(JNS) For those who visit Israel regularly, the love affair with the country can take on many forms. Some are entranced by the somberness and spirituality of Jerusalem; others love the hustle and bustle of Tel Aviv. There are deserts and mountaintops, swaths of farmland and the dramatic hills of Judea, the Galilee and the Golan. Most visitors are entranced by all these different geographical areas—so much differentiation in one small place.
And throughout all of it are the Israeli people—a wonderful, welcoming, brusque, emotional, infuriating and complex collection of Jews, in addition to Christian, Arab, Druze and Bedouin minorities who each play their own sometimes contradictory roles in a vibrant and democratic society.
Israel, for those who come to know it, is a complicated place. It’s not the idealized fantasy of novels like Exodus or other classics of Zionist cheerleading. Bringing together Jews from different cultures and traditions from the world over is a wild and often difficult ongoing experiment that is still only eight decades old. Clashes between religious and secular, Ashkenazi and the Mizrachi, as...
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