When I got home from work the house was suspiciously quiet. Then I heard a rustling from the bathroom. There I found the kids, happy as could be, next to a portable heater going full blast, though the ceiling air conditioner was running full blast. The bathtub was packed with fiberfill fluff and there were scissors on the floor, the empty throw cushions from the sofa, and a few animals which, when I left for work that morning, still had their stuffing.

“We’re making cotton candy” was all they said.

Much has been said about discrimination and the lack of inclusion of women in the Israeli labor market. Countless studies on this topic have been written in Israel and around the world. But what about discrimination against mothers? Actually, not just mothers, but also fathers. I’ll call it “discrimination against the parents of schoolchildren.”

In the Israeli education system, there are three months of vacation a year. Two months in the summer, and nearly an additional month when Sukkot, Pesach, Hanukkah, election days and other days are added together. That’s a quarter of the year. In standard workplaces, employees are allotted one to two weeks of vacation, depending on their seniority and how long they’ve been employed. What do they do with the kids the rest of the time?

It is true that in recent years, “summer and holiday school” has been established, and that’s a huge and welcome change for the better. But there are still many vacation days left when those not employed in education have to go to the office or to their businesses while their kids are enjoying themselves at home.

According to a non-scientific survey I conducted, there are very few mothers of school children who manage to integrate into the Israeli economy in senior positions. In the business sector there are almost no women CEOs who have school-aged children at home, and the same goes for the Knesset and the government: at the elected and other senior levels I’ve found almost no mothers with school-aged children at home.

These mothers are doubly challenged in the job market. Apart from the inherent discrimination against women in key positions in the economy, they also have to deal with the impossible challenge of school vacations – 25% of the year.

There are over two million families in Israel, over half of them have at least child of school age. That’s more than a million mothers. How many of them are represented in the Knesset? In the government?

Perhaps the reason for the nonexistent representation of these mothers at senior levels of Israeli politics and business is that it is not possible, in Israel, to meet the impossible challenge of advancing at work while the kids are running loose at home!

First published by ‘The Times of Israel’.

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The conflation of Israel advocacy and Israel education has resulted in growing numbers of North American Jews ill prepared to understand and negotiate the complexity of contemporary Israel.

New initiatives are launched to prepare young and old to respond to calls for BDS, to defend Israel’s legitimacy, to deepen their appreciation of the historic achievements of the Jewish state reborn. Leadership avoids investing in substantive Israel education and as a result, the drift continues, gulfs widen, large numbers turn away. Israel education can provide contexts for thinking critically about complex Israel related issues and developing one’s own vision of what Israel can and should be. While intensifying debate, Israel education can also strengthen connection and engagement. It is time for Jewish leadership to invest significantly in serious sustained Israel education.

* * *

Pre-State Visions

For many years, I have taught a class titled “Pre-State Visions: Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, and Magnes” in which participants read excerpts from each of these pre-state Zionist leaders. After outlining the context of the Yishuv during the Palestine Mandate (l920-1948), participants zero in on the different visions these leaders proposed for the emerging “Jewish homeland in Palestine” — the language of the Balfour Declaration. Each held different views on core issues: Should the future homeland/state be socialist or capitalist? Secular or religious? Should it be a Jewish state or a bi-national state? The responses to these dilemmas provided the ideological foundation for the pre-state movements — a harbinger for the robust and noisy multi-party politics of Israel today.

Each of these Zionist schools of thought had partner organizations in North America and Europe which amplified their visions and mobilized support — financial and human. Back then, American Zionist leaders identified and supported groups that had conflicting visions of what the future entity in Palestine should be. As but two examples, if you were an adherent of the revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, you likely supported a Jewish state on both sides of the River Jordan; and if you were a member of Hashomer Hatzair, you likely supported a bi- national socialist state.

Early Statehood

When Israel was attacked after declaring independence in May l948, world Jewry rallied to provide essential financial and political support during the state’s first decades. In North America, a wide network of national Jewish organizations emerged that focused on telling the history of 20th century Jewry — from the Holocaust to the building of the Jewish state — and marshalled historic levels of financial and political support. Post l967, Israel advocacy enabled American Jews to learn the history of the young state, embrace its achievements, and mobilize political support on its behalf. This became, as Jonathan Woocher z’’l described in his 1985 book Sacred Survival, a core pillar of the “civil religion” of North American Jewry. The American Zionist groups, which had heralded different visions of what the future State of Israel should be, withered. North American Jewry focused, both in its advocacy and education programs, on teaching and inculcating Israel’s founding core narrative — in Weizmann’s words, “the solution for a people without a land and a land without a people.” Israel’s dazzling accomplishments were celebrated, support was mobilized, and checks were written. This period will stand as one of the great accomplishments of 20th century American Jewry. However, growing sectors of North American Jewry — particularly the younger generations who had not lived through either the Holocaust or the state’s first decades — found themselves increasingly ill prepared to understand or negotiate the complexity of contemporary Israel.

Israel Advocacy/Israel Education

If Israel advocacy can be understood as mobilizing American Jewry to stand with and champion the people of Israel as they build the state, Israel education can be understood as providing settings to study the historic connection of the Jewish People with Israel, the history of Zionism, the history of Jews and Palestinian Arabs in Palestine/Israel, and to understand and work their way through some of the difficult “gray areas.” The purpose of Israel education is both to deepen connection with the State of Israel and its people and to provide contexts for students young and old to develop their own visions of what Israel can and should be.

Four examples of “gray issues” that beckon serious examination:

In a May 2018 article titled “As Israel turns 70, many young American Jews turn away,” Northeastern University Professor Dov Waxman wrote that most young Jews are liberal and it is increasingly “hard for them to reconcile the values they have internalized with the idea of a state that gives preferential treatment to Jews at the expense of its non-Jewish citizens.” As Waxman observed, most American Jews are liberal nationalists, committed to equality. The Zionism that prevailed is a conservative nationalism, preferencing Jews. A second example: Our narrative has Israel being continually attacked by its hostile Arab neighbors (and we were). However, both the Suez War of l956 and the 1967 Six-Day War are now viewed by some historians as pre-emptive wars launched by Israel (with allies in l956) in response to aggressive threatening behavior from its Arab neighbors. A third: While many celebrate Israel as the lone democracy in the Middle East, Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens garners widespread scrutiny. Fourth, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians since l967 is increasingly regarded as a hostile occupation that violates human rights. Each of these issues is markedly different but they are among those that surface and require serious study — introducing students to their complexity, the various perspectives on each, and their multiple surrounding narratives. The objective is to help students learn about the issues, recognize different perspectives, and develop their own views.

Young American Jews and Israel

These issues can be studied and worked through, but not by ignoring them. Young American Jews are increasingly introduced to these and similar issues on college campuses, which leads them to often ask “why didn’t they tell us?” A 2018 qualitative study of high school graduates from four Jewish day schools — two Modern Orthodox and two community schools — was prepared by Rosov Consulting with the support of the Avi Chai Foundation. In the 2018 report titled “Devoted, Disengaged, and Disillusioned,” one high school alum captured a view shared by many: “I realized how one sided the information was that we were provided in high school.” Another likened his day school education to being “plugged into a propaganda machine.” The Rosov/Avi Chai report concludes “we are left with a strong sense of a group of individuals who feel their schools have failed them.” To repeat, this was not a study of marginal Jews, it was a study of graduates of Modern Orthodox and Jewish community high schools.

Having been denied space or time to grapple with these and other issues in their day schools, synagogues, congregational schools, Jewish summer camps, or Israel trips, students are often angry — why didn’t they tell us? Growing numbers feel bewildered if not betrayed, and some intuit that Jewish leadership lacks confidence that studying such issues can lead to positive outcomes for identified Jews who care deeply about Israel.

While empirical data about the long-term impact of Israel education is scarce, anecdotal reports and preliminary studies appear to confirm that providing contexts to examine such issues strengthens long term connection to and engagement with Israel. Dr. Bethamie Horowitz authored an important 2020 study of the alumni of Kivunim — an Israel based gap year program. Of the 589 alumni who attended Kivunim from 2006 to 2019, 65 percent participated in the study. Overwhelmingly, the study details how Kivunim alumni appreciate and value the program’s educational vision, which includes studying the historic debates within the Zionist movement, requires the study of both Hebrew and Arabic, and fosters critical thinking about the complexity of Israel’s history and contemporary challenges. The report concludes: “Alumni felt that Kivunim gave them a way to address the most troubling challenges of contemporary Israel while helping them develop profound connection to it.”

The Israeli Reality

The reality of Israel is complicated. In all societies, one’s founding mythic history avoids nuanced issues and there is often distance between a country’s lofty ideals and contemporary realities. Americans are now grappling with this vis-à-vis race in America. The delta between what is and what could be, the world as we know it and our visions for the future, provides the context for deep study, for more deeply understanding Israel, and for determining how one can most effectively be an ally in shaping Israel’s future.

Israel remains a dazzling historic achievement — politically, economically, culturally and beyond. Israel also faces a range of challenges, including maintaining its security in a changing regional and global context, reducing economic inequality, clarifying the proper religion-state balance, strengthening the fabric of Israel’s democracy including the demographic challenge of Israeli rule over millions of Palestinians who do not enjoy civil and political equality. These challenges provide a rich agenda for study and learning, which can lead to enhanced engagement.

Effective Israel Education

To be sure, effective multi-year Israel education will have many objectives. It will seek to enable the student to learn about the historical, cultural, and religious connection of the Jewish People to the land and people of Israel. It will enable the learner to understand the historical context in which Zionism emerged. It can provide a window into and an experience of Israel’s amazing cultural, economic and technological vibrancy. Effective Israel education will speak to the learner’s heart and head. But beyond these important objectives, effective Israel education can enable the learner to think critically about the complicated “gray” issues of Israel’s history and its contemporary challenges and provide the context for each student to develop his or her own views and visions of what Israel can be.

While most American Zionist groups withered over time after l948, small groups emerged on both the political right and left advocating policies for different visions of Israel’s future. That said, the largest centrist organizations of American Jewry — the Reform and Conservative religious movements, the Federations, the national coordinating bodies of Jewish community centers, Hillel, and Jewish summer camps — migrated to advocacy. As their memberships reflected the wide spectrum of views held by American Jews on issues in Israel, in avoiding issues where there were growing differences of opinion — particularly in recent decades as debates about settlements and religious diversity in Israel became more important for American Jews — the largest North American Jewish organizations became potent and effective advocates for Israel. Political leadership in Israel — whether under the Labor Party or the Likud — and the leadership of the Jewish Agency welcomed this transition. In a hostile and challenging environment, Israel’s leadership welcomed an American Jewry that was supportive and actively advocated on its behalf, not one with visible debates about core values, conflicting visions, or alternative policies.

But we are at a different moment. To be sure, strong Israel advocacy will continue to be essential moving forward — mobilizing North American Jewry to stand with the people of Israel. However, if we are to engage future generations with Israel, we will need to provide time and space in our key Jewish educational institutions — day schools, Jewish summer camps, youth groups, in synagogues and on Israel trips — to learn about and grapple with the complexity of Israel’s history and the range of views on contemporary issues. We will need to provide a context for young and old to forge their own views and visions of what Israel can and should be. When I was quietly discussing these ideas with colleagues some years back, one asked: If we place the challenging issues on the table, might large numbers of Jews walk away? To which I answered: Most will emerge with a far clearer understanding of why and how Israel was created, of its legitimacy, and the multiple challenges it continues to face. And this can lead to strengthened identification with Israel, commitment to it, and active engagement. Credible Israel education can enable young and old to legitimate Israel on the basis of views developed after wrestling with Israel’s history and contemporary issues and aligning their views about Israel with their deepest values.

Conclusion

There are examples of serious Israel education sprinkled throughout the landscape of American Jewry, but they are few and far between. They must be massively scaled; Jewish educators need to be prepared to lead such efforts; age appropriate curricula will need to be developed. This will require significant sustained funding and will only take place if Jewish leadership in Israel and North America recognize the urgency to do so. This will require encouraging young and old to debate core assumptions and policies and settings to develop one’s own vision, conflicting visions, of what Israel can and should be. If seriously undertaken, it will be messy and noisy, reminiscent of pre-state Zionist debates, but the noise will reflect heightened engagement in shaping Israel’s future. With confidence in the legitimacy of Israel and the Jewish People, serious sustained Israel education can stem the drift and distancing currently underway.

The choice is before leadership. Will we invest in serious Israel education? Or will the attraction of a still potent support/advocacy engine, if declining in numbers, mean that the drift continues and more and more Jews turn away — not in anger, not as opponents — but because there is simply no place within our community to grapple with the complexity of contemporary Israel? The choice is before us.

Notes

Dr. Bethamie Horowitz and Amanda Winer, Kivunim Alumni Study, 2020: www.kivunim.org/alumni-study

Professor Dov Waxman, “As Israel turns 70, many young American Jews turn away,” May 3, 2018. The Conversation: theconversation.com/as-israel-turns-70-many-young-american-jews-turn-away-95271

“Devoted, Disengaged, Disillusioned” Rostov Consulting, November 2018: www.rosovconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/7-Years-Later-Final-Report-FINAL-20181101.pdf

Israel Education: The Next Edge, Edited by Jonny Ariel, The Jewish Agency, 2020.

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Yom HASHOAH, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is a solemn day in which we remember the six million Jews, including one and a half million children, along with millions of others who were victims of Nazi brutality who were murdered between 1933-1945; honor the 330,000 survivors worldwide, a third in Israel; and recognize how the absence of a Jewish state in which European Jews could take refuge directly contributed to the Shoah.

There was nothing inevitable about the Holocaust. It is history’s most tragic example of what happens when people and governments are indifferent in the face of evil. At a time of high levels of anti-Semitism, the United States and the Western world were indifferent. President Roosevelt did not want World War II to be perceived as a war for the Jews, who were expendable, just as other religious and ethnic minorities are in 21st century genocides today. Hitler’s original goal was to make Germany judenrein, free of Jews, but they had nowhere to go. Hitler proceeded carefully and methodically, taking one ghastly step after another, gauging German public and world reaction, and seeing none proceeded to the Final Solution.

He got a clear signal and said so publicly that the world did not care about the Jews:

>At the 1938 Evian Conference of over 30 countries called by the US to deal with the plight of German Jewish refugees, our country refused to take the lead in lifting rigid immigration quotas;

>In May 1939, the liner SS St. Louis, carrying over 900 German Jewish refugees was refused landing rights in Miami after waiting for three days.

>No US sanctions were imposed on Germany until after the US entered the war.

> President Roosevelt and his close friend US Felix Frankfurter brushed off the eyewitness account provided to them by courageous Polish diplomat Jan Karski, who risked his life by going into the Warsaw Ghetto.

>Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, instructed his editors to bury stories of the Holocaust.

>American Jewish leaders were largely passive in refusing to pressure Roosevelt, concerned at raising anti-Semitic sentiment.

>Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long instructed US Consulates in Europe to do everything possible to delay Jews from entering the US, leaving one million visa slots unused during the Holocaust.

>The staff of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau presented him with a 1944 report remarkably entitled “The Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews”, leading Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board, which saved tens of thousands of Jews, working with courageous people like Raul Wallenberg, but too late to save more.

Upon the liberation of the death camps, to his great credit, Nazi atrocities were first filmed and revealed to the world by Supreme Allied Commander (later President) Dwight Eisenhower. But the staggering dimensions of the Shoah were not understood. The Holocaust quickly took a back seat as the focus of the US and the western world were the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

>Only a tiny fraction of Nazi perpetrators were tried at Nuremberg, and some senior Nazi officials were recruited by US intelligence against the Soviets.

>Jews trying to reclaim their confiscated homes and businesses were driven off or even killed in Poland and Lithuania and post-war restitution laws in west Europe were inadequate.

>Many Survivors were placed in squalid Displaced Persons Camps: President Truman’s representative concluded: “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except we do not exterminate them.”

>The British, still in control of Palestine, kept over 50,000 survivors from entering in camps in Cyprus, some up to five years.

> Elie Wiesel, an eyewitness to the inferno at Auschwitz, spent years trying to get his classic book Night published.

But the monstrous dimensions of the Holocaust could not be hidden forever, although action to deal with its consequences was slow and painful. The April 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, now exactly 60 years ago, following his dramatic capture by Israeli agents in Argentina, broadcast to the world the face of evil and the dimensions of the murder of the Jew.

I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia in a home suffused with Judaism, with a father and two uncles who served in the military, but the Holocaust was never discussed and I never met a survivor. My confrontation with the Holocaust occurred after leaving the White House Staff of President Johnson and becoming research director of the presidential campaign of Vice President Hubert Humphrey against Richard Nixon, when I met a co-worker Arthur Morse, who had just published a path-breaking book While Six Million Died, exposing what President Roosevelt knew about the genocide of the Jews and failed to act upon. This was a shock to me since FDR was an icon, and I pledged to myself if ever given the chance in the US government to remove this cloud from the World War II history of the US whose brave soldiers helped win the war, but whose government did so little to save the Jews. Morse’s book opened the floodgates to a whole genre of books written by eminent historians about the Shoah and documentaries, like the 1978 NBC series “Holocaust” and Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 “Shoah”, as well as movies like” Sophie’s Choice” and Steven Spielberg’s 1993 “Schindler’s List”.

Beyond books and films, for the first time in the history of warfare, a unique process was created by which a country that had abused its own citizens and those of the countries it occupied, agreed to compensate Survivors wherever they lived. In September 1951, the first post-war German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer accepted responsibility in his world “for the unspeakable crimes that have been committed in the name of the German people.” One month later, 23 Jewish organizations, convened by Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, created the Conference on Material Claims Against Germany, the Claims Conference, and in a historic agreement in Luxembourg in September 1952, the State of Israel, represented by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, and the West German government agreed to direct payments to Survivors by Germany and through the Claims Conference. Since then, Germany has paid over $80 billion to Survivors. I became Special Negotiator in 2009, along with Roman Kent and Holocaust survivor team from Israel, Poland, and the UK, and we greatly expanded eligibility and have negotiated over $9 billion in benefits for low income needy Survivors with dramatically higher monthly pensions, Hardship Fund payments, special supplemental payment for Survivors from the former Soviet Union, increases in home care services from 34 million Euros in 2009 to 554 million Euros in 2021, and just a few weeks ago, a new 11 million Euro program to help poor Survivors obtain COVID vaccines.

Beyond the Claims Conference, I led a unique effort during my eight years in the Clinton Administration and then continuing in the Obama administration, to negotiate over $8 billion in recoveries for Holocaust survivors and heirs of victims, for the first time in history, from private companies for the harm they caused to civilians, mostly Jews, during World War II. The Holocaust was not only the largest genocide in world history; it was the largest theft, only a small fraction of which has been recovered. With the full support of the presidents and secretaries of state, we negotiated settlements of class action cases in the US against Swiss and French banks, which hid Jewish accounts deposited for safekeeping; German and Austrian slave and forced labor companies (which included payments for the first time to non-Jewish forced laborers from Poland, and other Central and Eastern European companies); European insurance companies, which refused to honor policies after the War; the French government for transporting Jews on their state-owned railway; the restitution or compensation of private and communal property (synagogues, Jewish school, community centers, even cemeteries); and the 1998 Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art and 2009 Terezin Declaration, which has led to the restitution or compensation for thousands of the 600,000 Nazi looted artworks and to pensions to survivors from Austria and Poland wherever they now live.

And yet with all of this we should be embarrassed on Yom HASHOAH, that at least 50 percent of the 330,000 Holocaust Survivors in the world are poor or near poor: some 90 percent of the 44,000 Survivors in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe; 30 percent of the 55,000 in the US (40 percent in New York City); and 35 percent of the 150,000 in the Jewish State of Israel. It is unacceptable that those who suffered so grievously in their youth, should live their declining years with further indignities. There has been an ambivalence in Israel toward its Holocaust Survivors. There is a moving moment of nationwide silence on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Yad Vashem is the remarkable testimony to the Shoah. But there were demonstrations years ago by Survivors for their inadequate benefits.

But the final word on the Holocaust must be memory not money. This is more important than ever with rising anti-Semitism in the West, and declining knowledge of the Holocaust. Survivors, the eyewitnesses, are passing away at the rate of 6 percent a year. A recent survey of American Millennials and so-called Generation Z young people showed almost half could not name a single one of the more than 40,000 concentration camps, camps or ghettos established during World War II; 56 percent could not identify Auschwitz; 63 percent did not know that six million Jews were killed; and astonishingly, 11 percent blamed the Jews for the Holocaust. Roughly half have seen Holocaust denial or distortion posted on their social media platforms. On a positive note, almost two thirds felt that Holocaust knowledge should be compulsory in schools and 80 percent believed it was important to learn about the Holocaust.

The need to preserve memory is what led me to recommend to President Carter in April 1978, a Presidential Commission on the Holocaust chaired by Elie Wiesel, which in turn proposed the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Since it opened in 1993, there have been 50 million visitors, some 90 Percent non-Jews. Yad Vashem is the second most visited site by tourists next to the Western Wall, with approximately one million visitors per year since it opened in 1953.

In January 2000, as deputy secretary of the Treasury, I worked with Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson to establish what has become the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance of over 30 countries to promote Holocaust education in their school systems. Unfortunately, only 17 of our 50 states have mandatory Holocaust education, although others permit it. In 2020, the US Congress passed the Never Again Holocaust Education Act to provide $10 million to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum for grants throughout the country to promote Holocaust education. And in our most recently Claims Conference negotiations with Germany, the German government has agreed to fund Holocaust education through the Claims Conference around the world, which began in 2020 and will increase to 18 million Euros by 2023.

But education about what happened in the Shoah is not enough. On this Yom HASHOAH, we must pledge to learn the lessons from the Holocaust in our own actions in the 21st century. In Israel, that means all Jews should respect each other, regardless of their religious practices. In 1939, before the War there were 17 million Jews in a world of two billion; today there are only 14.7 million Jews in a world of seven billion. We cannot afford to be divided. When Mengele made his “selections” at Auschwitz he did not distinguish between Orthodox, Reform or secular Jews, or ask by whom converts were converted.

More broadly, we will truly honor the memory of those who perished in the Shoah and those who survived, by being tolerant to those who are different, by race, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference; by Israelis treating all Israeli citizens as equals, Jew or Arab alike. And, yes, by improving the living standards and governance of Palestinians under the control of Israel. By maintaining a vibrant democracy that respects the rule of law and the rights of minorities, Israel will be embodying the lessons of the Holocaust.

Finally, we must stand up ourselves and press our governments, particularly the United States, to speak out and take actions against genocides and mass violations of human rights, wherever they occur: including the Ruyhinga in Myanmar; the Uighurs in China; the Kurds, Sunnis and others in Syria. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken, whose stepfather Sam Pisar, was a Holocaust survivor, have already made human rights a major pillar of their foreign policy. I hope Israel will do so as well.

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