If you had been almost anywhere in the Milwaukee Jewish community between Oct. 13 and 21, you likely at some point would have seen an energetic and compact man, 30-something but looking younger, with dark hair, glasses and a big smile, speaking in a lilting South African accent about Israel.
His name is Jonty Blackman and he is a “freelance educator,” according to remarks by Alon Galron, Israel emissary and director of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Israel Center.
In a packed schedule, Blackman spoke at synagogues, day schools, the Hillel Foundation-Milwaukee, Chai Point Senior Living Apartment Complex and the MJF.
In each appearance, he sought to “try to bring Israel to the community and create a forum in which people would be able to delve into their connection to Israel [and] consider how Israel informs their Jewish identities,” he told The Chronicle.
In an interview on his last day before flying out of Milwaukee, Blackman said that he believed he had succeeded. “The response has been very positive,” he said. “People wanted to hear more.”
Moreover, “I had a really good time,” he said. “People were very friendly [and] very warm to me.”
A good sample of his work and his approach to it was seen at an in-service held for MJF professional staff members on the relationship between Israel and U.S. Jewry.
Worldwide, he said, many if not most members of the Jewish community feel themselves to be one family, such that if Jews are hurting in one part of the world, Jews elsewhere will “feel it in your fingertips.”
But “families are sometimes dysfunctional” or contain members who “don’t like each other” or “have issues” with each other, he said.
So he asked the group of about 20 people — several of whom have made multiple visits or lived for some time in Israel — to have a group “psychotherapy session” and express their “gut feelings” about what annoys them about Israel and Israelis; and what they think Israelis find irritating about American Jews.
Blackman then had two members of the group enact a “psychodrama” in which one played Israel and the other American Jewry and attempted to have an honest discussion about this topic.
Next, Blackman handed out texts that illustrated three different “models” of Israel-Diaspora relations. The first was a passage from the Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Berachot 30a) mandating that all Jews outside the land of Israel should “direct their hearts” to the land and Jerusalem. In this model, all Jews are like spokes on a wheel whose center is Jerusalem; and by all of us “facing this one place, we are all facing each other,” Blackman said.
The second text was a passage from “Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic” (1977) by Hillel Halkin, an American-born Israeli. In this model, Blackman said, Israel is the stage on which Jewish history is being played, and Diaspora Jews are spectators.
The third text was a poem by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, “The Diameter of the Bomb.” This describes how a terrorist’s bomb has a stone-thrown-in-water ripple effect that reaches beyond its immediate targets to victims’ family members in distant countries and even “up to the throne of God and beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.”
This posits a model of Diaspora Jews and Israelis bound together by fate and a ripple effect of events that enclose all Jews everywhere, Blackman said.
Blackman acknowledged that with American culture having so much influence internationally, “many other Jewish communities feel themselves to be on the periphery more than in the States.”
And he expressed hope that Israel and Diaspora Jewry can reduce the tension between them so “a wonderful relationship can develop.”
Blackman came here through MELITZamerica, a project of Melitz and the Archeological Seminars Foundation. Melitz is an Israeli non-profit agency that provides “informal educational services” in Israel and the Diaspora, according to its Web site.
Blackman was brought here by the Israel Center in cooperation with the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning and the Coalition for Jewish Learning, the education program of the federation. His appearance was made possible primarily by a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation, the federation’s endowment development program.
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