The 90`s

Why I Agree With Yossi Beilin

Note: Written by Howard Barbanel, Published Week of July 22nd - July 28th 1994

Can there by anything more awful for a Likudnik than to be in agreement with the likes of Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, a leader of the left wing of the Labor Party? 

Back in my idealistic student years, I was going around the Jewish community like Jeremiah at the gates to the city preaching the woeful message of rampant assimilation, galloping intermarriage and negative population growth.  Back then I got myself in heaps of hot water with the local leadership for daring to suggest that Jewish education and student funding were grossly under-funded.

So he comes Yossi Beilin, telling American Jews to keep our $500 million and put it into Jewish education and Israel experiences.  Beilin says Israel isn't some poor Third World Country, s stop with the pity and get with the new program. He couldn't be more right.

Overall, intermarriage in the U.S. exceeds 50 percent, which means that in the Reform, Conservative and unaffiliated communities it can range as high as 75 percent.  Dating non-Jews? The percentages are even higher. And young Jewish couples are probably not making hordes of babies. One to two kids is the fashionable number.

More than half of American Jewry is over 45, while the median age for Americans as a whole is something like 26.  You don’t have to be an actuary to know that declining Jewish marriages and few babies equals self-inflicted genocide.

So what is Beilin advocating? Get our kids in Jewish school and get our teenagers to Israel.  The Catholic Church has got it right - its parochial schools charge about $1,500 for annual tuition and it extends scholarships all over the place.

We should guarantee a full-time Jewish education through high school to every Jewish child who wants it.  Make the tuition so affordable that money becomes no object. Create a dual-tracked Jewish school system modeled after Israel's.  Religious schools for those who wants them and secular Jewish day schools for everyone else - heavy on Hebrew and Yiddish language, Jewish history (including the Bible), Jewish literature and culture with a heavy dose of Zionism thrown in.  Graduation present? Send all the high school seniors to Israel, where they'll see their education in action and bridge the widening gap between Israelis and American Jews.

Statistics all bear out that graduates of full-time Jewish schools intermarry far less frequently and are far more likely to be involved in the community.  The best thing my parents ever did for me was send me to Jewish schools and to Israel. I'm living proof.

Beilin is right on the button when it comes to how Israel is presented.  Nobody likes a loser, especially Americans. Stop with suffering, poverty, weakness and all that negative stuff.  Show Israel as a success story - and it is. Anyone who has been there lately can tell you about the 2 million cars choking Israel's highways; the American-style shopping malls and cable TV; the improved high-tech and real estate industries; the growing stock market.  When you count national health insurance and free tuition at the religious public schools, many Israelis have it better than many American Jewish families in Brooklyn and Queens.

Beilin is also correct in calling for the abolishment or wholesale restructuring of the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency, both redundant and, excuse the pun, pork-barrel machines dispensing far more jobs and patronage than results.

Beilin is also right about democratic Jewish life, letting the common people share power with the plutocrats.  Let the community as a whole decide where the gelt should go.

Before this love fest goes any further, let me say that I totally disagree with Beilin's native notions about peace with the PLO, Syria and every other pseudo-reformed terrorist and tin-horned despot.  I subscribe to the Jabotinsky ideals of full-throttle capitalism - he doesn’t - and Jewish rights to settlement everywhere and anywhere in the land of Israel. Also, I vehemently reject Beilin's utopian plans to divide Jerusalem into separate semi-sovereign cantons.

I'm of the view that very few people - even left-wing Laborites - are all bad, so on the other stuff I'll hold my nose and go along with Beilin on saving American Jewry because this is an emergency, and emergencies call for radical thinking.