Sometime in the 12th century, Yehuda Halevi, a Jewish physician and poet, wrote what would become an often-cited poem that begins with a painful yearning for Zion: “My heart is in the East, and I am at the edge of the West.”
Living in Muslim Spain, Halevi’s narrator thought of himself as an exiled prisoner, forever wondering how he would ever be able to find “savor in food” and uphold his vows while Zion lies so far away and he, “in Arab chains?” When Halevi wrote this poem, the Land of Israel was very much real, but not as a sovereign Jewish country.
When I first read this poem, the Land of Israel was very much a sovereign Jewish country. A miracle, no doubt. No longer the objects of history, Zionism helped to catapult our people into being its subjects.
In 12th-century medieval Europe, going to the Land of Israel was quite an ordeal; today, it is, more or less, effortless. My heart yearns for Zion no less than the poet’s, and perhaps one can argue even more, because now is the time to go not just to a Promised Land, but to a land where our people are the majority.
How can I call myself a Zionist?
And yet I stay here, in the United States. Am I a hypocrite? How can I call myself a Zionist? I did not serve in the IDF; I do not pay the taxes in Israel. Moreover, the Zionist mission has been achieved. To be a Zionist in 1904 is quite different from calling oneself a Zionist today. What, then, does it mean to be a Zionist today?
A few years ago, I met a rabbi from a prominent synagogue in Los Angeles. I came to him because I wanted to help educate the community about Israel, the conflict, and most importantly, the remarkable story of the Jewish people.He listened and when I was finished, he said: “You are a very strong Zionist. It doesn’t compute. Why are you living here?” A similar story happened to me when I went to Israel during my annual summer trips and stayed with my family, who call me their “Zionistochka!”. (I come from a Russian-speaking Jewish family, thus the Russian diminutive.)
They asked me how I can be a Zionist and live in America? A true Zionist lives in Eretz Yisrael. During that same summer trip, a man I met spoke with great fervor: “We do not need to know what Zionism is. We live Zionism every day.”
That summer, I also spoke to a few young adults who had just graduated from high school and were off to serve in the IDF. I asked them, “Are you Zionists?” One said while taking a long drag of his cigarette, “What else would we be?”I’ve observed that if you ask a Jew in America whether they are a Zionist, the answer is always a very clear “yes” or a “no.” In Israel, I get furrowed brows and a chorus of “betakh” (of course!). How can this be? Are we not the same people, cut so to speak, from the same tallit?
WE IN AMERICA face a surge of antisemitism that comes from the radical Left, the radical Right, Islamism, the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, and the Nation of Islam. It’s in universities, high schools, on social media, and on the streets. We fight with weapons of words against a narrative war being waged against the Jewish people abroad.
At the same time, we will never know what it means to send our children to the military to safeguard the Jewish people and their land. We will never know what it means to hear the alarms blast “red alert” as we scramble to make it to a bomb shelter within 15 seconds. And we will never know the fear of a parent living in Efrat or Hebron when sending their child out of the house.
And because our experiences are singular, we struggle to comprehend one another’s lives. For example, when the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement came to the United States in 2005, we Jews in the Diaspora heard the figurative “red alert” and rushed to triage the alarming rate at which Jewish students across American universities began to feel unwelcome and unsafe.
And when we brought our concerns to the State of Israel, the government initially brushed it off, claiming that Israel is economically strong enough to withstand some little grassroots movement whose goal is to strangle Israel economically.
How wrong they were. The goal of the BDS movement was not to strangulate Israel economically, but to ostracize and delegitimize the Jewish country in the Diaspora.
Another vivid example comes to mind when, in my advocacy work, I began to work with shlichim, a cohort of young Israelis sent by the Jewish Agency to America to help humanize Israel to her detractors. One of the first questions I would ask these Israelis is how they would explain to someone that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. And they looked at me as if I were speaking another language.
It is understandable. After all, they had, all their lives, lived as a majority: they are Jews living in a Jewish country. No one screamed “Free Palestine” or showed them maps of the Middle East with Israel entirely missing; they had never been told that they are baby killers or that they are new Nazis. In effect, why should they know that anti-Zionism is antisemitism?
When I was a little girl, my Soviet Jewish mother taught me that the Jewish people are like a hand. And she showed me her hand, stretched it out, and pointed to all her fingers. If one finger is cut, she told me, the pain is felt by the entire hand. This, she affirmed, is the Jewish people.
True, the goal of the Jewish people is to settle the land that God gave to them. But at this moment in time, there are roughly 8.3 million Jews who live outside of the Land of Israel (there are close to 6.9 million Jews in Israel). It is imperative for Jews in Israel to know and understand the experiences of their brothers and sisters who live outside of their ancestral homeland.
True, we do not live in forced exile. But ask yourselves why the Birthright program, founded in 1999 by American Jews, continues to take hundreds of young Jews to their ancestral homeland. And why do our Jewish day schools strive to cultivate a strong Jewish identity centered on Torah, mitzvot and ahavat Yisrael, the love and support of the Jewish state?
In our metropolitan cities, Israel’s Independence Day is celebrated, and in New York City an annual Celebrate Israel parade garners more than 40,000 people. It is simple and can be summed up in the following dictum: We are Jews because we are Zionists, we are Zionists because we are Jews.
To know about Diaspora Zionists, therefore, is crucial for Israel. Our challenges are your challenges; and your heartbreaking summers of rockets pummeling the cities of Israel, of innocent civilians losing lives to terror, are our veytik (“pain” in Yiddish).
The writer was born in the former Soviet Union and came to the US with her family in 1989. She received her PhD in Russian literature and wrote her dissertation on Holocaust literature in the Soviet Union. She is the education editor for White Rose Magazine, and a research fellow for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, as well as an educator specializing in teaching Jewish history, the Holocaust, and world literature.