TJS S5 Interlude 80s conversation with Rav Yehuda HaKohen

Generated automatically from the audio and lightly corrected. It may contain errors; the recording is the authority.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing, said Viktor Frankl, the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. Well, I just have to do it my way. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Season 5, Interlude, An 80s Conversation with Rabbi Yehuda Hakohen. I am sitting here with my good friend and fellow educator, Rav Yehuda Akon of the Vision Movement, and I'm really excited to tap your brain and your perspective on the 80s. I know you're a listener, as well as a fan, as well as having your own amazing projects, which we'll get to by and by. And I want your insight on how we can start to wrap up the 80s, something that the linear part of the Jewish story has been engaged in, I don't know, maybe three or four episodes at this point, because I have a feeling that there's much of the world in which we live today as Jews and as Israelis that was actually kind of created or at least came to be in that time.

Well, that's interesting. I definitely see the 80s as a decade where a lot changed here in Israel, for sure. For instance? Well, a lot of neoliberal reforms. For folks who aren't familiar with the technical language, what do you mean by neoliberal reform a lot of economic changes within israeli within israel a lot of changes within the israeli economy i would also say that you know you had a roughly a decade i mean with a couple spots of peres yeah roughly a decade of likud rule and then you also following the 80s you had suddenly the oslo process and a rapid change here meaning i as a child in the 80s whenever i saw a map of the state of Israel. There was no lines in the middle. It was just the state of Israel with the Golan Heights, with Gaza, with Judea and Samaria.

That kid bean that people have become quite familiar with that's on the maps today was simply not there. Right. And it was just very clear that this is all Israel. And that changed in the 90s. It did. And I want to stay focused on America, although it's inevitable that the story really exists on both sides of the pond, as they say. So let's think about what was driving some of those changes in America in the 80s. You grew up like myself in the 80s, although as you pointed out earlier, I am a little bit older. Nonetheless, the American Jewish identity in the 80s underwent some major shifts. What would you say was the foundation of your Jewish identity growing up? Well, I might be unique because my parents were immigrants.

I was the first person in my family to be born in the United States. The immigrants from? Different countries. We've been wandering around for 2000 years. Jews. And I actually grew up, even though like as a child, I went to a Jewish day school until fourth grade. I think they kicked me out. I'll be kind to not ask why. Fair enough. But after leaving there, I think most of my social life was primarily with non-Jews. And also a lot of other immigrant kids, but also some Jews. But again, it wasn't like a Jewish space. And the Jews who were in that world were often very closeted about being Jews because it was kind of a rough crowd and being Jewish for whatever reason. Maybe it's part of the curse of exile we learn about in Parshat B'chukotai.

But Jews were considered easy prey in the world they grew up in. Yes. And when we come to speaking about Rav Kahana, we'll come back to that topic. Yeah, that's extremely relevant. I would say that just like a woman has to work harder to earn the same pay or get the same respect in the workplace, for a Jew to get the same respect in the world I grew up in, he has to be more violent than a black kid or an Irish kid. So it sounds to me then that if you're going to identify one foundation of your Jewish identity at this point in the 80s, it would have been the need to fight. Often. In order to have respect because your other option was to hide. Something to that effect. I'm not sure if I thought about it as a child.

I still remember the first time I experienced anti-Semitic bullying. I didn't even know it was anti-Semitic. I didn't even know what this whole... You just thought it was personal. Yeah, like, why are you talking about quarters? What do you mean throw a quarter in a taxi and all that? All these things. I was with a black friend who were playing in a playground, and these guys were a little bit older than us, and they at first wanted to play with us, and we just kind of were doing our own thing. And then they came over afterwards and got more aggressive and started making all these comments about my family. I didn't know them. They didn't know my family. I must have been like 10 or 11 years old at the time.

And I remember that being like, I'm not even sure I understood until years later that that was a Jewish thing directly. But it culminated in them actually getting physically violent. So this is a very different experience than I had growing up. I mean, I was in a much more Jewish environment. I was in many ways the prototypical American Jewish experience of the 80s. suburban, public school, but lots of Jews. Nobody really kind of, let's say, front-loaded their Jewish identity in public school, but nobody felt the need to hide it. It wasn't a source of shame or bullying, except in a very small elite group. But where the challenge set in is another element that I've spoken quite a bit about in the show, which is in this challenge of assimilation.

The success that the Jews experienced economically and socially in the 80s, many people today want to call it the kiss of death. And I was in youth groups where we were asking, are you Jewish or American, or are you American Jew? Like, where do you stand? Which, at the time, I took for granted. Now I can understand a little bit more that there was a note of desperation in the voices of the institutional powers that were behind that, because they had a sense that they were losing their kids. So it's interesting, social acceptance versus that sense of challenge. Just to speak to what you're saying, I think that the process of Jews attaining whiteness that really began, let's say, post-World War II in the United States with urban sprawl and the GI Bill, ultimately kind of, I think it kind of plateaued in the 80s.

I think the 80s is when Jews were kind of growing up, at least maybe where you grew up, like feeling less ethnic. Like I very much grew up as like an ethnic Jew in the 80s and 90s in New York City, like in relation to my Albanian or Irish or Puerto Rican friends. You grew up in an ethnic society. Yeah, where everybody was defined by their tribe. Yeah, yeah. The suburban environment was all about homogenizing. Uh-huh, right. So that's obviously very different. Except for the black-white divide. Sure. That you couldn't get around. Sure, sure. I remember the Jewish world you're talking about was the kind of thing I remember kind of experiencing in college and being surprised by. Because I actually requested to be – there were like – apparently there were like unofficially segregated freshman dorms.

Where did you go to school? Syracuse. And there were like these dorms that were known as like the Jewish dorms. And your listeners don't see my quotes, my air quotes. but I remember requesting you know to be in the Jewish dorms thinking I'd make some Jewish friends but assuming there were Jewish kids like me with my experiences growing up and they were all from like Long Island, New Jersey maybe some from Cleveland and I was just, it was culture shock for me it was like, I mean I'm sure your listeners are familiar with the term Jap I'm not even sure if that's an offensive term or not it is but it's okay, we're here to offend, it stands for Jewish American Princess for those who are unfamiliar But there were quite a few princes too.

Oh, yes. No, it can be Prince. And I was just like really – I mean I had encountered kids like this where I had grown up. But I don't want this to come – I don't know how to say this the right way. Where I grew up, those kids knew that they were beneath me on the food chain. You know, like but suddenly I'm in their world. and I'm like I felt like this kind of like gorilla who's like now like walking amongst these like you know there's a very important lesson there in that power is a lot about the control of context yeah in the things that give us power in one context can actually take it away to another right right and and that was really difficult for me because as like uh I think almost 19 year old I had been successful at attaining some level of power in the context I came from which was a very high stakes kind of dangerous world.

And now I'm suddenly in this world that just kind of reminded me of Saved by the Bell. So I want to go from the personal to the global for a second, because, you know, the 80s is a time in which many things were shifting. And as we were speaking about a little bit before we hit record, it was in many ways the end of the Cold War, but in a sense of a sunset effect. What do I mean? The Cold War didn't go out with a whimper. It almost went out with a bang. When I was growing up in the 80s, I remember in 1984 being scared and listening to Ronald Reagan speak about the evil empire. And when I was in sixth grade, our final project was a participatory art nuclear protest, hippie teachers that we had. But it wasn't make-believe.

It was a sense that such a thing could be. So what do you think the Cold War, what impact do you see it as having on the Jewish story? Not so much in Israel, we can come to that. But again, I want to focus on America. And as someone I know is a broad political thinker, I'm curious what you see. Well, I want to share maybe something a little more personal because I had a lot of family in the Soviet Union at the time. So, you know, I still remember in the 90s, a lot of my relatives coming to New York, quite a few. Suddenly I had all these cousins around that I'd only met once as like a seven-year-old when I'd gone to Russia and Ukraine. And that was 1987. Like, I had gone to the Soviet Union in 87. I want to hear about that.

It was hard to find food. You mean at all? You're not talking about kosher food? Yeah, at all. Like, we brought those, like, little kind of Kellogg cereal boxes with us. But even to get someone to give us a bowl to put them in was challenging. I remember my father bringing a carton of Marlboro's with us. And every time he wanted to get into a restaurant, you know, we couldn't get into a restaurant until he slipped the doorman a pack of Marlboro's. And that's what got us in. Which sounds like a very low threshold to me, but I imagine was quite valuable for them. This was Moscow, and then we went to the Ukraine, to Zaporozhye, where my relatives were. We couldn't find toilets. That was my experience. To be fair, it was a very rural part of the Ukraine.

But then anyway they came to the United States So I think from a geopolitical perspective it was the end of history That what we were told that this was the victory We now living in a unipolar U world the era of neoliberalism You had a Democrat like Bill Clinton in office for eight years, but really bringing the Democratic Party to the center of American politics in many ways. Well, yeah, that was at the end of the 80s, 92, which was still the 80s in most places. Okay. But I mean that that was this idea of the end of history, that America had won and that this is pretty much the best humanity's ever done and the best humanity's ever going to do. And this like U.S.-led global order, capitalism, neoliberalism, that's just like it forever and get used to it.

You know what I see happening amongst American Jews in response to that is a doubling down both on a distancing from Israel and an allegiance to America. The sense that they bet on the right horse, right? Not yet the type of sharp break that we're sensing amongst a good chunk of American Jewry toward Israel. But a passive agnostic. But, yeah, a soft sense of, listen, Israel is the sort of poor cousin that we'll continue to support. It's also religious Disneyland, nice to visit, wouldn't want to live there. I actually got in trouble, not in trouble, but I got a lot of pushback. And I took a sociology of Jewish communities course my freshman year of college. And there was going to be, they brought a guest lecturer to talk about Israel, and now I know where that was probably headed.

But I unintentionally derailed it when they... It's certainly not the first time you did something like that. Or certainly not the last. We're talking about a classroom full of Jewish sorority girls. And when this lecturer asked, well, when you think of Israel, what do you think? I said, it's an amusement park for American Jews. And they all flipped out and talked. And it was funny because they were just reinforcing my point. They were all yelling about, emotionally, about what a deep emotional experience they had on their teen tour. This might have been before Birthright or at the beginning of Birthright, so people going on teen tours. And I was just like, yeah, that's what I mean. But that, I think, derailed where that class was supposed to go.

But yeah, that's, I think, how we perceive it. Like, is it an amusement park for American Jews, a security deposit? Plan B. Right. It was like, okay, if this doesn't work out, we go there. But that's exactly my point, because I feel like it's in the end of the Cold War that American Jews felt like we don't even need that security. In fact, truth is, over there, it's starting to look even more grim than it is here. So I guess my experience was unique because, first of all, my father never had American citizenship. He never even tried. And he would always reinforce this point in my head that we're not home. This isn't where we belong. Our country is over there. Again, I was a very rebellious kid. I wasn't really buying into all the Jewish stuff that he was into.

He kind of got into, you know, he became like, started his shuva process, I guess, around when I was three years old. By the time I was 11, I was just like not hearing any of it. But I think a lot of it stuck. Well, look where you are now. Yeah, Baruch Hashem. No, I think a lot of my emunah really comes from things my father taught me. Just like raw emunah. I don't mean like, you know, learning like the maral inside. Right, not the intellectual faith, but the bedrock way in which you walk in the world. Right. My father, I think, definitely instilled a lot of emunah in me growing up. But part of that was like, this isn't our home. Like, don't kid yourself. You know, and I would say that the definition of exile is exactly that.

If you know that where you are is not where you belong. And I would argue that in the 80s, both because of the victory in the Cold War and how much American Jewry identified with the American side of their identity, therefore they're on the winning side, and because the way which post-Lebanon Israel's image was sullied, if not tainted, Just you wait until we get to the story of the Intifada, because nobody goes to Disney World when they're shooting people at the gates, right? So because of that, I think that there was really a shift toward this sense that we're no longer in exile. There's that soft word of diaspora, where it disperses people. But today, when I speak to my students at Pardes, who come from America to Learn here, or where I'm interacting with American Jews, a lot of them are perfectly at home, so perfectly that it doesn't even occur to them.

that they might belong somewhere else. I want to touch on Soviet Jewry in that light, because the struggle for Soviet Jewry, for me, was a defining moment. In my childhood, the famous Freedom Sunday in 1987, I have very strong memories of getting on a bus in Cleveland and driving through the night to D.C. and seeing hundreds of thousands of Jews rallying on the mall. And yet I now know from my research that one of the great challenges that was posed by that victory is that more Soviet Jews wanted to come to America than really wanted to go to Israel. And American Jews were happy to have them. America itself wasn't necessarily happy to have them as a country, a more complicated session. But the point is, it's another indication that American Jews were sensing that they were their own entity in relation still to Israel, but perhaps with a different agenda.

the more enlightened a student of mine is roommates with a rabbinical student at hebrew union college and she said to me that this person like openly speaks about like the duty of americans to american jews the duty of like jews in the united states to force israelis to get with the program and to become more enlightened and of course to westernize israeli society and etc and it's not even like There's no shame in it. They're just like, yeah, that's of course, that's the duty of American Jews. We have to use whatever influence we have. You know what the beauty of colonizers is? They're not ashamed. They think they're doing the right thing. Right. The problem is so many of us are colonized colonizers.

That's the really difficult… Playing out a multi-generational game. Right. And not even realizing, not even seeing our own colonization that drives us to behave as colonizers to ourselves or to others. Yeah. So, again, I'm doing the pivots here because I got a lot of points on the board. I'm curious about. So I got an email from a listener recently. By the way, you can reach me, rovmikefoyer at gmail.com. You can go to jewishstory.co or rovmike.com to get in touch with me that way. By the way, also, those sites were built by Vision Traction. You know, there's an amazing guy out there. His name is Eitan. He can help you create a digital profile that will really make you successful. But I digress. Just a favor to a friend.

I got an email from a listener who listened to my most two recent podcasts on the Jonathan Pollard story and the story on Rav Kahana. Two people I know to whom you have a strong attachment in various ways. Not personally, just, you know, to their story. So I want to read you what he says here and see what you think. First of all, Jonathan Pollard is a traitor, full stop. Pollard sold our most closely guarded secrets to Israel for money and belatedly used Israeli security as a shield for his reprehensible actions. There's no even-handed treatment of such a reprehensible, dishonest, and traitorous grifter. Right? He says he was so incensed, by the way, of my whitewashing, as he calls it, that he stopped listening mid-show and almost stopped becoming a supporter.

Which, by the way, you can go. That's at jewishstory.co, upper right-hand corner. There's a button there. Join the team for season six. He goes on, though, after Pollard. But he didn't give up. Don't give up on me, people. Today I listened to your story about Mayor Kahane. I was prepared for a denunciation of him, but to my surprise, you were even-handed in your Kahana portrayal. Did not damn nor praise him, but presented what I think is a fair assessment. Kahana, this is the key line, Kahana was a complex man whose motivations were simple. The protection of the Jewish people and the state of Israel above all else. Pollard was just a traitor, pure and simple. Now, I was shocked, not by the vehemence. As far as I'm concerned, if I can get a reaction out of someone, it's a big win.

And I really appreciate when people share their thoughts with me. even if they are critical, especially if they're critical. What I was shocked by was I would have assumed that someone who saw Pollard as a traitor full stop would have seen Mayor Kahana as a racist demagogue, perhaps. When I sort of prepped you with this, you had an interesting observation. What does this say to you? First of all, tell me a little bit about your Jewish story and what role the stories of Pollard and Rav Kahana might play there. I would say, even though my politics might be different, especially on Palestinian issues, I definitely have a lot of Akarat Tov to Rav Merkahana. Gratitude, recognition for the good that he's done for you.

Yeah, for me personally, because my way back to Am Yisrael was really through the JDL. Like I, as somebody who grew up the way I did and had the experiences I did, I discovered the Internet in my second year of college, and I discovered the Jewish Defense League through the Internet, and I joined them. And for me, it was like joining a Jewish gang. At least that's what I was expecting. All the politics and ideology kind of came later, but it was really like, it really changed my world. I thought it was going to be like an interesting chapter in my autobiography one day, and I'd just like move on and do something else. That like totally changed the trajectory of my life. And then when the second Intifada started, I dropped out of school to come here and join the army.

And I've been kind of living the Jewish story ever since. And you didn't trademark that, did you? The Jewish story? Yeah. I mean, sure, yeah. Sure. Okay. So I can say it here. You can say it here. I get royalties wherever else you say it. So, Bli Nader. So for me, like, and when I started learning Torah as a 20-year-old up in Syracuse, New York, I had an art scroll, Chumash, and dozens of cassette tapes of Rav Kahana speaking. On the Parsha, on political issues, whatever, that's what I had. And some of his books, I really devoured the stuff. And that was like a Torah that made sense to me. I think that was the only Torah that, taking into consideration where I was coming from, that was a Torah that was accessible to me, that was interesting to me, exciting to me.

And it really, like, you know, I thought I was joining, like, the Black Panthers, but, like, a Jewish Black Panther party. What role would you say that a sense of Jewish pride played in that? Oh, I was, like, it really, again, I'm telling you that I grew up in an environment where being a Jew was not, I didn't think this way internally because of, you know, way my father taught me and he also used to have like Edsel veterans over for Shabbat dinners and things like that. Like meaning he very much like pushed like a more Tough Jew stance It is And you know and a lot of the men in my family are tough guys So I never thought of myself and even like going to like day school as a kid like you know I would learn about the Maccabim and Avraham fighting the four kings.

Like I never thought that we're supposed to be weak. But the perception of Jews in the world I existed in as a teenager was like, you know, the easy targets, etc. I'm discovering as an adult that a lot of kids I grew up with were Jews, but we're so closeted about it. I remember one time outing a friend of mine for being a Jew and him wanting to fight me because I found out some girl in my math class told me she went to Hebrew school with him. And I was like, what? And when I brought it up to him, he wanted to fight. He was angry. He felt deeply threatened. So this is a world where being a Jew is really a liability in terms of identity, in terms of like the way people perceive you because it was definitely a world where like you know somebody if somebody like writes their name over mine on a wall we have to fight you know like there is no option not to do something about that because then then suddenly uh you know you're perceived as weak in a world where you don't want to be weak when suddenly like the different image of what a jew is is like a nation of scholar warriors first of all the jdl workouts uh back then were harder than anything I had to do in basic training in the army here.

Like meaning it was, it was like real. And it was, it was like something that really, really, really, like I wanted to be a part of. It was exciting to me. It looked well organized. I remember like doing pushups and having the guy in charge, like, like teaching us Torah as like, we're doing pushups. And of course, Torah from a certain perspective. And I remember also getting kavod for the first time for being a Kohen. Respect. Yeah. Meaning I remember, and it's like meant a lot to me because, you know, growing up as a Kohen, I don't know, like, okay, like, I can't marry this woman, or I, you know, or I can't go into a cemetery, like, there was like, okay, I'm a Kohen, what does that mean? But I remember, like, in JDL, it was like the first time during a workout once, you know, the guy asked, is anybody here a Kohen?

And I said, I am. He's like, all right, you make the bracha for everybody on, like, water, you know, and, you know, and I was like, wow, I'm a Kohen, you know? There's something there. Yeah, so, and I think there is something in that Torah that's deeply true. I mean, the way I would define if I were to really explain Kahanist Torah today, it's basically Haredi Torah with nationalism. And I think that says a lot about the trajectory of Israeli society today, by the way, because the Haredi population is really the fastest growing population between the river and the sea, and they're becoming much more nationalist. Yes, if people are unfamiliar, there's actually seems to be in the, according to the polls, a growing threat, in quotes, of Ben-Gavir's sort of modern Kahanist incarnation party pulling votes from the Haredi world.

Stay tuned. It'll be an interesting dynamic. Sure. And it's going to also push a lot of, I believe, I think it's going to push a lot of the Haredi politicians to take much more nationalist positions in order to stem the flow of young voters going that way. Listen, politics here is never boring. Whatever else you want to say about it. So when I think of Kahanistium, I think of the tribe of Shimon. That's like the spiritual expression of the tribe of Shimon in our national soul shines into the... The zealots. Well, I don't know. I consider myself a little bit of a zealot, and I'm not in that camp anymore. But I think that the tribe of Shimon is a maybe... It's a very simple, and I think your reader who sent you that email, he said something about Rav Kahana's...

He said he was a complex man whose motivations were simple. Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. And I think he also is correct about his primary objective being the security of the Jewish people, this kind of never-again ideology that really makes less sense to people as we move further away from the Holocaust. This is a big shift that I touched on, is that the 80s is also a part of that shift. It's a generational shift. People born in the 80s, their primary experience of Israel, if they're aware, or growing up in the 80s, was Lebanon, the first Intifada, all of which were ugly, televised, but none of them felt existential, except for the people, of course, living in the country at the time, as opposed to their parents who witnessed 73 and 67, these things which were not only prettier on TV, but truly existential troubles.

Yeah, I remember my father telling me that in 67 they really believed Israel might be wiped out. Oh, yes. And listening to the radio. You will repeatedly. Everyone I've ever spoke to was alive at that time. It was a certainty. And not oddly so, since it was literally, you know, just 22 years after the liberation of Auschwitz. So such a thing can be imagined. Right. And the fact that it ultimately was a biblical style miracle in the heart of the 20th century, I think that just like led to an explosion of Jewish identity, not only in the Soviet Union. I mean, I would explain it maybe in more mystical terms. I think that not just the miraculous nature of the war, but also the metaphysical impact of the Jewish return to sovereignty over Jerusalem.

There's a lot in the Zorchadosh about this. and I think that had an effect on our collective soul that just woke something up in American Jews, in Soviet Jews, etc. It's warping the fabric of almost everything still. I don't know if people can hear in the background the traffic, but that's the Dead Sea Road below us. We're on my porch, walking from the east toward Irak Kodesh, the holy city, even as we speak. So I hear the role that Rav Kahana played for you personally, and thank you for also fleshing out a little bit. I mean, I just want to also say that even now that, you know, when I came to Israel and discovered the Torah of Rav Kook, it took some time for me to realize, because on the surface, it could sometimes look similar, especially during the second intifada, because I came to Mahon Mir, which is the Rav Kook institution, during the second intifada, like when I was preparing to join the army.

And the Torah, they're both, we could call them both nationalists, for lack of a better word, approaches Torah. There's a significant nationalist element in Rav Kook's Torah. I wouldn't call it nationalist Torah. Well, no, I think nationalism is, it's the wrong word, but it's the word we have in English. And both are very much focused on the story of the Jewish people. And so it took me a little while to see the differences. Profound that they are. And understand, no, because during the Second Intifada, I think one of the things that happened here during the Second Intifada is a lot of the younger generation of the Rav Kook world adopted by default a lot of Kahanist positions on Palestinians. There was a narrowing and an intensification and a militancy.

Which makes sense when you're in war. Yeah. Right. That's, you know, we're talking about a population that experienced a lot of bloodshed, especially the Jews living in Judea and Samaria in the West Bank. And so it took me a while, you know, before I really understood that I'm not really a Kahanist anymore. That that's something. And of course, you know, once I started working with Palestinians a few years later and and getting involved in reconciliation work, that became more and more obvious. But I do think that there is something deeply true in in the Kahanist position that was necessary for me to grab onto at that time in order to make my way in. Excellent. And Jonathan Pollard? Well, I think Pollard is is was the secret to freeing American Jews.

The secret to, wait, pause on that. Pollard is the secret to freeing American Jews. All right, now tell me more. Now, I'm not saying anything I didn't learn from one of my teachers, Eli Yosef, who actually was one of the main organizers of the free Pollard movement here in Israel. I remember. Who I'm hoping to have on, actually, on the show soon. Ah, nice. So I remember when we used to do hunger strikes together for Pollard, and he would go to all these Israeli high schools, like, telling the story of Pollard and getting all these teenagers out and making Pollard an important issue in certain sectors of Israeli society. His argument, and I think he's right, is that Jonathan Pollard is the only free Jew in the United States.

Everybody else is a prisoner because he's the only one who had to confront the question, who am I? Am I an American or am I a Jew? I can't be both. I can't be both. He's the only one who made the decision but is still stuck there physically. right? And if we force the other Jews of the United States to confront the story of Jonathan Pollard, then they too can become liberated. And from Eli Yosef's point of view, Jonathan Pollard corrected the sin of American Jews during the Holocaust, who essentially wanted to be Americans and therefore, at least the Jewish establishment in the United States, kind of kept their constituencies in the dark, didn't make noise. Chose not to make waves. Right. You've done shows on Peter Bergson, Hillel Cook.

And so you did a show on Stephen Wise, I remember, I think, last season, right? No, season two. Season two. No, but you brought him up again recently, or maybe during your summer course. Could be. Anyway. I'm a real fan. But I think that Jonathan Pollard, I think this is true. I think this analysis makes sense that Pollard basically was confronted by a very similar dilemma as the American Jewish leadership in the 1940s. Basically, he saw information that Israel was in danger. He saw that – Specifically the Iraqi chemical. Iraqi, Syrian, Libyan, yeah. And he saw that the U.S. intelligence community was withholding that information despite a memorandum of understanding that obligated the two nations to share such information.

And he had a choice to make. Am I an American or am I a Jew? And he couldn't be both. And he decided to betray the United States. That's true. But in doing so, he really freed himself. And he showed that he is part of Am Yisrael. So it's an idealistic presentation. What do you say to this listener's critique that basically he was dishonest? He was a grifter. He was in it for money. He was selling secrets. Look, I think anybody who meets Pollard or who even hears him speak will know pretty quickly that that's not what we're dealing with. Now, perhaps. No, but I think we're also talking about a person. I agree that to a certain extent, there was an ideology that was very easy for him to subscribe to once in prison and once making the choices he made.

And I think his wife Esther who just recently passed away I think was very influential in his tshuva and bringing him close to Torah and giving him maybe a deeper and greater understanding also of Mordechai Leozatzel of giving him like a greater understanding of what he did and why it important And obviously a person in that position wants to see what they did is important But it's very hard for me to believe that just in terms of his character, in terms of the type of person we're talking about, that this was just kind of like a self-interested grifter, traitor of secrets. I think this is somebody who was shocked himself that the U.S. was withholding this information. Obviously, he was able to subscribe greater meaning to what he did later in life and understand it in a greater context.

But that doesn't mean that at the time he wasn't driven by idealistic motives. And I think there's definitely a huge incentive for many people, especially in the American Jewish establishment, who don't want to confront these issues to spread this misinformation in order to taint his reputation and paint them a certain way. Because honestly, that's like the immature approach. They don't want to deal with the questions that he represents. I always say that J Street is not the antithesis to AIPAC. Jonathan Pollard is the antithesis to APEC, because this whole narrative that the American Jewish establishment, including the pro-Israel American Jewish establishment, tells itself about its identity, its place in the United States, the relationship between the U.S.

and Israel. It's all a G-rated movie, and I think rather than deal with the contradictions, rather than actually confront these contradictions in their own identities and the way they've chosen to look at the world and the way they've chosen to make themselves comfortable with the choices they've made, they prefer to just tarnage the image of this guy who really sacrificed so much for the Jewish people. So in a sense, Jonathan Pollard and Rav Kahane intersect around Kahane's book, Uncomfortable Questions for Comfortable Jews, in the sense that Pollard poses the most uncomfortable question, which is that when you're faced with an opportunity to act which will do damage to one in service of protecting the other, who are you?

And I think you're correct that the 80s was the point at which American Jewry became convinced that that question was no longer relevant, that one could be as Jewish as they wanted to be and comfortably American. Although, you know, just to pivot to one last topic before we wrap things up, the reality of that for the majority of American Jews was that they were extremely comfortable and not so desirous of being all that Jewish. I noted in one of my earlier shows that it was in 1983 that the reform movement formally recognized patrilineal dissent. But I think even those who were interested in being openly Jewish, visibly Jewish, actively Jewish, also bought into the mythology of American exceptionalism.

I mean, you see that even in the American Hareda community, even among the modern Orthodox, for sure, among the modern Orthodox, that it's not just those who distance themselves from Jewish practice and Jewish ritual and halakha. I think even among those who are fully observant of halakha, there became this American identity and real contradictions in their identity. This is exactly where I was going. What I can point out is that there's a, you know, assimilation is a stick that religious Jews love to hit non-religious Jews with. Like, oh, look at all these assimilated Jews. And that's exactly what I was at. The setup of like, oh, the intermarriage rates. Oh, you know, educational systems are clapping.

Oh, oh, oh. But what you're pointing out is that a person can be, you know, faithful to the religious structures of Judaism and completely assimilated into American society. Absolutely. So much so that they would look at Jonathan Pollard as the quintessential traitor. Not just because he betrayed the country, but because he betrayed them. By exposing the contradictions which reside at the base. You know, I can tell you, my personal Jewish journey, the first time I came to Israel was in the 80s. I was in high school. Let's do the math. It must have been 1989. I was 15. at the time I came here USY High as a high school during the year three month program. A number of experiences including seeing Rav Kahana preaching at a street rally.

Did you understand what you were witnessing at the time? Not at all. I knew who he was because you got informed and I remember this very frightening feeling that the only thing I could associate him with was Hitler in the sense of like the angry power in the crowd. At the time the slogan was What was he talking about? He was talking about the loan guarantees that the United States was dangling in front of Israel as an assistance to absorbing the hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews that were being released at an incredibly rapid pace, right, in return for curtailing construction in Yudan Shemron, in the so-called West Bank. It's a microcosm that deserves to be unpacked. So that's what was so interesting to me about this email that you got, because I think it expresses something that I've seen, that I think has become a growing phenomenon among right-wing Jews.

What's that? And it's, especially right-wing Jews in the United States, this idea of Kahane's good, Pollard's bad, because that is something that was less common a decade or two ago. I was astounded when I saw that. Well, I think that, you know, I used to say in Israel, there are two kinds of Kahanistim, or maybe in the world, there are two kinds of Kahanistim. there are those Jews who really see themselves as an oppressed group. I think you see this a lot amongst Mizrahi, Kahnistim, maybe Soviet Jews, etc. Jews who really think of themselves as like an oppressed group, and this guy was fighting for our rights. He was fighting for us. And then you have Kahnistim who come from places like Texas and identify with the Republican Party and just see like, Like Rav Kahane is just like the right wing Jewish voice that puts us kind of on the same team.

And they buy in, you know, they totally buy into American exceptionalism and capitalism. You're seeing their stance on abortion right now come out in the media. Right. And so those guys, this obviously that seems to be a growing voice now. But I find it very ironic because, as you just pointed out with the slogan, I think the last big issue that Rav Kahane was fighting for and what probably got him killed was separating from the United States. Well, it's actually what he was speaking to the crowd about on the day his assassination was telling them, basically, time to choose. Where do you belong? Get out while you still can. Right, but not just about Aliyah, about Israel politically separating from the United States.

And I think that's a message that none of his students or followers, or I'm not going to say none, but... A few of them. Certainly the ones in the United States or who kind of like buy into, you know, like this narrative of Israel being the Robin to America's Batman. You know, like I think that the type of person who would be sympathetic, this email, by the way, wasn't necessarily Kahanist. No, he didn't know. He made an important observation, complex individual with a very simple motive. I think what was very interesting there was the radically different levels of nuance in his approach to Pollard in Ghana. I hit a nerve. Right. So meaning Pollard hits a nerve. And so, like, but what you see is there is this kind of, like, growing, I think, as the American Jews, including the Orthodox, including the right wing, you know, what we call maybe in a very superficial, from a very superficial perspective, nationalist Jews.

The conservatives, small c. Right. Like like no, no. But I mean, nationalists, meaning like in their minds kind of connected to the Jewish story, but it might not be as real to them as the American dream they're pursuing. I think that amongst that crowd or those who are invested in the U.S. is a relationship, maybe professionally or emotionally or whatever. I think there is this like, you know, Pollard is really triggering and you did touch a nerve. And it's just interesting to me because it used to be like a given that anybody who is at all sympathetic to Rav Kahan or Kahanism would have been pro-Pollard. That was my assumption. Right, but it evolved in such a way that you have all these right-wing American Jews who've bought into American exceptionalism, bought into the U.S.-Israel relationship as this unbreakable foundation of our security and national safety, etc.

And I think it makes a lot of Jews feel safe in the United States. They don't have to make a choice. I'm talking about the pro-Israel Jews. I'm talking about Teaneck. I'm talking about the five towns. It makes them feel safe. And I think the Trump administration was really damaging to us in that sense, that it intensified the sense of security. Oh, it did. And really made them feel, especially when you get a guy like David Friedman, you know, as ambassador to Israel. Suddenly, people in the five towns, Jews in the five towns are like, look, one of us. Like, we're there. And he was. Right. He really was. And so, although that whole administration was such an anomaly, such a crazy, like, fever dream. Don't count chickens before they're hatched.

Right. Sure. So listen, we're hitting time here. I just want to wrap it up and say thank you. There's some important insights here. I hope folks are listening closely. And if folks want to ask you questions or know more about where they can see your thought, where would they do that? They'd go to either visionmovement.org or visionmag.org. That's our magazine where your podcast is featured on an almost weekly basis. They can hit contact and say the emails for me and it'll get to me. They can also follow me on Instagram or Facebook or whatever. I'm yudahakohin. But definitely I would say go to visionmag.org because there's a lot of interesting content there that I think listeners should check out. Excellent.

Well, Ravi Hurta Hakun, visionary of the vision movement and fellow child of the 80s, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and the time with me. You can also reach me at ravmikefoyer at gmail.com. You can go to my website, that's thejewishstory.co or ravmike.com if you want to be in touch, you want to see all the great things I'm involved in. You want to give a little bit of per-podcast support, there's a button in that upper right-hand corner of jewishstory.co. Check it out. I need your support for Season 6. I want to thank the Land of Israel Network. That's thelandofisrael.com. They're creating a center for global transcendence in the heart of the Judean Mountains. I want to thank the Pardes Institute, P-A-R-D-E-S dot org dot I-L, for throwing the doors of the Beit Midrash open as wide as possible.

And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.