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Joel Schalit (Archive)
Israeli and American: Why Jews can have more than one home
By Roi Ben-Yehuda
Tags: Israeli immigration 

When I was a child my grandmother used to tell me that while the United States was a good place to make money, its society was morally and spiritually bankrupt. "In America", she would say, "if you fall down, no-one will help you up." Years later she actually fell down on the pavement of Manhattan and learned how wrong she was.

Despite similar fear-based warnings from our elders, for the last few decades, thousands of Israelis have been making the United States their new home. Like many immigrants, Israelis come to the United States to make a better life for themselves. The allure of social and economic mobility, along a lifestyle not dominated by the harsh realities of a never-ending war, is enough to pull them away from the home country.

It is hard to say how many Israelis are actually living in the United States. One estimate has it at around 130,000, another at 350,000, still a third at 600,000. While in comparison to other immigrant communities these numbers may not seem significant, for a country the size of Israel, the numbers are staggering. The highest estimate means that nearly 10% of Israel's population lives abroad.
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Israelis abroad tend to feel conflicted about their decision to live in the Diaspora. This tension is illustrated in the joke about an Israeli in New York who walks into an elevator and overhears a couple of Israelis speaking Hebrew. "Yordim?" he asks. "Not at all," they quickly reply, "we are here only temporarily."

Perhaps as an effort to reduce the cognitive dissonance of living in the Diaspora, many Israelis adopt different coping strategies. Some say they will imminently return (even though they have been living abroad for years); others acculturate into the host society but keep strong ties to their Israeli roots; while a third group develops a transnational identity which embraces elements of both societies while mollifying the exclusive nationalistic overtones of their identity.

The interview here with writer Joel Schalit, one of the more interesting Israeli intellectuals living in the US, explores these issues of identity and sense of home. Joel Schalit is an Israeli-American writer and editor based in San Francisco. His fifth book, Israel vs Utopia, is forthcoming from New York?s Akashic Books. Currently serving as Zeek's media editor, Schalit is the former managing editor of Tikkun Magazine and associate editor of Punk Planet . A contributor to France 24's Observers, his work has appeared in numerous publications including Alternet, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and XLR8R. Schalit has lived in Israel, Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Canada and the US.

Joel, what inspired you to leave Israel and come to the United States?

Joel: When I was twelve and a half, my father sent me to New York in order to stay with his twin sister, Bitia. A recent divorcee with a very demanding job, my father was working in Paris at the time, and needed a temporary respite from being a single parent. Though we had intended to move back to Israel, what was supposed to have been a four-month break turned out to be twenty-seven years.

Most Israelis living in the US do not identify with their host country; instead they are 'Israelis who happen to be living abroad'. Having lived in the US for many years, do you echo this pattern of identity, or would describe yourself differently?

Joel: My inclination has always been to say that I'm an Israeli first. Before I identify myself as either Jewish or American, or a twelve-year resident of San Francisco. This is despite the fact that my identity is a composite of every place I've ever lived. Nevertheless, in recent years I've become more insistent on identifying myself as an 'Israeli-American', because my outlook is deeply conditioned by both national experiences, and because I am increasingly coming into contact with other persons, like me, who have roots in both countries, and share a common world view.

You know the stereotype: We read Haaretz as though it were our local paper, we always know where the best local places to get good hummus are, we call our families in Israel all the time, and we plan our annual vacations around trips 'home', meaning Israel, even though our real homes are in the Diaspora. We get upset with American Jews for loving Israel too much, we're scared by Christian Evangelicals, and pride ourselves on the fact that we are neither religiously sentimental nor ritually observant, and have worse personal boundary problems than American Jews do.

This said, I don't think this means I don't identify with the U.S. In fact it may say more about what's happening to American identity than it does about the transportability and persistence of Israeli identity abroad, and how strong it is even when it's passed down culturally, through one's family.

Some people say that you cannot be an authentic Zionist or Jew and still choose to live outside the State of Israel. Do you consider yourself a Zionist? If so, how do you respond to the traditional Zionist claim (for instance made by A.B. Yehoshua ) that there is no alternative to Israel?

Joel: This ideological formulation is no longer valid, except for right-wingers and people familiarizing themselves with the foundations of Zionist discourse for the very first time. It is a product of its era. The ethos was spelled out during a period when Israel required mass immigration if it was going to survive, and was immersed in the construction of a new kind of civic and political culture that was necessary to create the state and give it an identity, but which most Israelis place little serious stock in any more.

The problem with the notion that you can't lead an authentic Jewish life outside of Israel is that it renders Diaspora life completely worthless, and it places a premium on the religious character of Israeli life, as exclusively Jewish. Neither is acceptable, from the perspective of respecting the rights of Diaspora Jews to make the choices they do to live happily abroad, and of recognizing the legitimate democratic rights of Muslim and Christian citizens of Israel to be treated as full citizens under the Basic Laws.

It also flies in the face of the fact that there are so many Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora who contribute to the life of the country positively, from afar, and why Israel needs those persons to always be abroad, and do for the country what they've always done. What it means to live for a country, and contribute to its wellbeing is the real issue at hand. A healthy state is never confined to any specific national boundaries. Its citizens live throughout the world, and define its health and wellbeing externally as well as internally.

Do you consider yourself a 'yored'? Or has the term become simply anachronistic?

Joel: No, I don't. It's intellectually and politically indefensible as an idea, especially if you take Zionism seriously, and understand how profoundly effective it has been as a form of political education. How can you 'step down', so to speak, if you carry Israel with you everywhere you go? How can one feel guilty about being apart from something that is inescapable?

This is Zionism's inherent paradox: Israel is a state of mind as much as it is an undeniable physical reality. If we are not reminded of it allegorically, through worship, we are confronted by it nearly every day, in the form of tragedy, on the news. As that dreadful Eagles song, "Hotel California", goes, "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

When talking to non-Israelis in the Diaspora, Israelis often reflexively become "little ambassadors" to their country (all the more so when their interlocutor expresses critical opinions of Israel). Are Israelis living abroad responsible to represent their native country in the best possible light?

Joel: The presupposition behind this question is the inseparability of Israelis from their state. It's an oppressive concept, for obvious reasons, but worst of all, because it presumes that there's an inherent symmetry between the political opinions that Israelis hold, and their government's policies.

By leaving Israel have you forfeited certain rights to be critical of Israel? After all, you are no longer experiencing the direct reality of life in Israel, nor are you also experiencing the consequences of your opinions.

Joel: What developed, modern, democratic countries insist on enforcing such mishegas? How does an Israeli 'forfeit' their rights, as citizens of the state, to have opinions about the country, if they choose to live abroad? Isn't the right to free speech guaranteed by Israeli law?

My point in responding this way is to demonstrate that such constructions are meant to enforce a certain kind of uniformity of opinion about Israel. They are not reflections of a post-colonial anxiety that Israelis are free to determine what's best for themselves, by themselves.

Can Israelis benefit from having more than one passport? Can a wide-ranging, transnational, and cosmopolitan perspective be an asset to Israeli discourse and identity?

Joel: The two regions of the world that define the modern Diaspora experience, North America, and the EU, have much stronger traditions of liberal politics than Israel does, and tend to, with certain exceptions, espouse official policies of multiculturalism and social tolerance that are lacking in Israel. These places, similarly, are more secular, and function as larger meeting spaces between Jews and their others, i.e. Muslims and Arabs.

Because of this, Diaspora Jews tend to have a better overall experience of politics than Israelis. Everything about it tends towards the superior, from the extent to which they are forced to live and work with non-Jews, to the role that the state can play in their lives. Israelis who partake of this benefit enormously, precisely because it is so alien. In my opinion, this kind of experience enhances and deepens their ability to interrogate Israeli life.

Although they associate with non-Israelis, by and large Israelis living in the U.S. tend to socialize within their own group. This exclusiveness includes a separation from the Jewish-American community. What kind of relations do you have with American-Jews? What has been your impression of the Jewish-American community(ies)?

Joel: I find it easier to associate with secular American Jews than I do with devout ones. They tend to be less conservative on social and religious questions, though, in both cases, their dealings with anyone of Israeli background tends to be heavily informed by stereotypes about Israelis, both on the left and the right. However, there are exceptions to every rule, and American Jews, despite their predilection to orientalize even Israelis, break every rank whenever given the freedom to do so.

Somewhat ironically, many Israelis become more religious in the Diaspora. This is the result of both the diversity of religious expression in the US (a synagogue of many rooms), and living as a minority and wanting to maintain a Jewish identity. Has your religiosity been affected by living abroad?

Joel: Yes, it has. The longer I've lived in the US, the more secular I've become. My reasons are entirely political. Religion is dialectical, just like any cultural formation, and can be deployed for just about any conceivable political purpose. It has no inherent ideological meaning. Given the extent to which I witnessed it being used by Americans to sanction everything from the present war in Iraq, to justifying the continuation of the Occupation, its negative usages, in a pluralistic, interfaith context, have really worn me out.

And now for the 1 million dollar/3.5 million shekel question - are you planning to return?

Joel: I miss Israel a great deal. We've spoken about it a lot the last year. However, in the short term, we are moving to London. If you compare the flying time between Heathrow and Ben Gurion, you'll have to concede that it's a hell of a lot shorter than flying from San Francisco. With my parents getting older, it will be much easier to go home on a regular basis.

Roi Ben-Yehuda is an Israeli-American writer living in Spain. He is a regular contributer to Jewcy and France 24. His blog can be read at Roi's Word Weblog

More by Roi Ben-Yehuda on Haaretz.com:

  • Notes from Barcelona post one / Epiphany in a Spanish neo-Nazi bookstore
  • Notes from Barcelona post two / Unwilling flag-wavers
  • Essential things Israelis and Iranians should know about each other
  • Keeping the faith
  • Turning Pesach from a 'wrathful' to a majestic holiday

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