Relationship Status for American Jews and Muslims: It's Complicated

This week, Reform Grand Rebbe Eric Yoffie spoke at the convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). In his speech, Yoffie deplored the "profound ignorance" of Islam in the US, and its demonization by "opportunists." Yet at the same time, Yoffie challenged American Muslims to combat the anti-Semitism that is rampant in the Muslim world.

The Reform movement determined that ISNA was a genuine partner for interfaith dialogue after it shifted its position from terrorism is bad (except when it is against Israel) to terrorism is bad (even when it kills Jews.) ISNA's efforts to allay Jewish concerns were met with skepticism elsewhere in Jewish Alphabet soup.

Yoffie's overture drew criticism from David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee.

"Here is another discredited group eager for mainstream recognition," Harris wrote in a blog on the Web site of The Jerusalem Post. "Inadvertently, in the name of inter-religious dialogue, [Yoffie] gave it."

Fortunately for ISNA, while the URJ represents 1.5 million congregants, a plurality of affiliated American Jews, while the AJC represents...the AJC (although to be fair, it performs its role as the Jewish Brookings Institution quite ably).

The skepticism towards ISNA and other American Muslims organizations has a genuine basis. As an initial mater, it is unclear how representative any of the American Muslim organizations really are. Wahhabis and other external groups are spending millions in an effort to strangle a tolerant, indigenous American Islam in its cradle. (Indeed, Jewcy contributor Stephen Suleymain Schwartz has in the past identified ISNA as playing a central role in that campaign.) Leaders of American Muslim organizations have been disingenuous about ties to Islamism, utilizing double-speak to dupe well-intentioned dialogue partners. Finally, even genuinely moderate and tolerant American Muslim leaders have been prone to have an irrational blind spot when it comes to Israel. (It should be noted that the leading critics of American Muslim organizations are often considered quite controversial themselves.)

However, it is critical that American Jews engage in meaningful dialogue with American Muslims, and that dialogue cannot be limited to groups on the guest list at the American Enterprise Institute. There is tremendous ignorance of Judaism in the American Muslim community, and only through engagement can we combat the pernicious leakage of Antisemitism from the wider Muslim world.

Moreover, given the season, it is time that American Jews take a hard look at our own behavior. Far too many of us have let real concerns regarding terror and Israel be used as cover for rank racism and wholesale defamation of a sister faith. Group libels that we would never allow pass against any other group are laughed off. Absurd questions of whether American Muslims are capable of fully participating in American democracy are entertained. The entire Koran is judged by its most problematic passages. The first elected American Muslim congressman is subjected to invective by prominent Jewish pundits and unfair scrutiny by the Jewish defense organizations. We of all people - who have a history of being deemed foreign and impossible to assimilate - should know better than to contribute to a 21st century Know-Nothing movement.

It is too soon to tell whether ISNA's reformation is genuine or whether its invitation to Yoffie will result in genuine, sustained dialogue between our communities. However, for our sake and theirs, we can only hope that a true corner has been turned.

Cross-posted at Jewcy.

Young American Jews Without Connection to Israel Alienated From Israel, Study Confirms

The findings in the most recent Kelman/Cohen studyare not as blazingly obvious as "men want hot women", but they are nonetheless unsurprising.

Based on the responses of more than 1,700 non-Orthodox American Jews of all ages, the study indicates that successively younger age groups show a greater detachment from the State of Israel.

According to the report, which was based on statistics collected as part of the 2007 National Survey of American Jews between December 20, 2006, and January 28, 2007, less than half of Jews under the age of 35 believe Israel's destruction would be a personal tragedy, compared to 78 percent of those over 65. Sixty-six percent of Jews aged 50-64 believe it would be a personal tragedy, compared to 54% aged 35-49.

The study doesn't even lend itself to the favorite American Jewish pastime of fruitless hand-wringing in that there is an obvious policy solution to this "dilemma.":

The new study showed sharp differences in levels of attachment to Israel between people who have visited the country and those who have not. Among those who have never been to Israel, the number of those with a high level of attachment is less than half that of those who have visited at least once (19% vs 42%). Additionally, the level of attachment grows with the amount of time spent in Israel. Thirty-four percent of those who have traveled to Israel once are highly attached to Israel, while only 17% of them report low levels of attachment.

The numbers go up as the time spent in the country increases. Fifty-four percent of those who have traveled to Israel two or more times are highly attached, while less than 10% report low levels of attachment. Meanwhile, 68% of those who have lived in Israel for a semester or year-long program show high levels of attachment.

That last paragraph should be quite effective in rousting up additional funds for Birthright (which given the study's sponsors, was probably the point of the study in the first place).

Not surprisingly, the Post article contaiins the requisite quotes from young, progressive American Jews who express their "detachment" from Israel. But what the findings really show is that young American Jews are increasingly alienated not from the reality of Israel, but of the myth of Israel. The Israel presented in Hebrew schools is one of child-like simplicity - SabraLand!- with the less convenient aspects of Israeli history and society omitted. Without a more sophisticated understanding of Israel, American Jews are ill equipped to respond to the counter-myths that are peddled by anti-Zionists at American universities, which they embrace or at least triangulate. On the other hand, those American Jews who get to personally experience Israel and all of its contradictions - the incredible surface rudeness and underlying warmth of the people, the wonder of Ben and Jerry's and McDonald's being just down the road from the Old City of Jerusalem - develop a mature love for the country, one that can withstand Israel's very human failings and the shifting currents of political fashion.

Cross-posted at Jewcy

Shalom Aleichem/Salaam Aleikum to Self-Segregation

Controversy continues to swirl around the Arabic-language Khalil Gibran International Academy in New York and (as Michael previously noted) its bizarro cousin, the Hebrew-language Ben Gamla charter school in Hollywood, Florida. The criticism of both schools is driven by skepticism regarding the secular nature of the schools. It is easy to dismiss the critics as the usual suspects, from Daniel Pipes to the ACLU, but the schools have also drawn criticism from less ideological figures. Recently in the New York Times Magazine, Jewcy's favorite constitutional law scholar Noah Feldman took the view that the projects of isolating Islam from a Arab cultural curriculum and Judaism from Jewish cultural curriculum were ultimately futile tasks, and therefore both schools were of dubious constitutional legitimacy.

Although it cannot be known for certain before they have begun instruction, Khalil Gibran and Ben Gamla seem poised to teach religion as a set of beliefs to be embraced rather than as a set of ideas susceptible to secular, critical examination. What, after all, is the point of a Jewish cultural school if not to bring the students to appreciation and acceptance of Jewish values? And what are those values if not the outgrowth of Judaism's millenniums of religious faith and practice? Not that Judaism without God is impossible. Secular Zionism sought to redirect yearning for God's redemption toward a national homeland. Likewise, Arab nationalism was born from the effort to supplant Islamic religious membership with a secular, cultural identity. But in both cases, the surgery designed to excise God was only partly successful, and there is ample reason to anticipate a recurrence in the classroom as there has been in the rest of the world.

If Feldman is right that Ben Gamla and Khalil Gibran are properly viewed as publicly funded religious schools, they clearly run afoul of the Establishment Clause. If one principle has held constant in the swirling morass that is the Supreme Court's religion jurisprudence, it is that the direct provision of public funds for religious indoctrination is treyf. If this red line is breached, the result will be the creation of multiple and parallel religious establishments - something the Founders clearly rejected.

Given this, the case of religious charter schools calls into serious question the Court's recent jurisprudence in school funding cases, which has held that parochial schools can be funded through public voucher programs. In the 2002 case of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the Court upheld Cleveland's voucher program despite its inclusion of parochial schools on the grounds that the funding was: (1) distributed through neutral criteria and (2) directed to religious schools as a result the individual private choices of parents. Both of these conditions are also present in a religious charter school context - charters are granted on religious neutral criteria and parents freely elect to send their children to particular charter schools. Thus, the constitutionality of vouchers seems to rest on the mere fact that funds technically pass through the hands of parents on route to funding religious indoctrination, an empty and formalistic distinction.

Even if Ben Gamla and Khalil Gibran could somehow scrub their texts of references to tefilah and salat, tzedaka and zakat, these schools would still be problematic in that they amount to publicly financed self-segregation. It is understandable why parents might want to send little Avi and Ibrahim to these schools. They provide an affordable way to help stem assimilation, through homogeneous social networks and literacy in the native languages of Jewish and Islamic civilizations. But as laudable as these goals from the view of parents, they should not be funded by the American taxpayer. One of the reasons why America has been so successful in integrating its immigrants is that they are thrown into the melting pot of the public school systems. Social networks become mixed, loyalties cross-cutting. If you have any doubts of whether our system works, the European model of state-sponsored religious schools and its failure to integrate Europe's Muslim immigrants stands in sharp contrast. (Or for a more extreme example, Israel's fractured education system and its failure to promote understanding between secular Jews, religious Jews and Israeli Arabs.)

Sure, a case can be made that Ben Gamla is a less problematic than Khalil Gibran as a matter of education policy. American Jews are already well integrated into American society, and the American Jewish success story would make any Jewish public school attractive to non-Jews. (Already Ben Gamla appears to have attracted a significant Black and Latino population.) But it is simply untenable to have a policy of permitting ethnocentric public schools for some cultures and not others and Arab and Muslim Americans would rightly be offended by such a policy.

There is a way out of both the constitutional and policy dilemmas posed by Ben Gamla and Khalil Gibran, one which can retain the primary benefits of these programs. Create charter schools that offer language immersion for multiple cultures- Chinese, Swahili, Farsi - under one roof. Better yet, pair the Hebrew and Arabic language school together, and have Avi and Ibrahim recite Shakespeare and dissect frogs next to each other. Since the Rambam already plenty of schools (as well as a Kentucky Derby favorite) named for him, why not Ibn Ezra-Ibn Rushd. It has a nice ring to it.

Cross-posted at Jewcy.