Within a few days in late August, the world learned of the deaths of three giants of global culture: Dolly Parton, Péter Nádas, and Yayoi Kusama.

An American country singer, a Hungarian Jewish novelist, and a Japanese avant-garde artist. There is no obvious reason to place them together. They belonged to different generations, countries, artistic traditions, and cultural worlds. Yet the news of their deaths arriving within days of one another offers a reminder of something increasingly precious: culture can create common ground – and open a door into unfamiliar worlds – without requiring us to become alike.

I saw this quite literally at a Dolly Parton concert in Toronto in 2016. There were unmistakable groups: men in cowboy-style outfits, a visible Evangelical presence, and large numbers of gay and lesbian fans. Whatever else divided them – politics, religion, sexuality, social background – they all adored Dolly.

For a few hours, Parton created a community among people who might otherwise have had very little to say to one another. She did not resolve their disagreements. She did something more modest and perhaps more valuable: she gave them something they could love together. I am Jewish. I do not share Parton’s Christian faith. But I do not need to share it to understand the image at the heart of her music, that human beings need something that gives them wings and something that keeps their feet on the ground; faith and humility.

Péter Nádas represented a radically different cultural universe. By coincidence, I finished The End of a Family Story three days before his death. It is an uneasy book – difficult, claustrophobic, and unsettling. Nádas was Hungarian and Jewish, and the Jewishness of his writing is integral, not incidental.

In The End of a Family Story, family, faith, politics, and memory become entangled with the violent history of 20th-century Europe. People inherit worlds they did not choose and histories they cannot simply discard.

What Europe means for Jews

For Jews, and certainly for Israelis, Europe is rarely only a geographical place. It is also memory. Sometimes longing. Sometimes fear. Sometimes culture. Sometimes a family story whose beginning we no longer know and whose ending remains unfinished.

Then there is Yayoi Kusama. I first encountered her work in person on the Japanese island of Naoshima in 2017. I later attended her major retrospective at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Again, the crowd was part of the experience. There were secular Israelis, families with children, and a large, visible group of Arab Israelis. Some had come to see the work of one of the most important artists of the past century. Others were drawn to the mirrors, dots, and pumpkins. Children seemed delighted by a universe that required no explanation before entering it. Kusama could speak to all of them for entirely different reasons.

That is what great culture can do. It does not require everyone standing before the same painting, reading the same novel, or listening to the same song to understand it in precisely the same way. It creates common ground without demanding uniformity.

That ability feels particularly valuable now. We are living through a period in which the boundary between culture and politics is becoming increasingly difficult to preserve.

Israelis experience this with particular intensity. They want to know what the singer said about Israel. Whether the writer signed a petition. Whether the artist supports a boycott. Whether the university severed relations with an Israeli institution. Whether the country voted for us or against us. These questions are not imaginary. Sometimes they matter enormously. Since the Hamas-led massacre on October 7, 2023, Israelis have learned that cultural, academic, and artistic institutions that appeared universal can suddenly become places where belonging feels highly conditional.

But allowing politics to become our only language for encountering other societies carries its own danger.

Jewish experience offers another possibility. For centuries, Jews wrote in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Yiddish, Ladino, German, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, and English. They borrowed melodies, literary forms, philosophical ideas, and languages from the societies around them. They participated in surrounding cultures while stubbornly refusing to disappear inside them.

That tension between belonging and particularity became one of the great creative forces of Jewish life. Israel should understand this better than most. The Jewish state was not created so that Jews could stop encountering the world. It gave Jews a sovereign home from which to encounter it. That distinction matters today. Israel sometimes feels extraordinarily alone. Its relationship with parts of the cultural world has become strained. Israelis arrive at international encounters wondering whether they will be welcomed as individuals or judged first by the passport they carry.

The understandable response is to retreat. To stop listening. To divide everything between those who are with us and those who are against us. We should resist that temptation.

The cowboys, Evangelicals, gays, and lesbians in Toronto did not become one another when Parton walked onto the stage. The secular Israelis, Arab Israelis, and families with children in Tel Aviv did not need to experience Kusama in the same way. Nádas did not make the contradictions of Jewish and European history disappear; he turned them into literature.

Perhaps that is what these three artists, whose deaths entered the news so unexpectedly close together, have in common. Great culture does not erase the boundaries between people. Nor does it require agreement. It gives us permission to cross into unfamiliar territory, to become curious about lives unlike our own, and even to discover something of ourselves there.

Three artists. Three distinct worlds. And three reminders that sharing a culture does not require sharing politics, a religion, or a history.

Published in The Jerusalem Post

The post What three cultural giants can teach us about finding common ground first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Recently, voices from across Israel’s political divide – from Bennett’s Beyachad party to the Movement for Quality Government – have proposed placing the Declaration of Independence at the opening of Israel’s future constitution, thereby elevating it to the apex of the country’s normative legal hierarchy. Former Supreme Court chief justices, Meir Shamgar and Aharon Barak, have expressed similar views. Is this appropriate?

The impulse is easy to understand, even compelling. The Declaration is an Israeli canonical text – without equal. For decades, Israelis have recognized the almost miraculous significance of the broad consensus reached by the leaders of the pre-state Yishuv. At the very moment the state was being born, with its survival still in doubt, they managed, through words, to give form to the Israeli spirit of a Jewish people renewing its life in its homeland.

The Declaration tells our story at the singular turning point when the Jewish people returned to history as a people. It is a capsule of distilled Israeli DNA, implanted in our national bloodstream by the founding generation as a gift to those who followed. It would therefore seem only natural to give it pride of place at the head of our future constitution.

But we should not.

Anyone who wants to preserve the Declaration’s exalted status above Israel’s political disputes must recognize the distinction between two very different kinds of discourse: one of identity and one of rights. The Declaration belongs to the first. It should serve as an instrument for forging shared identity. It is Israeli identity’s home port – the place from which Israelis set sail into the riptides of disagreement and to which they return to recover a sense of common belonging. Its success in fulfilling this historic role depends on broad popular support, both emotional and intellectual.

That support, however, will not survive if the Declaration is transformed from an identity-defining national canon into a legal instrument for determining rights. Dragging it into the discourse of rights will damage it, because that discourse plays out through judicial rulings, with winners and losers. When one side seeks to defeat the other by invoking the Declaration, it pushes its opponent toward rejecting the Declaration itself – thereby diminishing its value as a shared identity asset.

That erosion of the Declaration’s symbolic, educational, and identity-building power has already begun. During the dramatic Supreme Court hearing on the “reasonableness standard,” the lawyer representing the government challenged the Declaration’s importance, arguing that it had been drafted by an unrepresentative group, written in haste, and is old and anachronistic. He later clarified and softened his remarks, but the damage had been done: the Declaration had been deeply scarred.

At the other extreme, a Supreme Court justice, in a supremely activist lone opinion in the case concerning the “Tiberias Law,” held that the Declaration is the fundamental norm on which the entire Israeli legal system rests. He thus set in motion an intellectual and legal project that seeks to turn the Declaration into a legal trump card – one that could serve as the basis for judicial review even of Basic Laws.

The justice reiterated this position in a ruling handed down last week on the law freezing the arrests of Haredi draft evaders. In his view, the law “was enacted outside the scope of the Knesset’s authority and is therefore void,” because it infringes the right to “full equality” enjoyed by all citizens by virtue of the operative legal force he attributes to the Declaration.

Those seeking to incorporate the Declaration into a future constitution are embracing this justice’s position – and taking it a step further. In doing so, they risk turning the Declaration from a cultural asset into a legal weapon. Their well-intentioned effort to elevate its status could end up, paradoxically, destroying the very value it holds for all of us.

We suffer from a toxic syndrome: the Israeli public conversation repeatedly gravitates toward the discourse of rights while neglecting the discourse of identity. We choose to shift the center of gravity of our cultural disputes away from the public arena – ideology, politics, and the marketplace of ideas – and into the judicial arena, where binding decisions are handed down. Those who cherish the Declaration must resist placing it in the legal arena. The debate over judicial review of ordinary laws and Basic Laws should not be decided by invoking the noble words of the Declaration of Independence.

We live on shifting sands. Precisely for that reason, we have an urgent – even existential – need for a fixed point of consensus capable of holding us together. The closest thing we have to such a fixed point – our one secular sacred text – is the Declaration of Independence.

We must not squander the founding generation’s gift.

Published in jns

The post Israel’s Declaration: A Secular Sacred Text, Not a Legal Weapon first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

It would be more fun to write a feel-good column on the promise of a much better year. But reality points the other way. A convergence of trends and events – some global, some local – threatens to turn 5787 into a “perfect storm”: several forces coming together, each likely to confront us with challenges even greater than those we have already endured.

At home: political instability, intensifying internal conflict, accelerating net emigration, and continuing security threats. Abroad: artificial intelligence; a climate spinning out of control; instability in the international system and intensifying great-power competition; and, as a result of all these, the continued rise of antisemitism, which, true to form, blames Jews for every ill.

I hope I turn out to be wrong. But I may not.

The problems facing Israel in the new year

Let’s start in Israel. Elections will be held shortly after the holidays. Months of polling, including surveys conducted in recent days, point to a political deadlock. Like two wrestlers in the ring, the political “blocs” have each other by the throat, with neither able to prevail. If that holds, we can expect a replay of the election years of 2020–2023 and prolonged instability. This time, however, the social reality is more extreme – most Israelis identify the social rift as the greatest risk facing Israel –despite the immense challenges of the security environment. As conditions deteriorate, more Israelis are leaving the country, including many who are part of the backbone of the economy.

The security and foreign-policy fronts are also unstable – and in some respects, worsening. Israel has failed to achieve a decisive victory on any front. The IDF is stretched to the limit in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, while another “round” with Iran looms as a very real possibility. The security burden on military personnel and the Israeli economy is enormous – almost unprecedented.

The international outlook is no brighter. On the eve of the new year, Britain – once a close Israeli ally – imposed unprecedented sanctions on Israel. Eleven other European countries have followed suit, including major EU members. Israel’s standing in the United States is deteriorating as well. On both sides of the political divide, rhetoric toward Israel and Jews is becoming more extreme. Israel has already become a major issue in the midterm elections – not to its advantage – and as the 2028 presidential race heats up, the situation is likely to worsen. Public support for Israel is at a historic low. Then there is antisemitism. In Europe, this is old news – and the situation is bad. But over the past year, antisemitism in the United States, together with denial of Israel’s right to exist, has also surged and gained legitimacy, with such views now openly voiced by influencers and politicians. Antisemitism and rejection of Israel have become intertwined, threatening Jewish life in the Diaspora and becoming a national-security challenge for Israel itself.

Added to these are global challenges that will significantly affect Israel. The first is artificial intelligence. Many experts now expect AI to advance faster than previously thought – and to reshape our lives sooner than expected. There will be benefits, but the labor market and global economy also face the real prospect of a severe crisis – one that could last until economies and governments adapt to this new environment. Israel, whose economy is driven by its technology sector, is especially exposed.

Over all of this hangs the climate crisis. On its own, it might not drastically alter the international system. Combined with other pressures, however, it could become a major factor. Together, these trends intensify instability in the international system and sharpen great-power competition – both with consequences for Israel.

Some of these trends are beyond our control, and Israel has little influence over them. That does not exempt Israel from confronting them and preparing for their effects. Others – those directly involving Israel – are much more within our power to shape. Some result from government policy; others from external forces. But in both cases, we can do more to address them. The challenges awaiting us in 5787 could coalesce into a perfect storm. But this outcome is not inevitable; the choices we make can soften the blow. Despite it all – happy new year!

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post The Perfect Storm: Why this Rosh Hashanah May Start Israel’s Most Challenging Year Yet first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Last week, I found myself walking through Vienna in the footsteps of two women whose disappearance had transfixed the Israeli public.

Mali Yahalomi and her daughter Liel disappeared during a trip to Europe. Their relatives were desperate for news. Israeli officials became involved, the embassy appealed for help, and people kept asking a seemingly obvious question: How can two women simply disappear in the middle of Vienna in 2026?

I happened to be in the city shortly afterward. By then, the two had been found. I was not searching for them. Instead, I looked at the environment they had moved through.

What struck me was the ubiquity of surveillance. At Vienna’s main railway station alone, dozens of security cameras were plainly visible. Cameras were also visible in shops and public spaces. Like virtually every major European capital, Vienna is a city in which movement through transportation hubs leaves digital traces.

That made me reconsider the Israeli reaction.

Many had wondered why the Austrian Federal Police could not locate the two women more quickly. With cameras, mobile phones, digital payments and transportation records, how difficult could it be to reconstruct the movements of two people?

Walking through Vienna, however, I began to wonder whether this was the wrong question. Perhaps the more interesting issue was not what a modern state can discover but what a liberal democracy is entitled to do with information about adults who may be acting voluntarily.

Important limits remain to what can be said about this investigation, and parts of the case remain subject to legal restrictions. It would be wrong to speculate about what the Austrian police knew, when they knew it, or which tools they used. Public reporting suggests circumstances more complicated than a simple case of two people seeking privacy. The case should not be forced into a neat philosophical parable.

But the questions it raises remain.

For many Israelis, the assumption was straightforward. A mother and daughter had vanished. Their relatives were terrified.

The two had failed to return home as expected. Surely the police should find them and say where they were. There is something recognizably Israeli in that assumption.

Israel is an intensely familial society. Parents remain involved in the lives of adult children. Children assume responsibility for aging parents. Extended families mobilize during crises. When someone disappears, this can rapidly become a family emergency, a community emergency, and sometimes a national one.

Israel’s security culture reinforces that instinct. Israelis routinely accept intrusions into privacy in the name of safety that many Europeans might find uncomfortable. We open our bags at entrances, answer questions at airports, and encounter security checks in everyday life. In an emergency, we expect the state to use the tools at its disposal. When someone goes missing, our instinct is simple: find them.

European law and political culture often act from a different premise.

Privacy and data protection occupy an unusually prominent place in European law and political culture. European political systems remain deeply conscious of the dangers created when governments possess extensive information about individuals with too few restraints on how it can be used.

The distinction matters. A city can possess extensive surveillance capabilities without assuming that the resulting information belongs to relatives, the press, or the public. The ability to determine where someone is does not automatically entitle others to know.

The question becomes particularly uncomfortable when an adult disappears voluntarily. If someone has been kidnapped, attacked, or coerced, the responsibility to intervene is clear. But what if an adult chooses to leave and does not want to be found? Does her family have a right to know where she is? Does the public? Does the press? At what point does the obligation to search end and personal autonomy begin?

Such questions can sound almost offensive in an Israeli context when frightened relatives are involved. Our instinct is that their anguish should outweigh almost every competing consideration.

If the police have information, tell them. If technology can locate someone, use it. The idea that an adult might possess something approaching a right to disappear can clash with a culture built around unusually strong bonds of family and collective responsibility.

Yet on one crucial point, I think the European instinct is correct.

An adult who is competent, safe, and acting freely does not lose her privacy because those who love her desperately want information. Even the strongest bonds do not give us an unconditional claim to another adult’s whereabouts or reasons for leaving. In this sense, the right to disappear is not the right to obstruct a lawful investigation; it is the right to go against the notion of automatic disclosure.

But privacy should not require cruelty.

Once police establish that a missing adult is alive, safe, and acting voluntarily, there is a strong case for telling loved ones precisely that, so long as doing so creates no further safety risk. Police need not reveal the person’s location or other information she wishes to keep private. The family deserves reassurance, not necessarily disclosure.

That distinction offers a way to reconcile two values that need not be absolute rivals: the understandable need to know that someone we love is safe and the individual’s claim to autonomy.

None of this means that Europeans care less about family or that Israelis care nothing about privacy. The difference emerges when legitimate values collide.

Israeli’s collective reponsability

Israel gives exceptional weight to family solidarity and collective responsibility, reinforced by a security culture in which protecting life can justify intrusions into personal autonomy. European institutions and political culture often give greater formal weight to privacy, individual choice, and restraints on state power.

This is what stayed with me as I walked through Vienna. Israelis had looked at the disappearance primarily as a practical problem: Where are they, and why have the police not found them? I began to see a harder question beneath it: How much are we entitled to know about an adult who does not want to be found?

Israelis and Europeans frequently speak of their shared democratic values. But sharing values does not mean ranking them in the same order. Both value security, privacy, family, freedom, and human dignity. Their differences emerge most clearly when those values collide.

Here, I believe the balance should be clear. The state should establish that a missing adult is safe. The family deserves to know that much.

After that, the right to disappear may indeed be a right.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post The right to disappear: What Israel can learn from Europe about privacy first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

AI may not change what it means to be Jewish. But it could profoundly change the institutions through which Jewish life has been transmitted from one generation to another.

At a recent Deloitte event, “The AI Bottom Line,” Ilan Birnfeld, chairman and CEO of Deloitte Israel, made an observation that stayed with me. “Artificial intelligence (AI),” he argued, “will not change us as human beings. But it will completely change our companies.”

As I listened, I wondered what would happen if we replaced “company” with “the Jewish people.” AI may not change what it means to be Jewish. But it could profoundly change the institutions through which Jewish life has been transmitted from one generation to another. And once those institutions change, can the people they sustain really remain unchanged?

Birnfeld’s point about companies is more radical than the familiar argument about efficiency. If AI allows an employee to complete in 10 minutes something that previously took three hours, the important question is not simply how much time has been saved. It is why the company should continue organizing itself around a task that once required three hours. AI therefore forces organizations to reconsider not simply how people work, but what particular jobs, hierarchies, and institutions are for.

THE JEWISH world should begin asking the same question.

How AI can impact Jewish life

Take Jewish education. For centuries, meaningful access to Jewish knowledge depended heavily on access to people. You needed a teacher to learn Hebrew, a rabbi to guide you through religious texts, a scholar to explain Jewish history. Geography mattered enormously. So did language, money, and the accident of being born into a community large enough to provide those resources.

AI is beginning to lower those barriers. A Jewish child in a small community without a Hebrew teacher can have a private AI tutor available every day. Someone who has never studied Aramaic can ask for an explanation of a passage of Talmud, compare interpretations, and then ask follow-up questions. A secular Israeli curious about Maimonides can enter that intellectual world without entering a yeshiva. Jewish texts that were once accessible mainly to specialists can increasingly be approached by almost anyone.

This does not make the teacher or rabbi obsolete. It does something more interesting: it changes what we need them for.

If information and explanation become abundant, the value of the teacher increasingly lies elsewhere: judgment, interpretation, intellectual discipline, example, and human relationship. Abundance, after all, does not guarantee reliability. The question shifts from “Who has the knowledge?” to “Whose judgment do I trust?”

The same disruption may reach one of the foundations of Jewish identity: memory.

Jewish civilization has placed memory close to the center of collective existence. “Zakhor,” remember, is not simply an instruction to preserve information. Jewish civilization repeatedly transforms memory into obligation.

Now imagine a Jewish teenager 20 years from now conversing with an AI system built around a verified archive of thousands of hours of Holocaust survivor testimony. She does not simply watch a recorded interview. She asks questions. The system answers on the basis of the words, experiences, and historical record left behind by those who are no longer alive. There is enormous educational potential here. But there must also be a clear boundary.

AI should help us interrogate testimony; it should never be permitted to manufacture testimony. The distinction is fundamental. A survivor’s recorded words belong to history. A plausible sentence generated by an algorithm but never spoken by that survivor does not. The temptation to make memory more vivid could inadvertently make it less truthful.

For the Jewish people, that danger is particularly acute. We have spent generations documenting the past precisely because historical truth matters. AI should make archives more accessible, searchable, and conversational. It should not turn the dead into fictional characters capable of saying things they never said. In the age of AI, “Zakhor” will therefore require something additional: remember honestly.

This may be where Birnfeld’s corporate analogy becomes uncomfortable.

When AI can perform functions that once justified particular jobs, companies must ask what those jobs are actually for. Jewish institutions will increasingly face the same test. If knowledge, translation, and even sophisticated interpretation become instantly available, what exactly are the institutions that once provided them for?

Consider relations between Israel and Jewish communities in Europe. Language remains one barrier separating Jewish worlds. Israelis inhabit a Hebrew political and cultural universe that many Diaspora Jews encounter only indirectly, while Jewish communities across Europe conduct debates that most Israelis rarely hear.

Increasingly seamless translation can lower that barrier dramatically. A Jew in Berlin may be able to follow an Israeli television debate naturally in German; an Israeli may listen to a Dutch Jewish communal discussion in Hebrew. “But translation solves access, not shared experience.”

An Israeli and an Italian Jew can understand every word the other says and still experience October 7, antisemitism, Gaza, religion, democracy, or Jewish security in profoundly different ways. AI can remove the linguistic wall. It cannot determine which questions Jews consider important, much less make them agree on the answers.

And then there is the institution AI may find hardest to disrupt: the Jewish community itself. A synagogue distributes knowledge, but that is not why a synagogue exists. Jewish communities teach, organize, and communicate, but those functions do not exhaust their purpose.

Their deeper purpose is belonging. An AI can explain the laws of shiva, but it cannot sit beside a mourner. It can teach the prayers, but it cannot make a minyan. It can generate a sophisticated interpretation of the weekly Torah portion, but it cannot accept responsibility for another human being. It can describe Jewish solidarity perfectly. It cannot practice it.

AND HERE the question of trust returns.

Trust is not simply deciding which source provides the most accurate answer. Jewish trust is relational. It is built by showing up, sharing obligations, arguing, remembering, and accepting responsibility for one another. That is a question of relationship, not information.

If a Jewish school understands its purpose principally as transmitting information, AI will challenge it. If a rabbi’s authority depends primarily on possessing knowledge unavailable to others, AI will challenge it. If a Jewish organization exists mainly to transmit information between distant communities, AI will challenge it too.

Perhaps that is not something to fear. Perhaps AI’s greatest contribution to Jewish life will be forcing Jewish institutions to identify what cannot be automated. And the answer may be surprisingly traditional: presence, responsibility, obligation, and belonging.

For much of Jewish history, Jewish institutions helped solve a problem of scarcity. Books and teachers were scarce. Knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic was scarce. Communication across continents was difficult. Access to Jewish knowledge depended heavily on where one lived and whom one knew.

We are moving toward the opposite world: one of extraordinary abundance. The great Jewish question of the AI age may therefore change. For generations, we asked: How do we give Jews access to Jewish knowledge?

Soon, the harder question may be: Why should they want it?

AI may make it easier than at any previous moment in history to study Judaism, encounter Jewish history, and communicate across the Jewish world. But access is not belonging, information is not memory, and intelligence is not responsibility.

Those still require other human beings. Perhaps this is the real lesson of Birnfeld’s observation. AI will force companies to reconsider the value of human contribution. It may force Jewish institutions to do something even more consequential: rediscover what Jewish community is for.

And the answer to that question, more than the technology itself, may shape the next chapter of the Jewish people.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post AI will not change the Jews – or will it? first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

The discovery of the remains of the Altalena has ignited yet another round of verbal broadsides between the right and the left over responsibility for that tragic historical episode. But the exchange has obscured the Altalena’s most important lesson – one that remains relevant 78 years later.

The danger of anarchy still looms. So does the danger of civil war. The only safeguard against both is mamlachtiyut – an ethos that places state authority and the common good above factional interests. Sukkot and his allies, acting in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) as though there were no sovereign, no army, and no law, threaten to drag us into the abyss of chaos, trampling what little remains of that ethos along the way. The leadership that emerges after the elections must make mamlachtiyut, in this context and more broadly, an ethical North Star.

The Altalena, a ship carrying arms brought to Israel by the Irgun in the midst of the War of Independence, was ultimately sunk by the newly formed IDF. In this battle between brothers, while war raged on Israel’s borders, 16 Irgun fighters and three IDF soldiers were killed.

Rivers of ink have been spilled over the Altalena affair and the circumstances in which the shooting began. Stripped to its essentials, however, one thing is clear: Menachem Begin, then the leader of the Irgun and later prime minister, prevented his men from widening the circle of violence and turning the terrible incident into a full-fledged civil war. “There will be no civil war while the enemy is at the gate,” he told his men through tears.

But the truly historic decision was the more difficult one taken by David Ben-Gurion.

Israel’s first prime minister coined the term mamlachtiyut and elevated it into a core value. Even before the establishment of the state, Ben-Gurion worked to entrench the principle that decisions concerning the governance and future of the Yishuv – and later Israel – must be based on the shared interest and the common good. Only in this way could Israel, in all its diversity, become one polity – one state.

The Altalena affair was the ultimate test of this principle. At the core of a state’s power, and at the foundation of its existence, lies the authority to use force. Externally, against enemies at the gate; internally, in enforcing the law and maintaining security. A fundamental condition of statehood is the state’s monopoly on the use of force. So long as force is exercised by the state, or with its authorization, it is legitimate. Once that monopoly is broken, and civilians or groups outside the state begin using weapons and exercising force, anarchy inevitably follows.

Ben-Gurion acted to prevent the young State of Israel from sliding down that slope into anarchy, to preserve the state’s monopoly on arms, and to defend mamlachtiyut.

Smashing the remains of mamlachtiyut

Seventy-eight years after the Altalena, the state’s exclusive authority to use weapons and force can no longer be taken for granted. In recent years, small but genuinely dangerous groups have repeatedly resorted to violence – sometimes using firearms – to “create deterrence” and retaliate for terrorist attacks in the hills of the West Bank.

The persistent failure to enforce the law against these groups has given rise to deep suspicion in Israel – and absolute certainty elsewhere in the world – that those charged by the Israeli government with enforcing the law in the territory are turning a blind eye to this dangerous phenomenon.

MK Zvi Sukkot’s reckless conduct gives these militias a tailwind. After misleading the IDF and putting soldiers at risk for political purposes, Sukkot embarked on a campaign of smashing Palestinian gravestones, using force without authority and taking the law into his own hands – behaving not like a public leader but like just another hilltop rioter.

Along with the gravestones, Sukkot smashed what remained of mamlachtiyut in Israel.

Beyond the incalculable damage that he and his allies are doing to Israel and the settlement enterprise in the international arena, their violent actions endanger us all.

To survive, Israel must reclaim mamlachtiyut. That means ensuring that force is wielded only by the state – but it means more than that. This civic ethos must become the North Star of every branch and level of government. Only then can we continue to disagree while preserving fair and responsible governance – and prevent ourselves from sliding into civil war.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post From the Altalena to MK Sukkot – the Smasher first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

A few years ago, a school principal told me something I have never forgotten. On the first morning of the school year, as he welcomed students back, he said that he could almost tell which children had spent part of their summer at camp.

“You can see it in their eyes,” he told me—in their smiles, their energy, even in the way they carried themselves. Children who had been away at camp often returned energized and eager. Their vacation had not simply passed; something had happened to them. They had accumulated experiences, learned new things, made new friends, and in some small but significant way, grown.

Is this what summer looks like for most Israeli children? Not really.

That principal worked in a community with many immigrants from the United States, where sending children away for several weeks at summer camp is an established part of Jewish communal life.

For many American Jewish children, summer camp is among their most meaningful Jewish experiences, and sometimes one of their most formative encounters with Israel and Zionism. Research has found strong associations between camp attendance and later Jewish engagement, including emotional connection to Israel, communal participation, Jewish friendships and the practice of Jewish traditions.

But the more important lesson is how this kind of education works.

Summer camp does not usually begin with the question, “What information should children acquire?” It creates an environment. Young people sing together, travel, argue, take responsibility, meet role models, encounter stories and traditions, form friendships and discover capacities they did not know they had. Education happens through the experience itself. That lesson belongs in Israel’s debate about the quality of our schools. It is also a reminder that Israeli education has something to learn from educational practices developed in Jewish communities abroad.

We often forget that formal schooling is only one part of the ecosystem that educates our children. Israel’s formal education system needs serious reform, renewal and investment. But alongside the debate over schools, teachers, curricula and class sizes, we should pay much more attention to the educational spaces we call “informal.”

Our public conversation about education increasingly revolves around measurable academic achievement: standardized tests, mathematics, science, English, matriculation rates and preparation for university and employment. All of these matter. But education is also about raising children who are responsible, decent, generous and sensitive to others. It is about citizenship, belonging, Jewish and Israeli identity, initiative, leadership and learning to live responsibly with others.

Parents invest enormous energy in these things at home. But children also need spaces beyond the family in which they can practice them. This is where informal education can be at its best.

The long Israeli summer vacation could become an extraordinary educational opportunity: a time in which young people continue to grow while feeling that they are on vacation; a time for independence, responsibility, generosity, encounter and adventure.

It could also be a natural setting in which to encounter Jewish and Israeli culture—not through another classroom lesson, but by hiking the land; singing together; hearing stories of immigration and pioneering; meeting different kinds of Israelis; and discovering that heritage can be joyful rather than merely obligatory. Israel has youth movements with a proud educational tradition. But their summer camps are generally short and increasingly constrained by regulation and logistical requirements. Children who do not belong to a youth movement during the year have relatively few opportunities for a substantial residential summer camp experience.

Independent summer camps and excellent educational initiatives already exist, but they remain relatively marginal. Summer camp has not become part of mainstream Israeli educational culture as it has in many North American Jewish communities.

That should change.

The point is not simply that Israel should copy an American Jewish model. For generations, the relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jewry has too often been imagined in one direction: Israel as the center providing Jewish meaning, identity and inspiration, and Diaspora communities as those expected to support, visit and connect. The reality is richer.

Jewish communities abroad have developed institutions, educational practices and forms of communal life Israeli society can emanulate. Their investment in informal education—summer camps, in particular—is one striking example. What if we treated this not only as a lesson to be imported, but as the basis for a new educational partnership?

Israeli educators, youth movements, municipalities and civil-society organizations could join forces with Jewish camps, foundations and educational institutions abroad. They could develop summer programs, train educators, exchange counselors and staff; build shared curricula; and create opportunities for Israeli and Diaspora Jewish teenagers to live, learn and grow alongside one another.

An Israeli counselor working alongside an American Jewish counselor; an Israeli teenager spending a summer with Jewish peers from Boston, London or Melbourne; educators from both communities thinking together about Jewish identity, responsibility, peoplehood and Israel—these encounters could create connections that no conference or policy document can reproduce.

At a moment when relations between Israel and parts of the Jewish Diaspora are often described through disagreement, distance and crisis, education can offer a different model: one based on partnership, curiosity and mutual responsibility. The opportunity is not for one community to replicate the other. It is to recognize that each has developed strengths and forms of Jewish life from which the other can learn. We can learn from one another and build something together.

Imagine thousands more Israeli children and teenagers spending two or three weeks each summer away from screens and classrooms, living together, hiking, creating, volunteering, debating, singing and taking responsibility for one another. Imagine some of those programs created jointly with Jewish communities abroad, bringing together young people and educators from across the Jewish world.

Such programs would do more than create better summer camps. They could strengthen Israeli education, deepen the Jewish identity of young Israelis, and create lasting personal and institutional ties between Israel and Jewish communities around the world. We spend the entire school year worrying about how to educate our children. Perhaps summer is precisely the time to think more boldly—not only about how we educate them, but about whom they learn alongside.

The long summer vacation doesn’t have to be a break from education. It could become a space where Israel and the Jewish world come together to imagine and help shape their shared future.

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The post Israel is wasting one of its greatest educational opportunities: summer first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

The growing community of citizens living overseas demands a coherent national policy.

From the afternoon of Oct. 7, 2023, as news of the atrocities along the Gaza border spread and it became clear that Israel was at war, Israelis abroad mobilized to help. Many rushed back to their reserve units. Many more set up emergency operations centers, raised money and organized every form of support they could. Yet throughout the following long years of war and more generally, many have also continued to choose life outside Israel. When we speak of Diaspora Jewry, Israelis living abroad are usually not counted as part of it. But their numbers and attachment to Israel demand serious thought and a coherent policy toward this regrettably growing community.

The controversy over Israelis living abroad begins with the numbers. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics puts their number at roughly 600,000, while the Israeli-American Council estimates some 800,000 Israelis live in the United States alone. Beyond the United States, the largest Israeli communities are in Britain, Canada, Germany and France. Some have temporarily relocated, studying abroad or spending a limited period overseas. But most have chosen to make their lives elsewhere.

Whether Israelis abroad should participate in Israeli elections is one aspect of this issue. Many Israelis see the coming election as potentially decisive for the country’s future. That is why a major effort is underway to fly Israelis home to vote; to “airlift mandates,” as the phrase goes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced that he will reserve a place on the Likud slate for Oren Dobronsky, an Israeli who has lived abroad for years. Election fever has again put Israelis overseas at the center of public debate.

But the issue deserves attention well beyond this election season.

Israeli attitudes toward those who leave have changed dramatically. Since Yitzhak Rabin’s infamous 1976 description of emigrants as a “fallout of weaklings,” Israelis have become far less judgmental of those who choose to live abroad. Even the once-common label yordim—literally, those who “go down” from Israel—has fallen out of fashion. Globalization and the growing ease of combining study and work abroad in many professions have made spending part of one’s life overseas commonplace.

Israeli attitudes have changed even toward those who leave for good; not only among Israelis who remain, but among emigrants themselves. Many still see themselves as Israeli and are prepared to do whatever they can from afar to help the country. Israelis who leave are a loss for the state, and many in Israel still resent that choice. But at times emigrants are also an asset for Israel.

One problem is how Israelis abroad are classified. For decades, the State of Israel has devoted policy attention, relationship-building and resources to “Diaspora Jewry.” Israelis living abroad, by contrast, have rarely been treated as a distinct group.

In practice, these are highly diverse communities. In many large population centers, especially in the United States, Israelis and local Jews move in separate social circles and often fail to connect because of differences in mentality and culture.

That distinction is crucial to understanding the challenge posed by Israelis abroad. Jews who grow up outside Israel are generally aware that their Jewish identity can erode and must therefore be actively cultivated. Israelis are often less conscious of the danger. Having grown up in a country where Jewish identity is simply “in the air,” many neglect it abroad. The result can be rapid erosion of both Jewish and Israeli identity. In recent years, especially in the United States, efforts have been made to mitigate that trend, but the problem persists.

Israel needs to think seriously about its relationship with Israelis abroad. Numerically, they constitute the second-largest Jewish community outside Israel. Substantively, their connection to Israel is probably stronger than that of Jews born abroad. The Israeli government must confront this reality: It should rightly seek to bring them home, but if they choose not to return, it should continue investing in preserving their identity and strengthening their bond with Israel.

Published in JNS

The post Rethinking Israel’s relationship with its citizens abroad first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.

Israeli public discourse is caught between what the Left calls the “poison machine” and what the Right calls the “poison channels.” As elections approach and every party seeks to distinguish itself, the country’s social race to the bottom is likely to accelerate. A hot – and dangerous – summer lies ahead.

The Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) examines relations among the different sectors of Israeli society through its Emotional Proximity Index, which measures Israelis’ attitudes toward 10 groups. The findings show that the two least-liked groups, to put it mildly, are Arabs and haredim (ultra-Orthodox), with the latter at the very bottom.

Beyond the grave social consequences, the nationwide emotional distance from both groups has political implications.

Each is represented by sectoral parties that many other political actors effectively blacklist: so long as haredi parties defend broad exemption from military service, they are unacceptable partners for a centrist government; so long as Arab parties are not Zionist, they are consigned to the opposition in almost any conceivable coalition.

The stark result is that broad swaths of the public deem roughly one-third of Israel’s citizens illegitimate partners in a future government. This reality is not inevitable. The coming election campaign may offer an opportunity for some social repair through daring moves that cross sectoral lines.

One emerging development suggests what may be possible: if Mansour Abbas and Yoav Segalovitz can agree on the latter leaving Yesh Atid and joining Ra’am, it would begin to challenge the current threatening image of the “Arab parties” as disloyal to the state and therefore untrustworthy.

If Segalovitz, who is known for his commitment to fighting violent crime, were then appointed national security minister after being elected on a civic platform supported mainly by Arab voters, everyone would stand to gain. The message would be even more powerful if he served in a broad government that also included right-wing parties.

Many ultra-Orthodox Jews deeply dissatisfied with haredi leadership

A similar development could take shape in haredi society. Despite the community’s celebrated unity behind its “great Torah sages,” many haredim are deeply dissatisfied with its current predicament.

Their leadership’s unrestrained rhetoric, its scandalous refusal to shoulder its fair share of the national defense burden, its resistance to employment and educational reform, and the poverty and isolation these policies perpetuate, do not reflect the free choice of thousands of haredim.

Their numbers are difficult to estimate, but it is hardly far-fetched to say that they represent at least two Knesset seats worth of haredi voters.

An organized movement of haredim seeking integration – in employment and military service – already exists. Led by Rabbi David Leibel through the Achvat Torah network, it gives expression to an authentic haredi voice – one that understands that haredi society must respond to changing realities and connect with the broader public sphere.

These haredim seek to realize the ideal of Torah im derech eretz (Torah combined with worldly engagement) without viewing this as either an imposition or a compromise. Conservative in outlook and lifestyle, they nevertheless understand that excessive conservatism breeds stagnation and that its consequences are already clearly visible in parts of haredi society.

Some haredim are plainly dissatisfied with their political representation. Although the community is growing rapidly – doubling every 20 years – its political representation has barely increased. Haredi votes are already drifting to mainstream parties, but only as individuals, quietly breaking ranks, so the message of civic partnership is lost.

A new haredi party, a concrete initiative called The Haredi Public, is already taking shape, but would be unlikely to clear the electoral threshold and would naturally seek to join an existing party. The next Knesset could therefore include one or two haredi lawmakers elected on a mainstream slate and promoting an explicitly integrationist haredi agenda.

On the surface, these would be small shifts – a handful of seats crossing the stark lines between identity groups that divide us. Their true value, however, lies in challenging the automatic labeling of the groups routinely cast as Israel’s ultimate outsiders – haredim and Arabs. If this promising trend continues, it could strengthen the common denominator of Israeli society: citizenship.

Published in the Jerusalem Post

The post Crossing the Rubicon first appeared on The Jewish People Policy Institute.