Why American Jews don't have to choose between the US and Israel - opinion

A prominent fellow immigrant once told me that no matter how long one lives in Israel, no matter how many Israeli taxes we pay, no matter how many family members serve in the IDF, no matter how much hawaij we put in the soup, we will always remain “the Americans.”

He was right.

Within a few syllables, my accent gives me away, even though I’ve lived in Israel for half a century.

I admit to occasionally having my Sabra offspring or grand-offspring phone to get a negotiable price, because I still feel my American accent makes the supplier of goods or services reach for the high end of an estimate. Naïve Americans will be willing to pay more, they think.

I get it. The lowest blow is when the car’s navigation system offers me bizarre destinations as if I’m speaking English.

Alas, I comfort myself, Golda Meir never shed her American accent, even when she was prime minister.

This rumination about identity has to do with my land of birth, the United States of America, turning 250. I’m feeling particularly grateful not only for the blue and white but for the red, white, and blue.

All four of my grandparents left behind pogroms and found refuge in the United States. They came from what we all called “Poland,” today Belarus – a country I had never heard of growing up. They were young couples with no English. How did they become citizens and bring up such American children?

Grampa Fischel corresponded with his younger cousins who reached Petah Tikva. Grandpa Moshe reputedly made a trip back to visit his family after he became an official Amerikaner.

I was always aware of my good fortune that I was born in America, even before I could look up my grandparents’ towns on the Yad Vashem website and see the names of relatives among the murdered.

My mother was a passionate member of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. She also belonged to the Book of the Month Club, ordering and reading any book with a Jewish star on the cover. My father supported land reclamation and Israel emergency funds. Our JNF Blue Box runneth over. From fifth grade, like all my Jewish classmates, I joined Young Judaea. We didn’t see this mix of Americanism and Zionism as a conflict.

My first trip to Israel was on a Young Judaea High School Summer Course. When I came back from that trip, I happened to hear “This Land Is Your Land” playing on the radio. I remember thinking how America suited me. I would continue to feel at home in America and continue to love Israel.

I didn’t know that Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land Is Your Land” in 1940 as a populist answer to one of our own, Jewish Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” which he thought was too sentimental and too satisfied with itself.

Eight months after that first Israel trip, something switched inside me. As much as I loved America, I had an epiphany that I was walking in the Negev. I would begin my family’s transition to Israel, arriving first, followed by my mother and then my sister. Sadly, my father died on his and my mother’s planning trip. He’s buried in Jerusalem’s Har Hamenuhot Cemetery.

Growing up in Connecticut, knowing American history was imperative. Still sitting on my shelf in Jerusalem is the Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary I received when I won the Otis Constitution Prize for acing a test in American history. My sister Charlotte, who also now lives in Jerusalem, won the same prize two years earlier.

Thirty-six years before that, my late father was awarded his dictionary. It was a grander Webster from an earlier era: a fat beige volume, probably an unabridged India paper edition published by G. & C. Merriam.

We were deeply American. In our town, Colchester, Connecticut, my father was the moderator of the old-fashioned New England Town Meetings in which municipal policy was determined. In the 1960s, we kids were already using regulation voting machines to elect members of our student council. With an emphasis always on democracy, we were receiving citizenship training for future voting.

We were proud that we had Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish houses of worship in our town, and that our school teachers were a mix of religions and skin colors, too. As the song “Home on the Range” put it, “seldom is heard a discouraging word.” We never suffered from prejudice. My appreciation for these beautiful values goes far beyond nostalgia.

In Israel, the one time I was enlisted as a poll watcher for a political party, they didn’t know what they were in for. Having seen the 1964 film Sallah Shabati, admittedly a satire, in which the ma’abara ballot box is stuffed, I was a fierce invigilator. When voting time ended, I hugged the ballot box to my chest as if democracy itself might escape.

I was accused of unnecessary suspicion. The Hebrew expression translates as “One who casts suspicion on honest people pays for it himself.” Still, I held firm.

When I moved to Israel immediately after university, we Americans were accused of degrading local standards: Coca-Cola, rock music, hippies, permissiveness, and drugs.

The musical Hair and the American hippie image reached Israel, where Coca-Cola had only recently arrived, and pot hit the Israeli melting pot. Consumer goods, counterculture, flower power, feminism, Black Power, and new political styles were all blamed on the Americans who fulfilled our Zionism by coming to Israel.

There were other odd stereotypes. When I invited a hospitable family from Kurdistan for dinner, they were puzzled when I served Moroccan carrot salad. How could I have made this from frozen vegetables, the mother asked. She had heard Americans never used fresh produce.

Israelis are more sophisticated today. Many have relatives in America and travel there themselves.

I’m feeling sentimental about the US Semiquincentennial. So don’t be surprised if you find me singing along with the ubiquitous covers or the original Irving Berlin with tears in my eyes. “God Bless America” may have been mawkish for Woody Guthrie, but it suits me. There’s even a Yiddish version: “Got bentsh Amerika.”

The Fourth of July, the 250th birthday of the United States, fell on Shabbat. I was hoping there would be some recognition of this important date in my synagogue, where many of the congregants or their parents were born in the US. I was disappointed that there was nothing like “Adon Olam” to the tune of “America the Beautiful,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” or even Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”

So, at the end of the service, to the speaker’s surprise, I interrupted the announcements. We couldn’t end our services without a mazal tov for the United States of America.

As Irving Berlin serenaded:

“God bless America,

Land that I love.

Stand beside her, and guide her

Through the night with a light from above.”