SHAKESPEARE said it so sweetly.

“What’s in a name?” the Bard mused in “Romeo and Juliet,” his immortal romance about hostile households. “That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”

In Jewish tradition, names are taken a tad more seriously. Families give deep consideration to the perfect, commemorative, or even prophetic names for their newborns. And every Shabbat, parents bless their children that they should be like “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.” These names are not arbitrary, and the qualities of character they signify are singular.

But what about insults?

Last week, Donald Trump, the billionaire real-estate mogul with aims for the oval office saw fit to describe at least most Mexicans crossing the border as “killers” and “rapists.” His offensive blitz sadly deprived the world of the finer points of the Miss Universe Pageant, and cost him some tens of millions of dollars and counting, but it also had the stunning effect of driving up his polling in Trump’s wishful bid for the White House.

Name calling, it turns out, is cool.

This is good news for the Jews, or at least a very slender bunch of Jewish men, who have made headlines throughout the last year for carping at each other through a combination of crude, clever or simply comical name-calling.

We might say it started back in October 2014, when Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg fearfully reported that “The Crisis in U.S.-Israel Relations is Officially Here[!] (emphasis mine).” Goldberg wasted no time getting to the good stuff up top: In his lead, he declared that a senior Obama administration official had referred to the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as “a chickenshit.”

Forget Cairo; forget settlements; forget a nuclear Iran: The implication of this juicy jibe was that if high-ranking government officials were disparaging each other with salty smears, things between Washington and Jerusalem were really falling apart!

Even in reverse, the name-calling episode again proved propitious in the polls, and the slighted Netanyahu later won re-election.

For those of us who love a clever cut-down, there is at least one upside to the fact that the U.S.-Israel squabbles have not since subsided. In fact, they have been recently refueled by the release of MK Michael Oren’s book “Ally.” The former Israeli Ambassador’s tale of disappointed expectations at America has spawned a vociferous series of Jew versus Jew quarreling, much of it defamatory.

Let’s start with the book’s title: “Ally,” which is itself a kind of name-calling, since Oren goes on to critique Israel’s allies, including: the American President, American Jews and American Jewish journalists.

Things get worse inside the book for all of the aforementioned but especially, apparently, for Leon Wieseltier, one of the Jewish world’s leading intellectuals and a contributing editor to The Atlantic. In his indictment of American Jewish journalists, some of whom Oren claims use their Jewish identity as a credential for criticizing Israel, Oren also had the chutzpah to parallel Wieseltier’s sustained and searing critique of Bibi Netanyahu (he once referred to the Israeli PM as “a gray, muddling, reactive figure…a creature of the bunker”) with the same pathological hatred of Jews we call anti-Semitism.

Right or wrong, Wieseltier interpreted the slight as an accusation. “I don’t take kindly to being called anti-Semitic and I don’t take kindly to having Jewish self-hatred attributed to me,” he told Moment Magazine’s Nadine Epstein during a recent interview at the annual Association of Jewish Libraries conference. Wieseltier then penned a savage response to the epithet for the Atlantic, calling Oren, “my Javert,” a reference to the antagonist of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, an unforgiving police inspector who obsessively pursues the hero of the story.

That’s when things got really fun — like during a schoolyard fight, when a whole bunch of boys rush in, start yelling and take sides? Only this was the Jewish version, which is to say, with words:

In the Wall Street Journal, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bret Stephens belittled Wieseltier as “the gray eminence of minor magazines.” (Wieseltier must be so relieved that he is no longer literary editor of The New Republic and now writing for the not-so-minor Atlantic.) In the Forward, Raphael Magarik went to the mattresses on Wieseltier, naming him, alternately, “the king of spurious and lazy accusations,” “a fine ironist,” “the Grand Inquisitor himself,” “the gray-haired sage of D.C.” (though, it must be said here that Leon’s hair is actually bridal-white), and best of all, “the lion of Brooklyn.”

On the other side, Josh Marshall, editor and publisher of the political blog TalkingPointsMemo.com took Oren to task, calling him “The Ridiculous Mr. Oren,” an “over-clever asshole,” and also, incidentally, throws in a few barbs for Netanyahu, coming up with perhaps the most creative (and facetious) name of all, “the embodiment of the Jewish people which brings together both Maimonides and Herzl into one unified deluxe Jewish person.”

Wow! Out of petty name-calling, we now all have something to aspire to.

In the end, Oren backpedaled on his incendiary treatment of Wieseltier, telling Jeffrey Goldberg, “I’m Leon’s buddy, why would I want to hurt Leon? And I write about him lovingly in the book.”

Who knew so many serious, high-minded men could be so emotional? Over name-calling! But rather than call this fracas uncharacteristic, or uncivil, or dare-I-say a little bit juvenile, I’m going to chalk it up to the Jewish penchant for ascribing meaning to names. We’ve all been called them, good or bad, and even the ugly ones tell us something about who we are or who we don’t wish to be.

In her famous window-side soliloquy, the young ingénue Juliet fears the revelation of her name will preclude Romeo from loving her. So she devises a scheme: A name is just a title, she decides, something to flick off or cast away, leaving her and her beloved to embrace their core, indescribable selves. Why should a name hinder true love?

And why should an insult break up the tribe?

“People,” Wieseltier told Moment, “have got to recover the pleasures of being insulted. Having your feelings wounded is the price you pay for living in an open society.”

So maybe names are no big deal. Maybe they mean nothing until we make ourselves worthy of them.

“Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947” by Bruce Hoffman (Knopf) offers an uncomfortable but crucial message: Terrorism works. And the book is all the more disturbing because the examples Hoffman considers are the Irgun and Lehi (perhaps better known as the “Stern Gang”), which he bluntly describes as “Jewish terrorist organizations.”

“(E)ven if terrorism’s power to dramatically change the course of history along the lines of the September 11, 2001, attacks has been mercifully infrequent,” Hoffman writes, “terrorism’s ability to act as a catalyst for wider conflagration or systemic political change appears historically undeniable.” 

To be sure, Hoffman concedes that the Zionist enterprise depended on far more than physical violence. “The struggle for Jewish statehood employed almost every means possible: diplomacy, negotiation, lobbying, civil disobedience, propaganda, information operations, armed resistance …” But he ends the sentence with the object of his current inquiry: “… and terrorist violence.”  

Working largely in the newly declassified archives of MI5, the British secret service and the Palestine Police Force, Hoffman has been able to view through British eyes such momentous acts of terrorism as the assassination of Lord Moyne in 1944, the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, and the kidnapping and hanging of two British sergeants in 1957.  

Britain created the problem in Palestine for itself, or so Hoffman argues, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which favored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” but also noted that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Despite the “benevolent prose and altruistic intent” of the diplomatic letter, history shows that Britain now faced the task of “navigating between two peoples’ historical, cultural, religious, and political claims to the same land.” By 1929, Arab violence against Jews was one of the “facts on the ground” that confronted the Zionist movement in Palestine.

Hoffman usefully points out that Arab violence was not purely spontaneous. A radical imam called al-Qassam — now the name of a rocket used by Hamas — preached a holy war to the Arabs of Palestine: “You must know that nothing will save us but our arms.” In 1936, a gang of his followers stopped and robbed a bus and murdered two of its Jewish passengers. A Jewish reprisal took the lives of two Arabs. As violence erupted yet again around Palestine, the British authorities declared a state of emergency. “The Arab Rebellion,” Hoffman writes, “had now begun.”

The question in the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine, was whether Jews ought to answer Arab terrorism with terrorism of their own, an issue that divided the left-wing Labor Zionists from the right-wing Revisionists and resulted in two parallel Jewish defense forces, one called the Haganah and the other called the Haganah-Bet. The Labor Zionists embraced the doctrines of havlaga (self-restraint) and tohar ha-neshek (purity of arms), but the Revisionists insisted that the escalation of Arab violence called for new and more brutal tactics: “By blood and fire Judea fell,” was the slogan of the Irgun, “and by blood and fire Judea shall arise.”

Significantly, the Irgun commenced its operations with the bombing of an Arab cafe as an act of revenge for the killing of five Jewish farmers a couple of days earlier. “The shame of restraint has been removed,” declared David Raziel, the first commander of the Irgun. Indeed, Irgun violence grew steadily bolder and bloodier as the “Irgun launched a succession of shootings, bombings, road minings and various acts of sabotage and vandalism against British and Arab targets alike.” Against self-restraint and purity of arms, a new principle was announced: “A hitting fist must be answered by two hitting fists — a bomb explosion has to be replied with two bomb explosions.” 

As Hoffman shows in gripping detail, the emergence of the Irgun meant that the fighting front had divided into several lines of conflict. The Jewish Agency conducted a counterterrorism campaign of its own against the Irgun (and, later, the spin-off known as Lehi), and a Jewish civil war threatened to break out more than once. The British authorities sought to suppress both the Irgun and Lehi, as well as the Arab guerillas that operated in Palestine, and the Arabs set themselves against both the British and the Jews. “By the fall of 1938, Palestine was coming apart at the seams,” Hoffman writes.

“Anonymous Soldiers” can be seen as a corrective to the understatements and misstatements about the role of the Revisionist movement in the history of Zionism and, especially, the creation and defense of the Jewish state. Hoffman, a scholar who specializes in security studies at Georgetown University, succeeds in giving us an even-handed work of history that is, at the same time, a morally illuminating and challenging work about the role of violence in politics. But he also confronts us with the unsettling truth that sometimes, and especially when the adversary is a democracy that has lost its will to fight, terrorism will succeed.

“That Jewish terrorism played a salient role in helping to create and foster the sense of hopelessness and despair that … influenced the Labour government’s decision to leave Palestine is clear,” Hoffman concludes, although he insists that it was only one of many factors at work in the fateful decision.  

That’s not the end of the debate about terrorism, but “Anonymous Soldiers” is a good starting place, especially when we consider the price of not fighting terrorism. 

The children at the Arabic-speaking Ofek preschool in Jaffa spent a lot of time this past year thinking about a mouse named Samsoum, the character in a picture book all the kids have read at home with help from their parents.  

In class, the kids did a range of Samsoum-related projects inspired by the book “Samsoum the Mouse” by Jahil Khazaal, about a field mouse who relaxes while the other field mice gather food for the winter, but who later warms the hearts of the worker mice with his colorful stories. 

The children discussed the different emotions portrayed in the book. They also learned that every creature has a role to play in the community — and that food for the soul can be as important as food for the stomach. In the process, the children fell in love with the book.  

Throughout Israel, 45,000 Arab children in government preschools read “Samsoum the Mouse” as part of a reading-readiness program called Maktabat al-Fanoos (Lantern Library). The program began in January and is modeled after Sifriyat Pijama, which for the past five years has distributed children’s books in Hebrew to hundreds of thousands of Jewish preschoolers. Sifriyat Pijama is a sister program to the popular PJ Library Jewish family engagement program in North America, both founded by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation in Massachusetts. 

Lantern Library, created by the Ministry of Education in partnership with the Harold Grinspoon Foundation and San Diego-based Price Philanthropies Foundation, provided four books that the children took home and treasured. During the 2014-15 school year, the plan is to provide eight books to children in all government kindergartens and pre-kindergartens — 80,000 children in all.  

“As people who care about Israel and about the future of Israel, we feel it’s very important to help improve the lives of the Arab citizens of this country,” said Robert Price, president of Price Philanthropies Foundation, explaining his family foundation’s long-term involvement in the Arab community and the decision to be a partner in Lantern Library.

Culturally appropriate and with a strong storyline conducive to discussions on values and emotions, the books encourage parents and children to lay the groundwork for reading. As with books in the Hebrew-speaking effort, the Arabic books are chosen by a selection committee composed of experts in child development, children’s literature and preschool education. 

On the occasion of a visit by the Price family to Ofek, Keefah Masri Bassel, who teaches the 3- and 4-year-olds, said the program has transformed her classroom. 

“The first time I held one of the books, I began to dream that every child would have a shelf in their room reserved for their books,” Bassel said.  

A week later, the teacher invited the parents to the school, where she taught them how to create a library corner at home. The parents helped the children transform T-shirts into book bags and create “This Library Belongs to …” signs.   

When the children went outside for breakfast, a speech-language expert discussed with the parents ways to cope with the differences between spoken and written Arabic, and how to best engage the children — for example, allowing them to retell the story in their own words. Together, they explored the parents’ guide at the back of the book. 

Galina Vromen, executive director of the Grinspoon Foundation in Israel, said the Arabic-language program presented the organizers with some unique challenges. One of them is the dearth of quality Arabic children’s books that are accessible to the Israeli market. 

Vromen said the program “is largely dependent on what’s produced here in Israel, Jordan and Egypt” and noted that, due to political unrest, the annual Egyptian book fair, once the largest Arabic fair in the world, has been discontinued. Turmoil also has affected children’s book production in other nations, including Syria and Iraq. 

Because of the Arab boycott of all things Israeli, some Arab publishers have refused to sell reprint rights to Israeli publishers, who repackage the books, with a parents’ guide, for the program. That’s one reason the program has an interest in supporting the local Arab-Israeli publishing industry, which clearly benefits from a sale of 45,000 copies, whether the book is an original or reprinted.  

“We want strong readers, so we need locally made books,” Vromen said, adding that “there’s tremendous excitement” about the program in the Arab sector from publishers, teachers and parents. 

These same teachers and parents say the literacy program is particularly important for Arab children because it introduces them to formal written Arabic, which is different from spoken Arabic, at an early age.  

“Our goal is to encourage reading readiness with exposure to classical Arabic,” said Vicky Glazer, the supervisor of Jaffa preschools. 

Fatma Abu Ahmed Kassem, national supervisor of preschools for the Arab sector, said the program’s emphasis on interaction with adults “is critical to learning. Reading books offers an opportunity for quality adult interaction with children at home and in the classroom.”

The program, Kassem said, “promotes and enhances a culture of expression and discussion, and raises the awareness of language and enriches language use. Exposing children to a variety of literary works of Arab literature and culture as well as world literature encourages children to become curious and enthusiastic readers.”

Of all the incendiary books that have been written about Israel over the last year or so, none is quite as fiery as “Israel: The Will to Prevail” by Danny Danon (Palgrave Macmillan: $26).

Danon is a young activist in the Likud Party and serves as deputy speaker of the Knesset. He agrees with the various critics and commentators on the left on only a single point: “We are now at a critical juncture in our brief but momentous history,” Danon writes, “and our very survival is once again at stake.” Unlike Peter Beinart or Jeremy Ben-Ami, however, Danon rejects the notion that the United States (or, by implication, American Jews) is entitled to tell Israel how to conduct its affairs.  

“Israel must take firm hold of its own destiny, with a ready willingness to act decisively on its own behalf,” he insists. “[H]istory shows that when we act on our own, according to our own best interests, the results are not only better for Israel but for world peace as a whole.”

Lest anyone mistake his political colors, however, Danon pointedly insists on using the words “Jewish communities” and “residents of these communities” in place of “settlers” and “settlements.” The West Bank, of course, is referred to as Judea and Samaria. “The Jewish people’s claim to Israel,” he writes, “is older and stronger than any other people’s in the history of the world.” Indeed, Danon presents his fierce little book as nothing less than “a road map for Jewish victory — achieved with or without backing from her allies.” 

Danon insists that it is in the strategic best interest of the United States to support Israel, by which he plainly means the hard-line policies of Likud. “It’s an unfortunate fact that Israel has grown more distant from the United States,” he writes, “and I believe this puts both our countries in peril.” And he cites President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as advocates of what he calls “the growing acceptance in the United States and abroad of a left-wing, so-called progressive position on Israel” and “a one-sided view of Palestinian aspirations.”

“Discomforting behavior continues to come from the White House, which makes Israelis wonder whether the United States is really on our side,” Danon writes, “and strengthens the case that we must be confident to take matters, when necessary, in our own hands despite world or U.S. opinion.”

Nowadays, of course, the demarcation between left and right is blurry. Who, after all, would disagree with Danon’s assertion that “Israel’s experience with Gaza demonstrates the folly of those who say that the only pathway to peace involves handing over our land to the Palestinians.” Yet Danon also insists on salting his prose with fighting words — “our land” is a phrase that simply ignores the fundamental question of where the boundary is to be drawn between Arabs and Jews. Even when he claims that he “actively welcome[s] a healthy debate on the subject of Israel and the United States,” it is hard to discern where “healthy debate” leaves off and “criticism that demonizes Israel” begins.

The conclusion he reaches is that Israel cannot afford to take the risk of a compromise with the Palestinians: “Over and over again,” he complains, “Israelis are exhorted to concede more and more, while the Arabs are only asked to stop incitement and killing.” And, crucially, he argues that “any manufactured claim to a Palestinian state” is trumped by the inevitability that “such an entity would be a serious and ongoing threat for Israel.”

Danon calls instead for “a three-state solution,” an antique approach to peace-making in the Middle East that would assign sovereignty over the Palestinians to Israel, Jordan and Egypt. Clearly, his plan is not likely to succeed, and I suspect that’s the real reason why he advocates it: “Before we can make the three-state solution a reality,” he warns, Israel must be afforded “real recognition” by the existing states, and “Israel must take on and defeat those who are against us — Hamas, Hezbollah, and others.” 

“Israel: The Will to Prevail” leaves me in   exactly the same place I found myself after reading books by his adversaries in the progressive wing of Zionism — it’s a locked room in which the doors and windows are only a trompe l’oeil on solid walls. How Israel and the Jewish people are to extricate themselves from our unhappy predicament remains unexplained.

Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. His next book is “The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris,” which will be published in 2013 under the Horace Liveright imprint of W. W. Norton to coincide with the 75th anniversary year of Kristallnacht.

No book review I’ve written for The Jewish Journal has prompted as much feedback as the one I wrote about “A New Voice for Israel” by Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder of J Street. His argument that Israel must make uncomfortable compromises and take dire risks in order to secure peace with the Palestinian Arabs is clearly unsettling to a great many Jews, both in Israel and America.

But Ben-Ami will find a kindred spirit in Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli author (“The Accidental Empire”) and journalist who comes to some of the same conclusions in “The Unmaking of Israel” (HarperCollins: $25.99), which he describes as “a selective and personal journey through Israel’s past and present, for the purpose of presenting an argument: that Israel is unmaking itself, and must put itself back together.” Gorenberg provides a deft but penetrating and highly nuanced account of the recent history and current politics of Israel, and he offers a prescription for curing the ills that afflict the Jewish state.

“Zionism, understood from within, is the national liberation movement of the Jews,” Gorenberg begins. But the land on which a Jewish homeland was to be built was also the homeland of an Arab community. “Seen from the shores of Palestine, Zionism was a movement of foreigners coming to settle the land, to colonize it.” The struggle between these contending points of view must be put aside, he writes, if we hope to find a path to peace.

What’s at stake, according to Gorenberg, is nothing less than the character and destiny of Israel itself. “[A]t the moment of its triumph, Israel began to take itself apart,” he writes, referring to the history-changing victories of the Six-Day War. “Long-term rule of Palestinians was a retreat from the ideal of democracy. … The settlement enterprise was a multi-pronged assault on the rule of law. … [T]he government’s support of settlement has fostered the transformation of religious Zionism into a movement of the radical right.” Above all, Gorenberg insists, all of these trends “now threaten Israel’s democratic aspirations and its existence.”

The current crisis, as Gorenberg demonstrates, can be seen as an accident of history. He reminds us that the founders of Israel lived in a world where the exchange of populations was one of the tools of geopolitics, and “it should be no surprise that Zionist leaders thought about transfer.” Hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled from Israel during the War of Independence, a kind of de facto population transfer. By 1967, however, an even greater number of Arabs were back under Israeli rule. Thus began the “unmaking” of Israel, as Gor-enberg puts it.

The dilemma, of course, is that Israel cannot remain both Jewish and democratic for very long if its population includes a substantial and growing number of Arabs. Then, too, Gorenberg points out that Jewish settlement in the West Bank was undertaken by what he calls a “radical religious culture” that was itself a danger to democracy.

“A new generation of settlers has come of age, as radical or more in its theologized politics, alienated from the institutions of the state that have so assiduously fostered its growth,” he writes. “The meaning of these changes is a democracy in greater danger, a state that is weaker and less capable of ending the occupation.” Indeed, he puts it even more bluntly: The radical fringe of the settler movement “barbarized Judaism” by encouraging the kind of violence that ultimately took the life of Yitzhak Rabin.

Gorenberg warns that the growing role of observant Jews in the Israeli army is itself an obstacle to peacemaking. Only 9,000 settlers were removed from Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces, but no fewer than 65,000 Jews — and possibly many more — would need to be removed from the West Bank under even the most grudging version of an Israeli withdrawal. “The army would have to confront a young generation of settlers determined not to repeat the ‘shame’ of Gaza,” he points out. “Yet since 2005, the army’s dependence on soldiers coming out of the Orthodox academies … and other yeshivot aligned with the theological right has increased.”

Gorenberg is quick to characterize himself as “a religious Jew” and “an Israeli by choice.” He issues a heartfelt and heart-rending plea for the repair of the Jewish democracy: “I write from an Israel with a divided soul,” he writes. “It is not only defined by its contradictions; it is at risk of being torn apart by them.”

“For Israel to establish itself again as a liberal democracy, it must make three changes,” he concludes. “First, it must end the settlement enterprise, end the occupation, and find a peaceful way to partition the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Second, it must divorce state and synagogue. … Third and most basically, it must graduate from being an ethnic movement to being a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equality.”

Gorenberg does not provide us with much reason for optimism that any of these things will happen soon, or at all. But he seems to embrace the old Zionist aphorism — If you will it, it is no dream — and he sees something uniquely Jewish in the argument that he hopes to provoke in Israel and throughout the Jewish world.

“This, perhaps, is the best definition of a Jewish state,” he concludes, “the place where Jews can argue with the least inhibition, in the most public way, about what it means to be Jews.”

“Israel’s existence is in fact threatened by a progressive, terminal illness,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder of J Street, writes in “A New Voice for Israel: Fighting for the Survival of the Jewish Nation” (Palgrave Macmillan: $26).  According to his diagnosis, the illness is a kind of willful blindness that prevents both Israeli and American leaders from seeing a way out of the dire predicament that the Jewish state now faces.

J Street was founded by Ben-Ami and others in 2008 in a bold, creative but also highly controversial effort to “change the American conversation on Israel.”  Instead of “unquestioning support for Israel,” J Street insists on calling attention to “the moral and ethical implications of occupation and its impact on both the Palestinian people and Israel itself.”  Ben-Ami’s book serves a manifesto for J Street and, at the same time, a political memoir and a Jeremiad about the fate of the Middle East.

“If things don’t change pretty soon, chances are that the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will slip through our fingers,” Ben-Ami writes. “As that happens, the dream of the Jewish people to be a free people in their own land also slowly disappears.”

Ben-Ami’s politics would be unremarkable in Israel, but — as he readily concedes — they represent something new in America, where “politicians, community leaders, media and academics have been told you’re either with Israel or against it.”  He readily concedes that Israel faces an existential threat from its enemies in the Arab world, but he also insists that the very survival of Israel requires “a new definition of victory for pro-Israel advocacy:  “[I]t is now time for friends of Israel to perform the ultimate act of Zionism — to tell Israel the truth,” Ben-Ami argues, quoting a former head of Israel’s secret service.

Ben-Ami describes himself as “a preppy, private-school kid from the Upper West Side of Manhattan,” but he is also a fourth-generation Zionist whose great-grandparents made aliyah from a shtetl in what is now Belarus to the port of Jaffa during the First Aliyah. His father was a follower of Jabotinsky, the founder of the right-wing Zionist movement that is today manifested in the hard-line politics of Likud and its political allies. As a member of the underground militia called the Irgun, he changed his name from Rosin to Ben-Ami — “Son of My People” — and traveled to Vienna to participate in rescue efforts inside the Third Reich.

Fatefully, Ben-Ami’s father reached America before the outbreak of the Second World War, and so it was that Jeremy was raised in America rather than Israel. “I often wonder,” he writes, “how shocked my grandparents would be that their grandchildren were born in New York City and not in the city or country that they helped to build.”
He was taught to feel love and loyalty toward the Jewish homeland and to regard the struggle between Arabs and Jews as “a tale of good and evil, a morality play pitting David against Goliath.” 

All of his assumptions began to change when, after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist in 1995, he traveled to Israel to participate in a Hebrew language program.  “I was simply shocked to be sitting in kita aleph — basic first-grade Hebrew — learning my letters and basic grammar with Palestinians from Gaza.”  He also learned what he calls “a basic rule of history — that one people’s victory is likely to be another people’s catastrophe.”  And he realized that Israelis were far more willing than American Jews to talk openly about the real interests of the Jewish state.

“Everywhere I went,” he explains, “there was a lively and engaged argument over the future of the peace process, the proper course of action for the government, the legacy of Rabin, the intentions of Netanyahu.”

Back in the United States, Ben-Ami joined Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, where he came to understand that a different rulebook was in use.  When Dean called on the United States to “take an even-handed role” in the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, for example, the candidate was breaking the rules. “Abraham Foxman,” Ben-Ami realized, “will say it’s code for being pro-Palestinian.” That’s when he decided that another voice needed to be heard.

“What about my views, and the views of all my many friends and colleagues who had lived and worked in Israel, who passionately believed that it will serve Israel’s and America’s interests for the United States to be more evenhanded in its approach to the conflict? What isn’t anyone standing up for us?”

Thus began the idea for J Street and the role Ben-Ami has come to play in the conversation about Israel.  He insists, for example, that the only basis for making peace between Israel and the Palestinians is a land swap that would give the Palestinians land inside the pre-1967 borders of Israel in exchange for Jewish settlements on the West Bank, and a relinquishment of the Arab right of return in exchange for compensation, and shared jurisdiction over Jerusalem, which would serve as the capital of both states.

Ben-Ami’s vision of a path to peace is not new or original or wholly without support inside Israel. What makes Ben-Ami and J Street so unsettling to Jewish conventional wisdom is his insistence that the United States must put pressure on Israel to take risks that the Jewish state has found to be unacceptable. “[L]eft to their own devices,” he insists, “the Israelis and Palestinians will remain locked in a divisive status quo that at some point will spark another regional conflagration or worse.”

I know how Ben-Ami’s book will be received in some Jewish circles, because I have experienced the same visceral reaction that makes his position so controversial — how can American Jews, who live in peace and prosperity in the United States and who will not be called upon to fight in defense of the Jewish state, dictate peace terms to those whose lives are at stake?  Yet he makes a plausible argument that the threat to the security and even the survival of Israel may be even greater if the stalemate is not broken.

Ben-Ami and the American Jews who share his point of view are regarded as nothing less than traitors by some supporters of Israel, but he insists that he is an ardent and earnest Zionist who dares to speak truth to power: “Israel finds itself at a critical fork in the road, facing a choice of existential proportions,” he writes. “The lack of strong and politically courageous leadership on either side is one of the great tragedies of the conflict.”  And he insists that he has the best interests of Israel at heart when he demands that the decision-makers in the United States to take an “even-handed” stance.

“The truest act of friendship today is to ask our Israeli friends and relatives to open their eyes to the critical choices ahead and to the consequences of failing to take these choices seriously,” he concludes. “This is Zionism in the twenty-first century.”

Ben-Ami’s father, the former Irgunist, must be turning over in his grave, and I am confident that Ben-Ami’s book will raise the blood pressure of a great many of his readers.  But they are the exactly the ones who need to hear what he has to say.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He blogs at books@jewishjournal.com.

The overly creased and still tender face of Shimon Peres looks like he has always been crying; he seems to carry centuries of Jewish suffering upon his strong shoulders. Still, there is some flicker of hope in the old man’s eyes; a stubbornness and a determination that his life’s work will mean something.

Peres wants what is best for Israel, is desperate to save it, perhaps even from itself. He speaks to reporters eagerly and is comfortable on the world stage, where he has spent almost seven decades, but on matters personal he is quiet. One senses a man concerned with his final legacy, and perhaps this is the genesis of his latest project, a book about his mentor, the founding father and future first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion.

Peres wrote “Ben-Gurion: A Political Life” (Schocken: $25.95), the nineteenth title in the Jewish Encounter series from Schocken and Nextbook Press, with the assistance of David Landau, the former editor of Haaretz. Landau conducted extensive interviews with Peres over two years, asking him probing questions about Ben-Gurion and the founding of Israel, and from the book we learn a great deal about Israel’s early years, but ironically we also seem to learn just as much about Peres.

Landau cleverly prints verbatim some of his interviews with Peres and presents them to be read in their entirety at the end of various chapters. These dialogues sometimes border on confrontational and allow us to hear for ourselves how Peres thinks. He seems, for the most part, a reasonable and practical man prone to compromise and negotiation. He is not a warrior like Sharon, or single-minded in his vision like Golda, or angry and self-righteous like Netanyahu. Rather, he seems Obama-like, a man who rejects ideological passion in favor of the bigger picture that is present at any given moment. Until very recently, this mentality has lost him favor among the Israeli public. Finally now, in his old age and in his role as President and elder statesman, his popularity has soared.

Twenty years ago, Avishai Margalit wrote in the New York Review of Books that Peres has often been perceived by the Israeli public as unreliable. Margalit wrote that the facts prove otherwise. He pointed out that during one of Peres’ terms as prime minister, he was able to eliminate the obscene inflation rate he inherited from the Shamir government. He was also able to withdraw the army from Lebanon. Peres was acknowledged with a Nobel Prize for his work on the 1994 Oslo Accords and is regarded as the key figure responsible for Israel’s achieving nuclear capability. During critical times in Israel’s fragile history, he was able to secure armaments for his country from France and South Africa. In spite of all of this, Margalit maintained, it did little to help his reputation, explaining that “reliability in Israel politics does not depend on a commitment to tell the truth and honor agreements. Reliability means having an aura of authenticity which has much to do with toughness of manner. Shamir and Rabin are perceived as authentic, while Peres is perceived as slick.”

Peres himself has acknowledged that he has often been misunderstood. He once explained to Benny Morris that leadership is fraught with complications, stating “I told you Prime Ministers are not divorced from reality. Life is full of contradictions. Most prime ministers don’t do what they promise to do. More than prime ministers direct reality, reality runs them. Whoever thought Sharon would dismantle settlements?” Peres is not an ideologue. One senses that had the Holocaust, and the Jewish persecution that preceded it, not ripped open his heart, he would have been satisfied to remain living in the city of his birth.

Shimon Peres was born Shimon Persky in 1923 in a small Jewish shtetl in Poland, 37 years after Ben-Gurion. He studied Hebrew and immigrated to Palestine when he was only 10. His father was a lumber merchant and his mother a librarian. He met his future wife on a kibbutz, and they would eventually raise three children. He has always claimed an affinity for the Bible that fuels his Jewish identity and reveals that his beloved grandfather Rabbi Zvi Meltzer studied Talmud with him when he was a young boy. His own father’s home was not observant. All of Peres’ relatives who remained in Poland perished under Nazi brutality, including his beloved grandfather, Rabbi Meltzer, who was burned alive in the town’s synagogue.

Ben-Gurion chose Peres to be his trusted aide when Peres was only 23. He was soon assigned to be the director general of the Defense Ministry, from 1952 to 1959. He was enamored with Ben-Gurion’s strength of character and his vision. Peres tells us that after Ben-Gurion returned from seeing one of the Nazi death camps, he had “a more thorough understanding of how the reaction of the rest of the world had contributed to the fate of Europe’s Jews. Not only had the Allies failed to save them, not only had they failed to bomb the death camps or the railway lines, but British warships had kept the gates of Palestine shut to any Jews who managed to escape from the European hell. His conclusion was stark and unequivocal. We must have our independent state at once.”

Peres was always devoted to Ben-Gurion’s vision of a secure and strong Jewish state. He respected Ben-Gurion’s ability to take decisive action and his bold decision to break with Chaim Weizmann of the World Zionist Congress, who was still advocating patience. Peres also agreed wholeheartedly with Ben-Gurion about the Soviet Union. Both men had flirted with romantic notions about Bolshevism, but these dreams were quickly extinguished when Ben-Gurion returned from a trip to the Soviet Union. Ben-Gurion was horrified by the inherent anti-Semitism there, and the Soviet complete lack of human rights for all of its citizens.

Peres was always mystified by certain parts of Ben-Gurion’s personality that seemed unreachable. He explains that his mentor did not believe in the rabbinate and viewed it as an archaic hierarchical structure, but loved Judaism as a faith. Ben-Gurion embraced the vision of the biblical prophets and saw the Hebrew language as a living reflection of his belief. Peres believes Ben-Gurion’s unique powers stemmed from his ability to distance himself from the perceptions of others, something one detects Peres still has difficulty doing.

Ben-Gurion’s early life was marred by tragedy. He was born David Gruen in 1886 in Plonsk, a town in north central Poland. His father was an unofficial attorney who stopped wearing the traditional Jewish garb and instead chose to dress in a modern frock coat and winged collar, which other attorneys wore at that time. His mother died in childbirth when he was barely 12; it was her eleventh pregnancy. By 14, he was studying Hebrew and convinced that Jews should one day have a territory of their own. The czarist regime made it difficult for him to gain acceptance into college for engineering, and, by 1906, the 20-year-old Ben-Gurion arrived in Jaffa with his first love, the daughter of a prominent Jewish scholar.

This is a wonderfully intimate and important book about the brave men and women who created Israel against all reasonable odds after the devastation of the Holocaust. A desperate euphoria in these young Zionists fueled their abundant energies, a sense of mission and rage, as well as a glimmer of hope that is described eloquently by Amos Elon, who wrote about them in 1995, claiming they “were of that species of revolutionaries who lived in their own world of radiant expectations. The leftists looked forward to a perfectly just society. The rightists postulated the rebirth of the so-called ‘Muscle Jew.’ All upheld the need for assimilation on a collective basis: to become like all other people and peoples. Assimilation, as they understood it, did not mean that one ceased to be oneself. They did not intend to slavishly abandon their historical or ethnic identity, but rather to shed only the uniquely religious identity Jews had insisted upon during the Middle Ages.”

Elaine Margolin is a frequent contributor of book reviews to The Jewish Journal and other publications.

Ariel Sharon was a figure of controversy throughout his long career in war, politics and diplomacy, but no one can deny that he looms large in the making of the Jewish state.

Sharon was hailed as “Arik, King of Israel” when he returned from battle in the Six-Day War, a kind of latter-day David. But some of his critics still recall his role in the events leading up to the mass killings of Palestinians by Christian-Lebanese Phalangists at Sabra and Shatila, while others are second-guessing his courageous decision to withdraw Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza. Today, because of the strokes he suffered in 2005, Sharon is no longer an active participant in debate or decision-making in Israel, but people all over the world still ask: “What would Arik do?”

“Over the course of nearly sixty years my father has been on the front line of all major national events in Israel,” his youngest son, Gilad Sharon, writes in “Sharon: The Life of a Leader” (HarperCollins, $29.95), a biography that is, at once, intimate and magisterial. “His fingerprints can be found all across the length and width of this country — in the form of over one hundred blooming settlements in the Galilee, the Golan Heights, Samaria, Judea, the Negev and the Arava.”

As part of a national book tour, Gilad Sharon will be in Los Angeles on Nov. 4 to participate in a public conversation with Rob Eshman, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Jewish Journal, part of the annual Celebration of Jewish Books at American Jewish University. (For tickets and information, call (310) 440-1246.)

“Sharon” has been released simultaneously in Hebrew and in an English translation by Mitch Ginsburg. As we should expect from a biography written by its subject’s son, “Sharon” is sentimental rather than critical; indeed, Gilad opens the book with a touching account of the death of his father’s firstborn son, Gur, in a gun accident, an event that cast a long shadow over the life of his father and their family. “Even an early age, I had the feeling that I was supporting my father,” Gilad writes, “despite the objective fact that he was big and strong and I was small and young.”

Yet often this intimate relationship plays to the book’s advantage. When Gilad describes his father’s celebrated experiences in combat — the beginning of the Sharon legend — he is able to offer a wholly surprising insight: “During the Yom Kippur War,” he writes, “soldiers would cling to his shirt, needing to touch him amid the madness.” To be sure, Gilad offers a detailed account of his father’s high-profile experiences as prime minister of Israel, but he always includes a telling detail that an impartial biographer might never know: “ ‘If you’re invited to dinner with the queen, you’d better know your table manners,’ our parents would say.”

In a telephone interview, Gilad Sharon spoke from the family farm in Israel in advance of his visit to Los Angeles.

Jonathan Kirsch:  I think the whole world will be interested in the very last pages of your book, where you describe how your father is today.  Am I correct in my understanding that he is not in a coma?

Gilad Sharon: “Minimal consciousness” is the medical term for his condition. Unfortunately, I cannot talk to him the way I am talking to you right now. When he is asleep, he is asleep, and when he is awake, he opens his eyes. He moves fingers when I ask him to.

JK: If I asked you to single out the one thing your father will be remembered for — and the one thing for which he ought to be remembered — would they be the same thing? Is he misunderstood in any way?

GS: If you ask me why my father was controversial in the early years, I’d say he was so dominant that no one could stay indifferent toward him. His abilities, his achievements, the victories he led the [Israeli Defense Forces] to achieve — all of these put almost everyone else in the shade. As prime minister, however, he enjoyed love and support across political boundaries and all over the world. That’s what counts. Fighting terror is something he did since the end of the 1940s, but for me, the human side of him, which is less known, is the most important part the book. A warm and loving family man with a great sense of humor — these are the qualities that I most care about.

JK: You write that you prepared a position paper for your father on the question of “unilateral action,” which ultimately led to his decision to withdraw from Gaza. What was the extent of your role in that decision?

GS: It was clear that we had to destroy terror, or terror would destroy us. It was clear that the Palestinian Authority would do nothing.  For instance, building the fence to prevent terrorists from coming from Judea and Samaria was also a unilateral step. No one ever put it as a policy. Coming up with an idea is a nice thing, but the ability to listen to people and to decide and then to execute, this is real leadership. I don’t see anyone else in those days, or even today, who would have been able to do it.

JK: Given the troubled state of affairs in Gaza, what is the verdict of history on the decision to withdraw from there?

GS: Some people used to say the results from Gaza brought rockets on Israel. That’s false. The first rocket was fired on April 16, 2001, more than four years before the withdrawal.

There were more rockets and mortars fired during the year before withdrawal than the two years after. There was, and is, a consensus that if we have a peace treaty with the Palestinians, we will not be in Gaza. The only question remaining was: Should we wait for the Palestinians or should we get out of Gaza now?  When my father realized that there was not going to be a peace treaty with the Palestinians, and that we cannot count on them even if there were a treaty, he decided not to wait. 

JK: Your father, it seems to me, had the stature that was required to lead Israel into a very tough decision. Do you think that the current prime minister — or any prospective prime minister — comes anywhere close to your father in terms of stature?

GS: In a moment of honesty, the current prime minister would admit that he still has a long way to go. That’s not a secret.  And that’s what I think, too.

JK: Do you think that the Palestinians will be successful in achieving statehood without a peace treaty with Israel?

GS: The Palestinians declared statehood in 1988, and many countries recognize it. I don’t think that the Palestinian state is the big obstacle. The question is borders.  Israel has lived without fixed borders, too, but we cannot accept the 1967 borders from which we were attacked with no provocation in the past.  If the Palestinians had accepted the U.N. partition in 1947, they would now have a state as old as Israel is right now.

JK: There is one question that I guarantee you will hear on your book tour: What would your father make of President Barack Obama?  Would he regard President Obama as a friend of Israel?

GS: The answer is, yes. The friendship between Israel and the United States is deep and is based on shared values of peace and justice.  We are engaged in a mutual fight against fundamentalist Islamic terror. After the 9/11 attacks, the feeling of mutual destiny became even stronger. It goes well beyond the personal. Prime ministers and presidents come and go, but the ties remain.  Of course, it is much better to have relationships like the one my father had with President Bush. They reached a high level of mutual understanding, and it helps a lot when you have someone whom you know and trust.

For more information about American Jewish University’s Festival of Jewish Books, please visit ” title=”jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve”>jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve and can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

President Obama’s vacation reading list includes the best-selling Israeli novel “To the End of the Land” by David Grossman.

According to a White House statement, the novel is one of three that Obama took to his 10-day vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts. Since arriving on the island he has bought two more books, according to reports.

Published in 2008 in Israel to enthusiastic reviews, “To the End of the Land” became a bestseller in the United States and Germany. Finished after the death of Grossman’s son in the 2006 Lebanon War, it tells the story of an Israeli mother to a soldier who leaves home on an extended trip so as not receive the possible news of her son’s death.

“Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life” by Sari Nusseibeh with Anthony David (Farrar Straus and Giroux, $27.50).

Sari Nusseibeh’s political memoir is a monumental achievement both in breadth and boldness. There is little like it on the Palestinian side, certainly nothing from Columbia University Palestinian academic Edward Said, now deceased, who found only the holes in Zionism but never the heart. Nusseibeh reminds me most of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s spokesman and novelist, Ghassan Kanafani, who before a Mossad car bomb obliterated him in Beirut in 1972 wrote seminally honest short stories and novels, such as the symbolic “Men in the Sun,” whose Palestinian protagonists die in a water carrier in route from The West Bank to Basra, lacking help from their Arab brothers.

Nusseibeh never obfuscates, grandstands or justifies Palestinian excess. In a way no Palestinian has ever risked in print, he castigates the corruption of Yasser Arafat’s leadership in the territories:

“Politically, the center shifted suddenly from the intifada activists on the ‘inside’ to returning PLO functionaries, and geographically from East Jerusalem to Gaza and the West Bank, where the ‘outsiders’ now lived. Needless to say, the bulk of the ministers were ‘outsiders,’ whereas their undersecretaries were, by and large competent local people, many of whom had worked in the technical committees and hence had two years of preparatory work behind them…. Unfortunately, they faced the reality of working with the returning apparatchiks. The new ministers, dazzled by the trappings of power — the cars, the adulation — had little inclination to study reports or listen to local underlings. Ignoring the multiple volumes already on their desks, our potentates preferred commissioning new reports, which is after all what ministers do. One favorite pastime of many ministers was to gather around Arafat’s desk in Gaza, watching him conduct business and wanting to get their instructions directly from the Old Man. Some ministers, who behaved like demigods to the people under them, journeyed to Arafat’s desk in Gaza, to get his permission to hire an office secretary.”

Nusseibeh details the financial fraud of the ring around Arafat with painful precision — automobiles bought abroad with public funds then sold to the local populace the profit pocketed, collusion with unscrupulous local Jews in smuggling in gasoline. He argues persuasively that Arafat gained no personal financial benefit and was not squirreling away millions as has been charged. However Arafat read every report, knew everything and turned a blind eye to the corruption. Nusseibeh characterizes Arafat as someone “playing the trapeze act, carefully balancing himself between moderates and militants, unwilling and perhaps unable to come down firmly on either side.” Like many of us, his greatest strength was simultaneous his destructive weakness.

Painful for a Zionist like myself to read are the depictions of life in the West Bank and Gaza, something I frequently witnessed myself prior to the first intifada: roadblocks with yellow license plated settlers cars waved through while blue-plated Palestinians cars were stopped in a seemingly endless line at checkpoints; the squalor of the Dehasisha Camp near Bethlehem, where children were chased by soldiers for hurling a Palestinian flag in the electrical wires; the endless dusty dirt roads through the Gaza refugee camps in sight of the high chain-link fences of the settlements with sprinklers rotating over lush green grass. Failure to find sympathy for the Palestinians’ human suffering is as impenetrable a roadblock to peace as any.

The scion of an aristocratic Jerusalem family, Nusseibeh traces his roots back 1,300 years to one of the tribal leaders who joined Mohammad on his seventh century pilgrimage to Jerusalem. A family member still shares jurisdiction over the entrance key to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and twists the lock on those doors open each morning.

The idea for this memoir sprang from his reading Amos Oz’s memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” as Nusseibeh discovered that they had grown up 100 yards apart in Jerusalem separated by the uncrossable “no man’s land” that partitioned the city from 1948 to 1967.

Oxford educated, a philosopher by training, happiest teaching and in metaphysical reverie, Nusseibeh is repeatedly forced into the political fray by its concrete existence around him. A good man in a turbulent sea, he is relentlessly tossed around, beaten by radical Palestinians for his moderate stance and jailed by the Israelis in Ramle Prison, charged with being an Iraqi spy who guided undirectable Scud missile launchings while in reality he hid under his kitchen table with his wife and children as the errant rockets regularly fell short and landed in Arab territory. To the Israeli right wing he was far more dangerous than an Iraqi spy; he is a thoughtful, passionate and fair-minded moderate.

Probably the most tragic segments of the book detail the Camp David accords and how the dual egotism of Ehud Barak and Arafat prevented an accord “by a whisker.” Nusseibeh’s political trajectory moved from support of a binational state to a two-state solution to a sadly disillusioned stance. He no longer finds the erection of a Palestinian state preeminent and now focuses on the achievement of freedom and human dignity. The politician has returned to philosophy but I suspect only the politicians can ultimately bring the freedom and human dignity he and his people seek.

Howard Kaplan is the author of three novels on the Middle East.

“Black Jews, Jews, and Other Heroes,” by Howard M. Lenhoff (Gefen; $24.95).

“The Ethiopian Jews of Israel,” by Len Lyons (Jewish Lights; $34.99).

Roughly 20 years ago, Sudan, whose western Darfur region has been engulfed in genocide for four years, watched another other tragedy unfold — the deaths of thousands of Ethiopian Jews trying to escape to Israel via Operation Moses.

Nearly one-fifth of the fleeing Falashas perished on their journey due to murder, famine, drought and various illnesses. But tens of thousands reached the Holy Land; and the ancient Jewish community (known to themselves as Beta Yisrael), which had an almost invisible presence in Israel until the late 1970s, now numbers more than 100,000 people.

Two new books explore the Ethiopian Jews, one from the perspective of an advocate who helped forge a consensus behind the mass aliyah in the 1970s and 1980s, and the other from an admittedly apolitical jazz aficionado who has dedicated two and a half years of his life to interviewing an array of Ethiopian Jews some 20 years after the exodus.

Former activist Howard Lenhoff, author of “Black Jews, Jews, and Other Heroes,” might not consider himself one of his book’s eponymous heroes. He never traveled to Ethiopia, never risked his life, never engaged in the kind of swashbuckling derring-do of some of his colleagues.

Yet he played a critical role as president of the American Association of Ethiopian Jews (AAEJ) in negotiating with and, in some cases, applying pressure to the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency to change policy on Ethiopian Jews.

Typical of the response of the Jewish establishment in the 1970s was this remark by one American Jewish woman: “These blacks are not Jews.” Nor were the Israelis immune to demeaning characterizations of the Beta Yisrael.

Lenhoff quotes a letter from professor Aryeh Tartakower, another leading activist at the time, that spells out the one-time Israeli attitude toward the Ethiopian Jews: “They were to be considered as ‘Aliens’ like other people of this category, to be admitted as tourists only for a short period of time….

Things went so far, that certain overzealous Israeli officials threatened to deport those Falashas who would be tempted to come over illegally.”

As much as this letter may remind us of the present debate over illegal immigration in the United States, the Israelis ultimately did rescue tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews. Not only that, they provided them with food, shelter and education at absorption centers throughout the country.

How much of that was due to the advocacy of groups like Lenhoff’s is hard to know, but Lenhoff and other AAEJ officials met on many occasions with then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin, obtained more than 50,000 signatures on behalf of the Ethiopians, mobilized protests, distributed literature, got the Jewish press to report on the plight of the Falashas and even commanded a few rescues themselves.

Lenhoff first became conscious of race as a young boy growing up in North Adams, Mass. Most of the blacks in his hometown worked as “janitors and garbage people. It sort of bothered me,” he said from his home in Oxford, Miss. “Naturally, I became friends with them.”

He later served on the faculty at Howard University and participated in the civil rights marches in the 1960s, but his interest in the Falashas did not blossom until he visited Israel just after the Yom Kippur War in late 1973 and early 1974. It was then that he read a Jerusalem Post article by famed newsman Louis Rapoport about the Ethiopian Jews who were being denied the right to the Law of Return. Shortly thereafter, Lenhoff, through Rapoport, got in contact with some members of the Beta Yisrael and even provided one, Rahamim, with $1,000, which enabled him to bring his older brother to Israel.

Over the phone, Lenhoff, a former UC Irvine biology professor, said he was concerned about the rescue missions, thinking at the time, “We’re amateurs. What if somebody gets killed. I’ll be responsible.”

He has also been responsible for his daughter, who suffers from the rare genetic disorder known as Williams-Beuren syndrome. Last fall, he came out with “The Strangest Song,” a book about his daughter, who displays rare musical gifts despite her condition.

The same compassion he shows for his daughter comes through in “Black Jews.” He speaks glowingly of some of the Ethiopian men he has met, like Hezi, the first one he encountered, a drill sergeant in the Israeli army, whom he describes as “a towering figure, over 6 feet tall, with a trademark long, black handlebar mustache.”

The book could do without its many subheads, like “Meeting Rahamim — The Professor Hooked.” Likewise, it could do without definitions of such obvious terms as the Mossad and kibbutzim. Any reader will know that the former is the Israeli equivalent of the CIA and the latter the plural form of kibbutz.

Despite these stylistic flaws, the book offers a primer on grass-roots activism and documents a modern-day Exodus, a story that makes for compelling reading on Passover.

Len Lyons, who has previously written books about jazz and computers, first came into contact with the Beta Yisrael through the Boston-Haifa sister city exchange program, when he and his wife hosted two Ethiopians at their home.

Although he said over the phone from Boston that he did not grow up in a politically active home, he could always “relate to the idea of not fitting in completely with my own world.”

In his new book, “The Ethiopian Jews of Israel,” he interviewed the top stratum of Ethiopian Israeli society. Almost no one is unemployed. Not one interviewee seems to live in a broken home, even though there is a high prevalence of divorce among Ethiopian Jews. No one suffers from any of the other pathologies of the community — spousal abuse, depression and alcoholism.

Lyons admits at the outset that he has not presented a random sample or a true cross-section of Beta Yisrael. He tried to interview some inmates in a prison, but they, like other “people on the margins … failing to engage constructively in society, don’t really want to talk about themselves” because of the stigma and shame of being imprisoned, homeless or even unemployed.

“A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man’s Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance” by Zev Chafets. (HarperCollins, $24.95)

A book about the serious matters of religion and nationalism and politics and war is not usually laugh-out-loud funny. “A Match Made in Heaven” shatters that stereotype.

The author, Zev Chafets, shatters stereotypes with his life choices, not just his prose. Reared in Pontiac, Mich., Chafets moved to Israel after graduating from the University of Michigan. By then, he had gotten over the idea held by so many Jews that evangelical Christians are devils in disguise. In fact, Chavets exhibited outright curiosity about Christians, so he asked questions of his acquaintances uninhibitedly, the way children often do.

He remained in Israel for 33 years, becoming a well-known journalist as well as communications director for Prime Minister Menachem Begin and then, eventually, moved back to the United States.

Without his expert grounding in American and Middle Eastern culture, combined with his irreverence, Chafets would lack the credibility, the raw material and the attitude to write such a mind-shattering book.

First, the serious message: War in the Middle East could wipe out the nation of Israel any time, and its Jewish-hating enemies are unlikely to relent.

That means Israel needs all the assistance it can get, Chafets says, including the support of American evangelical Christians who otherwise seem incompatible with Jewish values.

Jews doubt the sincerity of evangelical Christians’ support for Israeli survival, Chafets contends, worriedly. “Many believe that evangelicals want to convert them, or use them as cannon fodder in some End of Days Armageddon battle. They suspect that behind the warm, toothy smiles of the evangelicals is a cold-hearted desire to establish a Christian theocracy in the United States.”

Jews who care about the survival of Israel should welcome the faith, the influence with Republican White House occupants, and the money supplied by the likes of preachers Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than turn it away, Chafets says.

He is not hopeful, though, because Jewish history is filled with misjudgments. “The Jewish impulse to deny danger, misread political reality, and choose the wrong enemies isn’t unique to this generation. The ancient Hebrews were out of Egyptian bondage for about 10 minutes before they began clamoring to go back. Jews wandered around the world homeless for two thousand years while every other nation got itself a state (even the Belgians figured out nationalism faster).”

“In Eastern Europe, Jews defended themselves by praying to a God who didn’t listen or building grandiose political theories about the brotherhood of man that pissed everyone off.”

As for today, Chafets worries that American Jews too easily conclude “it is more satisfying to fight the Falwells than to join them.”
That attitude is perhaps easy to understand intellectually, but difficult for Chafets to grasp emotionally when a war to the death is a daily reality.

In Israel, Chafets learned during his 33 years living there, Jews see nothing unusual about evangelical Christians supporting their right to exist in Ground Zero of multiple world faiths. It is the American Jews who find the match strange. So what if Pat Robertson exhibits a skewed view of kingdom come from a Jewish viewpoint?: “The simple fact is that, nuts or not, Robertson is a man with his own university, an army of lawyers, and a million viewers a day. In short, he’s a good man to have on your side.”

Chafets shows the warmth exhibited by Israeli leaders toward visiting Christian Zionists: “One day [celebrity American singer-songwriters] Johnny Cash and June Carter came by for a photo op” with Begin.

“Cash was a lover of biblical history and came to see Begin directly from a visit to Masada, the mountain fortress where Jewish zealots had, 2,000 years earlier, staged a sort of kosher Alamo in their futile rebellion against the Roman conquerors of Palestine. The early Zionists adopted Masada as a symbol of steadfastness and courage.

When Cash told Begin he had been there, the prime minister slammed his hand down on his desk and proclaimed, ‘Masada will never fall again!’ The Man in Black was so startled he nearly jumped out of his cowboy boots.”

The phrase “kosher Alamo” is a classic example of Chafets’ irreverence and humor.

There is nothing irreverent or humorous about Chafets’ final message, though: “I looked hard for evidence that the evangelicals are insincere, cynical, or devious in their attitude toward Israel and the Jews, and I didn’t find it. They may love Jews too much. They may love Jews for the wrong reasons. They may, in the future, not love Jews at all. But for now, the evangelical Christians of America are not the enemy. They are the enemy of the enemy and they want to be accepted and appreciated. In return they are offering a wartime alliance and free partnerhip in a Judeo-Christian America. It is an offer the Jews of America should accept while it is still on the table.”

Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist. People were mistaken when they labeled him a post-Zionist, when they thought that his historical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem was intended to undercut the Zionist enterprise. Nonsense, Morris says, that’s completely unfounded. Some readers simply misread the book. They didn’t read it with the same detachment, the same moral neutrality, with which it was written. So they came to the mistaken conclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that the Zionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually being condemnatory, that when he describes the large-scale expulsion operations he is being denunciatory. They did not conceive that the great scribe of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with those sins. That he thinks some of them, at least, were unavoidable.

Whereas citizen Morris turned out to be a not completely snow-white dove, historian Morris continued to work on the Hebrew translation of his massive work "Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001," which was written in the old, peace-pursuing style. And, at the same time, historian Morris completed the new version of his book on the refugee problem, which is going to strengthen the hands of those who hate Israel. In the past two years citizen Morris and historian Morris worked as though there is no connection between them, as though one was trying to save what the other insists on eradicating.

The book on the history of the Zionist-Arab conflict was published in Hebrew by Am Oved in Tel Aviv, while the Cambridge University Press published "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited" (it originally appeared under the CUP imprint in 1987).

He is short, plump and very intense. The son of immigrants from England, he was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was a member of the left-wing Hashomer Hatza’ir youth movement. In the past, he was a reporter for The Jerusalem Post and refused to do military service in the territories. He is now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be’er Sheva. He gives the observer the feeling that this agitated individual — who with his own hands opened the Zionist Pandora’s box — is still having difficulty coping with what he found in it, still finding it hard to deal with the internal contradictions that are his lot and the lot of us all.

Ari Shavit: In the month ahead, the new version of your book on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be published. Who will be less pleased with the book — the Israelis or the Palestinians?

Benny Morris: The revised book is a double-edged sword. It is based on many documents that were not available to me when I wrote the original book, most of them from the Israel Defense Forces [IDF] archives. What the new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape. In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah [the pre-State defense force that was the precursor of the IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.

At the same time, it turns out that there was a series of orders issued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinian intermediate levels to remove children, women and the elderly from the villages. So that on the one hand, the book reinforces the accusation against the Zionist side, but on the other hand it also proves that many of those who left the villages did so with the encouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself.

AS: According to your new findings, how many cases of Israeli rape were there in 1948?

BM: About a dozen. In Acre, four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her and her father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and tried to rape several more. At Hunin, which is in the Galilee, two girls were raped and then murdered. There were one or two cases of rape at Tantura, south of Haifa. There was one case of rape at Qula, in the center of the country. At the village of Abu Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four female prisoners, one of whom was raped a number of times. And there were other cases. Usually more than one soldier was involved. Usually there were one or two Palestinian girls. In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder. Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg.

AS: According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?

BM: Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field — they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village — she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.

The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and, perhaps, Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion.

That can’t be chance. It’s a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. [David] Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres.

AS: Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for a deliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion?

BM: From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, there is no orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere of [population] transfer. The transfer idea is in the air. The entire leadership understands that this is the idea. The officer corps understands what is required of them. Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of transfer is created.

AS: Ben-Gurion was a "transferist?"

BM: Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish State with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist.

AS: I don’t hear you condemning him.

BM: Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish State would not have arisen here.

AS: For decades you have been researching the dark side of Zionism. You are an expert on the atrocities of 1948. In the end, do you in effect justify all this? Are you an advocate of the transfer of 1948?

BM: There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands.

AS: We are talking about the killing of thousands of people, the destruction of an entire society.

BM: A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it. When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it’s better to destroy.

AS: So when the commanders of Operation Dani are standing there and observing the long and terrible column of the 50,000 people expelled from Lod walking eastward, you stand there with them? You justify them?

BM: I definitely understand them. I understand their motives. I don’t think they felt any pangs of conscience, and in their place I wouldn’t have felt pangs of conscience. Without that act, they would not have won the war and the state would not have come into being.

AS: They perpetrated ethnic cleansing.

BM: There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide — the annihilation of your people — I prefer ethnic cleansing.

AS: And that was the situation in 1948?

BM: That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. A Jewish State would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

AS: What you are saying is hard to listen to and hard to digest. You sound hardhearted.

BM: I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to establish a Jewish State here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. From the moment the Yishuv [pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine] was attacked by the Palestinians and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war.

Remember another thing: the Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them.

AS: And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed?

BM: That is correct. Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

AS: And you take that in stride? War crimes? Massacres? The burning fields and the devastated villages of the Nakba?

BM: You have to put things in proportion. These are small war crimes. All told, if we take all the massacres and all the executions of 1948, we come to about 800 who were killed. In comparison to the massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia, that’s peanuts. In comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against the Germans at Stalingrad, that’s chicken feed. When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost an entire 1 percent of the population, you find that we behaved very well.

AS: Besides being tough, you are also very gloomy. You weren’t always like that, were you?

BM: "My turning point began after 2000. I wasn’t a great optimist even before that…. When the Palestinians rejected the proposal of [Prime Minister Ehud] Barak in July 2000 and the Clinton proposal in December 2000, I understood that they are unwilling to accept the two-state solution. They want it all. Lod and Acre and Jaffa.

AS: If that’s so, then the whole Oslo process was mistaken and there is a basic flaw in the entire worldview of the Israeli peace movement.

BM: Oslo had to be tried. But today it has to be clear that from the Palestinian point of view, Oslo was a deception. [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat did not change for the worse, Arafat simply defrauded us. He was never sincere in his readiness for compromise and conciliation.

AS: Do you really believe Arafat wants to throw us into the sea?

BM: He wants to send us back to Europe, to the sea we came from. He truly sees us as a Crusader state and he thinks about the Crusader precedent and wishes us a Crusader end. I’m certain that Israeli intelligence has unequivocal information proving that in internal conversations Arafat talks seriously about the phased plan [which would eliminate Israel in stages]. But the problem is not just Arafat. The entire Palestinian national elite is prone to see us as Crusaders and is driven by the phased plan. That’s why the Palestinians are not honestly ready to forego the right of return. They are preserving it as an instrument with which they will destroy the Jewish State when the time comes. They can’t tolerate the existence of a Jewish State — not in 80 percent of the country and not in 30 percent. From their point of view, the Palestinian state must cover the whole Land of Israel.

AS: If so, the two-state solution is not viable; even if a peace treaty is signed, it will soon collapse.

BM: Ideologically, I support the two-state solution. It’s the only alternative to the expulsion of the Jews or the expulsion of the Palestinians or total destruction. But in practice, in this generation, a settlement of that kind will not hold water. At least 30 percent to 40 percent of the Palestinian public and at least 30 percent to 40 percent of the heart of every Palestinian will not accept it. After a short break, terrorism will erupt again and the war will resume.

AS: Your prognosis doesn’t leave much room for hope, does it?

BM: It’s hard for me, too. There is not going to be peace in the present generation. There will not be a solution. We are doomed to live by the sword. I’m already fairly old, but for my children that is especially bleak. I don’t know if they will want to go on living in a place where there is no hope. Even if Israel is not destroyed, we won’t see a good, normal life here in the decades ahead.

The above excerpt reprinted with permission of Haaretz.

Herb Brin, one of the most colorful writers and editors inthe annals of Los Angeles Jewish journalism, died of congestive heart failureon Feb. 6 at the Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda.

His death came 11 days before his 88th birthday and shortlyafter he completed his autobiography, pecked out, like countless exposes,features and editorials, with two fingers on a manual typewriter. For some 45years, from the mid-1950s to the end of the 20th century, Brin was theeditor-publisher of the Heritage weeklies in Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and the Central Valley.

He “was the last of the old-time Front Page newspapermen,absolutely committed to every cause he felt just,” said his youngest son,Daniel J. Brin, who worked at his father’s side for 25 years, succeeded him aseditor and, with his brothers, supplied most of the material for this obituary.

Amidst deadlines, soliciting ads and even printing hisweeklies, Brin authored six books of poetry and two books on post-Holocaust Germany,based on his frequent travels.

In some respects, Brin was a throwback to the mid-19thcentury editors of the Wild West, whose newspapers were an extension of theirpersonal passions and prejudices, and who settled differences of opinion withhorsewhips and six-shooters.

His overriding passion was for Israel, which he visitedcountless times, and in whose capital city he was buried earlier this week. Hebattled real — and sometimes perceived — enemies, or even lukewarm supporters,of Israel and the Jewish people, with every fiber of his being and applied thesame passion, and often blunt language, to a long list of causes, from civilrights to conservancy of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Never a very astute businessman, he fought bitterly againstThe Jewish Federation and the realities of a corporate society to maintain hischain of community papers, but, at his death, only the San Diego Heritage,under different ownership, has survived. Brin was born in Chicago of immigrantparents and cut his journalistic teeth at his birthplace’s fabled City NewsBureau, immortalized in Ben Hecht’s “The Front Page.”

After World War II Army service, Brin moved to Los Angelesand found his niche as a lively feature writer of oddball human intereststories at the Los Angeles Times.

In 1954, with a wife and three small sons, Brin quit TheTimes, mortgaged his home and started the Los Angeles Heritage as a 12-pageweekly.

He continued to write occasionally for his old paper andcovered the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for the Los Angeles Times. Throughoutthe years, Heritage published his investigations of white supremacy andneo-Nazi organizations, his early meetings with Soviet Jews, and his picketingof the 1979 Oscar ceremonies to protest an award to British actress VanessaRedgrave, a PLO sympathizer.

Elie Wiesel, who learned of Brin’s death while traveling in Europe,said, “Herb and I were very close. He was a great editor and a superb poet. Allthose who knew him will miss him.”

Brin was married and divorced three times. He is survived byhis sons, Stan, a business reporter; David, a bestselling author of sciencefiction novels; and Daniel, an editor; and six grandchildren.

On Sunday, a memorial service at the Jewish Home for theAging, with Rabbis Louis Felman and William Kramer officiating, honored Brin’slife and work.

To learn more about Herb Brin, sample his autobiography,or to offer condolences, visit www.davidbrin.com/herbbrin.html .