Zionism and the Right to Culture
As my Bildung-German Jewish grandmother and my traditional Iranian Jewish grandfather have by now realized, Israel’s Jewish education system doesn’t protect their Jewish culture, but their Jewish ethnicity. The fear is that a humanist Israeli public school system would not be able to protect this so-called right because, if they studied together, Jewish and Arab children would quickly fall in love.
.. And indeed, how could a Jewish state handle the mixed sons and daughters of a humanistic education system? Would the Supreme Court approve their designation as Israeli rather than Jewish or Arab? Would they be drafted for obligatory military service? Perhaps enroll in the expedited ‘conversion-to-Judaism’ program, which the Israeli Defense Force takes pride in offering to soldiers whose Judaism, as state and military rabbis determine, is in question?
.. Reality perhaps permits us, for a limited amount of time, to live in a Jewish democratic contradiction. The latter two alternatives are problematic, but they would at least allow Israelis to become conscious of what Halbertal’s essay attempts to obliterate: the existence of a “big question.” This question—an urgent crisis, really—consists in the fact that the main challenge to Judaism nowadays isn’t posed by nationalist anti-Semitic regimes. On the contrary, it is posed by liberal democracies that inhibit ethnic separations.