Daniel Gordis > Quotes

“Some of Ben-Gurion’s generals wanted to take the West Bank of the Jordan River, frustrated that Israel had forfeited an opportunity to establish a secure natural frontier, but Ben-Gurion demurred. He had several reasons. The last thing Israel needed, he believed, was to control an even greater number of Arab civilians. As it was, Ben-Gurion was worried about those Arabs who remained in Israel. They were Israeli, because they had stayed inside the state, but the only thing that distinguished them at that point from Israel’s enemies on the other side of the line was that they had not fled, while their family members had. Ben-Gurion did not dare imagine that they yet had any loyalty to the new state. Ben-Gurion was also concerned that the Americans would look askance on Israel taking more territory. No less important, Ben-Gurion chose not to conquer the West Bank because his mind had moved on to other challenges. He was, as Anita Shapira notes, “already immersed in the vital mission of bringing in masses of new immigrants and absorbing them.”48 THE”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“The story of the return of the Jewish people to its ancestral homeland became, in short, one of the great dramas in the history of humankind.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“THE BEGIN YEARS HAD not been easy ones for Israel, but they had been important. Israel had made peace with its once most potent enemy, Egypt. It had made clear that it would not tolerate weapons of mass destruction in the hands of its sworn enemies. It had shown that it would go to war—even a war that many Israelis eventually opposed—to protect the rights of its citizens and children to live normal lives and not to sleep in bomb shelters.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Yet if mere Israeli survival was going to evoke Arab anger, Dayan then warned both his listeners and his entire newborn nation, Israelis had better be prepared to live by the sword. In language filled with biblical imagery, as if to remind his listeners that the battle to stay in the land was not new but was a story that had begun thousands of years earlier, Dayan continued, “We mustn’t flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may claim our blood. We mustn’t avert our eyes, lest our hands be weakened. That is the decree of our generation. That is the choice of our lives—to be willing and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword be knocked from our fists, and our lives severed.”17 It was a worldview that would guide not only Dayan, but the country he was helping to found, for decades to come. AS”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“He had an impeccable sense of timing, knew when to wait and when to move, and declared the state even before it was ready, because he knew that another opportunity might never arise. Not”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“They often unfavorably compared Holocaust victims to the new, powerful Jews of the Yishuv who dislodged the British and fought off the Arabs with strength and military might. Tellingly, “[t]hose killed in the Holocaust were said to have ‘perished,’ while Jews who died fighting in Palestine had ‘fallen.’”27 Tommy”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Micah Goodman, a popular teacher on the Israeli scene and one of its young public intellectuals, wrote his first three books on Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed, Rabbi Yehudah Halevi’s medieval classic, The Kuzari, and the biblical book of Deuteronomy—hardly subjects one would expect to attract mass attention. Yet all three of Goodman’s books hit the Israeli bestseller list. Israelis were buying, reading, and thinking about books on subjects their grandparents had tried to evict from the Israeli conversation”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Nasser was dead. Israel’s military superiority had effectively neutralized any Syrian threat. Pan-Arabism was a thing of the past. Yet once again, Israel found itself arrayed against another enemy sworn to its destruction.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Amos Oz, who would become one of Israel’s greatest novelists and was several times considered a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, later recalled that night in his autobiographical memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. He told how, merely eight years old, he rode on his father’s shoulders in a surging crowd of celebrants in Jerusalem, and at three or four in the morning, still wearing his dirty clothes, crawled into bed.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“comfortable division has been made. The Arab states unilaterally enjoy the “rights of war” [while] Israel has the unilateral responsibility of keeping the peace. But belligerency is not a one way street. Is it then surprising if a people laboring under this monstrous distinction should finally become restive and at last seek a way of rescuing its life from the perils of the regulated war that is conducted against it from all sides?27”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Herzl promised the readers of Altneuland not only a Jewish safe haven, but a Jewish state that would be a source of progress and continuous growth. That dream, too, has been fulfilled.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“To be sure, for religious Jews, the Bible was God’s revealed word, filled with commandments about how they were to live their lives. For secular Jews, the Bible was one of the greatest works of literature of all time. For all, though, the Bible was the book that told the story of their people: what they had loved, where they had lived, how they had succeeded, and when they had failed. It was the story of their family. And central to the story of that family was the Land of Israel, the land to which Theodor Herzl was now urging them to return.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Zionism was centered around the Jewish future and the subject of a Jewish national home—but precisely how those needs ought to be met would remain the subject of often messy and acrimonious disagreement. As much as it was a movement, Zionism was actually a complex and often feisty conversation.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“several months had elapsed and it would”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“Dayan and Eshkol were against taking the Golan Heights from the Syrians. Syrian troops, they both insisted, had thus far made no effort to cross the northern border, and both feared that extending the war to the north would provide the Soviets with an excuse to intervene. But others disagreed. On June 8, David Elazar (commander of Israel’s northern front) went to Eshkol to try to convince him to take the Golan.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“HOW DOES THIS RADICAL conceptual divide over whether Judaism is a religion or an ethnicity play out in relations between the two communities? One manifestation is the lack of political cooperation between Israeli and American Jewish progressives. Though right-of-center American Jews are often active in supporting Israel’s right-leaning parties and offer financial support through American Friends of Likud and other organizations, there has been surprisingly little alignment between liberal American Jews and the Israeli political left.* There is, of course, some American organizational support for Israel’s left-leaning parties, but the relationship on the left is not nearly as vigorous as it is on the right. Why is that? Once again, the answer lies largely in the Judaism-as-religion issue, which makes it difficult for the two communities to understand each other. Einat Wilf—a secular and unabashedly nationalist former Knesset member and outspoken voice for liberal causes—is a compelling example of how Judaism-as-religion versus Judaism-as-nation creates a disconnect between the two communities. In 2018, she published a book titled The War over the Right of Return, in which she argues that the fundamental reason the Israeli-Arab conflict has never been settled has been Israel’s refusal to reject outright the Palestinian demand for a “right of return” of 1948 refugees and their descendants.* The fact that millions of Palestinians still harbor a hope of returning to “Palestine,” argues Wilf, leaves open in their minds the possibility that Israel as a Jewish nation-state can still be ended. End that charade, she argues, and one major obstacle on the road to settling the conflict will have been removed. What matters for us is not whether Wilf’s analysis is right or wrong. What we need to note is that there is scarcely an American Jewish liberal who would dare speak aloud about denying the Palestinian right of return once and for all. How does Wilf straddle the fence, some might ask? How can she be both a liberal and such a committed nationalist? To Wilf, as to many Israelis, there is simply no fence to straddle. For many Israeli progressives like her, there is no tension at all between liberal values and Judaism-as-nation. But for American Jews who see themselves primarily as a religion and not a nation, Wilf’s value set is a much more difficult position to adopt. The disconnect is between Judaism-as-justice and Judaism-as-survival. Those are obviously not always incompatible, but they are profoundly different instincts.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“Israelis, obviously, find the notion that the conflict may not be solvable distressing. They dream of a world in which their children, or their grandchildren, will not have to go to war, but at the same time, with any progress on a peace settlement increasingly distant, it is their sense of purpose that leads the vast majority to stay in Israel and to soldier on. Though peace is nowhere in sight, Israelis rank among the happiest populations on earth. Israel was rated the eleventh happiest country by the World Economic Forum in 2018, while the United States was eighteenth. Israelis are overwhelmingly comfortable with a Law of Return that guarantees Jews, but no one else, an automatic right to citizenship. Infused with a deep sense of purpose, Israeli Jews have more children than almost any other first-world country. And that is not only because of the ultra-Orthodox community. In fact, “since the beginning of the twenty-first century, fertility has actually declined by about 10 percent among Haredim, risen slightly (5 percent) among religiously observant women, and risen significantly, by 15–20 percent, among all other sectors of Israeli Jewish society.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“FOR AS LONG AS the Hebrew and Christian Bibles have defined Western civilization, humanity has been engaged in a debate over whether life is better lived through devotion to a particular people, ethnicity, or even clan or, alternatively, to humanity at large. Both, of course, are worthy commitments, and the Jewish tradition rejects neither. That said, Zionism chose to focus on the former, while American society is dedicated to the latter. That is the root of the rift between American Jews and Israel, and it is from there that any future mutual understanding will have to begin.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“modern secular Israeli novelists like Amos Oz and David Grossman)”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“The transformation of Judaism into a religion served American Jews’ interests in yet another way. America, after all, is corrosive of ethnic identity. Four generations after Italian immigrants arrived on America’s shores, how Italian are their descendants? Do they speak Italian? Are their homes distinctively Italian in any meaningful way decades later? When a descendant of an Italian immigrant who came to the United States in 1910 marries a descendant of a German immigrant from the same period, is any cultural adjustment required? Rarely. Aside from ethnic identities related to physical appearance (African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and the too often ignored Native Americans, among others), most other ethnicities have long since disappeared. Even the ethnic dimension of Jewish life has mostly dissolved. Few American Jews speak Hebrew, Yiddish, or other Jewish languages. For the most part, cuisine in Jewish homes is scarcely different from that of other American homes. American progressives are culturally almost indistinguishable from progressives of other backgrounds. Jews were perhaps the last to give up the ethnic ghost, but even among American Jews, ethnicity is finally disappearing. If anything has survived, it has been a sense of Judaism as a faith tradition, Judaism as religion, no matter how profound or casual a person’s faith and no matter what particular form religious participation takes.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“It was a time when having a Jewish state was a source of pride, not conflict, for American Jews.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“Застосування військової сили - це завжди складний моральний вибір, особливо коли терористи умисно розташовують свою інфраструктуру серед житлових кварталів і прикриваються мирним населенням.”
― Daniel Gordis, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

“In the United States, however, the response to Eichmann’s capture was not celebration but outrage. Joseph Proskauer, a former president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), urged Prime Minister Ben-Gurion not to try Eichmann in Jerusalem but to turn him over to an international tribunal. Proskauer, who had been at the helm of the AJC’s anti-Zionist wing and had explicitly objected to the creation of a Jewish state, had said years earlier that he viewed Zionist efforts to establish a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine as nothing less than a “Jewish catastrophe.”* He might have softened in the interim, but Proskauer was still appalled by Israel’s move. To try Eichmann in Jerusalem would be to acknowledge that Israel spoke for and acted in the name of world Jewry, and the AJC had long been on record as taking the position that the small Jewish state was anything but the center of the Jewish world. Nor did Proskauer, a member of a generation of American Jews deeply conscious of how they were seen by “ordinary” Americans, seem comfortable having the spotlight on Jews alone. Eichmann, he reminded Ben-Gurion, had committed “unspeakable crimes against humanity, not only against Jews.” Proskauer actually clipped a Washington Post editorial that insisted, “Although there are a great many Jews in Israel, the Israeli government has no authority . . . to act in the name of some imaginary Jewish ethnic entity,” and sent it to Ben Gurion.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“If American Jews are to effect change in Israel to make room for their brand of pluralism, they need numbers. No political change is ever possible without numbers. And there are no numbers in Israel for the kind of Judaism that Americans have in America. To get the big numbers, liberal American Jews have to decide who their actual potential allies are. If they seek Israeli Jews who will have a positive attitude towards religion, then they are likely to be non-liberal Orthodox Jews who reject their form of practice completely. If they seek Israeli Jews who will share their values of pluralism, equality, tolerance, feminism and liberalism, they are, by and large, likely to be the shrimp-eating-Shabbat-driving Jews, whose attitudes to religion range from revulsion to apathy. If Conservative, Reform and generally liberal American Jews seek partners in Israel who share both their liberal values and positive attitude towards religion, they will limit themselves to a pool of citizens that is barely likely to get one seat in the Knesset.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“In March 1919, almost a year and a half after the Balfour Declaration, almost three hundred Reform rabbis sought to convince President Wilson not to express support for Balfour’s sentiments. Going much further than Brandeis’s tepid endorsement of a “Jewish settlement in Palestine rather than an actual state,” they rejected even Brandeis’s formulation. In a letter to the New York Times, they wrote, “We raise our voice in warning and protest against the demand of the Zionists for the reorganization of the Jews as a national unit, to whom, now or in the future, territorial sovereignty in Palestine shall be committed. . . . We reject the Zionist project of a ‘national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“Faith does not stand in contradiction to intelligence; but man, in his intelligence, understands that there are things he cannot fathom by rationality, and so he believes in a Higher Power.”17 He was, and remained, a man of rock-solid faith. Like Zionism and humanism, his Zionism and his religiosity were inseparable; as far as he was concerned, neither made sense without the other.”
― Daniel Gordis, Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel's Soul

“Even with a much easier question, “Can you identify the name of the Israeli parliament from among the following: (a) The Bet Din (b) The Kotel (c) The Knesset or (d) The Schwarma,” only 60 percent of respondents got the answer right. American Jewish illiteracy touches all dimensions of Jewish life—religion, culture, history, Israel, and more. “Measuring ourselves by the standard of our tradition,” one keen observer commented, “we should note immediately one distinction of the American Jewish community; . . . The distinction that I have in mind is the illiteracy of American Jewry. I mean, its Jewish illiteracy.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“Given the centrality of Hebrew to the Zionists’ sense of accomplishment, the abandonment of Hebrew in the United States was bound to create a rift, a sense of otherness. And on a much more utilitarian level, American Jews’ decision not to learn Hebrew means that they have access to a very thin slice of Israeli culture. Everything that they know or feel about Israeli society is fed by a cultural trickle mediated by others who decide what should and should not be translated. If a citizen of France or Germany spoke no English, how deep an understanding could they possibly have of the United States, its culture, its struggles, and its nuances? Very little. No Frenchman or German who did not speak English could be said to understand America in any meaningful way, and any advice they offered would be ignored, swatted away like a pesky fly that, while annoying, was of no import at all.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“ANOTHER RELATED FACTOR DEEPENING the divide between American and Israeli Jews is also derived from the tension between Judaism-as-nation and Judaism-as-religion. That factor is the Hebrew language. Hebrew, obviously, is the language of discourse in Israel, and American Jews, for the most part, have decided not to speak or to understand it. This blunt formulation is intentional: it’s not just that American Jews do not speak Hebrew, but that over the years Jewish educators consciously chose to remove significant Hebrew-language education from their curricula. To be sure, learning a language takes time and effort, so they faced a significant pedagogical challenge given the limited number of hours with which they had to work. Yet, there are some schools (both Orthodox and non-Orthodox) that do teach Hebrew rigorously and give their students at least a good grounding. Most do not try; the decision not to teach Hebrew, say some scholars, was also a conscious decision not to highlight the peoplehood dimension of Judaism. Doing so would have made American Jews feel like outsiders in America.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward

“How deeply did American Jews internalize the notion that America was their new national home? A fascinating indication is a 1904 stained-glass window of Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco, which depicts a classic biblical scene: Moses descending from a mountain holding the Ten Commandments. What is remarkable about this artwork, however, is that it shows Moses descending, not from Mount Sinai, as in the Bible’s account, but from Yosemite’s El Capitan.”
― Daniel Gordis, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel – Understanding Two Communities, Their History, and the Path Forward