THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

How could it be that everything “came back” to him, I wondered, if he or hisparents had never been there? Did Hitler win over him, too? This to me was anothercase that showed that Middle Eastern Jews were embracing Israel’s survivornarrative. The Shoah made us all one and the same.The United States of America has always been a practical alternative to the Zionistidea—to assemble all the Jews under one national roof, independent andautonomous, thus removing once and for all the “Jewish problem” from the OldWorld’s agenda. Solving the Jewish problem was not meant to be just for the sake ofthe Jews, but for the benefit of whole world. The Zionists wanted to transplant thehated, persecuted Jews into their historic homeland in the Middle East and thus ridEurope of them. A few thousand dreamers and pioneers came to Zion but ahundred-fold more left czarist Russia for the Goldene Medina, the golden state ofAmerica, as it was called by the Jewish emigrants of North America. The idealist fewcame to the Land of Israel, but the traditional wandering Jew, always optimistic, wentto America. The Jew was reborn in Zion, but in America, against all expectations, theNew Jewry was born. Israeli ideology was tough and head-on—“You can notconquer the mountain until you dig a grave on the slope,” says the tombstone ofShlomo Ben Yosef, an Israeli terrorist from the 1930s. “It is good to die for ourcountry” is inscribed on the roaring lion’s monument to another Zionist hero, YosefTrumpledor. The American Jewish spirit was less dramatic: Assimilate. Be American.Integrate into the spiritual and material life that America had to offer. As Israelis weredeveloping collective separatism, American Jews wove themselves into the fabric ofthe general public. Being Jewish could be achieved in two different ways: isolation orintegration; a ghetto of belligerent colonialism or Jewish universalism.The difference between the integrative American Jewish approach and the recreationof Jewish ghettos and shtetls in Israel is plain. Listen carefully to the Jewishvoices of renewal; the seeds may have been planted in the Germany of MosesMendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, and Abraham Geiger, but the fruits belong to AmericanJewry. The Jewish “churches”—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionistand Secular—were made possible by America’s religious freedom. The AmericanJewish Torah is a valid alternative to the Zionist national Torah and to Israel’s