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The New Aliya

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This is not the article I set out to write. My plan was to write a long-form piece about “two Zionisms”, about the way American Jews and Palestinian-Americans adapt when they move to the Holy Land (“the unabashed, can-do American spirit finds creative outlets on both sides of the conflict” – or something like that). I conducted interviews in Jerusalem and Ramallah, but my heart wasn’t in it, and the deteriorating political situation in Palestine provided me with an easy excuse to abandon the project.

As I I spoke to my Jewish subjects , though, I was drawn to a peculiar myopia that transcended checkpoints and religious divides. For many Americans who had moved to the Holy Land, everyday reality had simply faded away. The people and the culture, the conflict and the land, had become mere background noise for their spiritual and political trips.

In 2006, the year I spent in Israel, some 3,200 American Jews immigrated, the highest figure in thirty-three years. Many believe there is a single reason for this: the founding in 2001 of Nefesh B’Nefesh, a non-profit organization dedicated to facilitating the easy move of English-speaking Jews to to Eretz Israel.

According to Yael Katzman, Nefesh B’Nefesh’s press director, the organization directly assisted over 2,760 of these 3,200 American émigrés, both financially and logistically. Nineteen hundred and twenty came within a “family unit.” The other 840, all over 18, are considered “unattached singles.” Each new oleh received a seven thousand dollar check from Nefesh B’Nefesh, with the sole condition that they remain in Israel for at least three years. Of these 840 “unattached singles,” only 100 enlisted in the Israeli army. The other 740, about 88%, had no such plans.

In Nachlaot

Friday night dinner, and we are playing house. My high school friend Ari, a recent McGill graduate who’s learning part-time at a yeshiva in the West Bank, has invited me to Josh and Karen’s house for Shabbat. Josh and Karen are newlyweds, all of 22 years old. Josh is from New Jersey and learns full-time at a yeshiva; Karen stays at home. I know a bunch of the other guests from religious Zionist summer camp.

Ari is thinking about making aliya, but hasn’t committed yet. Josh and Karen and Reuven and several others are recent American émigrés, with family back in America; most of the others immigrated from the United States as children or as teenagers with their parents. Many split in their time between Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The conversation is lively. For hours we sit, singing songs, mostly speaking of different teachings of different rabbis, of different stories heard from different yeshivot. No Hebrew is spoken. We drift to the topic of the Third Temple, to the two thousand year old messianic dream.

“If you will the third beit hArikdash [the Third Temple], it’s like it’s already here.”

“It is already here. It’s here at the table!”

”I can feel it coming!”

Midway through the dinner, Reuven - whom I know from summer camp - gives an impromptu toast: “Let’s pray that no more settlements will be evacuated and no more Jews expelled from their homes.” All nod their assent. We say a brief amen, and that’s that. No more politics, just a brief, offhanded complaint about a settler highway – a direct, faster route to the yeshiva that Ari’s studying at – remaining closed because of “ridiculous” political considerations.

“I don’t know about politics, man,” Ari tells me later.

Reuven, who dropped out of college and spent the last four or five years living on and off in Israel, is now in Narcotics Anonymous; he says he’s been writing music about his experience. Reuven’s been living off his Nefesh B’Nefesh check and he babysits occasionally for some extra cash. He brings grape juice to the meal, which he unsheathes his grape juice uneasily, like someone who hasn’t been in recovery that long and doesn’t yet know how to broach the subject. Reuven asks the host to keep him in mind for the blessing, since he won’t be drinking wine.

As the meal winds down, he says that we should all “find the music within ourselves,” basing this good-hearted but fundamentally nonsensical piece of learning in the Torah, in the utterance of “netzach shebnetzach” (roughly: “victory from victory,” though according to my hosts, who have repeated it as a sort of mantra all night, it means “so much more than that”), but of course in his message’s universality, in its total feel-goodness, it’s not really related to the biblical passages he’s quoting, but is something that may as well have been an aphorism spoken onstage at a Phish show.

I remember what it used to be like, for Reuven and Ami and I; of schizophrenic Saturday afternoons on the Upper West Side spent hiding from our parents and calling our pot dealers, of getting stoned to the point of near-hallucination in Reuven’s car on Riverside Drive, watching out for the police but grooving to the music on the car stereo, feeling, on some level, the holiness of the Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin, knowing almost preternaturally that life has its sadness, but knowing also its transcendent hope and holiness, a holiness that as teenagers we found in music.

But now these former Phish-heads, these ex-jam-band freaks who still grow their hair out long and wild, who believe, as they always have, in life’s holiness, have found that holiness elsewhere, connected to the Land, to the yeshivot at which they study. They’ve adopted the almost grating soft-spokenness of hippies, man. They speak in hushed, reverent tones about certain rabbis just as they once spoke about Jerry or Tre; they still play music – everyone plays guitar, just like in high school – though now they talk about old Hasidic melodies the same way they used to speak about certain bands’ jams.

I meet Yonatan, Ari’s new roommate and another recent immigrant, about a month later. He’s 29, with an enormous black beard and a growing paunch. In another place and time, with his sort of throwback look, basically Jewish Seersucker, he might have been a 1950’s intellectual writing for the old Commentary.

But Yonatan is not an intellectual. Nor does he appear to be employed. The first thing Yonatan tells me – in a manic, soft-spoken voice – is that he’s trying to bring “Israeli energy to American parties, not American energy to Israeli parties, or American energy to American parties.” He’s a pothead and asks Ari if he can grow marijuana on the porch (“no”), then asks about psychedelic mushrooms (“I guess”). He comes in chanting a mantra “erev Shabbat kodesh, erev Shabbat kodesh, erev Shabbat –—“ (“Holy Sabbath Eve, Holy Sabbath eve) and then looks at me as though I’m supposed to finish it, so I do, I say kodesh.

He starts speaking about a gathering he was at, a gathering “of real holy people” who were learning and drinking and apparently also – maybe this is what holy people do – speaking about how they wished that Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister of Israel, were dead. According to Yonatan, the rabbi at this little party was “pretty laid back,” which is why he wasn’t personally trying to kill Olmert — no, he was gunning for Shimon Peres.

Apparently “Peres has killed thousands of Jews, he’s an architect of Oslo,” a sort of canned phrase frequently employed by the extreme right (“architect” is truly a cold-blooded word. There were “architects” of the Final Solution, not “planners.”) Yonatan says that you’re permitted to – even supposed to – pray for the death of Jews who harm other Jews.

The conversation winds down; it’s Thursday night, party night in Jerusalem, and Yonatan tells me he’s going to “smoke a doobie and go with the chevreh to Gan Sacher” where everyone’s bringing guitars and smokes and drums and that some real “holy people” will be there to celebrate the coming of the Sabbath a day early. He’s switched gears from fundamentalist to Deadhead. He excuses himself and goes into the kitchen to make a cheese sandwich.

Neither Josh nor Reuven nor Yonatan, all recent immigrants to Israel, all recipients of Nefesh B’Nefesh money, plan on serving in the Israeli army.

Crack Square

Crack Square is where Ari and Reuven and Josh most likely spent time when they studied in Israel as post-high school students at yeshiva. It’s the dark underbelly of religious American Jewish life in Jerusalem, where many Modern Orthodox 18-year-olds get the sex and drugs out of their systems before they are born-again. For the uninitiated, it’s a sight to behold: yeshiva kids puking their guts out, girls in long skirts making out in corners with boys in kippot, chain-smoking Hasidim chugging down vodka. Though its real name is “Cats’ Square” (“Kikar Chatulim”), Israelis call it “American Square” (“Kikar Amerikaim”); Americans, for fairly obvious reasons, simply refer to it as “Crack Square.”

I go to Crack Square to meet Shimmy, my friend’s cousin, for a drink.

Shimmy is 24, a happy-go-lucky American who’s made aliya for lack of a better option. His family moved here from the Chicago suburbs, and he’s followed them. He’s living with them, working for his dad, biding his time until something else comes along.

Shimmy was kicked out of his yeshiva high school. He’s been smoking pot since he was 13, but he bears the Orthodox world little ill will and still wears a kippah and tzitzit (fringes). He spends much of his time at yeshiva - “it’s great because you can blaze” –a bunch of time at home – “it’s great because you can blaze” – and even after his grandmother recently died, shiva week wasn’t all that terrible – “because I blazed.”

Shimmy is very friendly and hard not to like. He loves Israel but doesn’t care particularly much for Israelis: “It’d be great if we could just replace them with American Jews.” He doesn’t really speak Hebrew and tells me he has no real Israeli friends. Thin, wispy, a smile always on his face, he looks several years younger than 24. He spends much of his time hanging out in Crack Square talking to yeshiva girls at least 5 years younger than he is, “blazing,” and generally enjoying himself.

Shimmy indulges me when I ask him a few political questions. He mentions, somewhat defensively, that he had Arab friends in college. He wants to extend Israeli citizenship to Jews across the world – “that’s how we’ll solve the demographic problem” – but bears no real ill will to the Palestinians. He seems to genuinely care for their well-being. According to this plan, Jews around the world will be able to vote in Israeli elections, as will the Palestinians.

Shimmy is waiting another half year , until he turns twenty-five,to “officially” make aliya, so he’ll be old enough to receive Nefesh-B’nefesh money. He’s not eligible yet, as he’s still considered part of his “family unit.” Once he turns twenty-five, Shimmy will be exempt from army service, and the seven thousand dollars is his.

Despite not having any Israeli friends, despite speaking limited Hebrew, and despite not having officially made aliya, Shimmy loves Israel and believes that it is his country. And in many ways – in Crack Square, in Jerusalem, surrounded by religious American Jews similar to himself – this is true. Shimmy is but a nominal expatriate. There are no Israelis or Palestinians in his little corner of the world.

Victoria

I interview Victoria, another recent oleh, at a coffee shop in Bakaa, a Jerusalem neighborhood of American and French émigrés. She made aliya in December 2006, on a flight paid for by Nefesh B’Nefesh. For the last six months, she’s been studying Hebrew at ulpan.

Born in Odessa, Victoria didn’t find out that she was Jewish until her family left in 1989. They settled in Virginia Beach. Her parents didn’t have an easy time of it in America. “They didn’t have the American Dream lifestyle that other Russian immigrants have had,” she tells me. Despite her family being staunchly secular, she went to a Jewish day school through eighth grade – “that’s where they sent the Russian kids” – and then to a public high school.

After her freshman year at Old Dominion, Victoria was urged by some Orthodox friends to go on Birthright Israel, an organization that takes young Jews on 10-day tours of the country for free. “A soon as I stepped off the plane I just felt at home and wanted to stay.” She came back a couple years later and spent the summer studying at a girls yeshiva in Jerusalem, which further solidified her commitment to making aliya. She hated her last years at Old Dominion. “I just wanted to finish,” she says.

Victoria loves Israel – she really seems passionate and enthusiastic about the Land – but when I ask her to articulate her feelings, she stares at me blankly and responds with banalities.

“I can’t really put my finger on it but I just feel at home here,” she says. “Now that I live here I’m very in touch with being Jewish.”

She especially loves Jerusalem: “Every time I drive by the Old City, it’s like, I live here. I love the Old City. All my friends are in Jerusalem. I want to be in Jerusalem.”

At the ulpan, where meals, housing, and education are paid for – in many ways, it’s like a freshman year dormitory - Victoria has had a wonderful time. “We have Ethiopians, Argentines, Brazillians, French. I became close friends with a lot of people… we’re always together, doing different things… We go out a few nights a week.”

Unlike many others in ulpan, because of her age – and because she’s a girl – Victoria is exempt from conscription. She’s been looking, unsuccessfully, for a job and an apartment in Jerusalem, and is going to move in temporarily with her cousins in Netanya. She’s not sure about the next step: “I don’t know what I want to do, which is sort of hard for an almost-25 year old. I don’t know. I will probably get a Masters. That’s the terms of my making aliya. It’s free as a new immigrant.”

And what will she give back? “I guess just living here is contributing in some way.”

Living in the bubble of ulpan, Victoria has sheltered herself from the political situation. “I try not to think about [it]. I guess everybody hopes for peace but I don’t think it’s going to happen. They’re always going to hate us. I don’t that’s going to change all of a sudden.”

Like other single American émigrés, Nefesh B’Nefesh handed Victoria a seven thousand dollar check. She gave the bulk of the money (she calls it a “cash bonus”) to her parents, as her mother recently lost her job. “They needed it more than I did,” she says.

Despite her difficulties adjusting – “the Hebrew has been very hard for me” – Victoria doesn’t regret making aliya. “I know there’s better opportunities and all that in America… but I don’t miss anything, just my family and my friends..”

If things don’t go so well, she’s not averse to returning to the United States. “[Israel] is not like Mars. I’m not stuck here forever. I still have my American citizenship.”

Sympathizers

Meanwhile, less than 10 miles from Jerusalem, past the Qalandia checkpoint and the graffiti-stained Wall, a very different sort of American Jew engages in a very similar myopia, funded, in large part, by the countless Western aid organizations and programs that are in many ways the mirror image of Nefesh B’Nefesh and Birthright Israel.

As a sort of foil to my high school friends in Nachlaot, there’s Danielle, who went to college with me and has been living in Ramallah more or less since she graduated. During his early 20’s, her Jewish father traveled around Israel (her mom is Chinese). “When I first came, part of the reason was to go to the kibbutzim my dad went to,” she wrote me. “I have a whole list.”

Danielle learned Arabic in college. After graduation, she went to live with a friend in East Jerusalem. Working for an American NGO implementing a USAID program, she just sort of fell in with the Palestinian cause. Since then, she writes, “I wouldn’t necessarily go into details about some of the other organizations I’ve worked with.”

I send her an email early in the year, asking for her help in finding Palestinian-Americans to interview. Her response:

“Some ideas to chew on for your article: the American Jew has no ties to Israel other than ideological ones. Palestinian Americans have their great grandfathers and great grandmothers here.”

The email was alarming. Danielle used the definite article here, describing “the American Jew” – a loaded term, certainly, borderline anti-Semitic. And what’s more, she wrote this without knowing my political views, without even knowing what I was doing in Israel:.She just knew that I’m Jewish and that I happened to be in Israel. What’s more, in a follow-up email, she proves entirely oblivious to Palestinian anti-Semitism. She instead tries to justify it:

“Your name is Jacob. You’re clearly not Arab. This is an issue. We Americans think we can waltz around the world and step foot wherever we want… Definitely not everyone I know would feel comfortable, to say the least, that I’m hosting you here.”

I don’t email her back.

Months go by, and we are not in contact. My offer of coffee in Jerusalem or in Ramallah remains unanswered; my project stalls, and she’s of little help. But then Danielle’s visa runs out and she calls me. On the phone she’s hysterical and despondent – clearly rattled. She tells me that she’d applied for a visa through a friend of a friend at the Peres Center, but no luck. What filters down through this Peres connection is infinitely more disturbing. She’s being watched. The Military Governor of Ramallah has taken a personal interest in her case;> He has somehow let it be known that he knows about her private life, her sex life, specifically.

Apparently the governor knows she’s been dating a Palestinian. Danielle is rattled; she tells me she’s always been paranoid. She knows they have a file on her at Ben-Gurion, a file that includes her Syrian and Lebanese and Egyptian visas, and there’s no escaping that..But this new information is creepier.

There is too much paranoia in this place, says Danielle, paranoia coming from all sides. She would’ve just left if she’d known this is how things would wind up. But Danielle feels guilty for her white skin (or in her case, half-Asian, half-Jewish skin) privilege. She’s upset that she can just pack up and go back to American, but her friends, well, “these are their lives, Jacob.”

Then, oddly, instead of complaining more about the Israelis and the Occupation (as I expect her to) she speaks about the general paranoia. “There are spies everywhere, Jacob,” she says, “spies on all sides,” and expresses concern about me, about my own well-being as I attempt to navigate this paranoia. Danielle asks how people looked at me when I was in Ramallah, (“you clearly seem Jewish”), whether I went into the city center, what happened when I was there. She wants to be sure that I’ll be alright, or at least that I’ll escape with my sanity.

Danielle had always cared, in one way or another, about everyone she knew. She was the camp mother in our college dormitory, the girl you could always go to with your problems. But in Palestine this innate warmth had been sublimated into a different sort of caring, into a caring that manifested itself in a fiercely political anger. Through the cracks, Danielle’s old identity emerges. She confesses to me – “it’s fucked up, I know” – that she’s only told a couple people in Ramallah about her Jewish father, hiding her identity from some of her closest friends. Consumed by the cause, Danielle’s past faded away.

David

David is a friend of a friend who recently received a Master’s from McGill in International Relations. He’s 27 and has been working in Ramallah as a copy-editor a couple days a week at the Palestine Times, more or less for free (they didn’t have enough money to pay their staff regularly, so it was basically pro bono). The rest of the time he takes Arabic classes at Birzeit, Palestine’s flagship university.

I visit David in his home near the Old City of Ramallah, where I wait for an interview I’ve scheduled for later in the day. The television is tuned to Al Jazeera English (“it tells you, unlike Fox News and CNN, what’s really going on in the world”) and the apartment is spare and lonely: a few couches, a table, but no wall-furnishings in the cavernous living room.

David makes me some tea, we play backgammon, and we sit. He swears that Ramallah is a fun town, but there’s an aura of loneliness to him that saddens me, and I don’t quite believe him, or know if he even believes himself. David gets up to ask the Palestinian children who are playing soccer in the courtyard to stop kicking the ball against the wall. We watch Al-Jazeera and wait. He tells me that his grandfather was a Zionist hero in 1948 (“ironic, no?”). Apparently there’s some park in or nearby Jerusalem named after his family. He’s in Palestine indefinitely and has vague plans to eventually pursue a doctorate in international relations. David claims he’s doing “research” in Ramallah, but he’s malingering, and it mostly seems that he’s researching his own guilt.

Almost every Friday night David goes into Jerusalem for Shabbat dinner at a friend’s. On Saturdays he returns to Ramallah; he doesn’t tell anyone where he’s been. Many of his Arab friends believe that Israel has no right to exist, and that if he were Jewish, he’d have no right to exist in Ramallah.

Later, after my interviews are over, David offers me a ride back to Jerusalem with his Israeli Arab co-worker. As we drive through the Khalandia checkpoint, David pretends not to know anything about Israeli history, and nods in sympathy at every offhanded remark the driver makes about the Occupation. The hatred in the car is palpable, the Arab staring at me, demanding where I want to be left off. David, Hebrew-school trained, pretends not to read Hebrew, and asks this ardent anti-Zionist for directions to Yaffo Street, which he’s visited countless times.

Though David has brown eyes, brown hair, a Jewfro, and a Jewish last name – anyone with any Jewdar at all can spot the yellow star on him from a mile away – he still hadn’t told anyone in Ramallah, save a few people at the university, that he’s Jewish. After almost a year in Palestine, David finally informs some Arab friends of his real identity. Many of them refuse to see him again.

The Palestine Times folds in May; David, however, remains in Ramallah, and half-heartedly seeks employment elsewhere. But he doesn’t apply to work for a humanitarian organization. He’s not in any tangible way alleviating the very real suffering of the Palestinian people. David’s not in Ramallah for the Palestinians - he’s there for himself. He’s on his own myopic trip.The land and its people are merely background noise for his exploration of his tangled Jewish identity.

Coda

The heroic age of Zionism is over. Organizations like Nefesh B’Nefesh and Birthright Israel have taken the meaning out of making aliya. Uprooting yourself and moving to the Middle East is still a hassle, but with 7,000 dollars waiting for you and a built-in support system, it’s no longer such a sacrifice. And while American Jewish sympathizers claim they’re in Palestine for political reasons, it’s little more than an ideological excuse to postpone their lives. Israel and Palestine are just an escape: if you lack a sense of purpose at home, you can always pick up and move to the Holy Land.

I’d like to invoke Joan Didion quoting W.B. Yeats, because here in the Holy Land there is a real Bethlehem, and there are also Americans on the same myopic spiritual trips that there were in San Francisco during the Summer of Love. Whether they know it or not, the religious hippies and the political leftists – and even the secular Zionists – are all children of ’68. They’ve taken the messianic politics of the sixties and inserted themselves into a discourse that could do without any more messianism. Americans can move anywhere in world. Still, they only see themselves.