I'm Jewish, older than Israel and more confused than ever

 

https://www.nj.com/opinion/2021/05/im-jewish-older-than-israel-and-more-confused-than-ever-opinion.html

Newark Star Ledger

Opinion

May 24, 2021

I'm Jewish, older than Israel and more confused than ever | Opinion

Star-Ledger Guest Columnist

By Charles E. Kraus

I am two years older than Israel. Have never been there, but evidently, as a Sunday School student, purchased tiny stamps containing pictures of leaves and pasted them onto olive tree illustrations. My nickels and dimes were sent to the new State of Israel, where they helped fund the planting of actual trees. Thus, we, American Jewish children of the 1950s, assisted in providing shade and bounty in what we were informed would otherwise remain barren desert. I pictured the Sahara.

It took me many years to realize that being Jewish didn’t automatically require me to support the Israeli government. Initially, doing so felt like a given. Then, the given became a burden. I’m wondering if gentiles can truly understand this tension.

From time to time during the early 1950s, my mother and I traveled from New York City to Baltimore where we’d stay in Aunt Fanny’s gigantic American Craftsman house. The porch wrapped around the place. The yard was bigger than a park. For a kid raised in a cramped Bronx dwelling, this was an expansive, two-story palace. The best part was Fanny’s basement. It was a wonderland filled with every prop and costume a child could need if he wished to spend the afternoon pretending endless scenarios. I experimented with canes and hats and dinner jackets. With tools and gadgets. Dozens of each stacked and piled so high the cargo overflowed onto the staircase.

Fanny was not holding a garage sale. The inventory was destined for Israel where it would help refugees begin new lives.

My formative years were nominatively integrated. New York’s public thoroughfares offered a rather nonchalant mixing of all the ethnic, religious, philosophical, economic and aesthetic approaches. But away from the Commons, people tended to live with and among their own. Little Italy, Chinatown, Germantown, Harlem, the Lower Eastside, Greenwich Village, the Park Avenue elites, the Bowery.

Because the city was home to the largest Jewish population in the world, it was somewhat chauvinistically said that everyone who lived there was a little bit Jewish. Meaning somewhat influenced by Jewish sensibilities. Secular sensibilities.

Secular was the key to my upbringing. Formalized religion was not used as a prescription for life’s challenges. Not in my family. Our rituals were — liberal attitudes, an approach to life that prided itself in sobriety, industry, education, knowledge, language, science, the arts — these tinged with a dash of humor and a strong sense of irony, all fueled by Jewish cooking and a certain pride in Israel.

Later, long after the Suez Crisis, after our elder’s silence was broken and we children were informed about the camps, after the book and movie, Exodus, and the sense of pride my Jewish generation took in the outcome of the six-day war, my allegiance to Israel was tested.

There had been indifference to Jews fleeing the Nazis. There had been a holocaust. The formation of a homeland where the diaspora could collectively grieve then focus on building a brighter future. This was not a utopian fantasy. Israel was a practical but problematic response to traumatic events.

After World War Two, maps were redrawn in Africa, Europe, the Far East and the Middle East.

The 1947 partitioning of Palestine was not some isolated event, but rather part of a reconfiguring of power and peoples designed to stabilize the world. That said, most of these ‘adjustments’ involved repositioning lines on maps, not uprooting populations. The Palestinian situation was dramatically different. The act of seizing land and relocating people was an outrage.

Over the years, I’ve come to feel sympathy for both Jews and Palestinians. Israel could have, should have, done much more to help its non-Jewish citizens thrive, and its neighbors respect both its might and compassion; if not out of altruism, then at least out of self-interest.

Houses were demolished. Settlements grew, encroaching on more and more disputed land. Netanyahu remains, his approach to leadership encouraging the hard and hardened right. Here in America, it has become more and more difficult for me to defend Israel. Or even to explain it.

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Charles E. Kraus is the author of four books, including “You’ll Never Work Again In Teaneck, NJ” and ”Baffled and Baffled Again.”