When my brother made aliyah with his new bride in the 1970s, he chose a neighbourhood that had few other American olim, joined a synagogue that was not primarily anglophone, and plunged into his professional life in Hebrew. He used to tell me, “If I wanted to live in New York, I would have stayed in New York.”
He and my sister-in-law began using their Hebrew names, and they gave each of their children Israeli names. Their children’s circles of friends encompassed young people from diverse backgrounds, and they eventually married people whose family origins differed widely from their own. In these choices and natural inclinations, my family exemplifies the national ideology that characterized the founding of the State of Israel and its development for decades: that Jews, wherever they may hail from, are one people, and that in coming to the Jewish state, they take on the mantle of Israeliness.
To Americans, the model felt familiar. It followed the rubric of the “melting pot,” the metaphor long used to describe the process by which immigrants from all over were to adapt to the United States. Much more than Canadians, American immigrants were expected to speak only English (ideally, without a foreign accent), take on American (that is, Anglo-Saxon) names, eat American (rather than ethnic) foods and generally blend in. This, people felt, was the best path to actualizing the American ideals of equality.
Yet this “melting” of differences into a uniform “Americanness” was not without cost. Jews, for example, worried that, pursued fully, the “melting pot” was a recipe for assimilation. And Jews were not the only group to rethink the ideal of a homogeneous culture. By the last quarter of the 20th century, many ethnic and cultural groups began to resist the pull to erase their origins in order to fit into the American whole. Under the mood of what came to be called identity politics, they began insisting on hyphenated identities – Jewish-American, Italian-American, African-American. Eventually, the hyphen disappeared, but the notion of a hyphenated or hybrid identity took hold. One might even say that this is one arena where Canada, with its metaphor of the cultural “mosaic,” was well ahead of its neighbour to the south, envisioning a kind of nation-building that countenanced diversity.
It may be that in Israel, too, there is a rethinking of what constitutes Israeliness – that the blending of olim from different diasporic locales into a singular Israeli entity has begun to morph into a different cultural model.
This summer, under the aegis of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, I participated in an intensive program for university professors who teach courses about Israel. As part of the program, we met with representatives of a wide range of constituencies in Israel. We were struck, again and again, by what I think of as the reclaiming of the particular among young adults, people in their 20s and 30s. Young Russian Jews, for example – children of Russian olim, or olim themselves – talked about reclaiming Russian first names, keeping the Russian language alive in their communities, and reading and even writing literature in Russian. Similarly, young Ethiopian Jews – olim or children of olim – were reclaiming Amharic first names, often against the impulses of their parents to adopt and confer Hebrew names. We met with Mizrahi Jews who were also reasserting a connection with their origins, whether Iraqi, Tunisian, Yemeni or Moroccan.
And we could not help but think: were we seeing the birth of hyphenated Israeliness, a proud assertion of ethnicity emerging from what had been envisioned as a kind of melting pot? If so, we should not be surprised. Almost 70 years into statehood, Israeliness is firmly enough established to allow for a celebration of diversity, of the richness of Jewish life and culture developed in all parts of the globe, and carried into new homes.