November 13, 2008
A new book for teens about Israel is not exactly mainstream American-Jewish fare; then again, author Marc Aronson did not intend it to be.
The first pages of Unsettled: The Problem of Loving Israel (Atheneum) are, well, unsettling.
“I could not live in Israel,” the Maplewood resident writes in the foreword.
After reciting statistics showing that nearly 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Arab but that they control just 4 percent of the land, he writes, “As much as I love Israel, I am, at heart, an integrationist who trusts in a society linked by shared laws and principles, not one defined by one religion or race. I do not feel at home in a land where so many people find safety in ignoring or excluding their fellow citizens.”
Unsettled takes off from this ambivalent tone. On one hand, Aronson writes, Israel “offers a shelter, a refuge, to Jews who have been the victims of discrimination.” On the other, “it discriminates against its Arab citizens.”
Some readers will regard the book as a layered and sophisticated interpretation of historical and current events — while others are bound to say it overemphasizes Israel’s challenges and flaws.
Indeed, among his first reader-reviewers at Amazon.com is Linda R. Silver, the former librarian of the Jewish Education Center of Cleveland. She calls Unsettled “specious and uninformed” and charges that Aronson is “obviously alienated from the sources of his ancestral religion and uncomfortable with his Jewish identity.”
Author Marc Aronson says he “would be comfortable with an Israeliness that has different flavorings.”
Photo by Johanna Ginsberg
A forthcoming review of the book that will appear in the Association of Jewish Libraries journal, made available to NJJN, will complain that Aronson “has to ignore or distort a lot of history to make his case” and that “[b]y the book’s end, his self-hatred reaches a fever pitch.”
Aronson responds that the idea that raising challenging questions about Israel makes him “alienated” or a “self-hater” is as absurd as the thought that raising challenging questions about America makes him unpatriotic.
He compares his questions about Israeli Arabs and Palestinians to inquiries about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the slave with whom he was said to have fathered children.
“It’s the opposite” of being unpatriotic, said Aronson. “It means you care enough about your country that you want to see its shortcomings and how it lives up to its highest ideals.” Moreover, he points out, “on any street corner in Israel, on the Ha’aretz website if you read through the comments, you will see this kind of discussion.”
In the end, the question may not be whether or not he is “alienated”; the more important issue is whether teenagers are ready to develop their own perspectives on Israel — especially Jewish teens who go off to college and may be unprepared to confront criticism of Israel from those hostile to the Jewish state.
“The problem kids run into is in the way Israel is introduced. It is so binary. You’re either for it or against it,” said Aronson. “You’re either counting down the days to Birthright Israel or you say, ‘Zionism is racism!’ and ‘Yeah Durban!’ That’s not really useful to either side, and it’s not true.”
Wrestling with Israel
Aronson, 56, lives in Maplewood with his wife, author Marina Budhos, and their two sons, Sasha, eight, and Rafi, three.
“I try to write the books I would have wanted to have when I was a teen,” said Aronson, dressed in black and gray offsetting his silver hair and nearly frameless glasses, in an interview in his home.
Aronson grew up in Manhattan, the son of Jewish intellectuals Boris and Lisa Aronov and the grandson of a rabbi. Boris was a Tony Award-winning stage designer who got his start in the Yiddish theater. (Most famously, he designed the set for Fiddler on the Roof.) He was also an artist who was friendly with Marc Chagall, for whom his son is named.
With a doctorate in American history from New York University, Aronson has written more than a dozen books for young adults. He won the Robert F. Sibert Award for young adult nonfiction for his 2001 book Sir Walter Raleigh and the Quest for El Dorado.
In each, he said, he tries to provide what’s missing, to issue an invitation to teens to discuss complex matters concerning conflicts over religion, race, and, in the case of Israel, identity.
Unsettled, he said, “is me arguing with God — and with myself — over what Israel is, what it was, what it could be,” Aronson writes in the introduction.
Aronson approaches the world from a secular intellectual approach that is nonetheless deeply Jewish. It’s something he inherited from his father, who left Jewish ritual — but not Judaism — behind when the modern era “shattered” the Kiev Jewish world he had grown up in, according to his son. Still, his father made sure Aronson was educated at the religious school of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan.
Although today Aronson claims neither synagogue affiliation nor denominational attachment, he too is adamant that his sons receive a Jewish education.
Anecdotes about Aronson’s travels to Israel and his family members there pepper the book, often with accompanying photos. He also reports on his conversation with his friend Jeffrey Goldberg, now a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine. Goldberg made aliya in the late 1980s, and talks to Aronson about the conflicts he felt, as a Jew and as an American, while serving as a guard at an Israel security prison during the first Intifada.
Aronson also sought out Arab perspectives. He focuses on Palestinian Sari Nusseibeh, the president of Al Quds University, whose prominent family has roots in Jerusalem going back centuries. “I was in Jerusalem in ’68, and I loved it,” said Aronson. “[Nusseibeh] was in Jerusalem in ’68 and found it a gloomy, dismal, depressing experience.”
‘When the dust cleared’
A large section of the book is devoted to the history of Palestine under the Ottoman Empire through 1948, how Israel was created, and how the Arabs who once lived there lost their land.
He studiously avoids what he regards as myths, instead explaining how both sides view particular moments in Israel’s history, searching, in his view, for the truth that lies somewhere in between.
Aronson enters a debate that has been raging in Israel, especially since a group known as the “New Historians” began to challenge the official versions of Israel’s founding and struggle to survive. Did the Jews force the Palestinians out or did they leave because their leaders told them to? Was there a clear Jewish plan to remove the Muslims or did they leave only in the hope of later ridding Palestine of all Jews?
“This is the heart of the historical problem of Israel,” Aronson writes. “I would really like to believe that the Israelis did nothing wrong. Or I would like to be sure they were terribly at fault, so that their obligation to the Palestinians was clear. I would love to know exactly how to fit what happened then into what I know of Americans’ history of its wars with the Indians and enslavement of blacks. I wish I knew just how to compare the story of the Jewish State of Israel with the period of white rule in South Africa.
“I wish there was just one straightforward story of 1948 with a shining moral at the end.
“But there isn’t.”
As Aronson looks forward, he describes a place where Jews and Arabs live and work together in what can only be called a post-Zionist Israel. His obviously controversial vision for the country is not included in his book (although he does not shy away from pointing out to readers the inherent difficulties for Israel’s non-Jewish citizens of living under a flag with a Jewish symbol and a national anthem about Jewish hope).
Before he will even discuss his views in conversation with a reporter, Aronson brings three books by Israeli authors to the coffee table, each offering a different vision of Israel’s future, as evidence that these are Israeli ideas, not just his own.
“I would be comfortable with an Israeliness, a sense of nationalness, that has different flavorings: Orthodox-Jewish flavoring, secular flavoring, socialist flavoring, and Arab flavoring…all within a kind of Israeli flavoring,” he said.
Does he think Zionism is racism? It’s a claim that some may charge hovers over the pages of the book with regard to Israel’s Arab citizens. “I don’t think Zionism is racism. I think ethnic nationalism — which was this turn-of-the-20th-century idea — I don’t ultimately believe it.”
He is quick to point out that integration is only one of several paths forward, that his view is only his view, and that plenty of people think Israel must retain its Jewish flavor.
In his writing, Aronson invites young readers to draw their own conclusions.
“The real challenge for Israel,” he writes as the book closes, “is how to make space for this growing group of non-Jewish Israeli citizens.”
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