In 1953 my family—my parents and their four boys, aged 4 to 12, I was 10—moved from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to Israel, where we remained for seven years. My father was what might be called a McCarthy refugee, a former Truman administration official who was also a “premature anti-fascist” (look it up) and thus not eminently employable in that chilly era of Red-hunting.
I’ve since read my father’s FBI file and I know how close he came to being fingered as a former Communist Party member (my parents both left the CP after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact). My father received offers to join many other former government officials in taking overseas posts in such imperial outposts as Japan, Indonesia and Pakistan, but my mother said she wouldn’t raise her children in a “foreign nationals” bubble surrounded by servants.
An offer to my father to join a group of economic advisers to the prime minister of the then 5-year-old state of Israel was another matter. To my mother, the daughter of longtime Labor Zionists, this was an appealing option, and we left the States for what was to be a two-year stint. After the two years were over, my father moved to the Hebrew University, where he taught for the next five years before we returned to the United States and I started college.
I’ve long thought that it wasn’t a bad bargain, missing out on the 1950s in the United States, by all accounts a very missable decade, and instead experiencing life in the young and then exciting and idealistic state of Israel. From the sixth grade through high school I went to Jerusalem schools, using Hebrew and absorbing a blend of nationalism and Jewish-slanted perspectives on history, within a context of widely proclaimed external threats and internal nation-building.
This was a period in which education—history, geography and even Bible studies—was clearly in the service of the national enterprise. Even in the secular schools Bible study was required, but the subject largely was taught as an extension of the story of the Jews, reinforcing the connections of the Chosen People to the land, with the names of biblical places still present all around us, cementing the historical continuity we were now experiencing after 2,000 years of exile. As the familiar song went, we have come to the Land, to build and to be rebuilt in it.
Even then there were tangles in the stories that were woven through the nationalist tapestry: The barely disguised racism to which Sephardic Jews from the Arab countries were subjected, in comparison with the preferential treatment of Ashkenazi Jews from Western Europe and the United States—to my parents’ amusement, British and American Jews were routinely referred to as “Anglo-Saxons”—and the even less disguised racism directed at Arabs.
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