Nadene Goldfoot
I realize today that I come from a culture that's a little different from others in the world being I'm Jewish. I come from a culture where G-d told our ancient biblical ancestors where to live, and that was in Eretz Yisrael. So I have ancestors who were people of the Bible, the Old Testament, the Torah. My culture honors our past history and uses it as a guide for our future. Perhaps others do, too.
We are looked down upon by the rest of the world to the point where some of our people are even embarrassed or even ashamed by having been a part of this culture and have tried to be a part of Others so badly. Self-hatred has been going on since Jews had first become Hellenized.
My family was on the fringe of this culture. We were American Conservatives. I was sent to Sunday school but my parents never went to to the synagogue except my mother, who also took me on the High holidays. My paternal grandmother, my Bubbie, went to her synagogue, which was the Mead Street Synagogue on 2nd. She was a widow when my dad was 4 years old. Dad was a part of the culture. He spoke Yiddish at home. I only knew a few words, like patch'n tuchus. The culture included not only religion, but food, language, friends, behaviors. jokes, swear words, curses.
Israel is again a thriving state in the world; It's the center of the news quite often, and rarely in a good light if you ask the UN. This is its 2nd and last chance to survive.
Jerusalem is the capital and was created by King David of the tribe of Judah who ruled from 1010 BCE to 970 BCE. He was the 2nd king of Israel, Saul of the tribe of Benjamin, being the first probably ruling from 1030 to 1010 BCE. The House of David supplied the kings, from David to Solomon to Rehoboam and 19 more. The Babylonians attacked and took away most of the citizens in 597 and again in 586 BCE, but they returned to the land some 60 years later. My ancestors were there. I know so much about their history. I'm an Ashkenazi Jew.
Judah continued to have Jewish rulers chosen mostly by the Romans, until the Byzantine rulers came along, and then came the Rashidun, Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates. The Abbasids, who took control of the entire empire including Jerusalem were next. Our Israel and then Judah has been under other's control, with the Ottoman Empire holding it for 400 years, and now it's back in our hands again. My ancestors wound up in Germany and then Eastern Europe in Poland and Lithuania. With a grandfather who died when my father was 4 years old, it's a miracle I was ever born. I think I've received a double dose of genes in that I'm very pro-Israel. To survive and having lived in Israel for 5 years and write in defense of Israel is amazing even to me! Who did I inherit this aptitude from? It was almost squelched several times if events that happened hadn't happened. I moved to Israel, lived there for over 5 years and taught English as a foreign language if not a 2nd language. i was never going to return to the States. They say, never say never.
Jews of America have evolved differently from the Jews that have lived in Eretz Yisrael. Meyer Levin in his book, IN SEARCH, put it beautifully. "And in reality, it came to me, the explanation for the distance that was growing between the Jew of Israel and the Jew outside Israel, between "them" and "us", was the simple fact that the outsider did not know this Jew, who was our past made present.
Despite all that had been written and told of the Yishuv in the past 30 years, few outside Palestine realized that the children brought up in the land had the Bible as their geography and their sociology rather than as a religious work; every place name of Biblical times was familiar to them as a hiking ground during their scout years, they were David's men, they were the last-ditch fighters of Masada, they were Gideon's men and they were Joshua's men, and this war was a continuation of all the wars in this land; they were falling at night upon the Hittites and the Jebusites, the Edomites and the Philistines, the Syrians, Egyptians, Iraqi, and invaders from across the Jordan. To them the Jews of America and other lands were merely the Jews who had not returned after the captivity of Babylon." Some of them were my relatives.
And the Jews of America? How did they feel about the Israelis? I started dating at age 15 in 1949 when Israel was 4 years old, and I know I had one male friend who talked about wanting to go over and help the Israelis. He could have been 17, but he didn't.
My moving to Israel came about because of events that happened at my husband's high school where he was teaching outside of Ontario, Oregon. Anti-Semitism came in the form of comic books given to the students there. Then, skin heads, real Jew-haters, held meetings at his Kiwanis breakfast club restaurant. We looked into the need for English teachers in Israel and found the need was great. We were the only Jews in Ontario. We drove to Boise to go to the synagogue there.
Meyer Levin (October 7, 1905 – July 9, 1981) was an American novelist. Perhaps best known for his work on the Leopold and Loeb case, Levin worked as a journalist (for the Chicago Daily News and, from 1933–1939, as an editor for Esquire).
It makes me feel that I'm not alone in my thinking as I kept reading Levin's book. He went on saying that "on the positive side, it is generally recognized that the valor of our people in Israel has won universal admiration and given a new conception of the Jew to populations that were previously anti-Semitic, if only through folklore based on falsity."
IN SEARCH was published in 1950. He hadn't yet seen The Six Day War of 1967 when Israel was really admired as they were attacked by ALL the countries of the Middle East and still they won. But it was a short-lived admiration. I got into IN SEARCH after reading Levin's book, THE Settlers, all 832 pages of this hard-backed book that tells about the Jewish pioneers of Palestine in the 1st aliyah or close to it. Set in Palestine from the turn of the century to the Balfour Declaration, it encompasses over a quarter of a century of turbulent events; pioneering, Turkish overlords, Jews and Arab relationships, flood feuds, hatred, WWI, Russian Revolution, Jewish fighting force centering around the Chaimovitch family from Czarist Russia.
"And the old old proposition is advanced again: Let the Jews outside Israel assimilate, and gradually disappear. For why need they now remain Jews? Until now, the argument runs, every Jew carried the burden of race through a kind of primordial sense of obligation to insure the survival of the group. Whether he hated his Jewishness or not, a deep inner sense of responsibility prevented him from abandoning his people--though of course many did succeed in overcoming this interdiction and there was always a seepage, a melting away....."
"This is the program offered by such logiclans as Arthur Koestler, and it is no doubt a seductive one......Koestler concluded that Jews outside of Palestine would do best to put an end to their "dual loyalties," to cease to bring up their children as Jews, and to trust that in a few generations their progeny would melt into world civilizations, as citizens of their various countries of habitation, whose culture they would have adopted."
He also wrote a book I disagree with, THE THIRTEENTH TRIBE. (Arthur Koestler, CBE was a Hungarian British Jewish author and journalist. Koestler was Jewish, born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany, but he resigned in 1938 because Stalinism disillusioned him.) My feelings about him is that he quickly learned to be a self-hating Jew. Born into Jew-hatred, it turned him into hating himself.
I know people like Koestler. There's Bernie Sanders, senator, b: September 8, 1941, 80 years old. Norman Finkelstein, b: December 8, 1953; and his pal, Noam Chomsky All tear Israel apart. I had experienced my own personal debate through email with Chomsky, and couldn't get him to call uncle once. No matter what secular evidence I used, he was mentally vaccinated against anything I brought up.
I'm at the end of my life, and feel that Israel may be the only place where Judaism has a chance to survive, and their opportunity is always in peril. Jew-hatred is the highest its been since WWII. How sad a state this is for the one religion that switched from polytheism to monotheism early on and has struggled for 4,000 years to stay afloat; the father and mother of Christianity and Islam, and they are the children who have turned against their parent religion.
According to the CBS figures, as of the end of 2018, 3.3 million immigrants have moved to Israel since 1948. Of that number, according to Jewish Agency figures, only 148,083 have come from the United States, a Jewish community that – depending on whom you count as a Jew – numbers between 5.5 to six million people.
The religion that dared to speak with G-d, who bartered with G-d, who took direction from G-d through Moses. The people who were so stiff-necked that G-d figured they'd stick with the program, and they have, through thick and thin; test after test.
So here we are today, in the nuclear age and the virus pandemic which only grows and mutates, much as the people are, acting out to get attention. We've got Iran (Persia) gaining nuclear power by the minute while announcing they will wipe out Israel, and they carry their Shi'a attitude of Jew hatred-so are serious; but there are a few Sunni countries banning together with Israel which is a good sign.
We've got shooting going on daily in our cities, the defacing of cities by rioters, where it's not even safe to step out of our homes anymore. Governments are losing control. Police are afraid to act as they're first to be blamed.
I'm thinking of the group, J Street, a group mostly Jewish who say they defend Israel while finding fault all the time, wanting to decide what Israel should do. Don't they realize that by harming Israel they are also harming Judaism? Judaism will not last in the US without Israel. It may have lasted from 70 CE to 1948, but it won't happen again. Not this time without the backing of all of us. Israel has to live, and the 6 million Jews plus in Israel will die with it rather than give into their enemy. It's the same way with Israel. There is no purpose for Israel without Judaism. That's why it was created.
The surprise is that all of these events have been foretold to happen, and they're actually happening. We're living through a prediction. The End Times were predicted. That's not scientific! We'll live through it. Isn't that what the Jews said in Germany? It was the end times for them.
Resource:
https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2021/11/our-jewish-roman-and-muslim-rulers-from.html Our list of Kings
https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2021/11/david-melach-yisrael-king-of-israel-and.html
https://www.tasnorthridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/menorah_1115_hr2.pdf on Rabbi Philip Kleinman
https://www.dw.com/en/dissident-intellectual-noam-chomsky-at-90/a-46629642
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky
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