What Israeli-Americans can learn from American Jews.

Israeli schoolchildren hold the Israeli and American flags. (photo credit:REUTERS)

Over the past decade, American Jewry has emerged as perhaps the strongest Jewish community in the history of the Diaspora.

Their story of success is nothing short of inspiring. Jews began arriving in large numbers in the United States from Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century. The vast majority of them had no money, no knowledge of the English language and little understanding of their new culture. Strong Jewish communal institutions were established and provided an important foundation for these immigrants, their children and their grandchildren to maintain a strong sense of Jewish identity as they climbed America’s socio-economic ladder.

Today, approximately 60 percent of American Jews have a college degree (compared with 27% of Americans). Today they comprise around one fourth of Ivy League undergraduates, and 37% of American Nobel Prize winners. In a survey of America’s most 200 influential intellectuals in the 1970s, half were Jewish and 75% had at least one Jewish parent. Despite only being 2% of the US population, American Jews today account for seven of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, 11 out of 100 US senators, two of 15 US cabinet secretaries and one third of the Supreme Court. 

Many of America’s immigrant communities today draw from the American Jewish experience to see how to integrate and succeed in the US while still maintaining their identity. Israeli- Americans should do the same.

Recently, there has been a revolution in the way that Israeli-Americans like me view ourselves. Since we first began coming to the US after Israel’s independence in 1948, Israelis living in America held onto the belief that we would eventually return to Israel. We lived with our suitcases packed. Without feeling rooted in the US, we didn’t cultivate community, and generally remained disconnected from synagogues, Jewish educational institutions, and Jewish community organizations.

Supported by organizations like the Israeli-American Council, we are now embracing our unique hybrid Israeli-American identity, metaphorically unpacking our bags and building a strong, thriving community. In September, the third Annual Israeli- American Conference in Washington, DC, will bring thousands of Israeli-American activists together with prominent leaders in politics, journalism, the Jewish community, education, art and business.

A primary goal of this conference is to learn from our fellow American Jews, who have effectively built a thriving community in the Diaspora. I believe there are at least three ways we should emulate their example: 

First, American Jewry has invested in preserving the community’s heritage and supporting its Jewish life. Decade after decade, American Jews have effectively developed and sustained organizations to meet a range of religious, educational, social, political and cultural needs – from synagogues and community centers, to Jewish Day schools and camps, to advocacy groups and Federations.

Jewish education is at the heart of this work. Day schools, religious schools and summer camps provide a framework for instilling Jewish identity in the next generation and creating opportunities for Jews to form bonds of community while living in the Diaspora. American Jewish families have long embraced the concept of L’dor V’dor (from generation to generation), with even secular Jews participating in multi-generational Jewish activities as a family – from celebrating holidays, to joining a Havura, to becoming active in their local JCC.

These practices were not so intuitive for Israelis coming to America, accustomed to living in a Jewish state, where Jewish holidays are part of the official calendar, Jewish history and heritage education is mostly provided by the public school system, nearly all of your neighbors are Jewish and many functions of preserving Jewish identity are carried out by the government. In Israel, you can take your Jewishness for granted. In America, you simply cannot.

Second, American Jewry has fostered a strong culture of philanthropy. They understand that Jewish institutions will only exist if they support them financially, and as a result, wide swaths of the community give to synagogues, Jewish schools, and other organizations.

In Israel, the government is expected to provide for all social needs and support a strong Jewish community. In the US, this culture of giving is not present in the same way. For most Israelis, giving money to charities is considered naïve, reserved for freiers (Hebrew for “sucker”).

When we founded the IAC, a primary goal was to instill this commitment to philanthropy in the Israeli- American community. We came up with the motto, “I aspire to be a freier,” and required that all early members of the IAC support at least one charitable cause outside of the IAC. We have made great progress on this front, raising unprecedented sums from the Israeli-American community in support of communal needs. Yet, we still have only raised a fraction of our community’s capacity – and have a long way to goal to realizing our full potential.

Third, American Jewry has effectively engaged in civic life and the political process. Today there are more than 20 Jewish members of Congress, and Jews serve at all levels of government, including mayors of major cities, like Michael Bloomberg in New York City, Rahm Emanuel in Chicago and Eric Garcetti in Los Angeles. A range of organizations like AIPAC, ADL and AJC have effectively organized and rallied the Jewish community in support of Israel and domestic policy priorities.

American Jewry has successfully built bridges to other communities around common issues – from human rights and social justice, to education and business. In short, American Jewry has been at the forefront of advocating for others.

Israeli-Americans should find lessons and inspiration from this experience.

We need to engage in advocacy to ensure that both the United States, our national homeland, and Israel, our Jewish homeland, remain strong allies and fight for just causes. The Israeli-American community recently launched its own 501(c)4 advocacy group, the Israeli-American Coalition for Action, to make our voices heard to our nation’s policymakers.

In his new book, Flexigidity, Gidi Grinstein makes a compelling argument that the secret of Jewish success and survival over the millennia has been our willingness to “balance new and old, innovation and tradition, flexibility and rigidity.” As we look at how to address the great challenges facing the Jewish people in America, it’s clear that engaging Israeli-Americans and the broader Jewish-American community in closer conversation can advance solutions. Building wider and deeper partnerships between Israeli-Americans and Jewish- Americans will benefit all, bringing a new vibrancy to Jewish life in our country and all over the world.

The author is an Israeli-American philanthropist, national chairman of the Israeli-American Council, real estate entrepreneur and president of the Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation.

When you read this, you might realize this story is about you. Please forgive me. I have the utmost respect for you and your work. However, this lesson is just too valuable not to share.

Last month, I was approached by a group of professionals who had a simple yet brilliant idea: They needed $150,000 in order to create a high-quality program that would be taught to three million high school students every year. They told me that their team had the professional skills to build this incredible program. They also had connections to networks that would help the program actually reach three million high school students every year.

“How do you know that the teachers will want to teach this program?” I asked.

“It’s easy,” they responded. “We have connections that will make this possible.”

“Do you have any letter, agreement, or proof that this will work?”

“No.”

“Have you asked your networks if they will do it?”

“No.”

“Has anyone else pledged to fund this program already?”

“No.”

There are many things we look for in projects. But, I didn’t see a reason to continue the conversation until I saw a letter confirming that the program would indeed be taught to three million high school students, as they claimed. What else can I do? The best program in the world is completely worthless if it cannot be implemented on the ground.

It’s been over a month and a half, and I haven’t heard back from them.

Here’s the thing: This is a group of very intelligent people, but I don’t know them. I’ve never worked with them and I don’t know other people who know them. I don’t have the expertise to assess the quality of their program. I like the subject, but how do I know for sure if the program is good? Professionals in high schools should make that call. All I need is a letter. But they called me before they made the phone call that would get them that letter—an easy task, according to them. They jumped to fundraising before they collected the low-hanging fruit.

Now, let’s step outside of the nonprofit sphere and into the business world. You have a product. You think it’s an amazing product. You want to manufacture large quantities of it, but you need to fundraise in order to be able to manufacture that first batch. Under what circumstances do you think it would be easier to fundraise—with or without a purchase order of three million units?

The answer is clear. Your company’s valuation will be much higher if you have a letter from someone who wants to buy three million units. As the founder, if you know that you are one easy-to-get letter away from increasing your valuation, you go and get that letter before you pitch to venture capital firms.

The situation I described happens again, and again, and again.

Recently we were approached by two young men with an amazing, out-of-the-box idea that has the potential to have a tremendous impact. I mean unprecedentedly big—at least in our sphere, in my humble opinion. The problem is that there are a few operational elements that have not been figured out yet. I offered my advice and said that we would try to help with the fundraising if they improved their operational plan. They said it would be a few days. Four weeks later they emailed to apologize for the delay. I had to respond that unfortunately, due to the long delay, we can no longer consider supporting the project. It doesn’t matter why there was a four-week delay, all that matters is that the project is not a high priority, and if it’s not a high priority for the people running it, we cannot spend the foundation’s money on it. No disrespect—these really are unusual circumstances—but whatever the circumstances may be, what matters is that we cannot be rest assured that the project is managed properly.

It’s frustrating because these are good ideas, coming from smart, capable people. These projects are not going to make them rich, but they would further our cause. They are passionate about their projects and they are reaching out to foundations that can help make their ideas possible. But by reaching out too soon, they are shooting themselves in the foot because they come across as unprepared, which raises the worst kinds of questions in a donor’s mind.

I know that feeling, the feeling of having an amazing idea, an idea so good it would make me a millionaire or change the world. But you can’t go asking strangers for money—even if they are called a foundation and even if you share the same mission—before you have taken the idea as far as you can by yourself, as a token of thoroughness, seriousness, and dedication. For more on this see my blog about the difference between foundations and bank accounts.

Another extremely talented young man I know, highly respected in our community, told me once, “Man, if only someone gave me, person B, and person C a million dollars, we would change things around.” I had to wake him up. Buddy, no one is giving you a million dollars. You need to come up with a plan, budget it, try it out, prove that it works, and then go raise the money.

If you go back to my older posts, you will see an overarching theme:frustration. There is so much wisdom out there, so many great ideas and capable people. But many of those great ideas get lost when people fail to raise funds for their unproven concepts and incoherently presented plans, and those small mistakes have a big cost.

If you have an idea that you are serious about, if you can prove that it would make an impact, and if you have done everything in your power to get the idea as far as possible, I welcome you to reach out to me so that I can potentially help you bring it to the next phase.

“Put your money where your mouth is,” they say. I’ll make it easier on you: Put your time where your idea is.

Never again. That was the sacred vow made by the Jewish people over the past 70 years in the wake of the Holocaust.

Following the murder of six million of our brethren by the Nazis, the Jewish people have come to recognize that we have only ourselves to rely on for our defense.

When the going gets tough, no one else will come to fight for us.

And in today’s tumultuous world, the sole guarantor of Jewish safety is a strong Israeli military. Jews facing mortal danger in any corner of the globe can count on Israel to protect them.

No event in recent years symbolized this more than the Israel Air Force flyover of the Auschwitz death camps, in what is now Poland, in September 2003. After being invited to take a part in an air show marking the 85th anniversary of the founding of the Polish Air Force, three IAF F-15 Eagle fighter jets, all piloted by descendants of Holocaust survivors, flew to Auschwitz and thundered through the skies above the camp where nearly one million Jews were slaughtered between 1940 and 1945 while the world stood by and did nothing.

The message of the flyover mission was clear: unlike the Allied forces during World War II, who patrolled the skies above the death camps but refrained from bombing Auschwitz and its rail roads for “lack of resources,” Israel will never leave Jews to their fate. 

Never again means never again.

Israel will see to that, no matter the consequences.

As the IAF’s F-15s were soaring over the camps, hundreds of IDF commanders on the ground proudly sang “Hatikva,” the Israeli national anthem, the title of which means “the hope” in English.
 

One of the Israeli pilots was Amir Eshel, now the commander of the IAF. In a radio message broadcast to a delegation of IDF soldiers gathered down below at Auschwitz, Eshel declared, “We pilots of the Israel Air Force, flying in the skies above the camp of horrors, arose from the ashes of the millions of victims and shoulder their silent cries, salute their courage, and promise to be the shield of the Jewish people and its nation Israel.”

His words succinctly capture the story of the State of Israel. Our homeland was established with blood, sweat and grit by a battered, but brave and defiant Jewish people. We overcame all odds and built a thriving democracy in our ancient homeland in the heart of the Middle East.

Before Israel’s founding in 1948, Jews were easy prey. They could run but they were not safe. Not anymore, never again! Thanks to its strength, the Israel Defense Force is fulfilling its true purpose – to serve as the ultimate insurance policy for the Jewish people against our enemies.

If history has taught us anything, it is that others will try to annihilate the Jews again and again in the future. But whenever the next time comes, we will not be helpless. Israel, with all its might and determination, is not going anywhere. It will do whatever is necessary to eliminate threats posed by those who seek the Jewish people’s destruction.

In the early 1930s, people across the world – including many of the most successful and assimilated Jews in Europe – wrote off Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism, believing that he would never actually act on his words. Little could they imagine the disaster that would be brought upon the entire world by Hitler’s madness just a few years later, leading to the death of tens of millions and the destruction of half the world.

If Hitler’s intentions had been taken seriously early on, he could have been stopped. The Holocaust was further evidence that Jews are the proverbial canary in the coal mine. When Jews are persecuted, slandered or unfairly singled out, this does not bode well for others.

While Jews are often the first to be targeted by tyrants and bigots, it almost never ends with the Jews.

Remember that the next time you hear the news about an IDF operation. When Israel goes to war, it is not doing so just for its citizens or Jews around world.

When Israel fights, it does so on behalf of Western civilization as a whole. Israel is the floodgate – it sits on a strategic fault line between enlightenment and tyranny.

In the not-too-distant future, we will be without any Holocaust survivors who can provide us with direct personal accounts of the horrors they suffered. But the lessons of the Holocaust are more relevant than ever and they must be passed on to future generations.

This month, we lost one of the great bearers of these lessons, Elie Wiesel, who said of this cause, “Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.”

As Wiesel often shared, one of the most important ways to safeguard the memory of the Holocaust is to strengthen and support Israel. The Jewish state stands as a vivid rejection of everything the Nazis believed in. As long as the Jewish people can defend ourselves by ourselves, we will flourish and prosper for generations to come. And so will the world.

The author is an Israeli-American philanthropist, national chairman of the Israeli-American Council, real estate entrepreneur and president of the Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation.

 This month (May 2016), I authored a piece in the Jerusalem Post focused on one of the most pressing challenges facing the Jewish people in America today: how to connect our next generation to their Jewish heritage, instill in them a sense of pride in their Jewish identity, and connect them to their Jewish homeland. In recent years, this has been a frequent subject of conversation and a source of controversy, with the now infamous 2013 Pew Research Center study, “A Portrait of Jewish Americans” showing a serious decrease in Jewish affiliation among millennials and a disconnect between them and Israel.

I presented what I see as one of our community’s most effective solutions to this great challenge: Israeliness. Israeliness is the identity of the people who have been living in Israel for the last century and those who left Israel and moved to the diaspora. It incorporates many elements, including Israeli culture; Jewish values; Hebrew, the modern version of the biblical language; pride in the Jewish tradition and history; a deep belief in Zionism (believing in the right of the Jewish people to live freely in their homeland); a connection to the Land of Israel; and a commitment to the idea that the Jewish people around the globe are brothers, sisters, in one big family.

I’ve seen firsthand how Israeliness can attract, engage, and inspire American Jews, particularly the next generation of Jewish Americans – and how Israeli-Americans are uniquely positioned to serve as champions and ambassadors of Israeliness in the United States.

The replies to my article came in quickly. Many loved the idea. Some people didn’t comprehend what I meant when I wrote Israeliness. They had NO IDEA what I was talking about. Others said, “Adam, we love the concept, but how can we implement it?”

The short answer is that this is no longer merely a vision, but a reality. More than a dozen programs built by the Israeli-American Council (IAC) in partnership with the broader Jewish community are spreading Israeliness all across the U.S. Through the IAC’s work, we are seeing how Israeliness—and Israeli-Americans—have the capacity to change the landscape of Jewish life for the next generation.

Here are five ways that Israeli-Americans are engaging the broader Jewish community.

1. We are leveraging Israeliness to bring young people into the community. The IAC exposes American Jews to Israeliness through bilingual programs like Eitanim, which uses the inspiration of Israeli entrepreneurs and innovation along with a special project-based curriculum to cultivate leadership skills in high school students. Despite starting just this January, there are already hundreds of participants across the country from both the Israeli-American and Jewish-American communities. We also have Mishelanu, which provides a home for Israeli-Americans and pro-Israel college students through programming focused around the Hebrew language and Israeli identity building. It is the fastest-growing Jewish program on college campuses. Other programs focus on young professionals, like Dor Chadash and BINA, bring together Americans and Israeli-Americans for gatherings inspired by Israeli culture, offering everything from social and business networking to intellectual salons.

2. We are igniting Jewish pride and heritage for those who are not interested in going to synagogue. Recently, the IAC opened the first Israeli Community Center in the U.S. We are building partnerships run Israeli Centers inside JCC’s all across the country. These centers serve the Israeli-Americans and the broader Jewish community through activities centered on Israeli culture, art, music, and food. They can provide a home for programs like Shishi Israel—a Friday night “Israeli-style” Kabbalat Shabbat dinner filled with Israeli music and culture, and food, which bring the joy of Shabbat – and a reignited sense of Jewish pride – into families that were long unaffiliated with the “temple-going” crowd. We also organize and encourage Shabbat dinners at our homes where we bring our Jewish-American friends to enjoy our food and culture with us. Through the IAC, many young, Jewish Americans are finding a way express their Judaism through an Israeli lens, which is not necessarily religious.

Israeli-American Council’s Celebrate Israel Festival. Photo credit: Abraham Joseph Pal.

3. We are uniting all different strands of Jews—religious and secular—under one umbrella. Israeliness means Jewish identity without religious affiliation. It means being Jewish without the label of Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform. Israeliness means being proud to be who we are, with courage, and standing up for what we believe in. It means not judging people from where they came from – whether Ashkenazic, Sephardic, secular, or Orthodox. This month’s Celebrate Israel Festival brought together Jews of all backgrounds in six major cities, and was the largest celebration of the Jewish State outside of Israel. We provide a space for everyone from the orthodox to the unaffiliated and all those in between to come together in a place that they never would before.

4. We are bringing the joy and vibrancy of Hebrew to American Jewish life. Hebrew unites Jews not just because it is our historical language or even because it is the language of the Jewish state: it is the language of our ancestors, beautiful and rich in history and nuance. It should be the second-language in every Jewish home (or the first if you live in Israel). We offer programs like Keshet (previously known as Sifriyat Pijama), which brings Hebrew into the home from the earliest years of life, providing young families with free Hebrew-language children’s books that teach Jewish values. More than a quarter of the participants are Americans Jews with basic Hebrew knowledge. They seek to improve their language skills, while teaching their kids Hebrew. As the co-founders of this program, my wife Gila and I hear over and over how it is changing life for more than 18,000 families across America.

5. We are bringing a fresh pair of eyes and energetic spirit to how we think about American Jewish life. Israelis are famously bold. Our ingenuity and willingness to take risks turned a sparse desert into a thriving oasis of high-tech innovation. Israeli-Americans can bring this same spirit when it comes to community building. The IAC’s rapid growth in just a few years from a single region to a national Movement reaching 250,000 people show that this willingness to take risks can yield huge rewards. We are willing to fight anti-Semitism and BDS, and we are gaining friends and allies in the Jewish-American community to help us in this fight.

In his new book, Flexigidty, Gidi Grinstein, Founder and CEO of the Reut Institute, a well-respected Israeli think tank, makes a compelling argument: he says that the secret of Jewish success and survival over the millennia has been a willingness to “balance new and old, innovation and tradition, flexibility and rigidity”. As we look at how to address the great challenges facing the Jewish people in America, it is clear that engaging Israeli-Americans and the next generation of Jewish-Americans in new ways must be part of the solution. Building wider and deeper partnerships between Israeli-Americans and Jewish-Americans will benefit all, bringing new vibrancy to Jewish life in our country and all over the world.