Mira Sucharov – Page 3

Democracy and choice

The sublime thing about liberal democracies is that they are based on the rights and responsibilities of individuals rather than groups. Unlike the kind of sectarian societies imploding in civil war in the Middle East, in a liberal democracy, it is the individual who chooses to go to the ballot box (or abdicate) or to attend a protest (or go to the movies), and it is the individual who must abide by the law or face punishment.

In robust multicultural societies like Canada’s, individuals are given another opportunity – to identify as an ethnic, religious or cultural group. While these groups are considered a boon to the fabric of society, all rights and responsibilities remain solely with the person. Which is why calls for Muslims in Canada and the United States to publicly denounce acts of terrorism committed by the Islamic State (ISIS) and others inspired by them, is understandable – but ultimately wrong.

Here’s where it’s understandable. Terrorism – defined as the targeting of civilians for political ends – is morally distasteful. When committed by a fellow citizen, the action is especially corrosive, leading to distrust and paranoia. When an act of terrorism is committed by a person or group claiming to act on behalf of a particular religion, it’s tempting to want everyone else from that religion to denounce the action.

Here’s where it’s wrong. As a Jew, I regularly urge my fellow Jews to stand up for injustice as Jews, to stand up against an array of Israeli policies that I find objectionable. I encouraged my Jewish community centre (when I was a board member) to undertake staff training around LGBTQ awareness, thus enabling it to declare itself an “LGBTQ safe zone,” as facilitated by the Jewish LGBTQ organization Keshet. As a Jew, and as a Jewish columnist in the Jewish press, I stand up for religious freedom in Israel, for human rights, for an end to the occupation and for racial and ethnic equality.

But let’s recall an incident last summer with Jewish pop singer Matisyahu. Organizers attempted to ban Matisyahu from performing at a music festival in Spain unless he denounced the Israeli occupation. Matisyahu is an American, not an Israeli. His only association with the Jewish state is that he himself is Jewish.

It was a distasteful act of political theatre on the part of the organizers precisely because they drew a faulty line of logic: Israeli occupation is morally objectionable to them, so all Jews (or at least famous ones) must take a public stand because they are Jews. (After a public outcry, the festival organizers backtracked.)

In a liberal democracy, whatever collective identities we hold – sexual, religious, ethnic and so on – are the domain of the private sphere unless we choose, as individuals, to act otherwise. So, while I hope my fellow Jews will take a stand against an array of social ills, and am aware that some don’t, I would be disgusted and disturbed if, say, a work colleague or a politician or a journalist in a local or national daily were to demand that I, because I happen to be Jewish, denounce one thing or another.

The upshot? Community conversations about dynamics relating to that community are crucial to have. But they are just that: community conversations. We must leave members of synagogues, mosques, churches, JCCs and other organizations to debate among themselves whether and how to publicly denounce actions committed in their name. The pages of the community newspaper may indeed be one useful forum among many for these tough conversations.

And perhaps the Jewish community, being more integrated, prosperous and secure than the Muslim community in North America, may even serve as a model. But demanding that sort of stand taking by others in a civic forum violates the delicate multicultural balance that is intrinsic to a liberal democracy, where the individual is the only meaningful object and subject of political action.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She is a columnist for Canadian Jewish News and contributes to Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward, among other publications. This article was originally published in the CJN.

An evolving experience

Madrichim at Camp Miriam palling around in summer 1990. The author is in front. (photo from Mira Sucharov)

On a little corner of Gabriola Island lies an enclave of old-style Jewish utopianism. Modeled after a kibbutz, campers (chanichim) and counselors (madrichim) talk about heady topics like radical justice, equal worth, unionization, socialism and Labor Zionism.

They learn Hebrew, engage in physical labor and debate topics like whether O Canada adequately addresses the reality of First Nations, the fate of the Palestinians, and how to make a radically inclusive society within Israel. It’s Camp Miriam, part of the network of Habonim-Dror camps across North America. Among the founders of the camp was my grandmother, Marian Margolis, and I spent one memorable summer there as a counselor in 1990.

A lot has changed in Israel – and especially across the kibbutz movement – over the decades. I spoke to the current rosh (director), 22-year-old Leor Laniado, a student at the University of British Columbia majoring in environmental and sustainable geography.

The camp instils in its campers the value of “shivyon erech ha’adam,” a principle that every human being is of equal worth. It’s heady stuff for 10-year-olds who don’t measure themselves in terms of professional status anyway, but the idea is there. Alongside the usual fare of swimming, sports and crafts, campers choose a daily work branch where each task is valued. Fittingly, bathroom-cleaning detail has become one of the most popular options, Laniado tells me.

Campers also have a long tradition of running a kupah (common fund). An initial donation of pocket money is placed into a pot where campers decide how to spend it. Maybe the kids want to pool the funds for a party, maybe a portion will be donated to charity, maybe one camper needs a new toothbrush and applies to the treasurer – who is, of course, a fellow camper.

Rachel Fishman logged eight years as a camper before joining the staff. She values how much she sees Camp Miriam embodying the ideals of youth empowerment. Within limits, she points out, “youth are given space to make their own society.”

Trilby Smith spent 13 summers at Camp Miriam and is currently vice-chair of the camp committee. She sends both her kids to Miriam so “they can develop a sense of community defined by their peers, so that they can be in an environment that is open to questioning and thinking critically about Israel and what it means to be Jewish, and so that they can learn to be leaders.” And, she added, “So that they can have fun!”

Socialism isn’t the only tricky concept permeating the walls of the dining hall. (Yes, campers even do the dishes.) So, too, is Zionism. “I think that Jews in the Diaspora are facing a crisis of how to support Israel. A lot of madrichim struggle with this internally, especially studying in liberal universities,” Laniado said. It’s about “simultaneous love and criticism” at Miriam. “Recognizing that we’ve created a vibrant Israeli society, there’s a lot of work that remains to be done,” she said.

In Israel, Habonim-Dror partners with Hanoar Haoved on projects such as teaching English in Arab high schools. Called the Shared Existence project, it seeks “a joint liberation of both Israelis and Palestinians, striving towards a diverse and vibrant Israeli commonwealth,” in Laniado’s words.

Struggling with Israeli-Palestinian relations and with Zionism is a common refrain these days, but what Camp Miriam – and Habonim in general – manages to do is offer a way for youth to grapple with these issues head-on rather than abdicate altogether. Abdication – or what sociologists have been calling a “distancing” from Israel and Jewish life – is one of the biggest challenges.

These days, the radical secularism that I recall from the summer of 1990 has been replaced by an inching towards Judaism. While they still forego the Hamotzi in favor of a Labor Zionist chant, campers are now more likely to hear about Jewish values, embrace Jewish texts or be treated to a discussion by the rosh on the weekly Torah portion.

While the simple porridge my Baba Marian made for the campers in the 1950s when she was the first “camp mother” has been supplemented by scrambled eggs, fruit salad, yogurt and granola, along with gluten-free and dairy-free options, Zionism is wrestled with rather than taken for granted as a simple solution to the ills of antisemitism, and a commitment to Hebrew is now paired with a desire to “engage with Arabic language and culture.” The big values – leadership, debate, a commitment to Israel, Jewish identity, justice, labor and inclusiveness – remain.

For more information on Camp Miriam, visit campmiriam.org.

Comparing refugee response

While American political discourse around whether to accept Syrian refugees smolders under the embers of xenophobia, Canadians have been opening their hearts and their wallets to bring in Syrian refugees.

Canada is one of the only countries with a private sponsorship option, which means that groups of ordinary citizens can provide funds and demonstrate their intention to provide emotional and logistical support to refugee families for one year, thus enabling the absorption of refugees whom the government might not otherwise have been able to afford.

Like many faith and neighborhood communities, Jewish communities, especially through synagogues, are on the frontlines of this effort.

It’s not often that a rabbi’s sermon gets reprinted in the daily newspaper of a major city, but such was the case for Rabbi Lisa Grushcow of Montreal’s Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom. “For too long, we have thought of religion in passive terms, counting how many people are sitting in the pews or paying dues,” she wrote. “All this is necessary but not sufficient. I want us to count how many lives we change, how many people we help, how many hearts we touch.” Her synagogue is sponsoring at least one refugee family.

Meanwhile, a sermon delivered on Kol Nidre this year by Rabbi Dan Moskovitz of Temple Sholom in Vancouver helped capture the hearts and minds of his congregants. “Tonight, I want to ask you to do something great. I want to ask you to save a life, the life of a stranger – because we were once strangers in the land, because we are human beings and that is the only similarity that we really need.” It didn’t take long for the congregation to come up with the $40,000 necessary to sponsor a refugee family. They are now fundraising to bring a second. Other synagogues across the city – including the Jewish Renewal Or Shalom, which is sponsoring three families – have followed suit. (See story, page 1.)

In Toronto, Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, one of nearly 100 organizations across the country that enjoys sponsorship agreement holder rights, has been flooded with sponsoring requests.

I spoke to Ryan Friedman of Darchei Noam and to Pippa Feinstein of First Narayever Congregation, two Toronto-based synagogues that are sponsoring refugees. Feinstein in particular noted that, while wanting to “ensure a safe place for any refugee family who is looking to come to Canada,” her congregation is aiming to launch “parallel awareness-raising activities” around the plight of persecuted minorities in the region.

Among those minorities are the Yazidi people of Iraq, who are being faced with a genocide – in the words of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights – at the hands of ISIS. In collaboration with other faith groups, Winnipeg’s Jewish community has spearheaded an effort to sponsor multiple Yazidi refugees. As Belle Jarniewski described it, “When I saw the article about the mass grave [of the Yazidis], I really responded to it viscerally. It reminded me that we keep talking every year “never again” and, as Jews, we talk about this all the time, how important it is … and what are we doing about it?”

In my own city of Ottawa, Lori Rosove and Dara Lithwick of Temple Israel launched a community-wide effort to sponsor a refugee family. As Rosove explained it, “It’s the human thing to do.”

I, too, have helped launch a cross-denominational grassroots sponsoring effort, working through both Jewish Family Services of Ottawa and the United Church of Canada. Since a handful of us gathered in a neighbor’s living room in early September, we now number 250 participants and have raised $150,000 so far, enabling us to sponsor six families. So as to provide the suggested “soft-landing” that settlement agencies advise, each family will live with a neighborhood host for the first couple of months.

And what of pushback from community members? Moskovitz explained that, while 95% of his congregants have been enthusiastic, a few were not. “I met with each individual or group who registered a concern,” explaining the “rigorous UN screening and the Canadian screening [process].”

For their part, American Jewish groups have been doing what they can. There was the statement of moral clarity issued by 10 Jewish organizations. And there is a rabbis’ letter drafted by HIAS, urging their elected officials to “welcome the stranger.” In addition to lobbying Congress to accept refugees and supporting local resettlement agencies in their efforts, the U.S.-based Religious Action Centre of Reform Judaism has taken the initiative to help American congregations partner with Canadian ones in order to support their neighbors’ efforts. As RAC head Rabbi Jonah Pesner told me: “To sit at our [Passover] seder tables every year and [tell] the story, [starting with] ‘my father was a wandering Aramean,’ and to live through 5,000 years as a community of refugees, not to model for the world what it means to welcome the stranger would be an abdication of our legacy.”

So, while the U.S. Congress wrings its hands over whether to accept a meagre 10,000 souls, Canada (one-tenth the population) has pledged to receive 25,000 Syrian refugees by February, of which 10,000 are expected to be sponsored privately. When private citizens are empowered to help people from across the globe, the bluster and rhetoric can be bypassed while the real work of saving lives and opening hearts can take place.

Remain open to discussion

As hot as things have become in Israel and the West Bank over the last many weeks with escalating violence, here in North America a chill is palpable. It comes in the form of silencing within and across communities – in private homes, on university campuses and in community institutions. It’s coming from both sides: those who call themselves “pro-Palestinian” and those who call themselves “pro-Israel.” While the Palestinian solidarity side uses boycott and silencing, the Jewish community has its own internal conversation watchdogs.

Recently, a speaker at the University of Minnesota was shouted down, his talk delayed by 30 minutes. The invited scholar was Moshe Halbertal, a philosopher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a professor of law at New York University. It was a scholarly talk: the Dewey Lecture in the Philosophy of Law, sponsored by the university’s law school. Halbertal is also a noted military ethicist who helped draft a code of ethics for the Israel Defence Forces. The Minnesota Anti-War Committee took credit for the stunt; Students for Justice in Palestine endorsed it.

If you’re concerned by the extent to which civilians have born the brunt of violence and destruction in the Israeli-Palestinian context, Habertal is someone you’d want to speak with, especially in an academic context, where the point is the free exchange of ideas. But it’s hard to pose tough questions if you’re trying to silence the person.

This blocking of Halbertal’s speech is a trend that gets its fire from the academic and cultural boycott of Israel organized by the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement, along with the more general push against what many Palestine solidarity activists call “normalization,” meaning ordinary engagement with Jews and Israelis and their ideas. Activists argue that the target is institutions, not individuals. But the effects on individuals and open speech, as they were at the University of Minnesota, are clear.

Continuing in this vein, producers of Dégradé, a film about Gaza told from the perspective of clients at a hair salon, pulled it from the Other Israel Film Festival sponsored by the JCC Manhattan because it’s a “Jewish” festival. While it seems that the producers’ decision was their own, it suggests a dangerous precedent: fortifying the silos between acceptable audiences and unacceptable ones in the world of art, ideas and culture.

Meanwhile, while the Jewish community doesn’t talk in terms of boycott and anti-normalization, it has its own troubling rules of engagement.

There are the narrow speaker guidelines for those with whom campus Jewish groups allow their members to publicly engage in dialogue. The guidelines for Hillel International, the world’s largest Jewish student organization, exclude anyone who “delegitimize[s], demonize[s] or appl[ies] a double standard to Israel, or supports the boycott, divestment and sanction movement.” While it’s natural that Israel supporters would bristle at those things, the rules effectively preclude Hillel students from inviting for debate and dialogue any Palestinian solidarity activists, almost all of whom, unfortunately, have jumped on the BDS bandwagon.

When my seven-year-long columnist post was cut from my local Jewish community paper last summer, I was told that it was to “make room for new voices.” Since then, it’s become clear that the publisher wanted only one angle on Israel. The columnist who focuses almost exclusively on the failings of Israel’s adversaries remained in place, while my replacement is steering clear of Israel altogether.

And then there are the corners of quiet shunning. I recently organized a Jewish community youth project involving rotating hosts. One of the participants pulled out, citing the fact that her husband “didn’t want me in his home.” He was appalled by my last Globe and Mail piece. When it comes to “support for Israel,” they said, “there is only one side.”

But some – young Jews in particular – are pushing back against this narrowing of discourse. First there was Open Hillel, a grassroots organization devoted to opposing the speaker guidelines mentioned above. (Disclosure: I am on the group’s academic advisory council.) And now there’s the Jewish People’s Assembly, which has launched in Washington. The group is demanding that Jewish federations – the main funding body of local Jewish communities – “not condition support for Jewish institutions and organizations on these institutions’ adherence to red lines around Israel.”

One might fantasize about casting all the silencers into a room where they can sit in silence with each other to their heart’s content. Meanwhile, the rest of us can continue to try to talk, to write and to publicly grapple with the dilemmas of the day, trying to search for bits of common ground wherever they might be.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. A version of this article was originally published by the Globe and Mail.

Changing Israel education

In the longstanding debate over whether collective narratives should be transmitted as capital-T truth, or whether they should be challenged and problematized, there is a flurry of activity around rethinking Israel education for the next generation. As if they were speaking to each other (they weren’t – neither creative team knew of the other), a short documentary film and a new curriculum have emerged to address an apparent gap in critical thinking around Israel.

The director of the short film Between the Lines, Ali Kriegsman, was frustrated with the kind of Israel-right-or-wrong messaging she received growing up in Jewish day school. In the film, she interviews students, rabbis, Jewish educators and professors who each suggest that it’s time to allow the light of critical thought into our community’s classrooms when it comes to Israel.

As a professor who teaches Israeli-Palestinian relations, I am well aware that the kind of one-dimensional Israel education that some students receive does not make them well placed to take in the more intellectual, critical-thinking approach that is the hallmark of higher education. But where the film makes its most counter-intuitive suggestion is in the area of Israel advocacy on campus.

The film suggests that even for those who want to create effective Israel advocates, the current tone of Israel education falls short. Kriegsman, who says she “wants to see improvement and justice in Israel,” believes that “antisemitism still exists in the world” and is troubled by the fact that the Palestinians “are marginalized and mistreated and settlements continue to expand,” puts it this way. She believes that a student who has been force-fed a simplistic view of Israel and arrives on campus where the discourse is almost inevitably contentious and polarized will do one of three things.

In one scenario, the student will become embarrassed by the actions of the country they were taught to idealize and thus choose to detach entirely. In another scenario, the student will draw on the “AIPAC”-style advocacy “bubble” they lived inside during Jewish day school and will become completely closed to any alternative narratives. In this scenario, the hypothetical student might become an “exaggerated version of a day school student” – discriminatory and racist. In a third scenario, the hypothetical student may feel “duped or betrayed” by her Jewish day school education and burn her emotional connection to Israel entirely.

Having premièred at a SoHo loft in New York City, the documentary – which received seed money from the Bronfman fellows alumni fund – is slated for a West Coast première in October sponsored by a Los Angeles synagogue.

Unbeknown to Kriegsman, as the film was being made, a rabbi in Madison, Wis., was creating a new curriculum that appears to address the conceptual gaps that Between the Lines identifies. Called Reframing Israel, the curriculum is meant to address what Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman saw as a major deficiency in Israel education at the elementary and high school level: “There was virtually no published material that asks students to think critically about the conflict.”

The rabbi wants kids to think in more complex terms, to be inspired to look at Jewish texts.

How do you cultivate compassion for both Israelis and Palestinians? How do you understand Palestinian stories?

Rather than emphasize a “love” for Israel, Zimmerman uses the term “connection.” As she puts it, “We pick one of the following: Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), Medinat Israel (the State of Israel) and Am Yisrael (the Nation of Israel). We ask, What does it mean to be connected to each of these?”

She has been piloting parts of the program over the last couple of years. Last year, two 13-year-olds created a debate with each other on the question of the one-state versus two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “It didn’t matter what they believed,” she said. Rather, the act of articulating the critiques was really valuable.

Some critics of this open-minded approach will claim that, to be agnostic about whether Israel remains a Jewish state (given that a one-state solution, in its democratic form, would basically spell the end of Israel as we know it) is itself a betrayal. Zimmerman, however, “trust[s] kids enough to draw conclusions that are sound and solid.”

As for what kind of Jewish student she hopes to send to campus once they have graduated from religious school, Zimmerman wants to send kids who are “inquisitive; have open minds, can evaluate an argument, apply their knowledge; research a position and make an informed choice. I guess that makes me radical since I’m not trying to send kids to campus to defend Israel. I care mostly that they go to campus and think deeply about being Jewish, about their connection to Israel, about Palestinian perspectives. The role of education is to create people who are actively engaged in their communities.”

How author lost faith

photo - Shulem Deen, author of the memoir All Who Go Do Not Return — Shulem Deen, author of the memoir *All Who Go Do Not Return*. *(photo by Pearl Gabel)*

One of my Haaretz blogs several months ago told the stories of two individuals who left the Orthodox fold. This past June, I nearly swallowed whole the new former-Chassid memoir everyone was talking about: Shulem Deen’s All Who Go Do Not Return. I then caught up with Shulem by phone, where we spent two hours musing about Talmud and kabbala, faith and questioning, whether the concept of dogma can be expressed in Chassidic Yiddish, what he sees when he revisits the film The Chosen and whether he still loves Beethoven, the first movie he ever saw (he doesn’t).

Those who have read the memoir or the press coverage of it know that, after he was declared a heretic, his Skverer Chassid community in New Square, N.Y., excommunicated him. Along with their five children, his wife – still a firm believer – moved with him to the nearby town of Monsey, before his marriage ultimately dissolved. He now lives in Brooklyn and is on the board of Footsteps, an organization dedicated to helping former Chassidim adjust to secular life. Tragically, his children refuse all contact with him.

I admitted to being a bit confused as I approached the topic. In my youth, I had learned that Judaism, more than any other religion even, encourages questioning. Is this true? I asked Shulem. Of modern Judaism, it is, he admitted. But not of orthodoxy. He cited a talmudic dictum that appears in his book: “He who asks the following four questions – what is above, what is below, what is the future, what is the past – it is better if he were never born.”

Shulem described what it was like to lose faith. “Once my faith fell apart,” he told me, “my worldview fell apart…. If one of these [principles] is not true then what is true?” Shulem likened it to existing in a Matrix-type world, or being a character in The Truman Show.

Yet, despite rejecting his Chassidism at enormous personal cost, and no longer believing in God, Shulem maintains a strong Jewish identity, including a commitment to “Jewish peoplehood, Jewish history, Jewish text, Jewish culture and Jewish tradition.”

He studies Talmud weekly, approaching the text as “literature,” as he puts it. Neither is he dismissive of Yiddish – the language that has effectively kept many Chassidim ignorant of English: another barrier to engaging with the secular world. Yet he enjoys reading Yiddish writers such as Sholem Aleichem, Chaim Grade and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and even grants spoken Yiddish press interviews as the need arises.

Where he draws the line is dogma.

Community-instilled religious dogma is what arguably led his children to reject him. Shulem is insightful about how things unfolded. “When a child is taught that his parent is wicked … what the child feels … is shame,” Shulem writes in the book. And, from this shame, comes a desire to distance oneself from the perceived source of the shame.

It’s enough to make any parent rage forever into the night. But, as a writer, Shulem was careful to contain his anger, feeling that deploying that emotion “would have impeded” the reader’s experience.

And yet, others’ anger was on his mind as he decided what to include. At one point, he ran into a former student. Without his beard, Shulem wasn’t immediately recognizable, until something clicked. “I know you,” the student said. “You hit me with a wire.” Shulem apologized, and left the exchange feeling “incredibly ashamed.” Including the scene about his act of corporal punishment was for him an “act of penance.”

Before our interview, I had noticed Shulem recommending the film The Chosen on Facebook. One of the favorite movies of my own childhood, my curiosity was piqued. What would a former Chassid get from a film about the tension between fundamentalism and modernity? Hadn’t he lived it enough? Not so, which is what makes Shulem such a thoughtful and appealing writer and interlocutor. “I think it’s brilliant. It’s beautiful,” he says of the film. His favorite scene? The rebbe’s tisch (communal meal). Unlike the contemporary tisch (a setting that Shulem wrote about in a poignant 2011 essay revealing the pain of a once-believer), he said of the film’s scene, “This is a 1940s world where a rebbe has only several dozen followers. It’s a very intimate, very spirited setting. Something very simple, yet devout.”

I was touched by Shulem’s ability to still be able to glimpse goodness in a system that had oppressed him; perhaps this is the definition of open-mindedness, that rare commodity among the ultra-religious.

Indeed, the broad themes of the film continue to speak to him. Given the increasing porousness between Chassidism and the outside world due to the march of technology, “people are testing the boundaries and trying to see what is possible while staying within the community,” Shulem said. And, while his book recounts his struggle to do just that, via a primitive AOL internet hookup, a job in Manhattan and – something he relayed to me – taking his daughters to the public library, his world eventually imploded. Part of this was due to the feeling that the ground was opening beneath his feet. And part of it stemmed from a problem all too common in modern life: basic marriage incompatibility.

To a non-Chassid, Shulem’s story is a fascinating glimpse into a hidden world, just as it is ultimately a universal story about the pursuit of personal truth, the attempt to be open-minded in a close-minded world and, ultimately, the bitter inability to control what others believe about the righteousness of one’s path.

Enriching or superficial?

With the High Holidays around the corner, I have noticed my usual light bout of pre-holiday anxiety. So much always seems to ride on this part of the Jewish calendar. For strong believers, there’s the spiritual reckoning. For the less religious who still care about affiliation, there’s the loaded nature of synagogue attendance, compounded by the challenge of pricey tickets. And, for the simply social, there’s the pressure of ensuring some communal marking of the calendar.

Amid all of this, Reboot – an organization that bills itself as “affirm[ing] the value of Jewish traditions and creat[ing] new ways for people to make them their own” – is taking a lighter touch: its annual 10 questions project. Sign up at doyou10q.com and, starting on Sept. 13 and lasting 10 days, the website will email you one question per day encouraging you to engage in the kind of personal reflection that is customary during the intervening days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

Once completed, the answers are sent to Reboot’s “vault” for safekeeping, and users can decide whether to share them or not. Either way, one year later, Reboot will send the answers back to the participant, and the questions will be posed again, so one can see what changes in life perspectives occur over time.

It’s a truism that Jewish life is fundamentally communal. A quorum of 10 is required for prayer; weekly Shabbat dinners are often an extended-family-and-friends affair; Jews are encouraged to educate their children Jewishly in a group setting; Jewish summer camp focuses on intense communal experiences; and bar and bat mitzvahs are marked by a public aliya la-Torah.

So, are individual, web-based initiatives like Reboot’s enough to scratch the itch of Jewish communal practice? Or are they, in their push-a-button way, a frivolous addition to what should be undivided attention to the technicalities of Jewish literacy and to the bricks and mortar of conventional Jewish life, where Judaism is experienced publicly and communally?

This question isn’t a surprising one, but it may be misplaced.

In the age of “destination” bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies, where almost no one from one’s community may be in attendance, and in the age of concierge Judaism – a term the Jewish Outreach Institute now uses to suggest that Jews may be looking for an array of products and services tailored to their own individual needs – and in the generation of the Millennial who seeks to refashion Judaism to suit her own sensibilities, Reboot knows that one has to reach Jews where they are.

But there’s more to it than simply realizing that initiatives like Reboot may be what’s needed to save do-it-yourself-style Jews from disconnection. Despite the absence of Hebrew or Jewish texts or a group of Jews sitting in a study session with a rabbi, initiatives like the 10 questions project is not a challenge to Jewish literacy at all. In discussing the initiative with colleagues, I realized that, without Reboot’s initiative, I might never have given those intervening days another thought.

In my typical hectic pace, I would likely be rearranging my work schedule, securing a break-fast invitation for my family or deciding whether to host one, and practising the Haftorah my shul has asked me to prepare for Yom Kippur morning. No doubt the personal reflection bit would fall by the wayside and, even if I did try to engage in it, it likely would not be as fulsome as that encouraged by the kinds of daily questions Reboot sends. That kind of thinking and writing – including being faced with one’s past challenges – takes immersive effort, both intellectual and emotional.

So, tailored-and-trendy versus tried-and-true may be a false dichotomy, after all. We would be better placed to think of Jewish life as being enriched by as many touch points as our current crop of Jewish innovators can create.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. This article was originally published in the Canadian Jewish News.

“Threat” term problematic

When it comes to Israel, many Diaspora Jews harbor a double standard. They want their own countries to embrace pluralism and multiculturalism, owing to the kind of fluid immigration that allowed their own grandparents and great-grandparents to build a better life in America and Canada and many other places across the West. But, when it comes to Israel, they are comfortable articulating their desire to maintain a Jewish majority. Israelis – even those on the left – have a term for this need: they openly refer to Palestinians (whether in the West Bank, whether refugees living abroad or whether Palestinian citizens of Israel itself) as a “demographic threat.”

Palestinian citizens of Israel are pouncing on this usage more than ever. Ayman Oudeh, head of the Joint List, has called it offensive. He wants Israeli citizens to view their Palestinian citizen brethren as partners in nation-building. Still, he is not looking for a melting-pot version of Israeli identity: he demands that Israel grant the Palestinian citizens “collective rights.” Since they already have their own school system, presumably, by collective rights he means at the very least equal funding for schools and towns, including removing the unequal bureaucratic barriers to gaining building permits, something I’ve written about at the Globe and Mail.

Yousef Munayyer is also distressed by the term “demographic threat,” and concludes that it is intrinsic to Zionism. Instead of having a demographic problem, Israel has a Zionism problem, he argued last March in The Nation. This, as Bibi was whipping up fear against the Arab minority on election day, claiming they were coming to the polls “in droves.”

The scope of the issue is more complex than these critiques – as important as they are – allow. There are at least three aspects at play.

First, strategy. There are reasons why a peace activist may choose to use the term “demographic threat” to sell the idea of withdrawal from the West Bank, for example. This kind of reasoning may appeal to those on the centre or even the right who, unfortunately, aren’t moved by human rights imperatives. When it comes to language and lobbying, we must not forget the game of persuasion.

This connects to the second aspect: emotions. Here, the question is this: without undermining democracy, can a majority population privately desire to maintain its majority status? And, in the event that these private desires are shared publicly – through art or literature, say – should the users be chastised as being anti-democratic?

Here, we need to recall what may be motivating these feelings. It may not be anti-democratic tendencies or racism or even a sense of national superiority. As a national liberation movement, Zionism was acutely concerned with Jewish self-determination, more than it was with undermining any other national group in its midst. And, along with the material gains of statehood has come the desire to sustain a modern Jewish national culture, most markedly in the form of Hebrew. To contemplate becoming a minority in one’s country is to consider the attrition of one’s national language, at the very least, if not the possibility of collective safety and self-determination. Even if the fears are unfounded, even, if, somehow, a post-Zionist Israel can engage in a project of radical multiculturalism such that Hebrew culture maintains its treasured place alongside Palestinian culture and Arabic language, the impulse is still understandable.

Finally, there are the public policies themselves. On this, there is clearly much room for improvement. Oudeh’s call for a high-profile “civics conference” in the tradition of other annual conferences in Israel on issues – including security, social issues and economics – is a good one. As is the urgent need to close the funding gap to Arab schools and towns, and to educate against casual racism, including some landlords not renting to Arabs and “social suitability” committees determining who can live where, the kind of practices outlined by Amjad Iraqi in +972 Magazine. These attitudes and the practices that stem from them are corrosive to democracy.

All this is to say that the creation and maintenance of national identity, particularly in a state as young as Israel, is an enormous project. Using the term “demographic threat” as a way of describing the actual collective emotions and preferences of some citizens is as useful as any analytic phrase. To censor it completely, therefore, would be anti-intellectual and anti-democratic. But, when it comes to policy advocacy, thoughtful Israelis should consider thinking twice about using these words. As citizens of democracies, we should at least strive to hear things as our fellow citizens hear them.

Poet chooses politics over love?

In times of protracted conflict, can matters of the heart exist apart from politics? An award-winning documentary from Israeli filmmaker Ibtisam Mara’ana Menuhin left me at once spellbound, uplifted, sad and restless, as I found myself wrestling with this question.

Write Down, I am an Arab depicts the life of Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish. The politics is important – more on that below – but what makes the film especially gripping is the story of Darwish’s catapult to national and international fame against the backdrop of his private longings for a woman on the other side of the Palestinian-Jewish divide.

Darwish met Tamar Ben Ami in the early 1960s at a political rally – this one for the Communist party in Israel. Frequently separated geographically – he under military administration (as all Arab citizens were until 1966) in Haifa, she studying in Jerusalem – Darwish documented his feelings for her in a series of letters.

I spoke with Tamar – by phone, Facebook and email – over the course of a few days. A dancer and choreographer (the film chronicles her stint in the Israeli navy’s performing troupe), Tamar divides her time between Tel Aviv and Berlin. She describes her art – and really her entire personal life – as being shaped by her time with Darwish. Her love for him is palpable, still.

Caught up as I am as a political scientist and columnist in contemplating political arrangements – refugees, Jerusalem, borders, one-state, two-state, federation or separation – Tamar operates differently.

“It’s cliché, and maybe I sound naive, but I believe in unconditional love,” Tamar tells me when I ask her what kind of political future she envisions. She is disturbed by what she sees as the artificial divisions of nations, races, ethnicities and religions, including what she sees as a dangerous interpretation of Jewish chosenness. “On this, the occupation has been nurtured.”

And, while it’s hard to disagree, I find myself confounded. Is the Palestinian national struggle one over occupation? Is it about the West Bank settlements, the land appropriation, the checkpoints and night raids and administrative detention? Or is it about the stones and earth of Palestinian towns and villages within Israel itself to which many Palestinians long to return? And, if it is the latter, how can the two national dreams ever be squared?

In the film, we see video footage of Darwish meeting a resident of Kibbutz Yas’ur, which was founded on the ruins of Darwish’s childhood village, al-Birwa. “It’s a moment of sadness and hope,” Darwish says to the man. “The sadness is that I’m not allowed to go back to that place and you have the right to go back there. But if we have the ability to be friends and we are friends, then peace is still possible.”

On one hand, it’s a wholly human encounter. On the other hand, once we put the subject of Israeli towns, cities and kibbutzim within pre-1967 Israel on the table, we are talking about the core of Israel’s identity, one which Israelis – and most Jews worldwide – are loathe to give up. And, if I’m really honest with myself, as a (liberal) Zionist who shares the Jewish national dream of those kibbutzniks, then perhaps the pain is also mine.

Nowhere was the tension between resisting occupation and demanding more fundamental claims more evident than in Darwish’s highly controversial 1988 poem called “Passers Between the Passing Words.” There, Darwish wrote: “It is time for you to be gone. Live wherever you like, but do not live among us…. For we have work to do in our land. So leave our country, our land, our sea, our wheat, our salt, our wounds, everything; and leave.”

With the first intifada raging at the time, Tamar is certain that the poem is about the occupation, not about Israel itself. “What can the occupied do?” Tamar recalls Darwish saying. The irony is that Darwish didn’t even think it was a good poem, Tamar says. To be judged by that poem pained him, and more than anything he longed to be considered a universal poet, Tamar adds.

After the 1988 poem controversy, Tamar found herself in Paris, trying to reconnect with Darwish, who was now at the centre of Palestinian politics. While she was sitting with him, Darwish took a call from Yasser Arafat. They spoke in Arabic. She could not make out what they were saying. The next day, when she called him again, Darwish rebuffed her: “You are not my girlfriend.”

We can never know whether Darwish, who died in 2008, chose politics over matters of the heart, or whether this unkind ending was just like so many ruptures between once-lovers: prosaic and universal.

But Darwish and Tamar did have contact again. After Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Darwish reached out to her in compassion. And, in 2000, Education Minister Yossi Sarid attempted to introduce two Darwish poems to the Israeli (Jewish) national curriculum. Stormy Knesset debate ensued, and the government narrowly survived a no-confidence vote. Darwish called Tamar. “My poetry is so important that over it the government nearly fell?” he mused.

Though their romance had ended, they clearly shared a sense of absurdity in how the universal language of poetry can be thrust into the forefront of the ugly struggles over land, narratives, history and invisibility. It’s a story that continues to be told, even as Tamar will always think in terms of interpersonal love as much as in terms of borders and territory.

Impromptu interview

After having spent decades trying to visit Wilensky’s lunch counter, made famous by the Mordecai Richler novel and film The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, I finally made it to the weekday-only Mile End joint in Montreal a couple of months ago.

It’s a modest place with a tiny menu – two main course options, a few beverages and – for those seeking vegetables – pickles. As I finished my Wilensky’s Special (a fried bologna, salami and mustard sandwich on a kaiser) chased with a chocolate egg cream, I spotted a neighborhood fixture finishing his hotdog: Socalled (aka Josh Dolgin), the Yiddish hip-hop artist and music producer. He has been dubbed “hip-hop’s answer to Mordecai Richler.”

We made our way to a St. Viateur patio for coffee as we spoke about his latest album, his growing up in Gatineau, Que., his love for early Yiddish film, his views on Zionism, and the art of musical “sampling.” Our impromptu interview was interrupted frequently. Like the King of Kensington, Socalled seemed to know everyone in the neighborhood.

Socalled had been on my radar since my husband brought home his Passover album, The Socalled Seder: A Hip-Hop Haggadah, 10 years ago. In that album, ads for Manischewitz, along with Passover dinner table chatter, are sampled over a driving hip-hop beat; the track “The Ten Plagues” features the lyricist rapping that “sometimes bad things happen to bad people for a good reason, you dig?,” the “Miriam Drum Song” features an urgent fiddle, and the hip-hop single called “Who Knows One” is heavily klezmer inflected.

His latest effort, Peoplewatching, is perhaps more accessible musically, and is frequently quite beautiful, though whatever Jewish aspect is there is much more subtle. Still, Dolgin insists that his Yiddish interests influenced him. He explained that the track “Never See You Again” features a chord progression from an Abraham Ellstein song used in the wedding scene of the 1936 film Yidl Mitn Fidl (Am, A7, D7, F7, E7, Am – for readers with a piano or guitar nearby). There are a couple of bits of klezmer. And there is a sad and pretty song about Shabbat candles starting a fire near his Hutchison Street apartment in Mile End.

As for the sampling so integral to his music, Dolgin describes it as “giving you sounds with the atmosphere cooked in…. It’s archeological. It’s like cultural alchemy.”

My fellow Canadians in particular will no doubt be tickled by the final track, “Curried Soul 2.0.” Familiar to radio listeners as the theme to the CBC Radio nightly current affairs program As it Happens, “Curried Soul” is featured here in an extended version of the remix that CBC invited Socalled to produce. In a charming bit of hyperbole, Dolgin told a CBC interviewer that he was daunted and floored by the opportunity to tinker with the show’s theme because he “heard it every single day of my life.”

It’s not only Canadian listeners who have been privy to that storied evening broadcast: some Israelis have been featured on the show as well, including Meretz MK Michal Rozen and Tel Aviv-based pollster and political commentator Dahlia Scheindlin.

These days, beyond promoting his new album, Dolgin is busy with a Yiddish barbershop quartet he founded called Julius, in homage to the Oscar Julius Quartet. Many of the songs Dolgin’s quartet performs were originally in Yiddish translated into English, which Dolgin helps put back into Yiddish.

I was curious about what motivated Socalled to seek out Yiddish in the first place (a trip to a Salvation Army vintage record collection supplemented by a textbook called College Yiddish) and whether his continuing interest in the language and culture has anything to do with a rejection of Zionism – the nationalist movement which sought to “negate the Diaspora” in its urgent, Hebrew nation-building project (not so, in his case).

“I don’t believe in countries or nationalism,” Dolgin said, “but if we are going to live in a world with countries or nations, it’s not insane for the Jews to have a country.” He added, “I think Palestinians should have a home, too.” That said, he stressed that he is “more ashamed by how Canada has treated its aboriginal people. I’m more worried about the report on residential schools.”

Politics aside, I wondered whether Dolgin gets to speak any Yiddish these days. He does: at Yiddish festivals around the world, with an “old Jew he met in Russia” and, most often, with his Chassidic landlord. It’s Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood, after all.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. A version of this article was originally published on haartez.com. For an in-depth interview with Socalled, visit jewishindependent.ca/oldsite/archives/oct11/archives11oct07-01.html.