In 1948, when the state of Israel was established, many Diaspora Jews felt that their poor relative needed saving. The state had to ration oil and food in the 1950s as the population more than doubled from immigration. With enemies surrounding it, and what looked like chaos within, Israel became the great charity case of the Jewish world.
By the 1990s, Israel was one of the world’s most rapidly developing countries. Its traditional, centralized, socialized economy was modernizing, becoming the launchpad for a start-up nation. Israel’s standard of living was starting to match Europe’s. The one million Russian immigrants were bringing in new skills, professional experience, and a sophistication in basic sciences, enhancing Israel’s competitiveness. In 2000, Israel’s economy started its amazing winning streak, averaging 3.3 percent growth every year, outdoing most European countries.
Israel started passing most of a society’s essential road tests. It was heading in the right direction in terms of social justice, tolerance, education, fairness, prosperity, and freedom, while acing the test that assesses confidence in today and tomorrow: the pregnancy test. Israel’s birthrate of 3.1—2.2 per secular woman—is the highest by far in the OECD. The last time Western Europe averaged 3.1 births was in 1931; for the United Kingdom and France, it was 1889.
This optimism helps explain why Israel ranks higher on the world happiness index than the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, Belgium, and France. Israelis also have a strong sense of family and tradition. Israel is the only major Jewish community growing quickly today, a rare place where nonreligious Jews succeed in passing on a strong sense of Jewish connectedness to their children and grandchildren.
At the same time, Diaspora Jews, especially in America, underwent their own transformation. Jewish communities outside Israel were richer, prouder, stronger, and freer, with each generation of children more American, more Canadian, or more British than their parents. But in the 1990s, Jewish demographers started pointing out a trend, especially in America, that many parents and grandparents, including some of my friends, were already experiencing in their own homes. As each succeeding generation became more American, rates of Jewish commitment dropped dramatically. The sociologist Steven Cohen observed that young adults were “significantly less involved in Jewish life in terms of communal affiliations, ritual practice, and even friends.” They were more distanced from Israel too.
If Hebrew school didn’t excite, if the bar or bat mitzvah didn’t inspire, if synagogue left them bored, what else might work? Well, wasn’t there a generation of kids whose parents played an important role in the unique struggle for Soviet Jewry? They enjoyed a success of biblical proportions. Could this story, now a part of their family history, engage them? You can’t just inherit that feeling of belonging or the connection to old stories. Kids only take it personally and feel it easily through the hard work of their parents.
In our family, we have two seders every year, despite living in Israel where most people have one. One is the traditional Passover seder. This celebration of freedom remains one of the most popular Jewish traditions. More than 70 percent of American Jews and 97 percent of Israeli Jews reported attending a seder last year. Every spring, each family repeats the story of our exodus from Egypt.
A central mitzvah, commandment, that night is, “Thou shalt tell that story to your children.” Children are invited to ask questions, and the discussion proceeds from there. When we read about the four sons, we learn that the Wise One asks, “What does this means to us?” The wisdom lies in understanding that each person is supposed to take Passover personally, imagining that we were just freed from slavery that night. The Wicked One distances, asking, “What does this mean to you?”—and not “to me” or “to us”—separating from our people, from our story. The Simple One is easy to understand. But the growing threat in the Jewish world today is the fourth child, who does not even know how to formulate the question.
Our family’s second seder usually occurs about six weeks before the traditional one. It marks the anniversary of my release from the Soviet Union and my reunification with Avital, on February 11, or the Hebrew date of Bet Ba’Adar Aleph.
Our more personal seder always revolves around our children’s questions. Avital and I answer them, as I wear the kippah a Ukrainian cellmate made for me in the Gulag from the rough cloth used to line my boot. When my daughters were younger, they would ask about my best friends in my punishment cell, the spiders. They would ask how we used Morse code to communicate from one cell to another. And they were always fascinated by how we spoke through the “toilet phones,” sticking our heads deep inside the bowl after draining it of water. As they grew older, their questions became more sophisticated. They would ask Avital how she knew what was happening to me, and how I knew what was happening at all. They wondered how it was possible that so many people around the world wanted to help.
As they matured more, they probed deeper, asking how we started building our lives together after a twelve-year delay and what lasting impact it had on us. “Was it hard to resume normal life after Abba’s release and your reunion?” they asked Avital—all too shrewdly.
Now, we are on round two, telling the grandchildren our story. These days, our children and their husbands help their children ask the questions. Our children do a better job of answering them, finding a common language linking all three generations. Today, with the grandkids still young, we are back to playing with spiders and talking through toilets. We haven’t graduated yet to mobilizing masses or communicating between forcibly separated spouses.
A few years ago, I tried retelling them the story of the Soviets as a new Pharaoh who sentenced me to jail. But I lost them as soon as I used the Hebrew word for jail sentence, tzav ma’asar. Tzav also means “turtle.” “Turtle!” the kids yelled. “Pharaoh sent Grandpa a turtle.” Before I could get flustered or frustrated, my daughters, with years of experience as educators in youth movements, stepped in. “Quick, kids, under the table!” they yelled.
“Now, get out,” they commanded, while blocking the way. “That’s what happened to Sabba”—to Grandpa—they explained. “He wanted to get out, and go to Israel, but they locked him in a small room and didn’t let him go.” The kids looked up, worried.
“Don’t worry, he got out, because Savta”—Grandma—“started yelling too. At first no one listened to her, but she traveled all over the world, asking Jews to help. When the Jewish people joined in, you know what happened?” my daughters asked.
The kids shook their heads.
“Well, let’s try,” they said.
Everyone shouted: “Let my grandpa go to Israel! Let my grandpa go to Israel!” It worked. My daughters and sons-in-law let my grandkids go.
That short, punchy, Twitter-esque message was just what the kids needed to know then. The Passover seder teaches about God’s power in helping us by choosing us, liberating us. My personal seder teaches about God’s power in helping us when we each stand up individually and work together as a people.
So far, for our first two generational cycles, all this storytelling and remembering has worked well. My oldest daughter, Rachel, says that one of the things that helps is that we told the story in fragments. She explained, quite insightfully, in Tablet for Passover 2020, that “like the authors of the Haggadah, my parents never tried to offer us polished versions of their story.” She believes “this lack of editorial intervention… made their story so impactful.” Avital and I “didn’t treat it as their story to tell and to give, but rather as building blocks that we could use in the stories we told to ourselves,” then—fragmented—to their kids. “With every new question and every new answer, my parents’ experiences seeped into my own sense of self.” Ultimately, of course, how it will work in the next cycles, time will tell. But it will not happen by itself.
For the past thirty years, Avital and I have been asked again and again, together and individually, to tell our personal stories and the story of the broader struggle for Soviet Jewry. One particularly popular request is that we speak to young bar- and bat-mitzvah-age kids, either one-on-one or to their class. It’s difficult to say no, especially when a former comrade in arms—from Russia, North America, Europe, Australia, or Israel—asks. Inevitably, whenever our friends who fought with us relive the struggle through our retelling, they get very sentimental. It triggers a flood of memories. They often leave teary-eyed.
Over the years, as their children listened to the story, we could see it had already turned into history. Most kids lacked the emotional connection with our struggle their parents felt. At first, we were shocked. How could parents not have told their children about the determination they showed, the risks they took, the sacrifices they made? The smuggled letters, the angry protests, the secret trips to Russia? Tens of thousands of people spent years of their lives in the movement. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, attended demonstrations. And they simply forgot to tell the next generation about their devotion and about our shared victory.
Gradually, we stopped being so surprised. We got used to the ignorance. Now, we are asked to speak to their grandchildren. You can see it in the kids’ eyes: most don’t feel anything. They don’t want to upset their grandparents. They are willing to sit patiently, indulging them. Avital and I can always resort to the time-tested anecdotes that wake kids up, about Morse code and toilet phones. But it doesn’t seem to mean much to them.
At a certain point, pitying those kids and ourselves, we had had enough. We were tired of burdening this captive audience. Now, when asked to speak to young teens or to their classes, Avital and I propose, “First, let them read a book, any book, about the struggle. Let them come with questions. We will be happy to answer.” Since we added this condition, the number of speaking requests has dropped drastically.
This little experiment suggests that the parents or grandparents need to give it a personal touch for the next generation to feel connected. Without the elders’ massive investment, those in the younger generation don’t take the leap to make any part of history a part of their identity. There are too many other distractions. It’s too easy to see it all as distant.
By contrast, look at these same kids’ faces, and their older siblings’ eyes, when they visit Israel. They’re engaged. They’re excited. They’re discovering something they have been told is theirs for years, but they never appreciated before. That’s what drives Birthright.
Toward the end of the 1990s, Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt, two well-known North American billionaires, approached me with a “crazy” idea. It had been bubbling up for a while now, thanks to Yossi Beilin and others. I had known Bronfman as a generous funder of many initiatives, including our Zionist Forum. His wife at the time, Andrea Bronfman, of blessed memory, had been among the leaders of the Montreal Group of Thirty-Five, determined Canadian housewives who spearheaded the fight to free Soviet Jews. I knew Steinhardt, a gravelly, grumbly street kid who made really good, less well.
“We noticed that our kids and their friends are more interested in being Jewish after they visit Israel,” they told me. “We want to guarantee that every Jewish kid born anywhere in the world will get a free trip to Israel. We want the Israeli government to pay a third of the costs. Local communities will pay a third. And the last third will come from private philanthropists, us and our friends.”
I eagerly became their cheerleader and government lobbyist. For more than a year, I played the role of matchmaker, connecting these visionary donors with various Israeli officials. Many in the government considered this strange idea anti-Zionist. It upset the natural order. “Are you mad? Why are you supporting them?” some ministers scoffed. “You want Israelis taxed even more so rich American Jews can bring their children here for free? They can afford it. They should be sending us money.”
Although only a few million dollars were requested in Birthright’s first years, Israel’s budget was so tight that any new allocations triggered massive government bickering. I believed this new program was worth fighting for. I believed in bringing young Jews to Israel on intensive programs, while appreciating the symbolism of the gesture. The state of Israel would be investing in developing the identity of Jews who remained in the Diaspora, not just those ready to make aliyah. That kind of leadership could represent a revolutionary shift toward a more mutual relationship.
Bronfman and Steinhardt were a new breed of guerilla philanthropists. They did not wait around for the Establishment’s approval. As the government and the Jewish Federations dithered, the billionaires charged ahead. Before getting the green light, they already had established a foundation, a steering committee, a top educational team, and a basic recipe for the free ten-day trip for eighteen-to-twenty-six-year-olds, which participants more or less still follow today.
Meanwhile, for more than a year, I continued my lobbying within the government. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes, when speaking to old-fashioned aliyah-focused Zionists, I talked their talk, asking, “How else are we going to recruit immigrants in the future if we don’t introduce them to Israel today?” But despite many studies proving the Israel experience’s effectiveness, most ministers remained unconvinced or uninterested.
One minister got it. Fortunately, he was the prime minister. Netanyahu understood that the money would be well invested in strengthening our unity as a people and that the dividends would pay off in the future.
I was proud to participate in the historic meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office with Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt. We watched with excitement, and some nervousness, as Prime Minister Netanyahu signed the letter that turned this fantasy into that great Jewish identity-building project, Taglit-Birthright. Instead of looking at the Jewish people as a tool to build Israel, we were using Israel to build the Jewish people.
The first group arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport in December 1999. For the first three years of the program—as Israel ran through prime ministers from Netanyahu to Barak to Sharon—the small sums the government allocated kept coming under cabinet attack. Again and again, I would confer with Bronfman and Steinhardt, then lobby the prime minister and finance minister to protect the funds.
Eventually, something clicked. The program’s importance became so obvious, it became politically incorrect to oppose it. The budgetary requests ballooned as the program expanded, but the government support grew too.
By 2006, Birthright had inspired tens of thousands of young Jews, but it was still relatively small. It wasn’t yet the standard Jewish rite of passage Bronfman and Steinhardt had first imagined. The founders dreamed that, at birth, every young Jew would get a certificate to be redeemed after the age of eighteen, promising an Israel trip as one’s “birthright.”
That December, Miriam and Sheldon Adelson started scaling up the program dramatically when they stepped in to “buy out” the waiting lists. During Israel’s sixtieth anniversary in 2008, they and their family celebrated by donating $60 million to Birthright.
Their donations sent twenty-four thousand young Jews to a country Sheldon’s taxi-driving father was too poor, then too unhealthy, to ever visit. Since then, Birthright has operated on a much larger level, as a $100-million-plus program, bringing forty thousand to fifty thousand young Jews to Israel annually. This program shows that cooperation is possible, even in our polarized world. Funders of the Jewish Left like Charles Bronfman and Lynn Schusterman work together with funders of the Jewish Right like the Adelsons, appealing to young Jews from across the political spectrum.
Malcolm Hoenlein, the outgoing executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, has often said that the struggle for Soviet Jewry saved a generation of American Jews from assimilation. The same can be said about Birthright. It became the biggest and most successful educational project uniting the Diaspora and Israel. It also became the most prominent example of American Jewry’s strategic switch. The Diaspora was no longer just saving Israel; now the Diaspora needed Israel to save it too.
By 2009, Birthright and Masa, a Jewish Agency internship and learning program for five to twelve months, were bringing tens of thousands of Jews to Israel annually. As of this writing, more than 750,000 young Jewish adults have participated in Birthright—including one hundred thousand Israelis through mifgash encounters with their Jewish peers.
The statistics speak for themselves, especially because, as good businessmen, Bronfman and Steinhardt invested in elaborate mechanisms to track the results to see the return on their investment. Twenty-plus years after Birthright’s founding, mountains of surveys show that 85 percent of participants considered the trip a life-changing experience. Seventy-four percent feel a connection to Israel, and they’re 40 percent more likely to feel that way than nonparticipants. However you judge being Jewishly involved, Birthright helps.
Educators, who know how difficult it is to change young minds, wonder: What’s your secret? How can so many participants have a life-changing experience in just ten days of touring, including travel time?
Over the years, I have spoken to thousands of Birthright participants, in formal speeches and informal chats. I always get this eerie sense of recognition. The way they speak about the program’s effect on them, and the looks I see on their faces, throws me back to the 1967 war’s effect on me and my Soviet Jewish peers. It’s immediate. They discover, as we did, all at once, their roots, their people, and their country.
Of course, we’re not the same. Our assimilation was forced upon us. Most of them, or their parents, just drifted away. Most have always known they were Jewish and just never cared about it. It’s harder to overcome intentional indifference than imposed ignorance.
While appreciating the past, Birthright participants also discover an excitement in the present they had never associated with being Jewish before. It’s not Judaism as some kind of suburban country club for middle-agers. Instead, they feel they belong to this young, exciting family and a wise, ancient nation. In Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, in the Negev and the Golan, Israel is cool and fun. On Birthright, they just get to experience this first surge, this initial injection of energy. Nevertheless, the strange new feeling that there’s something deeper in their identity, in their birthright, is liberating and truly thrilling.
If Birthright offers this sweet first taste, Masa provides a meatier meal. Established before I joined the Jewish Agency in 2003 as part of a fifty-fifty partnership between the government and the agency, Masa is the clearinghouse for two hundred or so different programs, lasting from five to twelve months, for eighteen-to-thirty-year-olds. They study, teach, volunteer, or intern, finding meaningful interactions in Israel.
I enjoy speaking to Masa participants after they have been in Israel for a few months. I start by asking, “What are your complaints about Israel?” With the range of options Masa offers—from teaching English in Arab schools, to volunteering in Tel Aviv slums, to studying in a yeshiva in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem—it attracts participants from across the political and religious spectrums. The participants’ experiences usually reinforce whatever political or religious inclination led them to choose their program. After all, they are often with like-minded—and strong-minded—people. I hear lots of political criticism. I hear that Israel has abandoned Judaism or that the rabbis dominate Israel, that Israel is too hard on the Palestinians or that Israel has turned soft.
“Now tell me,” I ask, “what does Israel mean to you?” During hundreds of conversations I have had with Masa participants, religious and nonreligious, left and right, I hear roughly the same answer. They say, “I found a family here. I feel more comfortable expressing my views here than anywhere else in the world. Here, I am loved not for my politics or my achievements, but because I belong.”
As one young woman explained to me, “You know in Israel when the cab driver, after grilling me about three generations of my family history, wishes me ‘shabbat shalom’ on Friday, I feel that he really means it. When the New York cabbies mutter, ‘Have a nice day,’ it means nothing.”
As Jewish identity thinned in America, American Jews discovered Israel as a tool to thicken their Jewish selves. It was no longer about saving Israel, but about using Israel to increase the chances that your grandchildren will be Jewish tomorrow by finding meaning and passion today.
The Jewish world beyond Israel faces an assimilation epidemic. Small communities are disappearing, big ones are shrinking. Having visited dozens of Jewish communities, I have only seen two sets of brakes that can counter assimilation: faith and Zionism. To stay Jewish, you either connect to tradition or to Israel. As with all systems, if you can use both, they reinforce one another. If you have neither, statistically speaking, your grandchildren have very slim chances of being Jewish, wherever you live, in France or Mexico or Australia or America.
Israel could afford to finance programs strengthening Jewish communities because Israelis were no longer the poor relatives. On the contrary, Israel was flourishing. The outside media treated the country as if it were on the verge of collapse, but we Israelis lived a different story. We made the desert bloom and welcomed the exiles home. We were leapfrogging ahead of one European country after another economically, while becoming the eleventh happiest country in the world. We weren’t defined by boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) and delegitimization, but by drip irrigation, USBs, Waze, Mobileye, ReWalk, PillCam, Check Point’s firewall, rooftop solar water, and cutting-edge, life-saving medical research.
When he founded the modern Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl expected that the creation of the Jewish state would eliminate both anti-Semitism and the Diaspora. Though he was prophetic when it came to envisioning Jewish statehood, on this, so far, he has been wrong. Despite all of Israel’s successes, establishing a state didn’t eliminate anti-Semitism or the Diaspora. In fact, anti-Semitism survived and spawned a new offshoot, the New Anti-Semitism targeting Israel, with its demonization, delegitimization, and double standards. Despite being strong, stable, and successful, Israel was the only country in the world forced to defend its very legitimacy, constantly.
When the Forum Against Anti-Semitism was first formed out of the Prime Minister’s Office, it advanced Israel’s mission of helping world Jewry, in this case by defending Jews. Once I turned it into the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism, world Jewry was defending Israel.
This same transformation occurred on campuses. We all realized that strong connections between Jews and Jewish communities worldwide were in Israel’s interest. So, as a secondary payoff, all these Jewish identity-building programs boosted Israel enthusiastically. Soon, on every campus, ambassadors for Israel, from left to right, religious and secular, Israeli-born emissaries from the Jewish Agency and full-time students, were not just defending Israel but celebrating it. They didn’t do it out of some kind of guilt or obligation, but out of a need to defend themselves and this place that was so central to their identities.
This process was repeated in other parts of the Jewish world. It wasn’t easy for many Israelis to stop expecting the Diaspora to assimilate away, or to start supporting these Jewish identity programs. The justice minister and deputy prime minister from 2003 to 2004, Tommy Lapid, entered politics as a classic Zionist, hostile toward religious Judaism and disdainful of the Diaspora.
Lapid’s life story wired him to scoff at all these Jewish identity programs and the worries about whether the world liked us. Born in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (present-day Serbia), in 1931, as a boy he watched the Gestapo take his father away. Lapid and his mother survived the Budapest ghetto, but he lost his faith in God and the world there. He became a Herzlian Zionist, defining “the whole Zionist idea,” he later wrote, as a guarantee that “every Jewish child will always have a place to go.”
Whenever cabinet discussions turned to any religion-and-state issue, Lapid liked to pronounce, “I am a better Jew than the Lubavitcher Rebbe himself, because I live in Israel.” He loved to note that our kids serve in the Jewish army, and the Rebbe never did. Lapid bristled whenever I mentioned yet another identity-building program, saying, “A modern government shouldn’t pay for old-fashioned missionizing activities.”
Yet, when as minister of justice he had to counter the delegitimization of Israel, he started appreciating our Jewish partners abroad. When I launched my initiative to learn about the New Anti-Semitism every International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Lapid surprised me. Speaking in the Knesset, he quoted my report from my campus trip. As he descended from the podium, he turned to me and said, “It’s good that you took us there. It’s good that we are reaching the students. We need them fighting for us.”
Lapid and many other Israelis had to adjust. They had to appreciate Israel’s new needs, then see the Diaspora’s potential. Diaspora Jewry was no longer just Israel’s piggy bank and population bank, but, like every good family member, Israel’s first line of defense and perpetual sparring partner.
We were entering the third, more mutual stage of Israel-Diaspora relations, wherein we still save each other but we need each other too. Strong Diaspora Jewish communities stopped being threats to the aliyah tallies in the short-term, becoming long-term investments in future advocates and immigrants.
Some went so far as to suggest dropping the term “Diaspora,” just as previous generations stopped calling the Diaspora “exile.” The term still works for me. Diaspora suggests that we are dispersed, which we are. Acknowledging the Land of Israel as the historic homeland does not stop us from respecting one another. Besides, “world Jewry” includes Israel, so “Diaspora” distinguishes between Israel and the other Jewish communities scattered globally.
Most important, just as many Diaspora Jews realized they needed their Israeli family in their great battle against assimilation, many Israelis—especially in government—realized that, even in these flush times, they needed their Diaspora Jewish family in the great battle against those questioning our very right to exist.
Despite the headlines that emphasize our distance, surveys keep showing that 80 to 90 percent of Israeli Jews understand instinctively that we need one another, practically and existentially. A state of Israel that is just a state of all its citizens and not the Jewish people’s homeland risks losing its legitimacy. More than seven decades into Israel’s existence, the state’s legitimacy shouldn’t be questioned. But our enemies are constantly questioning it, because they understand the stakes involved.
The international community has repeatedly recognized the Jewish people’s fundamental right to a nation-state in the Jews’ historical homeland. Israelis only emerged after May 1948, meaning that they don’t have the rights to the Land of Israel—the Jewish people do. The Jewish people received the Balfour Declaration in 1917. The Jewish people won the vote in the United Nations in 1947 granting the legal right to establish a state. After defying exile and oppression, after longing for the Land of Israel for two thousand years, the Jewish people came from dozens of countries to rejoin the Jews who never left.
If we only talk about the Israeli people—a state of all its citizens—what distinguishes Israel from certain colonial projects that have vanished from the earth? The difference between Israeli identity and Jewish identity is the difference between the fact of existence since 1948 and our eternal right to exist. The difference is between citizens who live on a piece of land and speak the Hebrew language and the descendants of a people who, after being scattered globally, returned to their historic homeland, with broad-based international approval.
That’s why, even during the starkest disputes about the Diaspora and Israel in cabinet, my ultimate argument remained the same. “But Israel belongs to all the Jews in the world,” I would say, “and we have an obligation to keep it as a home for all the Jewish people.” No matter how heated the fight might have been about implementation, no one ever questioned that core principle.
When I became chairman, the Jewish Agency for Israel already was running some third-stage identity-building initiatives that acknowledged the new interdependence uniting world Jewry. Launching Masa and funding Birthright helped Diaspora Jewry. Sending young emissaries to campuses to fight the New Anti-Semitism helped Israel. But ideologically and structurally, the Jewish Agency was still in the second stage. The board of governors consisted of Israeli and Diaspora Jews still out to save each other. And while the Jewish Agency was organized into three major departments—aliyah, education, and Israel activism—encouraging aliyah remained the core of its mandate. The agency therefore evaluated every program based on its contribution to aliyah, no matter how artificial the connection might be, especially when justifying programs to the government.
The three departments functioned more as competing corporations than as one integrated organization. This structure unintentionally encouraged emissaries from different departments to waste time and precious resources on turf wars, pitting, say, the community-focused education emissary against the Israel-oriented aliyah emissary.
Noting the years I spent fighting for Soviet Jewish emigration, many in the Jewish Agency expected me to strengthen the aliyah focus. Instead, I brought down the walls dividing the three departments. I merged them into one integrated, cooperative organization while making an ideological shift: strengthening Jewish identity became the agency’s central mission.
My logic was simple. Most of the 3.5 million Jews the agency had helped settle in Israel came on the aliyah of escape. Since 1948, Jews had fled Holocaust-torn Europe, anti-Semitism-scarred Arab countries, Communist regimes, and African dictatorships. We would continue helping any Jews escaping persecution, be they the oppressed Jews of Iran, Yemen, or anywhere else. But today, most Jews live in free communities. Those who move to Israel make an aliyah of choice. Deciding to live in the Jewish state expresses a desire to be more intimately connected, hour by hour, day by day, to Jewish history and Jewish life. As I liked to quip to our board of governors, “To have more immigrants, you must have more Jews,” meaning more connected Jews.
The aliyah of escape required speed; aliyah of choice required patience. The best way to encourage aliyah was by strengthening Jewish identity. The best way to fight assimilation or oppose the anti-Israel boycott or encourage more activism and community building was by strengthening Jewish identity.
This shift tested a central Zionist idea: our shared sense of peoplehood. We couldn’t approach identity building as a sham, just waiting for those in the Diaspora to wise up and move to Israel. We had to ask ourselves, “Can you love them wherever they live, even if they never leave?” For me, the answer was easy. My commitment to Israel sprang from my sense of Jewish peoplehood as family, not the other way around.
One can ask, is this only branding? After all, it’s the Jewish Agency’s programs that count. Do they serve our people or not? To prove that we weren’t just switching slogans, I often compared it to the Copernican revolution. Until the 1400s, the Earth sat in the center of every map of the universe. All the planets and stars circulated around it, just as they appeared to be doing when we looked up in the sky.
Copernicus put the sun in the center. As we know from modern physics, all the movements are relative. Nevertheless, suddenly, all the equations describing the planets’ paths became simpler. Before that, complicated equations describing each planet’s orbit had to be tailor-made. Once Copernicus realized the planets all circled the same center, scientists could use one elegant equation to describe the trajectories.
Similarly, once the Jewish Agency put strengthening identity at the center, it was easier to explain the logical connection between different programs and assess their impact. The agency’s main tool in strengthening Jewish identity was the mifgash, the grassroots, mutually beneficial encounters between Israeli Jews and Diaspora Jews. This mifgash would take place in Israel, in communities all over the world, and on neutral turf, with global Jews united in common cause.
We would build a spiral of such Jewish experiences, with Jews at various ages and stages of their lives involved in these mifgashim. Rather than revolving everything around one question—When are you moving to Israel?—the spiral of experiences invited young Jews to find their place in an ever-escalating process, interacting with Israelis along the way. It could start by meeting Israelis: as counselors at summer camp, emissaries on campus, tour guides on a Birthright trip, or neighbors and colleagues during a Masa internship in Israel.
Different people could decide for themselves how far to go on this spiral and where to get on or get off. Some would go all the way and make aliyah. Some would be active in their community. Some would get involved in pro-Israel advocacy. Some would send their children to get a basic Jewish education. All this fed the Jewish Agency’s central purpose of nurturing the global Jewish family.
In going beyond traditional, one-size-fits-all identity building, we developed new programs to address people’s interests, capabilities, and trajectories on their particular Jewish journeys. So, for example, the Jewish Agency opened up Masa in 2004, with forty-five programs offering participants the choice to work or study. By the time I left, we offered nearly two hundred different pathways for Masa participants, from studying to cooking to dancing to teaching English to participating in cutting-edge social and communal experiments.
In our identity-centered world, once-competing programs became complementary. When first launched, Birthright and Masa fought each other so intensely for support from the government and philanthropists that the program administrators refused to share information. Today, they cooperate. Birthright runs Masa program fairs so the ten-day participants can easily transition to longer-term internships or study opportunities.
It became clear that there were many students who seek a post-Birthright experience but are unwilling to spend a full year in Israel. In response, we created Onward Israel, a six-to-ten-week Israel program, so these students could also find their place on the spiral.
Most dramatically, this identity-centered world updated that classic Jewish Agency type, the shaliach. For decades, the shaliach—the emissary—was the ultimate living, breathing Zionist stereotype. This representative Israeli’s first historic role, long before the state began, was to encourage aliyah and to save as many Jews as possible by bringing them to Israel.
In this new stage, we tried to eliminate the historic tension between a strong Israel and a strong community. To the contrary, we Israelis were now interested in building the community. The new mission changed the shaliach’s role to encompass building individual identities, reinforcing the connection Jews felt to Israel, and representing Israel in different contexts.
Not surprisingly, we saw that, once emissaries were no longer just aliyah recruiters imposed on communities, communities became more welcoming. New types of emissaries started appearing to fit our identity-building approach, in synagogues, in schools, and in Jewish community centers. They joined the traditional emissaries in youth movements, in summer camps, and in an ever growing number on campus. The number of shlichim almost doubled, and the average age dropped from thirty-eight to twenty-six.
A new program brought in younger bridge builders, shin-shinim, from the Hebrew abbreviation for Shnat Sherut, the national service year. More and more young Israelis started doing a year of national service before their army service, often in neglected or peripheral communities. As these volunteer, educational, or social work internal gap-year programs proliferated in Israel, we in the Jewish Agency asked, “Why not send some of these young idealists abroad?”
Army officials were skeptical about this program at first, hesitant to give draft deferments for a boondoggle in cushy Jewish communities overseas. Over the years, commanders have seen how much more mature returnees are, and some high-ranking officers have noted the experience’s profound impact on their own children. The program expanded from twenty-five to more than two hundred participants during my tenure. It keeps expanding. More and more communities are requesting to host these Israeli teenagers, while more and more Israelis are volunteering. The program is remarkably cheap—because these youngsters usually rely on home hospitality—yet often life-changing for Israelis and Diaspora Jews alike.
One post-high-school, pre-army volunteer told me that throughout her “entire life” in Tel Aviv—all eighteen years of it—she had received less exposure to Judaism than in her first three months in Toronto. In the increasingly popular expression, “she left as an Israeli and returned as a Jew.” Once back in Tel Aviv, she would share these new perspectives with her friends.
The Jewish Agency’s emissaries in each city started working as a team, often meeting regularly, even if they worked with assorted organizations. Different departments stopped competing with one another. We imagined one big identity assembly line, culminating in aliyah for those who chose that path.
We soon realized that a more sophisticated approach required more sophisticated training. The traditional two-week orientation seminar for emissaries was not enough. We needed a school for them, which we founded and which I continue to head.
With this new understanding of Israel-Diaspora relations as a two-way street, when emissaries finished their jobs representing Israel to the Diaspora, their bridge-building missions would continue as they represented Diaspora sensibilities to Israelis. Israelis could best explain to other Israelis that the different Jewish denominations were not different escape routes toward assimilation but different pathways toward communal expression and worship. This new, deeper understanding might help defuse some of the tensions around controversies, such as the ongoing struggle over who can pray at the Western Wall.
To help keep these young Israeli voices interested and engaged, our Shlichut Institute in Jerusalem expanded to work with people post-shlichut, improving follow-up once their jobs abroad formally ended.
All these different kinds of encounters welcomed members of different Jewish communities around the world to feel part of the bigger Jewish story. In speaking to one another and sharing new experiences, Diaspora Jews and Israelis could enrich their Jewish identities by adding new dimensions they wouldn’t have otherwise experienced. Diaspora Jews could see what it’s like to have a more natural, integrated Jewish identity, free of neurosis, second-guessing, and doublethink. When young Diaspora Jews met Israeli soldiers, they realized what it means to take responsibility for your people, to belong to and contribute to something big, sweeping, and noble—Jewish history itself. At the same time, Israelis discovered what being Jewish feels like when you are in the minority, not the majority. Judaism seems different when it is really a choice to affiliate, not simply assumed, and when there are pluralistic Jewish expressions, not Israel’s all-or-nothing approach to religion.
Thanks to all these interactions, hundreds of thousands of better- informed and more engaged Jews have become our most effective ambassadors, explaining the Diaspora to Israelis, Israelis to the Diaspora, and Israel to the world, while championing all kinds of projects shaping Jewish civil society.
Similarly, responding to the desire of young Jews who wanted to help people beyond Israel, we launched Project TEN. This international development program operates volunteer centers in Ghana, Mexico, Uganda, South Africa, and Israel to help the needy while raising a new generation of global Jewish activists. We envisioned a serious program of Israelis and non-Israelis working together and learning together about the sources of tikkun olam, repairing the world. By studying, they would understand that they are volunteering in that region not in spite of their Jewishness but because of their Jewishness.
Avital and I visited these idealists in Durban, South Africa, and in Uganda. We were moved to see young, post-army Israeli women bringing smiles to the faces of neglected children, and to see an Israeli-style youth movement emerging in the world’s grimmest slums. Many participants reported achieving a better understanding of what people were talking about when they talked about peoplehood.
When some government officials heard we were sending Israelis and Diaspora Jews to developing countries, they hit the roof. “Isn’t tikkun olam a pretext to run away from Zionism?” they asked. “Why go to a third country and not to Israel?”
My standard answer was always the same: “Don’t you expect the Jewish Agency to work wherever there is a Jewish community? The ‘republic of tikkun olam’ is teeming with Jews. Often, they see their idealism as an escape hatch, helping them run away from what they believe to be their ‘narrow’ Jewishness. This is the opposite.”
Once again, in our polarized age, a fundamental value that should have united left and right, religious and secular, became a flash point. Liberals kept trying to make it their exclusive property without reading the entire phrase: “Tikkun olam be-malchut shaddai,” repairing the world in God’s kingdom. In response, conservatives, including Israeli politicians, mocked such an important Jewish value because, as interpreted, it tracked too closely with the trendiest liberal agenda of the moment rather than expressing eternal Jewish values.
Tikkun olam, in proportion, was and is a central Jewish idea, but it is not the only Jewish value. It’s also a central Zionist idea, but not the only one. Something is off when Jews divorce tikkun olam from their Jewishness. And something is off when Jews embrace tikkun olam instead of their Jewishness.
With our new approach, we looked more systematically and sympathetically at Diaspora communities, assessing how to help. I saw the advantage of outsiders looking at a community through fresh eyes when I visited Toulouse, France, where a terrorist had killed a thirty-year-old teacher and three children. I visited this embattled community twice. Once, with the prime minister and other officials, I went to pay respects. Another time, I just looked and learned. The Islamist terrorist had cased the Ozar Hatorah school a few times, discovering its vulnerabilities. I, too, saw that the electric gates didn’t close and the security cameras didn’t work. But when I asked school officials about these lapses, they replied, “We have no money for this.”
We in the Jewish Agency launched a special project to protect synagogues and other Jewish community buildings throughout the world. It was a great symbolic moment. The two major donors came from New York and Moscow, the Helmsley Charitable Trust and the Genesis Fund. Enhancing the sense of global partnership, Israelis offered their unique counterterrorism expertise. We spent over $11 million fortifying Jewish buildings in fifty-eight countries during the first four years.
We expected to spend most in developing countries, yet Europe and Latin America had the greatest need. On Yom Kippur 2019, when a German terrorist attacked the Halle synagogue, the security door and cameras we purchased stopped him—saving seventy people inside.
Still, reorienting the Jewish Agency ocean liner wasn’t easy. It required tremendous efforts on the part of lay leaders and professionals. The board of governors debated the reforms for months. Then, the professionals had to restructure the agency, a multimillion-dollar operation, developing new understandings and methods in seminars and workshops.
Some Jewish Agency veterans, backed by some old-school government allies, worried that aliyah seemed to have lost its central place. I was accused at one cabinet meeting of undermining the agency’s core mission. “You are diminishing this unique Zionist institution,” the minister of aliyah and absorption charged. “It’s no longer an agency of aliyah but the Ministry of Tourism.”
The director general of the Prime Minister’s Office agreed. “Why should the Israeli government fund some kid in New York rather than our kids in Kiryat Malachi?” he once challenged me. “Why should I, as the government, care about them?” Fortunately, Prime Minister Netanyahu supported our reform.
With every program now fitting into a broader vision and with emissaries and departments cooperating, not clashing, the figures soon started speaking for themselves. Each new emissary and each new program expanded our reach exponentially. Even the average annual aliyah rate nearly doubled, from seventeen thousand when I became chair of the Jewish Agency to over thirty thousand when I left.
Many factors beyond our control shape any individual’s desire to emigrate. Still, our programs were inspiring more alumni to choose Israel. When 85 percent of Masa graduates from the former Soviet Union made aliyah, when nearly 100 percent of immigrants had gone through some Jewish Agency Israel experience or another, we knew the spiral was propelling some people, and Israel, forward.
In building the agency’s more mutual “we need one another” approach, I was closing two circles from my Moscow days. First, recalling the dropout wars, I was again linking identity and freedom, championing a Zionism based on choice while refusing to play the traditional role as a command-and-control commissar of Zionism.
By bringing down the artificial walls between the world of Jewish education and the world of aliyah, I felt we reached a new equilibrium on the politiki-kulturniki question. When we face physical destruction, we must be politiki, plunging into practical political work to save individual Jews. But looking at the long run, fortunate as we are to have most Jewish communities located in democracies, we were able to be kulturniki, learning, developing, and building identity, strengthening our global Jewish family.
Of course, there’s more to build. We certainly have to work harder to develop a constructive dialogue between Israel and Diaspora. But rather than being a dinosaur lumbering toward extinction, the Jewish Agency returned to the center of the Jewish world, once the platform for the third stage of relations between Israel and non-Israeli communities was up and running. Once again, the agency was addressing the key questions vexing the Jewish world, questions about how to stay Jewish and how to stay together as one family, despite being spread throughout the globe.