June 24, 2010. OK, Welcome to the New Jerusalem Talmud discussion of assimilation…. We had a meeting at the Jewlicious Festival in LA in February to create the Mishnah of this and that seemed like an appropriate place to do it. Jewlicious is a meeting place of about 500 of some of the most amazing Jewish leaders, innovators, [1:10 ? Singers] and just engaged interested people from all over America and even some from Israel. We had a little group of people [?...] doing in America and we had a really good discussion of trying to figure out what assimilation looks like, of what the Mishanah should look like; what is the real question. We actually had a whole discussion towards the Gemara but we had it on Shabbos so we didn’t write anything down, we didn’t record anything so it exists in the larger [1:46 ?] sphere, which is appropriate for oral tradition. But we’re trying, -I mean, if you really had your dream of what learning Gemara would be like -my dream, I’m a historian so I want to know everything about everyone. I would want to know what was the bigger discussion going on when the chachamim came up with just the little bits we have on the page. What’s each guy’s life story, where’s he coming from, why did he think this and what did they actually say when they [? 2:12]. I don’t know if we can put ourselves on that level; maybe a few of us someday, God willing. But I do believe that every one of us is coming from a place of truth; that you some how have connection and are simply passionate about an issue, to something real that is going on and that’s an important part of the discussion. So my name is Matthew Mausner; I’m a historian among other things, and I guess part of my focus as a historian is about identity [2:53 ?..]and what it would look like [?] so the area I studied most intensely was American Indian culture before they were conquered. Introductions 3:07 -I’m Stevie. I’m in training to be a scientist, a physicist. I suppose in terms of trying to identify what something means [?} to avoid [?}statements and to identify its [?]. -My name is Rob, I’m a tourist, I’ve been here a week but this is my 14th visit to Israel. I’ve done a lot of things both in Israel and outside of Israel. I worked for a while as a shepherd in the Galilee; I worked on an archeological dig in [3:59?] in the Negev. I’ve lived in Paris, I’ve lived in Berlin and I guess I currently live in Los Angeles. -My name’s Mo and I’m a Yeshiva student and I’m originally from New York –and I’m Sephardi, -where assimilation is an issue and extreme tactics for me is, especially in NY, is to reduce assimilation to nothing. 4:56 -My names’ Ya’akov Conssor. My background is in meteorology. I’ve been in Israel for a couple of years. [5:12….?]. 5:25 -Avital [?.......] 6:16 -Mia [?......] 6:45 -My name is Michaella [….?] and I study at Hebrew U. [?....] 7:28 My name is Ian. I [?...]. I just finished my junior year at Columbia [?]. Now I’m studying philosophy with a Jewish background [?....] 7:50 My name is Shoshanna [?...] 8:14 My name is Jordan [?...]. 8:55 My name is Steven. I’m an Oleh Chadash, tomorrow will be [?} weeks. I live in Arnona. In the states I was in New York City [?...]. …political science teacher in public schools [?...] Studied at Machon Meir [?...] 11:08 Names for simplicity: Stevie, Rob, Mo, Yaacov, Avital, Mia, Michaella, Ian, Shoshanna, Jordan, Steven -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 11:23 Assimilation. Its what we boiled it down to. How much of non-Jewish cultures or values or places can be taken on or lived in before essential Jewish identity is lost. Where is that boundary? In order to answer that we realize you have to have some idea, it doesn’t have to be the same idea for everybody but what and where makes Jews Jewish and who decides and why does it matter. So you don’t have to answer it all at once but who’s got some ideas? 12:14 Stevie: Well I have a question right away. When I was doing my graduate degree in Jewish studies I had a question about what’s the difference between assimilation and acculturation. I never satisfactory answered it. When I studied inter-testamental literature and Hasmonean stuff and Greek presence here and Roman presence, there seems to be a distinction between people who retain a Jewish identity but still have some kind of interaction with the dominant alien culture and affiliation with it and those who take on a certain amount of that culture to the point and forfeit their Jewish identity so to me assimilation implies some Jewishness retained whereas acculturation is more the abandonment and rejection of Jewishness. Its something I used to think about and it came up for me today when it was apparent. 13:25 -There is a question if there is any opportunity for comparison which societies historically and in the modern period [?} with one or the other, acculturation or assimilation. -and within the same society both dynamics can be at work. They can even be at work in the same community with out any clear distinction among say its leaders or its participants that that’s what’s going on. 14:02 -Rob: I’d like to play devils advocate in general so take whatever i say with a grain of salt. It may or may not be what I’m really thinking. So what’s wrong with assimilation? I mean isn’t that one way Jews should be influencing the world? By joining the general culture and participating in it and being part of it? 14:22 Shosh Levin: Ideally that would be amazing; in an ideal world when your representation is active and that’s actually happening then its great because we are then able to take our light out into the nations, which is what we are supposed to do, our job in this world, and to really light it up. Sadly what happens I think, especially because of the numbers-- OK, it’s not all about numbers but-- the number of people that you have, -you need to be a very, very strong positive light in order to have an influence on –what are Jews? Just .14% of the world population? There are so few of us that if we disperse singularly into this kind of darkness although not necessarily darkness of the non-Jewish world the likelihood of our light getting swallowed up as opposed to our light exploding outwards is not proportional to what is most desired for the ingenuity that Judaism is viewed. 15:43 SK So your saying the power of Judaism requires a sort of aggregation, a certain collective as individuals. As individuals Judaism won’t prevail, perhaps? 15:57 Shosh-Judaism is a community-based thing 16:00 SK -are we talking about assimilation of individuals or are we talking about assimilation of communities. It’s a distinction you have to ask. 16:07 MM: also, the subtext there of what you were saying was that it does matter somehow. That if a bunch of Jews just dispersed somehow into whatever society, you know, Spain in the 1100s or South Africa or France or America and I think the bigger one people talk about, capital ‘A’ assimilation today, they’re talking about America. The subtext I was hearing is that on some level it matters to you or you’re seeing it matters to some group of people who are somehow defining who Jews are and saying they are not staying with that definition and they are going off into, could be the darkness or it could be just dispersing into the population. 17:01 Shosh-Yes and no because even the most assimilated Jews that I know who I’ve had the pleasure to meet are people who don’t even go to the other extreme and say I’m an atheist and I don’t believe in religion because then there’s some sort of passion, some sort of fire, some sort of belief in this belief; I’m talking about people who are not at all connected to anything and kind of don’t care either way. They still will say I’m a Jew. Like you’re least observant, least interested, least religious, least affiliated person and I’m going to go for America because that’s my background; I think we can all agree that we know these people and still they say, I’m a Jew. Is there a value in that and why do they do that. Even if they say, well, I don’t do the whole religion thing but I’m Jewish. 18:01 SK-Well, Michael might say, because he’s very interested in identity, just to have a place to hang your hat with a name on it provides a degree of comfort and direction that ultimately might be vacuous but it’s a little more than what your favorite basketball team is. 18:21 -Matthew: I just want to m’chazek us for a second that you said what about their grandchildren 18:28 Mia Right because if they are connected to Judaism because, oh yeah my grandparents in Poland wore black coats or whatever it is so fine. That’s going to sort of get diluted over time and probably can get a lot [affected by assimilation]. -18:37 Well that’s the joke about Reform Jews; what do you call the grandchildren of Reform Jews? Christians. Not to disparage them because I was raised a Reform Jew and bar-mitzvah’d in a Christian church, in a Catholic Church, because my Reform synagogue had a building fund but no building but.[Shosh: Well that’s true]..they are trying to reverse it. But Rob’s question about assimilation, I think the question we have to ask is if there is a natural tendency to assimilate whether there’s a brake, B - R - A - K - E , in the Jewish tradition that allows us to assimilate to a certain level that generally prevents us from going to the point where it irrecoverable. I think that’s important. 19:24 Moe: I hear what you’re saying but at the same time there comes a point where a man is going to lose his Jewish identity. Fine, I can go and assimilate and I can be part of a whole not Jewish community and do business with them and go to dinner with them and whatever but there will be a certain point where the real mashmaut of his Jewishness is lost and it gets diluted and it gets knocked out. And basically lose Jewish identity so yes, its good up to a certain point. Up to that, great. 20:24 Matthew: before we start to really jump in to all of these potential directions does anyone else have something to say that hasn’t put in yet? 20:32 Yeah, as also someone who is very interested in history, especially very knowledgeable in Jewish history, I want to point out –I don’t know the number but something like 85, 90% of the descendants of Isaac Meir Wise, a well known Reform Rabbi in the late 19th century, are not Jewish and probably 95% of the first descendants of the most significant early Jewish families, which were mostly Sephardic Jewish families in the American 1700s are not Jewish. So it just shows you what the ravages of generations do to people that even thought the first and second generations many of them were completely observant and very, very rooted in the Jewish community but over time -and that was back then, -the pressures of assimilation were not necessarily as strong as they are today. 21:32 Matthew: I just want to qualify that by saying yes, and saying it’s the ravages of generations, that’s a value judgment. There’s a fact of a certain number of people becoming not Jewish and there’s a value judgment in saying it’s a bad thing, so just to make that… 21:52 I also wanted to add in, I think there’s a potential conflict between concerns about assimilation and [? really religious] people that they sort of, like [?} a chance for what they believe is [?} Jewish [?...] and I think it gets a little touchy in terms of what do people believe because its [?] putting it out there that they’re Jewish [?......] but don’t identify with a lot of things that we would identify with [?...]. 23:14 [?] I happen to have been in Petra [?]. Petra is the ancient Nabatean city in Jordan so I was looking at all the structure there [?]. Petra was conquered first by the Greeks and then by the Romans as were we and it was interesting thinking how these ancient Nabateans dealt with being conquered by these other ancients peoples [?} dealt with assimilation the way we dealt with it. They appropriated ancient Geeko-Roman architecture into their cities the building [?...] the Bar Kochba Revolt [?....] the Roman Empire [?...]. We’re still here and the Nabateans are gone [?...] 24:26 Stevie: A lot of historical examples have been brought up and I’m also a student of history and it seems to me there is this kind of assumption that along with dispersal comes loss of identity but I would argue that the Jewish People’s identity was crystallized in exile and upon retuned from exile the returning Jewish community didn’t trust the legitimacy of the existing Jewish community and that sort of the –the defiance of the people who were in a subculture, that was their most defining aspect about them and similarly almost 1000 years later in the times of writing the Talmud, granted this is a story that is in the Talmud Bavli but the Talmud Bavli claims itself to be more legitimate than the Yerushalmi on the grounds that in exile they were more careful about keeping things correct and having a consistent passing down of traditions as opposed to sort of the assumption that within our place its all going to work and that in the modern era its very tempting to say that Israel, because its here, because it’s a Jewish population, it will ensure a continuation of something Jewish which is true but its not necessarily the same something Jewish that we recognize and that is more likely to be maintained by the extremist cultures who are the people who perpetuated the revolts that you just mentioned and those extremist certainly exist both in Israel and America. 27:20 Jordan: …I’m thinking a lot about American exceptionalism. I’m borrowing that term from the Israeli Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren. He was talking about the American Jewish community in the loss of what I would call of tribal identity 27:36 [?} a new form of Christianity that arose but I want to borrow that term and say that America is unique in many ways and its unique in the strength of the political institution and the culture that it fills and within that framework and the ability to buy, to buy into the American individualism and that for the first time in history a nation was formed not on the basis of a cultural tribal identity but in the basis of a political philosophy that was consciously being developed between people who were political philosophers who were well read and were trying to, -they were true revolutionaries, they were trying to build a totally new foundation for a new type of civilization and in doing so I think they were very successful in creating institutions that over time when our people began coming in the 1970s and the different waves of migration that this individualistic tendency was -essentially broke down the tribal barriers that persisted for so many years that were maintained in other civilizatioins whether they were in Europe or in the Middle East and etc. So going back to the distinction between acculturation and assimilation, I wonder if America might be a test case and that we might see under a different type of phenomenon there relative to other regions in the world. 29:15 Matthew: I just want to reflect back a couple of things that have been said…As a student of early American history they were very conscious about modeling their idea of America as a new creation explicitly on biblical precedent. They conceived of it as a new Jerusalem. It’s not such an accident that America and Israel are in such resonance on a lot of issues. In some ways they are the only two countries in the world that are explicitly founded on ideals rather than on ethnic accidents. It’s not so simple and not so clean but both were explicitly founded on an idealistic founding, which I think makes a big difference. To resonate back with what Michaella said about intermarriage being one of the sort of red lines there’s been times in Jewish history where Judaism was not strictly matrilineal; it was also patralinial and arguably up until the end of Roman times when it became, you know, Roman soldiers rapping became this big issue, that they explicitly made it matrilineal and that points in a lot of directions. One thing is that when we were secure in our own land worrying about assimilation wasn’t such an issue because people who would come here would naturally assimilate towards us. Which is something you see in the period of Esther, the people were mityahadim, were judaizing. This issue even being and issue of assimilation is very dependant on historical context. In a lot of our Jewish history there was no option in terms of the way –the societies around us defined our identity as well as our own. You were either in or you were out and there was no middle ground. In a lot of Europe and a lot of the Muslim world and even in various other places. Even in India it was not even an option. It’s really only in Babylon, and in different ways Greece and Rome and today in a lot of western countries to very different degrees. I think as Jordan said America is very different than Britain or Canada or Australia. The last example I want to throw into that as far a context is that South African Jewish identity; South Africans define their own identity as both proudly a member of a tribe, one of the 12 major nations or whatever, and as a South African and that those can be like, both strong. So I think from what I’ve seen its been easier for South African Jews to be proudly Jewish and proudly South African in a way that its very different than Australian or Canadian or French or American. So just in terms of looking at the different historical contexts the discussion that we’re having in terms of –I guess the last point, going back to something that was said a ways back was in terms of talking about assimilation as a problem we’re not so much worried about taking on a few little things like the Babylonian calendar or this or that. We’re talking about going beyond the red line, that somehow we’re talking about people becoming so much a part of the societies they are in that they cease to be meaningfully part of the Jewish nation, however you define it. Ok, let’s go deeper. 32:45 Michaella: are those the only things you want to talk about? Or do you want to concentrate on what values make us Jewish and help us […?] Matthew: The answer is yes. 33:04 I think it’s difficult to define that line, especially in the situation that we find ourselves in as a global community Jews in the whole world. There are; where as in a time where they was less room for debate, less room for discussion, less room for personal interpretation, now if you ask me you’re only a Jew if your mother is a Jew or if you’re converted in a way that I believe is appropriate. But if you ask one of my father’s colleagues from college he will tell you you’re a Jew if your mother and or your father is a Jew. And then you can have further people who say I feel like a Jew, I don’t need to make it official in any kind of way because what we have is not really something you can touch or feel or see. It’s not a race and it’s not a gene, although there was an article; its something that on the strictest terms is defined very much according to blood. It has nothing to do with that. And so anyone can really define how they want to be defined in this world and so for us to come and say to somebody else you’re crossing the line or this is the line, they would come back and say no, you’re crossing the line by telling me there is a line. So how do we even get to that -if we’re ever going to get to any kind of beginning of a discussion then –there’s ideas floating around and I’m having a hard time trying to figure out when this discussion is going to start because there’s no way to get everyone to agree on any one thing. 35:10 I would say yes, on that you’re right and in order to create distinctions, like maybe we could look at, ok, like, I’m thinking about I have some really fanatical orthodox friends that I bring a Reform or even a Conservative guy which I’m friends with and my judgment is that he is for all intensive purposes Jewish, this fanatic is going to say no he’s not. -And I have a lot of friends who would come and say that guy is a fanatic crazy Jew. -Probably. So what I would say is that in a Reform setting that would be the line and in a Conservative setting and even in the Chareidi -for a modern Orthodox person that would be the line. It really depends from what background your looking at. 36:15 -I feel like [?] since we are we talking about Judaism as a different religion or a culture or an ethnicity. I hear a lot of discussion of who is a Jew, you know, according to my religious ideologies or different people who have these ideologies but I was thinking about what Michaella was talking about before about Anti-Semitism as internalizing Anti-Semitism and there’s so many factors that go into being Jewish culturally and ethnically. There are plenty of people that would say I’m not Jewish, I don’t keep anything, I don’t identify, I don’t know anything about Judaism but, you’re still effected by anti-Semitism and internalize that anti-Semiticm. Lots of other Jews don’t want to just define Judaism by the negative aspects but… 37:12 Matthew: I want to reflect back, also I wanted to say this before and then I forgot. First, your question: are we talking about religion, ethnicity, identity, whatever, -the answer’s yes. It’s a theme in Torah, I think, that often the anti-Semites or Amalek or whoever it is defines us. Comes into us and has conflict with us partly to define us. That’s one of the strands of Jewish thinking in many eras. Certainly Nuremberg laws is something that defines us; that no matter how assimilated people were in Europe the Germans fanatically tracked down the records and anyone with one Jewish grandparent was treated as a Jew no matter how loyally they served in the German army or their conversion to Catholicism was. So there is a certain component of anti-Semitism defining us in spite of our own attempts to define or un-define people as Jews. 38:28 -I would like us to acknowledge some internal mechanisms, which is at work, not only in our discussion but in general discussions about Judaism and Jewry, and world Jewry. That there is a compulsion to maximize our numbers. Why? Instead of minimilizing them. Why? Some how our numbers, our presence is going to –that’s the determining factor in our pride, in our faith; in our legitimacy. To do that we by necessity dilute whatever criteria we are using, the volume of the criteria and the nature of the criteria, and I think there is something problematic about it. And I think if you look at it from the point of view of the law –of course there are two foundations for my understanding of things; of a people and that’s the law and traditions that relate to the law and the historical experiences in relation to that law. And then you have the Judaism of law and what you call the anti-nomial Judaism which is either indifferent to law, resistant to law or only in part dedicated to law and that focus of law and this attempt to, this desire to maximalize our numbers, I think, are in real conflict and they come up in every discussion of the Jewish People today. 40:27 -Yeah, I just want to go back to and earlier point which was to say that there, -I think its very interesting that, that there is in Jewish tradition sort of a ceremony that goes along with joining the Jewish People and that –in Bahai faith for example someone simply decides they are Bahai and they are; there specifically is no ceremony, it’s an everyone is welcome attitude. In Judaism there has always been something physical, -a circumcision, an immersion, and so forth that sort of separates that turning point and the number of steps that go into it has changed in time to be sure and there was also once also a category called Ger Toshav, of people who did not go through those steps but were still part of the Jewish community and its unclear exactly what part they played. Its possible that they were intermarried with Jewish People, its unclear historically as far as I know. Anyway, I think there is, that its sort of an important part of identity to be able to sort of grant -the leaving of Judaism there isn’t something to point to which is why its such a hazy red line but the idea that there is something. 42:10 Matthew: -Not since the Greek times when we tried to reverse circumcision. -Well, those were the days. 42:31 -Just in terms of the real issue of Jews being focused on maximilizing our numbers, there are only 13 million Jews in the world, approximately. There are over a billion Catholics and over a billion Muslims. I’m not saying that justifies why we should not mazimilize our numbers but lets say God forbid, hypothetically a second Holocaust occurs and wipes out six million Jews. That would be half the world’s Jewish population and lets say the other half continued on this path of assimilation/ acculturation. It always seems to me problematic and I agree it shouldn’t be our primary focus. We should be focusing on -I didn’t say it shouldn’t be, I just pointed it out. -no, right, it is an issue. We seems so be focused on that and maybe not focused on other [43:18?] but I think its not something which we should [?]. 43:25 -I grew up in the Orthodox yeshiva system in Brooklyn and a big part of my experience with that was this emphasis on the numbers. There’s this constant, it felt almost like a scare tactic: We’re dieing out! We have to make sure we don’t die out! Like the dinosaurs. So not that its not an important thing to think about but the why does this matter part of this Mishnah is really important and that’s not necessarily something that’s looked into enough, discussed enough, and that’s why I think, its like many, many in my class [44:12?]. I think [?] but there not so much interested. I think that emphasis verses not thinking so much why does it matter [?...]. 44:32 -Because your teachers focused on the tribal elements of connecting to the Torah and to Judaism and that’s exactly what I claim didn’t work in America at all and it’s not going to work at all in the modern world if America and individual values of the outside culture maintain its strength and attraction [44:52?] that the approach has to be that we have a unique national mission, to spread a particular set of values and if there’s not a buy-in to that national mission the fear factor is not going to work. Most Jews I know are not fearful in America about their existence, that their property can be confiscated. Even in our tradition, which is very, very long the Holocaust happened and the last attempt before that –there were pogroms here and there but they were localized. The last kind of global attempt was the Purim story so even if we played the number historically that’s not going to happen for a while so why should I be concerned about that and frankly I’m not so concerned about dieing, myself, anyway. I came here [to Israel] because I’, not so concerned about dieing –so it can’t be the tribal aspect of ‘we just must exist because we’ve existed for a long time.’ Its got to be what Avraham Avinu reflected that we have a unique mission of spreading Godliness and a particular set of values of Godliness around in the world. 46:06 Rob: So I’d like to question that. It seems the underlying question is, are we fulfilling some unique purpose and especially at this point. At one point we were the first people to proclaim there is one God and now many people in the world believe that. If everybody decided to assimilate and I don’t think if that would happen but if that happened what would be lost? Does it really matter to the world, aren’t the values that we came here to proclaim, aren’t they already part of the world and will continue even if we - 47:02 -on a similar point I think; my opinion would be that if there is -that considering that some other cultures that I don’t identity with that I don’t know much about or understand, if they were to disappear and be absorbed by some pervasive world wide super culture then I think that would be a tragedy and it certainly does happen and just as I am not a member of an endangered species I care about endangered species and that’s an almost silly analogy but I think it gets the point across and we can go in the sub communities of the Jewish culture also. I do identify with Yiddish speaking people- 47:59: Ladino. … Ladino is a very serous one in danger and small Chassidic groups and Sephardim in certain parts of America and Ashkenazim in certain parts of Israel and obviously the smaller groups within those groups that I think the issue of assimilation is not necessarily a value judgment of ‘this group of people is more important than whatever other culture they are a part of.’ I think that if all –choose a small country in central Europe, -got absorbed by Germany and is culturally indistinguishable after that I think that would be a shame and even though I don’t have an personal identification with that. 49:08. -Why would that be a shame? I’m just curious. You mentioned that it would be tragic if any thing were wiped off the face of the earth, any group of people, right. 49:19 -Dozens of languages get extinct every day. That is in some way tragic. Is it something that’s going to have a profound impact on the fate of humanity? 49:31 -I think that it’s a western kind of education that they taught us that every thing, every person, -I’m not saying this is wrong, I just think this idea that things shouldn’t get extinct, that things should be preserved, -I think it comes from this idea that we are all conditioned to know and believe that everything is equally important and special and everything, -a snowflake. How true is that? I don’t know. 50:05 -Even western culture doesn’t really believe that because western culture for many hundreds of years sought to destroy other cultures 50:12 -Maybe this is a reaction to that. -Right, but this is I think an apologetic reaction 50:16 -Matthew: let me reel that back in. that like, it is really important to make the distinction that like there is a value of preserving diversity but getting back to what we were saying before, what is the mission? What are we doing here as Jews? What does it matter? Is there a buy-in of being Jewish? Sometimes it depends on believing we have a mission and having that be widely understood. And it does matter in a sense that like we could try to resurrect the Aztec culture but does that mean they should go back to cannibalizing 14,000 on every summer solstice? I don’t know….may be…. May be…lets follow that all the way through. I mean they are probably working on it. So just ground it back in history and reflect back on what a couple of people said, I think for the first maybe 1000 years of Judaism there was a pretty clear sense of the people who were identifying as Jews that very central to our mission was ridding the world of Avodah Zahra, was bringing monotheism to the world. Once that shifted, -like by the end of Roman times it was pretty clear that that was happening. There is a whole discussion we could get into of Esther and how she was the goddess representative of the Avodah Zahra culture and is like [? the goddess/ that God] sacrificed herself to be a part of Judaism and that was like the turning point. The Chachamim see that as like the turning point in actually ridding the world of Avodah Zahra and, that then Avodah Zahra’s days were number after that. And then the Greek and Roman thing happened and then we get expelled from the land and I think for most Jews for most of the last 1800 years –I don’t know if they could have really articulated that much of a mission except to say we are going to survive until some sort of redemption or return to the land or whatever but I think most Jews would have agreed that was central to the Jewish mission and a lot of ways halacha changed when we went into exile, -kashrut and intermarriage was designed explicitly to keep us separate from the other nations while we were in exile. The last thing I want to say is that now we are back in the land that almost demands in terms of this logic a total redefinition of the Jewish mission and I think we are seeing this manifest in the collapse of collective American Jewish identity. That now Jews in America don’t know whether they are American or Jewish. They don’t know whether they should move to Israel or want to reject Jews who stand up for themselves and who are no longer the victim. Jews identified very strongly with a lot of American values, as Jordan was saying, and a lot of the ideals of America. And a lot of these western liberal ideas that happened in South Africa too, Jews were very, very identified with the liberal ending Apartied, all sorts of things like that. One of the more interesting things I read about the ’67 war is that all the Jewish, -after 1000s of years of might being right, in 1967 the world radically shifted and suddenly it finally became cool to be the victim and right at that exact instant Israel had the chutzpah to massively win a war. So western Jewish liberals never quite forgave Israel for that and that’s kid of like at the heart of this split, which is part of the split in the entire world between were you pro-Vietnam or were you anti-Vietnam; were you pro-the counter culture, were you conservative, and like where does that split? I think now a couple of generations after ‘67 we’re starting to see some people who are getting out of that dichotomy and that’s where I think real potential leads towards figuring out what the Jewish mission really is. I don’t know if that’s what’s happening in this discussion but I think we are at least asking that question and seeing that potential. 54:29 I think that is very good but I think that Israel as a nation as a country

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