What Israel Means to American Jews
I can’t speak for all, but I think I’m on the mark here…
I was nine years old when the Six Day War happened. In just a few days everything changed. Israelis strode mightily across headlines the world over. David Rubinger’s classic photo portrayed a new Jew, the muscular Yid who didn’t take crap from anybody, not even three powerful Arab nations.
In the back of our Hebrew school weekly readers this photo appeared with text balloons added. One of the massed prisoner Arabs says to another:
There’s only one of them and a hundred of us, maybe we should rush him.
No, says another, I don’t like the odds.
Israelis became a kind of redemption.
Redemption from the image of the Jew, docile and submissive, herded by the thousands into cars built for the cattle they resembled before being stripped naked and gassed like the vermin Zyklon B was created to exterminate.
Not these men and women. They created an entirely new paradigm of the tough, hard-muscled Jew who didn’t…
