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- Jun 19, 2010
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By Allison Yarrow | The Daily Beast – 17 hrs ago: 12/01/2011
Jewish children reared in America grow up hearing one thing on repeat. It's like a dull tuning fork in the ear, or an image that sticks in the brain. Marry a Jew. Over and over. As if each time is the first. The subtext is that each of us is responsible for all of us, and if we intermarry, we risk disappearing completely. American Jewspreach marrying each other in Israel's name. The act does the Jewish homeland proud. A friend's parent once told me that marrying a Jew would be great, but marrying an Israeli would be even better.
Unfortunately for American Jews, and all those niggling parents, it turns out that Israel might not be on our team in this marriage game. A middling and now infamous Israeli government department has forged a peculiar U.S.-based advertising campaign. In a series of videos and billboards, it is discouraging Israeli expats from marrying American Jews and imploring them to move back toIsrael.
The ham-handed effort isn't targeting American Jews, but it is offending them. Outrage has been concentrated in the blogosphere. "I don't think I have ever seen a demonstration of Israeli contempt for American Jews as obvious as these ads," writes Jeffery Goldberg in The Atlantic. Gal Beckerman, a child of Israeli expats who lives in Brooklyn, writes in The Forward that the ads are most disturbing because they are full of fear.
This public offensive voices what American Jews should already know, and should be angrier about: that many Israeli writers, thought leaders, politicians, and rabbis believe assimilated American Jews are not Jews at all. People who make it their business to say who is and who isn't a Jew are as old as the religion itself. That paradigm is hardly a useful one. Nobody listens to people who only want to exclude. There are more of us here than in Israel. Questions of Jewishness may not permeate our everyday activities, but maybe that's Israeliness and not Jewishness at all.
Besides, if there are no Jews here in America, who would be left to plant all those trees?