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The war in Gaza is over. The battle to stop Israel from becoming Sparta is just beginning.
Now that the war in Gaza appears to have come to an end and Hamas has returned the remaining 20 living hostages to their families, we can fully expect Israel’s enemies and other critics across the globe to turn their attention to the declared intention of some of the extremist members of the Israeli government to formally make the West Bank part of a greater Israel that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.
Except, of course, that President Donald Trump seems to have preemptively put the kibosh on any such scenario. “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” Trump told reporters two weeks ago. “It’s not going to happen.”
Trump realizes and has said out loud the simple truth that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his acolytes stubbornly ignore: Israel cannot endure in the long run by permanently subjugating the Palestinian population of the territories it has held since the June 1967 Six-Day War. More importantly, as Trump told Netanyahu in a telephone conversation this past week, “Israel can’t fight the world.” Or as he told Netanyahu during his speech to the Knesset on Monday, “Be a little bit nicer, Bibi, because you’re not at war anymore. … You don’t want to have to go through this again.”
An Israeli – or Jewish – hegemony over what was once the biblical land of Judea and in due course morphed into pre-1948 British Mandatory Palestine is not and has never been the goal of mainstream Zionism as conceived and understood by the likes of Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion and Louis D. Brandeis. But with the concept and essence of Zionism widely misunderstood or deliberately mischaracterized, it is more critical than ever to place the broad and multifaceted nature of this ethnocultural ideology in its accurate historical context.
We know whereof we speak. We are both unabashed Zionists who unequivocally identify with the State of Israel even though we radically disagree with the extremist ideology and many of the policies of its present government. One of us is a former national president of the Labor Zionist Alliance and past member of the Zionist General Council which oversees the work and activities of the World Zionist Organization. The other has been a visiting professor at both the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University, and maintains ongoing relations with both. We are long-time supporters of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. One of us met with Yasser Arafat and senior leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization together with four other American Jews in Stockholm in December 1988, resulting in the PLO’s first public acceptance of Israel as a state in the Middle East. The other is presently writing a book on the early socialist founders of modern Israel.
Trump’s above-quoted comments regarding the West Bank came against the backdrop of an earlier pronouncement by Netanyahu in which he resurrected the old meme of Israel as latter-day Sparta. Acknowledging Israel’s ever-increasing political and economic isolation in consequence of what then still seemed as his government’s seemingly interminable war in Gaza, Netanyahu declared that his country “will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics” and become a “super-Sparta.”
Had Netanyahu’s reference been to Plutarch’s account of the ancient Greek polity — a society highly unified, disciplined, and militarily formidable when existentially threatened – then perhaps, fair enough. The problem with his analogy, however, is what it leaves out: First, that Sparta’s hegemonic dominance was decisively and permanently ended by its catastrophic defeat at the hands of a far superior Theban army at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE. And, more importantly, second, that Israel was meant by its socialist founders to emulate Athens more than Sparta, and that most of its population longs to return to this “Athenian normal” even as its current leaders try to force it into a Sparta-only straight-jacket.
There are, in short, two conflicting contemporary visions of Israel that can, when taken in “absolutist” fashion, distort understandings of both the Athenian and the Spartan aspects of today’s Israel. Peace, progress and prosperity await both refinement and synthesis of both visions.
The first vision, part of which was at the core of the Labor-Zionist-guided establishment of Israel under U.N. auspices in 1948, is of a democratic polity rooted in not only the quintessentially Jewish values of justice and social solidarity but also, equally important, a Jeffersonian-republican model of social democracy pursuant to which religiously and ethnically diverse groups coexist and co-govern as a matter of course.
This vision requires updating in one subtle respect to stay true to the Israel-as-Athens picture: namely, by supplementing the largely pastoral-agricultural imaginary of Israel’s primarily kibbutznik Labor-Zionist founders (not to mention of Jefferson himself) with a now-fuller and more productively-diversified picture of the Israel now widely called, among tech visionaries and others, the “Startup Nation.” This we must do if we are to understand both the motivations and, indeed, the promise of the Abraham Accords with their vision of a vibrantly revived Mediterranean-Levantine civilization the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the days of the ancient Phoenicians.
The second, borderline-apocalyptic vision of Israel now dominant in today’s Netanyahu-led Israel government is that of a fundamentalist Jewish hegemony over the entire biblical territory that encompasses not only Israel but the West Bank as well – “From the River to the Sea for Jews and Jews Only,” as it were. This is the pseudo-messianic model that Netanyahu and the shots-calling extremist far right members of his government are working feverishly and openly to bring about at the expense of Israel’s Jewish and non-Jewish citizens alike — not to mention its neighbors, its standing in the international community, and even the interests of Jews across the globe.
This vision requires far more radical revision to do justice to a plausible — and indeed desirable — Spartan comparison than does the original Labor-Zionist vision to do justice to a plausible Athenian comparison. Indeed, an accurate Spartan vision would have to be as Jeffersonian as the Athenian model: It would be that of a republic of citizen-soldiers able to mobilize on short notice, “Minute Man” style, when threatened, but otherwise going about the business of producing, inventing, arguing (these are Israelis, after all), and governing under the rule of law just as the ancient Israelite leaders were anointed only on condition that they rule under then-Hebrew law.
Happily, there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis who not only reject the Netanyahu government and its (distorted) “Super-Sparta” policies, but also have consistently taken to the streets against it since long before Hamas’ terrorist savagery on Oct. 7, 2023. These Israelis have sought to block Netanyahu’s attempt to eviscerate their country’s independent judicial system. They are the ones who called consistently for the ceasefire in Gaza that has now been reached and that will hopefully result in a pathway to a viable Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. And they are among those whom, alas, the likes of Hollywood actors Javier Bardem, Emma Stone,and Hannah Einbinder seek to boycott.
Israel’s aforesaid enemies, for whom a putative “anti-Zionism” they do not begin to comprehend or deliberately distort is an article of blind and blinded faith, seem either cognitively unable or perversely unwilling to distinguish between anything-but-Athenian neo-fascists like Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Internal Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who want to destroy Israel’s democracy on the one hand, and the likes of Israeli President Isaac Herzog and opposition leader (and former prime minister) Yair Lapid, among others — who work to preserve that democracy — on the other hand. And in his heart of hearts, we fear, Netanyahu desperately wants the world to see only the former and never the latter.
Nahum Goldmann, then president of both the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress, pointedly observed, in the wake of Israel’s June 1967 “Six-Day War,” that Israel cannot prevail exclusively as “the Sparta of the Middle East.” He was right. Israel must be both Athens and Sparta — and it must be the actual, not the children’s book, version of both. Netanyahu does not seem to “get” this. Nor, sadly, do some of those who support New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who in endorsing a “global intifada” are, wittingly or otherwise, effectively calling for the elimination of Israel altogether and thereby perpetuating Netanyahu’s comic-book Sparta government with all the apocalyptic horrors that this entails.
The road ahead will not be easy even after the Gaza war is in the rearview mirror and it will not be short, but if there is to be any hope for the future, the leaders of both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must embark on it by recognizing each other’s humanity and seeking to emulate Athens more and Sparta less.
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On El-Sayed, Michigan’s Jewish Democrats aren’t all ready to unite behind nominee
Following Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow win of the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the state’s Jewish Democrats are reflecting on whether the divisions El-Sayed’s candidacy brought to the fore can be bridged before November.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan. But the community had become deeply invested in the race, with Jews both in fierce opposition and fiery support of El-Sayed in an election that had become a proxy fight over the Gaza war and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Jewish former Michigan congressman Andy Levin, who had endorsed El-Sayed, believes Democrats will get behind the nominee in the interest of defeating Republican Mike Rogers — a race that could determine which party controls the Senate. Pre-primary polls found Rogers leading El-Sayed by single digits.
“Shame on any Jewish Democrat if they’re going to go vote for Mike Rogers and put our democracy at risk because they can’t find their way to supporting Abdul El-Sayed, who is such a brilliant person, just because he doesn’t share their exact beliefs on Israel and Palestine,” Levin told the Forward. “That’s ridiculous.”
Levin lost his Senate seat to Rep. Haley Stevens after heavy spending against him by AIPAC, the campaign fundraising group advocating for unrestricted U.S. aid to Israel. An AIPAC-associated super PAC spent some $32 million in a failed attempt to get Stevens the Senate nomination.
Stevens endorsed El-Sayed for the general election Wednesday morning. But some Jews who voted for Stevens see no possibility for reconciliation. Rabbi Asher Lopatin of the modern Orthodox synagogue Kehillat Etz Chayim in suburban Detroit had endorsed Stevens in the primary, alarmed by El-Sayed’s association with the controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and condemnation of Israel as a genocidal and apartheid state.
In a TV interview Wednesday, El-Sayed used the term “bloodthirsty” to describe Israel.
“To have so many people vote for someone who is so hurtful to the Jewish community, the things that the Jewish community values — I think it’s depressing,” Lopatin told the Forward.
Lopatin has made up his mind that he will not vote for El-Sayed in the general election, but he also isn’t yet sold on Rogers, the Republican nominee.
“I have to study him more,” Lopatin said. “But I will not vote for Abdul El-Sayed, definitely, and I would tell people they should not.”
Lopatin said he wishes Stevens would condemn El-Sayed rather than endorse him.
Still, others see El-Sayed as the best candidate to face Rogers in the general — and don’t want him to pull back on the issues that won him the nomination. Barbara Weinberg Barefield, a photographer outside Detroit who helped organize the group Jews for Abdul, said she has confidence El-Sayed will win the general — attributing the close primary race partly to the influence of outside money supporting Stevens.
“He was able to win this election in the face of close to $70 million of outside funding going to bolster his opponent,” Weinberg Barefield said. “This election is showing us, and elections around the country are showing us, that elections are not to be bought — they’re to be earned.”
Roslyn Schindler, a retired professor who taught Holocaust studies at Wayne State University, was also among El-Sayed’s Jewish supporters, even as she disagreed with him on his lack of support for a two-state solution. She stressed the importance of beating Rogers in November irrespective of disagreements on Israel.
“My motto is and will be: vote blue, no matter who,” Schindler told the Forward. “I am hoping that all Democrats realize that to do otherwise will be self-destructive and just plain wrong.”
Others are taking a wait-and-see approach. Decky Alexander, chair of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus — which endorsed Stevens in the primary — isn’t issuing an endorsement in the general election yet.
She said the close margin El-Sayed won by, about 15,000 votes, gives her hope that El-Sayed will see the need to unify his party. A start, she said, would be focusing less on AIPAC during his general election campaign.
“There’s a lot of opportunity on Abdul’s side to be a better bridge maker versus kind of a bridge burner,” Alexander told the Forward. “The cards are his. It’s his responsibility to initiate.”
In his election night speech, El-Sayed didn’t mention AIPAC by name, instead speaking more generally about getting money out of politics.
On Wednesday, he addressed Jewish Michiganders directly: “I want you to know that my commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety, is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.”
The post On El-Sayed, Michigan’s Jewish Democrats aren’t all ready to unite behind nominee appeared first on The Forward.
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‘The Yiddish Teacher’ (Poem)
One thing about the late Forverts staff writer and critic Miriam Hoffman — she cooked a heavenly eggplant in tomato sauce.
And why do I know this about one of our writers? Hoffman, a veritable lexicon-caldron of Yiddish sayings and terms she’d archived from her own mother’s distinct poylish dialect, was many things: A distinguished long-term professor of Yiddish at Columbia University; a theater critic turned playwright who turned the New York Public Theatre’s founding director Joseph Papp into a serious supporter of Yiddish culture; a child survivor of Siberian exile, and so much more.
As she encountered immigrant American life in da Bronx, the tiny dynamo that was Hoffman delighted in becoming American, freely advising everyone on the best consumer goods this country had to offer. A country that was a home and refuge to her, her parents, her husband and so many in her vast circle of Yiddishist friends, students, fellow writers, educators and chosen family. And then, once upon a time, she welcomed me into her Florida home for an overnight stay, so that I could record her jaw-dropping tales of how she and her beloved mameloshn Yiddish both survived the khurbn, the Holocaust. And talk into the video camera she did.
But first, there was lunch.
Rest in all your ferocious deliciousness, Miriam Hoffman, and thank you. For the eggplant, the advice on the best toothpaste, the stories — and for doing everything, everything, everything possible, to transmit your Yiddish to another generation.
The Yiddish Teacher
The Yiddish teacher bending saying:
In my book you’ll learn
the alefbeys through pictograms like so:
The gimel is a camel
The beys a house
You see?
The Yiddish teacher has an archive
in her bedroom closet
The folding doors open revealing:
shoeboxes filled with
stories and
poems and
songs she
wrote as a child
in the displaced persons camp
on paper donated to Jewish refugees
The Yiddish teacher was once
seated in back
of a transport truck
with all the other refugees
Trying to go over the Swiss Alps
to Mandate Palestine
The Yiddish teacher was born
in a Siberian prison camp
“people were starving, sure,
but there was sex”
The Yiddish teacher was the only
woman writer on staff
at the Forverts Yiddish newspaper
The Yiddish teacher remembers
the first time her family ate
Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti and
meatballs
from a can
in the Bronx
We go shopping together
The Yiddish teacher loves Rao’s tomato sauce
“it’s the best”
The Yiddish teacher recommends
“Mavis Toothpaste”
It’s the best
The Yiddish teacher loves to
go fly fishing
The Yiddish teacher is short and slim
and round
I think
if I cup my hands together
I can
carry her around always
— Chana Pollack
The post ‘The Yiddish Teacher’ (Poem) appeared first on The Forward.
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Christopher Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ is a Talmud-quoting, Tisha B’Av epic
“Before there were Jews… there was ‘The Odyssey,’” a theater manager infamously posted on a marquee in Portland, Oregon.
While the mythic, Bronze Age events recounted in the blockbuster film likely never transpired, Homer’s epic poem is by any measure younger than the Jewish people. And Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, now a proxy for a pitched battle over the essence of Western civilization, could not exist as it is without the Jews. Indeed, whether it knows it or not, it is telling a foundational story of our history.
Much of the criticism surrounding the film, which managed to agitate classicists from its first set photos of Matt Damon in a crested Grecian helmet (not a period-accurate Mycenaean boar-tusk ensemble) and bigots of all stripes with its casting of a trans man and people of color, has shifted since its release just before Tisha B’Av, taking aim at the film’s ideas and how they may clash with those of antiquity’s.
“Did you Christianize The Odyssey?” podcaster Zhong Shu asked Nolan in a now-viral interview.
Nolan explained that he was drawn to the ancient ethic of “xenia,” called “Zeus’ Law” in the film. In the Greek conception, this means welcoming guests because you never know if they may be a God. In Nolan’s blockbuster it’s described as treating others how you would be treated. When the law is breached, society as we know it comes undone, leading to our hero’s atonement and qualms that seem at odds with his traditional characterization.
While Nolan’s understanding mirrors the Christian Golden Rule, which itself is antedated by statements in the Torah and by Hillel, his vision of civilizational ruin when it is trespassed is more central to Judaism. Odysseus laments that, by creating the Trojan horse, and exploiting the code of hospitality to launch a massacre, he has broken something.
“To burn the walls of Troy is to burn the world entire,” Damon’s Odysseus tells Anne Hathaway’s Penelope. This is more or less a paraphrase from Talmudic wisdom: “To destroy one life is to destroy the world entire,” and its more recognizable corollary, “to save one life is to save the world entire.”
The Hebrew Bible is rife with examples of hospitality in extremis. In Sodom, Lot offers his daughters to a mob of rapists rather than have them violate his heavenly guests. The result: a destroyed city and a wife reduced to a table condiment. (Just before, Abraham fed these visitors, plus another angel of God.)
But watching the film Tuesday, I was reminded of another story. Remember when I mentioned Tisha B’Av, the holiday marking the destruction of Judaism’s ancient capital?
Our tradition teaches that the second temple fell because a man holding a banquet in Jerusalem kicked out his enemy, a fellow by the name of Bar Kamtza. Humiliated by his host, Bar Kamtza plots his revenge. He goes to Caesar and tells him the Jews are conspiring against his rule. To prove it, Bar Kamtza, like the wily Odysseus, concocts a ruse, suggesting the Romans send a sacrifice to the rabbis and see if they offer it.
They don’t, as Bar Kamtza blemishes the animal, making it unfit for offering.
In The Odyssey, the famous gift horse is presented as a tribute to Athena. Its blemish is the fighting force it hides inside, ready to sack the city.
The upshot of the rejected temple sacrifice was the razing of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans. The temple is desecrated, in much the way the temple of Athena is in the film.
Christian theology doesn’t argue quite so forcefully that the violation of the Golden Rule augurs a civilizational collapse. Quite the contrary today, where xenophobia and whispers of Great Replacement — akin to the trade-wind rumors of sea peoples in Nolan’s film — have taken root in the Evangelical right. (Ezra Klein, and really anyone attuned to commentary as subtle as IMAX subwoofers, picked up on this tension.)
Jewish history tells us we fare poorly in places where the stranger isn’t welcome.
In a departure from the text, Nolan ends Odysseus’ wandering with his voluntary exile. He sails west, predicting a benighted age to come, where his exploits will be sung as men lose the ability to write.
Our story ends on a similarly bleak, yet hopeful note.
When Jerusalem fell, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai devised his own deception, sneaking past the city walls in a casket (before he was let out, zealots wanted to stab the bier, recalling the Trojans’ stabbing of the horse).
But before Yohanan can make his escape he’s intercepted by the general Vespasian, who he mistakenly refers to as the emperor. Vespasian offers a correction, but almost instantly a messenger confirms this designation, telling him Caesar died and named him his successor. Regarding Yohanan’s mistake as prophecy, he offers him a request.
Jerusalem had fallen, self-determination was unrealistic, and so Yohannan asks for the city of Yavneh and its sages. From there our modern history began, literacy thrived and a dark age was subdued.
The Temple and Troy have yet to be rebuilt, but their legends live on.
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