OU BREAKFAST DRAWS TOP POLS page 6 PEW REPORT: THE VIEW FROM THE PULPIT page 12 YIDDISHKEIT ON A LEASH

page 16 FILM FESTIVAL NOTES page 45

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OCTOBER 11, 2013 VOL. LXXXIII NO. 5 $1.00

From Jerusalem to today

Yossi Klein Halevi, author of a majestic chronicle of contemporary Israel, to speak in Demarest for Jewish Federation
page 26

Cover Story

Y ossi Klein Halevis dream

the Brooklyn native has traced decades of israeli history through the life of seven paratroopers. on tuesday he will be the speaker at the major gifts dinner of the Jewish Federation of northern new Jersey.
DaViD sUissa
oo many books about Israel try to tell us what to think or feel. Whether from the left or right, it seems that the subject of Israel brings out the emotional partisan in many of us. We feel strongly one way or the other, so we like to read books or articles that support our opinions. Theres nothing necessarily wrong or surprising about that its just that it usually doesnt make for challenging reading. In his new, magisterial book about Israel, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, my friend Yossi Klein Halevi has taken a different approach. Hes written a book not of opinions, but of stories. Stories and dreams. By following the lives of seven soldiers bonded by a seminal event, and recounting their divergent narratives, hes captured the complexity of Israel in human terms. Yossis own dreaming began after a miraculous Israeli victory during one unforgettable summer. In late June 1967, a few weeks after the end of the Six-Day War, I flew to

iLir BaJraKtari/thE toWEr

Israel with my father, he writes in the book. I was a fourteen-year-old boy from Brooklyn, and my father, a Holocaust survivor, had decided that he couldnt keep away any longer. These paratroopers who fulfilled a dream of two millennia didnt just change the history of Israel and the Middle East, he writes, they also changed his life. At the Wall, I watched my father become a believing Jew. He had lost his faith in the Holocaust; but now, he said, he forgave God. The protector of Israel had regained His will. It was possible for Jews to pray again. That summer, he writes, everyone in Israel felt like family. Israel celebrated its existence, life itself. We had done it: survived the twentieth century. Not merely survived but reversed annihilation into a kind of redemption, awakened from our worst nightmare into our most extravagant dream. The young Yossi dreamed of returning one day to become an Israeli, and for good reason: The great Jewish adventure was happening in my lifetime; how could I keep away? He made aliyah in the summer of 1982 but was hardly prepared for the messy adventure that awaited him. Israel had just invaded Lebanon in

26 Jewish standard OCtOBer 11, 2013

Cover Story
they were soldiers once, and young.

Israeli paratroopers with a captured Jordanian flag in 1967.

Weeks after the SixDay War, Yossi Klein Halevi flew to Israel with his father, a Holocaust survivor. Yossi, 14, posed with evidence of Israels miraculous victory.

Paratrooper Meir Ariel on leave

response to terror attacks on the Galilee. This was no summer of love. Instead of uniting Israelis, as it had in 1967, war now divided them. For the first time there were antigovernment demonstrations, even as soldiers were fighting at the front. The euphoria of the summer of 67, the delusion of a happy ending to Jewish history, had been replaced by an awareness of the agonizing complexity of Israels dilemmas. Making sense of this agonizing complexity would come to define Yossis next 30 years. This wasnt exactly the dream he had in mind when he made aliyah the dream shaped by his idealized view of Israel in that heroic summer of 1967. This was a grown-up type of dream,

where the test of love would be trying to understand all sides and not rush to judgment. Ive known Yossi since the summer of 2000. When I first met him, I knew only about his reputation as one of Israels most astute political analysts. I had no idea he was also deeply spiritual and meditated every morning. I learned more about that side of him from his last book, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jews Search for Hope With Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land. These two sides the spiritualist and the realist have melded together in Like Dreamers. He has married the heartfelt sensitivity of spirituality with the hardnosed demands of reality. I tried to listen to the conflicting certainties that divided those who saw the

Hanan Porat, left, in Bethlehem

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Cover Story
results of 1967 as blessing from By staying close to these those who saw it as curse, he seven main characters over so writes. Israel was losing the feelmany years, by observing and ing of family that had drawn me faithfully recounting their disthere in the first place. Much of tinct and often-clashing narramy career became focused on tives, by showing empathy even explaining the unraveling of the when it was difficult and by Israeli consensus. weaving in his insightful comNot satisfied with producmentary, Yossi has delivered an ing only the piercing essays for Israel that dares to be authentic. which he is well known, in 2002 An Israel that transcends Yossi embarked on a decade-long caricature and humanizes the journey to better understand the flawed heroes and dreamers of country he loves to feel the the Jewish nation, including, Israeli reality through Israelis yes, even the much-maligned themselves and to write about it. settlers. The result is a poignant and An Israel gritty enough to face deeply human portrait of a litthe reality of life-threatening tle nation navigating existential problems with no easy answers. rapids through four tumultuous An Israel that can be both decades. united and divided, as when Young Yossi Klein Halevi was enthralled by his visit to His masterstroke was to tell he writes: Secular kibbutzniks Kibbutz Degania. In many ways, I grew up on that trip. this story through the lives of the and religious Zionists disagreed I left my home in New York pale and chubby and reparatroopers who liberated the about God and faith and the turned tan and lean, an almost Israeli. Western Wall where his father place of religion in Jewish idenregained his faith in that fateful tity and the life of the state. summer of 67 when Yossi first of Israeli soldiers who grew to become Yet for all their differences, began dreaming about Israel. remarkably diverse kibbutznik, religious religious Zionism and the secular kibbutz In thinking about these soldiers, he Zionist, artist, peace activist, settler leader, movement agreed that the goal of Jewish wondered: How had the war changed capitalist, even an anti-Zionist. statehood must be more than the mere their lives? What role did they play in tryThe group came to represent some of creation of a safe refuge for the Jewish ing to influence the political outcome of the major schisms within Israeli society people. their military victory? who not only helped define the political It is this unifying and aspirational idea It took hundreds of interviews all over debate of post 67 Israel, but also its social that fuels the book. the country, years of research, plenty of and cultural transformations. As its title suggests, the book is indeed midnight meetings, and more than a little Each of the paratroopers has a powera story of dreams, a story about the fate soul searching to get at those answers. ful story, but what truly distinguishes the of Israels utopian dreams, the vast hopes In his journey, he discovered a group book is how Yossi tells these stories. imposed on this besieged, embattled strip of land crowded with traumatized Jewish refugees. Its a story of dreams that dont go away, dreams that crash on each other, dreams that sometimes overlap, dreams that grudgingly evolve, dreams that are never fully realized. Its a story, above all, of complexity. Here in the Diaspora, were tempted to look at this complexity and feel exhausted and get impatient and say, Yeah, but the bottom line is that Israel must do this, or Israel must do that, as if there really were only one bottom line. Maybe the hidden message in Like Dreamers is that the absence of one bottom line is the bottom line. And maybe the broader message in Like Dreamers is that if you had to pick one bottom line, it would be having the very freedom to follow your dreams. That may well be Israels least-noticed and most notable achievement how an embattled Jewish nation surrounded by enemies managed to create a society where its traumatized refugees felt free to follow their dreams, even when those dreams threatened to tear the country apart. In giving us such a compelling portrait of Israels complex humanity, Yossi Klein Halevi has followed his own evolving and never-ending dream. David Suissa is president of TRIBE Media Corp., which publishes the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, where this originally appeared. Reprinted by permission.

The consequences of Israels contradictory dreams

Inside Like Dreamers, Yossi Klein Halevis extraordinary new book

Jonathan Kirsch
The stirring scene that opens Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi (Harper, $35) is a flashback to the night of June 6, 1967, when the 55th Paratroopers Reserve Brigade of the Israel Defense Forces crossed the no mans land from West Jerusalem and approached the Old City, a sacred place that had not been under Jewish sovereignty for nearly 2,000 years. They changed the history of Israel and the Middle East, Halevi observes. But Halevi has not written a hagiography of those courageous young men. Some of them were secular kibbutzniks and some were religious Zionists, a fact that strikes Halevi as emblematic of the tensions that have reshaped Israel during the half-century that followed what is now known as the Six-Day War. Their story, he insists,

is really about the fate of Israels utopian dreams, the vast hopes imposed on this besieged, embattled strip of land crowded with traumatized Jewish refugees. In that sense, Like Dreamers is as much about the future of Israel as it is about what the author describes as Israels most transcendent moment. Halevi is a journalist, memoirist, and commentator with a unique perspective on both Jewish history and the destiny of Israel. Born in Brooklyn, he was an early follower of the late Meir Kahane, a member of Kahanes controversial Jewish Defense League, and an activist in the movement to liberate Soviet Jews. As he recounts in his autobiography, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, he gradually moved from the far right of political Zionism into Orthodoxy and ultimately emerged as an advocate for rapprochement among Jews, Muslims, and Christians, as he advocated in At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden.

Today, at 60, Halevi lives with his family in Jerusalem, where he is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. His byline is familiar to readers of many publications, among them the New Republic where he holds the position of contributing editor The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Affairs magazine. He is much sought after as a commentator on the Middle East, and he brings a hardedged, highly realistic perspective to his work. To his credit, he refuses to mythify or idealize the people whose exploits he is writing about, yet he can show how seemingly ordinary men and women are capable of doing great things. Thus, for example, Halevi is quick to point out that all of the main characters in his book are Ashkenazim Jews of European ancestry even though nearly half of Israels Jewish population today is of Middle Eastern origin. And he emphasizes that the seven members of

the 55th Brigade whom he interviewed over a period of 10 years are markedly unsentimental; he is impressed by their faith in human initiative and contempt for self-pity and their daunting quest for solutions to unbearable dilemmas that would intimidate others into paralysis. Above all, their feat of arms in 1967 which united Jerusalem as an Israeli city, taking what had been ruled by Jordan can be seen as an augury of the problems Israel still must resolve: To a large extent, he writes, Israel today lives in the partial fulfillment and partial failure of their contradictory dreams. Halevi uses the biographies of those seven Israeli soldiers as a device to tell a much larger tale about the influences and pressures that shaped them. Avital Geva, for example, grew up on a kibbutz that belonged to Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist movement with distinctly Marxist values. Avital and his friends had been raised to revere the Soviet Union

28 Jewish Standard OCTOBER 11, 2013

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they were young, and civilians.

Esther and Yoel Bin-Nun at their wedding.

Meir and Tirzah Ariel

Yisrael and Sarah Harel.

as the second homeland, he explains, and he reminds us that Joseph Stalins death in 1953 was mourned on the front page of the movements newspaper. By contrast, Yoel Bin-Nun was a member of the religious Zionist youth organization Bnei Akiva, and when he confided his deepest longing to a girl of his acquaintance, it was to see the construction of a third Temple. With animal sacrifices and blood and all of that? she asked. Thats what is written in the Torah, he answered. Halevi allows us to see the conflicting Israeli views of the Holocaust barely 20 years after the liberation of the camps. Some native-born Israelis were astounded by and contemptuous of the survivors, whom they called sabon the word for soap, a reference to the notion that corpses were rendered into soap. Only when Arik Achmon, chief intelligence officer of the 55th Brigade, met the survivors who had founded Kibbutz Buchenwald did he come to see that they were worthy of his respect: Theyd survived through not passivity but constant alertness, Achmon came to realize. Sabon: what jerks we were. But Halevi reminds us that one of

the enduring victories the 55th Brigade achieved was to replace skeleton heaps in death camps with paratroopers at the Wall as the enduring Jewish image of the century. The centerpiece of the book, of course, are the operations that took place on the night of June 6-7, 1967, when the 55th Brigade was assigned a mission that had been a failure when it was tried during the War of Independence, in 1948. A tactical map of the battle lines will come as a shock to anyone who has since visited Israel as a tourist and strolled through the streets of Jerusalem, where, on that night, the trenches and minefields were laid out. At the headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces, the fast-changing situation on multiple fronts was under constant scrutiny, but at least one order was clear and unequivocal: Be prepared to take the Old City, Gen. Uzi Narkiss, commander of the central front, told Arik Achmon. I hope you will erase the shame of 1948. Exactly here, I think, is where we glimpse the unique importance of the battle for Jerusalem, and the various reasons why it was so consequential. For the battle-hardened officers of the high

command, the taking of the Old City was a point of honor as well as a crucial strategic objective. For others, it was a religious undertaking with messianic implications: Next year in Jerusalem, sang a group of soldiers, echoing the closing words of the Passover seder. A student watching them provided a new lyric: Next week in Jerusalem in Jerusalem rebuilt. For just about everyone, including the largely secular popular of the Jewish state, the strains of a new hit song called Jerusalem of Gold represented the nations suppressed anguish for the Old City of Jerusalem. But Halevi presses on in his search for the layering of meanings contained within the taking of the Old City. The tensions within the 55th Brigade are now writ large in Israel the divisions between the religious and the secular, the settlers and the kibbutzniks, and the arguments over whether and how to change the facts on the ground that were first established in 1967. We read of how the veterans of that fateful mission go on to live their lives, to reinvent themselves, to enter and leave relationships, to pursue careers and enterprises in civilian life, to endure illness

and confront death, and Halevi shows us how the same urgent issues that stirred in their hearts and minds in the heat of battle remain the same issues that the whole nation confronts today, often with heartbreaking and even fatal consequences. Thats why Like Dreamers is such a rich, complex, and eloquent book, both challenging and enlightening, an extraordinary effort on the part of the author to capture a vast historical saga through the lens of the lives of seven flesh-and-blood human beings. In their disappointment, some Jews had forgotten to celebrate, how to be grateful, Halevi concludes. It was a recurring Jewish problem, as ancient as the first Exodus. His achievement in Like Dreams is his own ability to celebrate the courage of the men of the 55th Brigade, without for a moment overlooking the perplexing aftermath of their victory on that remarkable day. Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, where this review originally appeared. Reprinted by permission.

Jewish standard OCtOBer 11, 2013 29

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away. Headquarters didnt seem to know much more than he did. Until the night before, the brigades battle plans had focused on a parachute jump into the Sinai Desert, and Arik had organized the necessary intelligence. But then, when the Jordanians began shelling Israels capital, the men of the 55th were hastily dispatched onto requisitioned tourist buses and driven to Jerusalem. A shell crashed into the facade of the building. Arik was covered with the dust of shattered bricks. Helmets! shouted Colonel Motta Gur, commander of the 55th Brigade. Arik checked himself: steady, as always. The paratroopers filled the side streets that ended in no-mans-land. Sandbags were piled before little stone houses with corrugated roofs. Flares formed red-andwhite arcs, exposing the paratroopers, flashes of silhouettes. Pavement erupted. Medic! Dozens lay bleeding. Avital Geva rushed through the darkness, shouting peoples names. A flash. Avital fell. My face! he screamed. My face! Someone laid him on a car, pointed a flashlight at his face. Covered with blood. Gasping, conscious, he was carried into a jeep, which sped through the exploding streets. Corporal Yoel Bin-Nun, bearing on his back his units communications box, ran through the blacked-out streets. In civilian life he was a yeshiva student and knew these Orthodox streets; now, though, he was totally disoriented. He was trying to find the men of the 71st Battalion, who were scheduled to be the first of the brigades three battalions to cross into no-mans-land. They would be followed by the men of Yoels battalion, the 28th. And it was Yoels assignment to follow the 71st to the crossing area, radio his battalion, and then point a flashlight, guiding his fellow soldiers into East Jerusalem. But where was the 71st? 02:15. Israeli sappers cut an opening in the first line of barbed wire. Bangalores long metal tubes filled with explosives were extended through the opening and detonated, creating a narrow scorched path in the minefield. Yoel Bin-Nun found the crossing point. Crouching, he aimed his flashlight toward the men behind him and repeated, Pirtza pirtza pirtza breach breach breach.  Yossi Klein Halevi
cover story continues page 33

Introduction: June 6, 1967

The long lines of silent young men moved single-file through the blacked-out streets, illumined only by flashes exploding in the approaching distance. Not even the outlines of houses were visible, as if the city of white stone had been reabsorbed by the hills. It was a cool June night in Jerusalem, but many of the men were sweating. Their uniforms were olive green or camouflagepatterned, US Army surplus more suitable for the jungles of Vietnam than for urban warfare. Most of the men were in their twenties, reservists abruptly extracted from university or from farms. For most this would be their first war. They were entering battle already exhausted: many had stayed awake through the night before, too anxious for sleep. It was just past midnight, and the men of the 55th Paratroopers Reserve Brigade were heading toward no-mans-land, the swath of barbed wire and minefields and trenches dividing Jordanian-held East Jerusalem from Israeli-held West Jerusalem. That morning the Israeli air force had launched a preemptive strike

Excerpt reprinted by permission of publisher

against Egypt, whose leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had moved his army to the Israeli border, blockaded Israels southern shipping route, and threatened the imminent destruction of the Jewish state. The Jordanian army had opened a second front in Jerusalem, shelling Jewish neighborhoods and hitting hundreds of apartments. Most residents were in shelters, all lights extinguished. Every so often a jeep or ambulance raced, without headlights, through the empty streets. Lieutenant Avital Geva, twenty-sixyear-old deputy commander of Company D, 28th Battalion, walked at the head of his men. He squinted into the darkness and saw nothing, not even shadows. Avital left the front of the line and walked alongside the men. Spread out, guys, he urged quietly, spread out. Nearby, on a fourth-floor rooftop, Major Arik Achmon, chief intelligence officer of the 55th Brigade, was on the radio with the central front command near Tel Aviv, seeking information on the Jordanian troops barely a kilometer

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30 Jewish Standard OCTOBER 11, 2013

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still leading after all those years

Arik Achmon was born on kibbutz, but he helped shift Israels economy toward capitalism.

Meir Ariel became the greatest Hebrew poet-singer of his generation.

Avital Geva, left, became a leading Israeli artist and Peace Now activist. Yoel Bin-Nun was a founder of the settlements of Alon Shvut and Ofra before breaking with the settlement movement after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

Udi Adiv served 12 years in prison for helping create an anti-Zionist terrorist undergound.

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Cover Story
The socialism of reprinted by the gang Excerpt permission of publisher
In the orange orchards of Kibbutz Ein Shemer, Avital Geva, barefoot and shirtless in the earlymorning sun, was frying eggs in a blackened pan. Turkish coffee was boiling in the aluminum pot, and his friends were laying out plates of tomatoes and cucumbers and olives, white cheese and jam. Ya Allah, what a feast! exclaimed Avital, as if encountering for the first time the food he had eaten for breakfast every day since childhood. It was mid-May 1967. Avital and his crew had been working since dawn, to outwit the heat of the day. Rather than return to the communal dining room for breakfast, the young men allowed themselves the privilege of eating together beneath the corrugated roof theyd erected for just that purpose. Could there be greater joy, thought Avital, than working the fields with ones closest friends and sharing food grown by their kibbutz? One could almost forget about the crisis on the Egyptian border. Late spring was Avitals favorite time in the orchards. The air was heavy with trees in flower. The last of the Valencia oranges had just been harvested, and the first swellings appeared of what would be the autumn harvest. Meanwhile the orchards had to be prepared for the long, dry summer. Every morning the crew dragged two dozen irrigation pipes, each six meters long, from row to row. Though only twenty-six years old, Avital had been appointed head of the orchards, one of the kibbutzs main sources of income. Ein Shemers orchards were among the countrys most productive. Avital experimented with new machinery that would increase the harvest without entirely mechanizing the process, preserving a tactile encounter with the fruit. If you dont say good morning to the tree, he had learned from the old-timers, the tree wont say happy new year to you. Avital could spend an entire morning pruning a single tree, satisfying his artistic longings. Michelangelo, his friends called him, and half meant it. Work in the orchards, Avital insisted, should be fun. When the kibbutzs high school students were sent to help with the harvest, Avital dispatched tractors to retrieve them from their dormitories and gave them the wheel. Awaiting them in the orchards were bins of biscuits; during breaks, he made French fries, an extravagance in a kibbutz whose diet was determined by austere Polish cooks. He divided the young people into teams, and the one that filled the most bins won chocolate. Avitals close-cropped hair exposed an expression at once tender and resolute. The lower lip protruded, and a sturdy chin rose to uphold it. His blue eyes seemed translucent. Hevreh? he called out. The eggs are ready! Avital turned ordinary words into superlatives. And for Avital no word was more urgently joyful than hevrehthe gangwhich he
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sang and elongated with new syllables. For Avital, hevreh was a kind of miracle, transforming separated beings into a single organism bound by common purpose, by love. The essence of kibbutz: a society of hevreh, in which no one was extraneous. Like poor Meir, heavy and sluggish, an Egyptian Jew lost among the Polish Jews of Ein Shemer, whod been shunted from one part of the kibbutz workforce to the other until Avital insisted he join the hevreh in the orchards. And when they went on a bicycle trip up the steep hills to Nazareth, they brought Meir along, installing

him like a peasant king on a couch mounted on a tractordrawn wagon. Banter around the breakfast table turned to the situation in the south. The crisis had begun a few days earlier, on Israels Independence Day, when Egyptian president Nasser announced that he was dispatching troops toward the Egyptian-Israeli border. Then he ordered UN peacekeeping forces to quit the border, and incredibly, the UN complied. Now Egyptian troops and tanks were taking their place. Radio Cairo and Radio Damascus were broadcasting speeches by Arab leaders promising the imminent destruction of Israel.

Why arent they calling us up? demanded Avital, a lieutenant in the 55th Brigade, the reservist unit of the elite paratroopers. How could he be sitting here while the country faced a threat to its life? Maybe there will be a diplomatic solution, someone suggested. Not with the Russians pushing the Arabs to war, someone else added. When my two friends were killed by the Syrians, the Russian ambassador in the UN said that Israelis killed Israelis to blame the Syrians. Thats when I finished with Mother Russia. Mother Russia, Avital repeated with contempt. Yossi Klein Halevi

Pastor John Hagee has gotten 50 million Evangelical Christians to stand up for Israel

Our thanks today assures Israels security tomorrow

Make your voices heard as the Jewish community honors our loyal friends Pastor John and Diana Hagee

for their decades of staunch support of Israels defense and $70 million in humanitarian aid.

Thursday, November 7th, 2013

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A Bnai Akiva hike in the early 1960s. (Women in the Orthodox youth movement then wore slacks.) Yoel Bin-Nun is center. Bin-Nun and other religious Zionist leaders are at the heart of Like Dreamers.

Grand Hyatt New York

6pm Cocktails 7pm Program
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Proceeds from the dinner will complete Meir Panims Mortimer Zuckerman and Abigail Zuckerman Israel Nutrition Center, which will provide 30,000 daily meals to needy children and adults.

Dreamers in Demarest
Yossi Klein Halevi will be the speaker at the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jerseys major gifts dinner in support of the 2014 annual campaign. The dinner is open to familiesand their adult childrenwhose combined household gift is $10,000 or above. The dinner is also open to members of the DOr LDor Society, those making unrestricted or annual campaign endowment commitments of $100,000 or more. Where: Alpine Country Club, 80 Anderson Ave., Demarest
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34 Jewish standard OCtOBer 11, 2013