different faith system and virtually no shared history, bringing them to Israel in Operation Solomon.

And it is peoplehood that has continually led American Jews – despite their absolute disinterest in making aliya and their profound differences with Israel about conversion policy and the peace process – to support Israel both financially and politically.

This move away from peoplehood will continue as intermarriage becomes more common. Flourishing marriages, after all, are possible even when spouses disagree about important issues. And therefore, in the logic of young American Jews, there’s nothing terribly illogical about my choosing to spend my life with someone who’s not Jewish.

After all, on a host of issues, I have my opinions and she has hers. So, too, in religious life. I have my synagogue, she has her church. I have my holidays and she has hers. I believe my beliefs, and she has hers.

But peoplehood? If I’m a member of a people, then there’s actually a yawning chasm between us. And since she has no interest in becoming Jewish, it’s Judaism – and not she – that must change. Consciously or not, I sense that Judaism must be redefined – as a faith system, a personal odyssey, as “my Judaism,” to use a problematic phrase now popular among American Jews.

As anything but a people.

YET WITHOUT peoplehood at the core of American Jewish life, devotion to Israel becomes a choice, not an instinct, as it used to be. Young American Jews look with horror at the suffering of Palestinians, and decide that this conflict is simply not theirs.

One of the founders of Fast for Gaza (www.fastforgaza.net) wrote recently that “unlike previous generations, [today's young American Jews] don’t necessarily understand their Judaism in traditionally tribal terms anymore. Rather, they are increasingly viewing their Jewishness against a larger, more universal global reality. In short, to be a Jew and a global citizen is what gives them ‘goose bumps.’”

This writer himself admits – the new, personal, less “tribal” (i.e., less peoplehood-oriented) Judaism is more animated by global citizenship than by a sense of Jewish responsibility. (That’s why they fast for Gazans, and not for Israelis under Gaza rocket fire or for Gilad Schalit, I assume.) From afar, it would seem that there is little that Israel and Israelis can do to influence this seismic shift.

But the dangers to Israel’s security as a result of this change are obvious. Something must be done.

One idea for starters: Recent studies show that a quick trip on Birthright has lasting implications for Jewish identification, and dramatically lowers intermarriage rates, for example. It’s because in Israel, Jews encounter peoplehood, with all its problems, but also with its triumphs.

It’s time to take the Birthright concept and expand it. Two-thirds of Canadian Jews and 75 percent of Australian and French Jews have been to Israel, but about two-thirds of American Jews have never even visited. That has to change.

Even in this economy, there is more than enough American Jewish money to get the vast majority of American Jews to Israel, to witness first-hand the power of peoplehood and, perhaps, to transform the dangerous, emerging American Jewish sense that attachment to other Jews and their state is a relic of the past.

We know what’s at stake. Those people who never even imagined that Jews are a people are the men and women who in a generation will be running the federations, many of America’s synagogues and national organizations. They will be setting communal agendas and disbursing American Jews’ money. Either they will argue our case on Capitol Hill, or no one will.

We would be fools to imagine that we do not need those American Jews at our side. But we’d be equally foolish to believe that they’ll care one whit about us, unless we can restore peoplehood to the central value it used to be.

[Photo credit for "The Secret": Zion Ozeri, at www.zionozeri.com]

Neve Gordon Is Not the Problem

Intentionally or not, Neve Gordon, senior lecturer and head of the Political Science Department at Ben-Gurion University, has unleashed a firestorm in Israeli academe. His recent op-ed in The Los Angeles Times declared that Israel is an apartheid state, and that it ought to be boycotted to “save Israel from itself.”

Sensing a public relations debacle among their American supporters, the president and leadership of BGU distanced themselves from his comments and hinted that he ought to resign. Predictably, other Israeli academics leaped to Gordon’s defense. Most interesting, however, was the outrage Gordon’s column has evoked among many American Jews. Some are so beside themselves that they are now threatening to withhold their financial support from the university.

To be sure, Gordon’s argument is deeply flawed. He writes as if Israel sought or enjoys controlling the Palestinians, making no mention of the fact that it captured the West Bank in a defensive war that it did not seek, or that more than once (most recently with Ehud Olmert’s election in 2006) Israelis have chosen leaders whose campaigns called for relinquishing those territories. Add to that his failure to admit that the Palestinians still refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist and continue to call for its destruction, and one can appreciate the fury of Ben-Gurion University’s American supporters.

The fury these American Jews are suddenly expressing illustrates how little these very supporters know about the system of higher education in Israel to which they are so deeply committed. Is this really their first glimpse into the widespread and long-standing hostility of Israeli academe to Jewish statehood? Gordon has been espousing this viewpoint for years. He regularly writes for anti-Israel publications, holed up with Yasser Arafat during the siege of Ramallah, and has on more than one occasion likened Israel to Nazi Germany. But he’s always enjoyed the steadfast support of the university, to its very highest echelons. His views are widely held among his colleagues.

Nor is BGU unique here. Coming to Gordon’s defense, Tel Aviv University professor Shlomo Sand stated outright that Israeli universities are not Zionist institutions and should not be. They are about scholarship, he insisted, not about the Jews or their state.

There are non-Jews and non-Zionists at these universities, he claimed, and the universities must serve them no less than anyone else. And at Hebrew University, the crown jewel of Israeli academe, the long-term influence of the binationalists involved in the university’s founding has also been well documented.

Indeed, the only thing that is surprising about this latest turn of events is that American donors are surprised. For, to those who know even a bit about Israeli academe, the anti-Israel posture of many departments is really yesterday’s news.

The important question in all this is what American philanthropists who are committed to Zionism and to Israel’s higher education ought to do. Surely they can’t really believe that universities will suddenly silence their professors or terminate tenure. What, then, are the options?

These philanthropists ought to look close to home for their answers. For many of America’s great universities developed from an entirely different tradition. Woodrow Wilson, as president of Princeton, spoke unabashedly of “Princeton in the nation’s service.” Columbia College instituted its now-classic core curriculum as an explicit defense of Western civilization. Neither Princeton nor Columbia, like many other great American liberal arts colleges, saw any conflict between superb scholarship and inclusiveness on the one hand, and devotion to country and one’s own civilization on the other.

Is it at all surprising that these colleges have produced an abundance of America’s great leaders?

Israeli education needs more support from American Jews, not less. Rather than withholding their funds, a much more useful response would be to channel their support and their knowledge to create an Israeli version of the “college in the service of the nation.”

How?

Those American philanthropists currently wringing their hands probably have no idea that Israel has not a single liberal arts college to its name. Typical Israeli undergraduates get none of the curricular breadth that an American education usually requires, and as a result, they know almost nothing about Western civilization, the majesty of Jewish intellectual history or even the competing philosophic currents inside Zionism.

In today’s Israel, the People of the Book do not even read their own books. When they read or hear someone like Neve Gordon, nothing in their education has given them the tools to evaluate what he says, or to take him on. They are helpless.

TODAY’S NARROW model of education, in which students essentially study only one discipline, produces excellence, but excellence as technocrats. It does not produce the broadly read, intellectually nuanced people that the Jewish state so desperately needs.

Without dramatic change, Israeli universities will produce only more Neve Gordon’s – scholars of varying quality, who feel no love for the very country that has saved their people. If it learned from American education, Israel might actually begin to cultivate a new wave of leadership, and with it, a generation of Israelis who actually love their nation.

Dr. Gordon is correct – Israel needs to be saved from itself. What Israel needs now is a reconceived notion of the educated Israeli.

It needs a liberal arts college, and the young people prepared to speak constructively about Jewish sovereignty, its challenges, its failures and its future that only that kind of college can produce.

A century ago, who could have imagined that the Jewish state would one day have a world-class army but a failing, collapsing educational system? Whether or not American Jews have the foresight to use their philanthropy to promote genuine change in Israeli academe still remains to be seen. But if they do, Neve Gordon’s op-ed may ironically have goaded both Israel and the American Jewish community into taking the first steps needed to begin to save the Jewish state.

Aug. 22, 2009

It’s not even over, but we can already begin to imagine how we’ll remember the summer of 2009. Haredi residents of Mea She’arim unleashed violent demonstrations when Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat dared to open a parking lot on Shabbat to relieve unbearable congestion. A few weeks later, Jerusalem neighborhoods were once again filled with smoke from burning trash bins, and this time, municipal workers were attacked, because an apparently deliberately starved baby was removed from his haredi mother’s care.

The mayor responded by withholding city services from Mea She’arim, saying (correctly) that he had an obligation to protect the city’s workers. A director of Hadassah University Medical Center, where the baby was treated, was then threatened and had to be assigned bodyguards. The battle lines were drawn.

In Ramat Bet Shemesh, a small band of anti-Zionist, ultra-religious fanatics continued to terrorize other residents for outrageous behaviors like owning a television set. But though the campaign of terror was months old, the authorities still seemed disinclined to intervene. Elsewhere, when a massive gay-lesbian rally was planned in Tel Aviv to protest the murder of two youths in a support center, a 20-year-old soldier from a Nahal Haredi unit was arrested for sending a threatening e-mail, promising the gay community that the next attack would be even deadlier.

His remand was extended, but our memories were not.

THIS IS Israel, and a few days later, we’d all forgotten about him. Indeed, mostly forgotten about all these instances. “They’re a bit extreme,” we tell ourselves. We can muddle through this, too. After all, when you consider that we have Barack Obama, Iran, Gilad Schalit, the economy, swine flu and a few other matters on our plate, how much do burning trash bins really matter? They want to turn their own neighborhoods into a war zone – can we really be bothered?

I suggest that we allow ourselves to be bothered, deeply bothered.

A brief reminder of some American history. Israel, as we all know, is 61 years post-independence. The US was the same age in 1837. That year, Martin van Buren was inaugurated as the eighth president of the United States. Michigan became a state of the union. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales became a best-seller. Horace Mann introduced his educational reforms in Massachusetts, American Presbyterians split into the “new” and “old” schools and Samuel Morse exhibited his electric telegraph at the College of the City of New York.

The parallels to Israel are striking. A functioning political system was in place. The country did not yet have permanent borders. Educational reform was desperately needed. America was a deeply religious, and religiously fractious, country. There was cultural excellence and technological innovation.

Not bad for a country only 61 years old.

But in 1837, 61 years after American independence, Congress was also operating under the recently passed “Gag Law,” designed to stifle congressional debate on slavery. Those who favored the Gag Law hoped to conduct the business of state as usual, without undue attention to that nagging problem of enslavement. Yes, most people understood that there was a deep and dangerous fault line running through American society with radically different conceptions of the kind of society American ought to become, and no, no one knew how to resolve it. What the authors of the Gag Law believed, however, was that what mattered most was conducting business as usual and putting off the slavery debate. They did not want Congress discussing slavery (because many of them supported it), and they wanted to spend their time working on seemingly more pressing and immediate matters.

We Israelis, of course, have no need for a Gag Law. No legislation is required to get us to ignore the massive fault lines running just underneath the surface of our society. We have radically different conceptions of what the permanent borders of this country should be, but no national conversation on the subject. Nor is there meaningful public discourse about how to manage the cooling relations between Israel and its historically most trusted ally. And though everyone knows that we have at least two major populations who do not share a commitment to Israel being both Jewish and democratic, with the exception of a foolish and ill-fated demand for loyalty oaths, no one is terribly inclined to take the issue on.

LET US return to America in 1837. On the surface, despite the rumblings of slavery discussions, America was thriving. But in 1837, the US was only 24 years away from its Civil War. The fault lines would erupt, threatening the very survival of the country that had once hoped to ignore them. Somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000 soldiers would die in the war; brothers would fight on opposite sides, sometimes killing each other. The war would rip the country asunder, and were it not for a leader of the likes of Abraham Lincoln, the US as we know it might not have survived.

With Lincoln, America elected a leader with a vision for the country and with the courage to fight for that vision. He knew that the price might be horrific. It is clear from his writings that he did not relish the bloodletting that preserving the union would require. But he stood fast. There are times, he understood, that one must be willing to say to large blocks of one’s citizens that their vision of the country is not ours, and that we will fight them – economically at first, then using force if we have to – to ensure that the democracy we envision survives, no matter what.

But those were different days. Some people in America knew what kind of a country they wanted and debated the issue fiercely. America wasn’t exhausted by seven decades of war. And perhaps most distressing, there’s no Abraham Lincoln anywhere on our horizons.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu were thinking of Tevye these days. Tevye was, after all, a quasi-pathetic character simply trying to make sense of a world changing far more quickly than he might have ever imagined possible. Having granted his daughter, Hodel, permission to marry Perchik the pauper, he wonders, “What am I going to tell your mother?” He didn’t choose Perchik, and he doesn’t really approve. But he is powerless. And when his wife expresses her dismay, the best explanation he can offer is “It’s a new world, Golde.”

“It’s a new world, Golde” is not a claim that Perchik is the right man for Hodel. Or that he’ll ever make a real living. It’s simply a claim that the rules have changed. And in a world with new rules, people must learn to act and respond differently. Tevye never says that, of course. But he is simple, not stupid; and he intuitively understands that he is going to have to learn to navigate his world in an entirely different way.

Tevye is a not entirely inapt metaphor for Israel. We’re living in world operating according to rules that we’re just beginning to understand. Convinced of the legitimacy of at least much of our position, for years we ignored the warning signs that the world was turning on us, that it has grown tired of the conflict in the Middle East, and that it believes we are the reason the conflict will not subside.

The world didn’t change overnight. We simply weren’t watching.

NOW THERE is no more denying the new ground rules. Barack Obama is not really changing them. Perhaps he is shifting America’s position, perhaps not. But more than anything, he is simply articulating infinitely more clearly than anyone else has what it is that the world has come to believe. And we are going to have to learn to operate not in the world we wish existed, but in the world that does exist. And in this new world, Israel is going to be held to standards that are infinitely less tolerant than the standards to which the rest of the world is accountable.

Consider, after all, events of just the past few weeks. In the aftermath of the Iranian election, much of the world watched with admiration and hope as Iranians took to the streets to insist on their (supposed) democratic rights. When the Iranian government resorted to intimidation, silencing of the press, force and then murder, the world was horrified – but it was also quiet. Where were the mass rallies across Europe and on those North American campuses where students were still to be found calling for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to back down? Where were the heads of state clamoring to get in front of television cameras calling for a new election? To be sure, the world was unhappy, but this was hardly an outpouring of support or of condemnation.

Compare that to the world’s reaction to the Gaza operation half a year ago. To be sure, the circumstances were entirely different. Iran’s election is an internal matter, while the Gaza op was not. And other differences abound. But Israel was responding to eight years of shelling of its citizens in what is undisputedly its territory (unless one disputes the notion that any territory is legitimately ours – which, in fact, is exactly Hamas’ position); nonetheless, even before the urban warfare began, the world was unanimous and vocal that the operation had to end.

An almost deadening silence in one instance. And deafening outcries of excessive force in the other. Welcome to the new world.

OR SUPPOSE that some number of Israeli Arab women decided that they were going to wear the burka as a means of intensifying their personal religious odyssey. And that in response to their decision, Netanyahu said, “In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” or that “the burka is not a religious sign, it’s a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement – I want to say it solemnly, it will not be welcome on the territory of the State of Israel.” One can just imagine the world’s outcry, the accusations of religious oppression, comparisons with apartheid South Africa or, yes, Nazi Germany. But substitute “the Republic of France” for State of Israel, and you have precisely French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s words this week – again, to a relatively silent international community of listeners.

Or finally, recall Obama’s twisting in the wind as he came to realize that his outstretched hand to Iran was not going to be shaken as warmly as he’d allowed himself to imagine. Eventually, he gave in to enormous pressure to criticize the Iranian regime’s repressive measures. But his criticism was tepid – he couldn’t get over his fundamental sense that the world ought not meddle in Iran’s internal affairs. A few days later, however, the press reported that Sarkozy had told Netanyahu that it was time to dump Avigdor Lieberman and restore Tzipi Livni. Sarkozy’s advice, apparently, is considered moving peace forward. Obama’s suggesting that Iran recount the vote would be meddling.

THERE’S NO point railing against a double standard that no one is even inclined to deny. Right or wrong, for better or for worse, we need to adapt. Israel is going to have to learn to get ahead of the curve. Had Netanyahu’s speech at Bar-Ilan University, by most accounts a very good speech, preceded Obama’s Cairo address, Israel would have been throwing down the gauntlet, challenging the Palestinians to recognize the Jewish state and to live in peace beside it. But coming when they did, Netanyahu’s remarks were essentially seen as caving in to Obama – too little, too late. That’s what has to change.

In this new world, the spotlight will almost always be on Israel. Settlement building. Roadblocks. Lieberman. We’re going to have to learn to alter that. Make some accommodations, but demand – clearly and unequivocally – that the Palestinians do the same. Netanyahu, or whoever follows him, is going to have to learn to keep the ball, and the world’s attention, squarely in and on their court. Like it or not, Israel needs to take the initiative, time and time again – because nothing else will work.

“It’s a new world, Bibi,” Tevye would have said. We don’t have to like it. And it may not be fair, or just. But as we are wont to say, “zeh mah yesh” – it is what it is. As Tevye understood, we can either adapt, exerting at least some control over our fates, or we can wistfully long for days when other rules prevailed, even as we get swept away by currents we’ve barely begun to comprehend.

In Perspective: Obama is right, it’s time for honesty

Jun. 11, 2009
Daniel Gordis , THE JERUSALEM POST

In the days leading up to his landmark speech in Cairo, US President Barack Obama said it was time for “honesty” between the United States and Israel. Now he has spoken, and we should respond in kind. For Obama is right – it is time, at long last, for honesty.

Too many analyses of the speech have ignored the fact that it was addressed primarily to the Muslim world, and was delivered in Egypt. And in that setting, Obama insisted that the US-Israel relationship could not be upended. He mentioned the Holocaust, (implicitly) berated Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his Holocaust denial, quoted the Talmud and called on Hamas to recognize Israel and abandon violence.

Not bad.

To be sure, it was not the speech that many Israelis would have written. Obama’s articulated position on Iranian nuclear power is unacceptable, just as an absolute freeze on natural growth in “settlements,” even in places where settlements are essentially cities, is both unfair and thoroughly unrealistic. And linking Israel’s right to exist to the Holocaust is a significant intellectual and moral mistake.

We could go on, but to spend our time pointing to all our disagreements with Obama while avoiding his call for honesty would be a mistake. With stunning clarity, he has told the world where he stands. Now it is time for us to do the same. What are we committed to? What are our red lines? Do we even know?

Ironically, what Obama’s first shots across the bows of both Israel and the Palestinians have inadvertently highlighted for us is that we’re a country that does not know how to be honest, even with itself. For too long we have avoided the national conversation that would have been required for us to have a vision as clear as Obama’s. Now is the time to have that conversation, and then, as Obama has requested, to be honest about what we decide.

WHERE SHOULD we begin? As but one example, let’s begin with some of the questions that the West Bank raises: Are we ever willing to give up the West Bank? For a moment, let’s set aside the obvious security issue and the devastating consequences if Kassam rockets start flying from the West Bank as well. Let’s assume for a minute (a wild assumption, I admit) that the Palestinians decide that it really is time to move on, to abandon terror and accept a division of the land. Are we willing?

I believe that we don’t know anymore. Our unwillingness to state our position is not a reflection of dishonesty or of hiding. It’s simply a result of the fact that we have for so long seen no possibility of progress on the Palestinian front that we’ve stopped asking ourselves what we would do if we could.

So let’s be honest: What would we do?

Are we willing to leave the West Bank, land that is no less ancestrally Jewish and religiously significant than any other part of Israel? If we are committed to staying there permanently, for historical, theological or even security reasons, isn’t it time just to say that? Or to annex it and stop pretending we haven’t made that decision?

When some of us speak about not making any change until the Palestinians have built a genuinely democratic infrastructure (bottom-up, we call it), are we serious? Or do we simply assume that they’ll never accomplish that under present circumstances, so what we’re effectively doing is announcing, though not with the “honesty” that Obama is rightly calling for, that we plan to stay, no matter what?

IF WE PLAN to stay, which could well be defensible, let’s be honest about the endgame. What do we plan for the Palestinian population there? The status quo forever? Are we going to make them citizens, and thus further erode Israel’s fragile Jewish majority? Are we going to give them some sort of citizenship that involves full civic rights but not the right to vote on matters that determine the nature of the state? Is that the democracy we seek? Do we have any alternative? Or are we planning to move the Palestinians to some other location (a plan which didn’t work very well with India and Pakistan, but which worked flawlessly in Cyprus)?

But if, alternatively, we do plan to leave the West Bank, what would we do if it turned into Hamastan, as happened in Gaza? We had no contingency plan for Gaza, and the results have been devastating. Will we make the same mistake again? And if we could solve the security issue, will we force all the Jews on the West Bank to leave? Or will we insist on their right to continue living there, even if under Palestinian rule?

And if Jews do have to be moved, are we accepting the international community’s tacit premise that only Jews can be moved (out of Gaza, and later, out of the West Bank)? Why can’t Arabs be moved? As even Benny Morris has noted, the Peel Commission “recommended that the bulk of the 300,000 Arabs who lived in the territory earmarked for Jewish sovereignty should be transferred, voluntarily or under compulsion, to the Arab part of Palestine or out of the country altogether,” and suggested that 1,250 Jews living in those areas slated for Arab sovereignty be moved as well, in “an exchange of population.”

How has it come to be that what the British once advocated we are too timid to raise? If Jews had to leave Gaza and might eventually have to leave the West Bank, is the movement of (some?) Arabs from Israel so it can remain a Jewish state so obviously out of the question? Why?

THESE ARE the questions we never discuss, because each of our leaders inherits a coalition so fragile that even raising such questions threatens to topple the government. So what if we were to use this new “crisis” as an opportunity?

What if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu were to begin speaking with the Americans, and with any Palestinians who publicly recognize our right to exist, but at the same time forged a coalition of Labor, Kadima, Israel Beiteinu and Likud, all of which called for dramatic electoral reform? He’d have the votes needed to pass the reform (several plans are ready) and make Israel governable. He’d make it possible for Israelis to finally talk about the issues we never discuss in the public square. He’d end the cynical and self-destructive culture of “Yisrabluff,” and ultimately he’d make it possible for us to form a national consensus about which we could finally be honest – with the world, but more importantly, with ourselves.

Imagine that. If Netanyahu seized this opportunity, Barack Obama, despite everything we didn’t love about his Cairo address, might actually enable us to discuss our vision for the future of Israel.

And with that, Obama may have saved the Jewish state.

The writer is senior vice president of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. His most recent book is Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End. He blogs at www.danielgordis.org.

But the real news is that contrary to what many expected, or feared, President Obama assumed positions virtually identical to those of Israel’s political center — namely, that the Palestinians must renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist, while Israel must cease settlement building and permit a Palestinian state to arise. Now, Benjamin Netanyahu’s problem is that it’s difficult to distinguish between President Obama and Tzipi Livni. And in Israel’s recent elections, Livni and her Kadima party won more votes than anyone else.

But the major “problem” that the speech poses for Israel’s leaders is that Israelis are finally going to have to make painful decisions about our future. No longer will Israel’s fractious politics provide a curtain behind which to hide. Will we abide a Palestinian state, or are we committed to the present stalemate as a matter of principle? Are we committed to keeping the West Bank (for reasons of security, history or theology), or are we open to withdrawing if a genuine peace accord is possible? If all Jews will have to depart the West Bank, what about Arabs in Israel? For years, we’ve fudged on these painful questions; with President Obama, that may no longer be possible.

Once Israelis grow accustomed to the new tenor emanating from Washington, we may see today’s speech in a different light. Barack Obama may or may not bring peace to the Middle East, but he may well force clarity, and perhaps disciplined policy, on an Israeli society that has long desperately needed it.

It was an interesting, though hardly relaxed, Shabbat afternoon.  (The conversation took place in English ironically, since even though the Arab woman spoke a mellifluous Hebrew, our American Jewish leader friend didn’t. But the abandonment of Hebrew on the part of American Judaism is a subject for a different conversation.)

Though it’s been years since that lunch, I thought of it again this week, particularly one moment at the end of the afternoon.  Lunch was breaking up.  The Arab woman left, as did our American Jewish friend.  My brother was still around, as was our son’s friend, who, by the way, had been born in Israel and lived here his entire life.  We were all catching our breath from what had been a pretty intense conversation.

Then the friend said, “That was really interesting.”  I, frankly, hadn’t noticed that he was paying much attention to the discussion, and was surprised.  “What did you think was particularly interesting?” I asked him.  “Well,” he said, “I’ve never met an Arab before.”

That line stunned me more than the rest of the conversation.  He’d been in Israel for fifteen or sixteen years, and had never met an Arab?  Part of me couldn’t believe that.  But I knew that it was not only possible, but it’s common.  (Israel’s no different than America in this regard, by the way.  In Los Angeles, for example, how many Hispanics or Asians did I really meet socially?  Very, very few – and in my community, I was the norm, not the exception.)

Why did I recall that conversation this week?  Because I got a response from Dr. K.  A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for the Jerusalem Post that I subsequently distributed here, about a correspondence I had with a certain Dr. K about the Jerusalem home in which he’d grown up prior to the War of Independence.  (You can read the responses to that column here, too.)  Just as I was preparing to write Dr. K and to tell him about my column, I heard from him.  He’d come across the article on the web, it turns out, and wrote me.  I asked him for permission to post his response here, and he agreed.

I was struck, in reading the many responses to my column that were posted on my site that many of the people writing had probably not ever met anyone like Dr. K before.  Like my son’s friend at that Shabbat lunch long ago, they are passionate about much of what goes on here, but haven’t actually conversed at all with significant swaths of the “players” in his complex situation.

So (yes, with his express, written ­permission), I’m posting Dr. K’s response to my article, and his invitation to others to engage in conversation.  The issue, I believe, isn’t the disposition of his particular house (about which I’ve done no research, as my column was about the uses of memory and how we overcome loss and work for a better future).  The issues that ought to concern us are broader than that.  But feel free to engage him on whatever subject you’d like.  Any comment that’s respectful in tone will be permitted.  In this week prior to Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Reunification Day), what subject could be more pertinent?

As Dr. K asks below, is it possible that we might begin to know each other and to hear each other in ways that we haven’t so far?

I am the Dr. K that Dr. Gordis refers to in his post above. The responses to his column raise so many issues that I find myself unable to respond to all of them. I will be short.

My father had this house built in 1932, and I was born in Jerusalem in 1937. My family left Jerusalem because of the state of war that occurred in 1948. Regardless of why we left (it was not voluntary), why should we lose title to our home because of that war? The Israeli government did not allow us to return to it (nor to pay taxes on it!) after May 1948. To this day we have never been offered compensation nor any acknowledgement by any party for our loss.

My original purpose in communicating with Dr. Gordis was to try and connect with another human being who can help provide me a sense of connection with my home and land of birth. I am a realist and not stuck in living in the past. Yes, I was shocked at the changes that have occurred but who wouldn’t be?

I am interested in a dialogue and not in having people talking at me and telling me how I should be feeling or behaving. I hope we can talk about ourselves and not lecture others. Is this possible in this forum?

Interested in responding to Dr. K?  Post your comments here.