“No one at Nicolet [High School] cares,” said Abigail Lutsky, a recent graduate. “I wish it wasn’t true, but it is.”
Lutsky is an example of the most engaged type of American Jew. She attended Jewish day school. Every summer, she attends a progressive Zionist summer camp and will spend a “gap year” in Israel next year before beginning college in 2011. Her father’s side of the family all lives in Israel.
Still, she has “fallen behind” in the news, she admitted, and missed out on the two recent controversies — the flotilla sent from Turkey that aimed to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza and famed journalist Helen Thomas’ remarks that Israeli Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine.”
Lutsky missed the controversies but what about other Jewish high school students? The Chronicle set out to talk with a diverse sample of Jewish students at Nicolet to discover what they think about the Jewish state.
Much has been made of the divergent attitudes toward Israel among those born before and after 1967. To the older Jews, Zionism is a given. But their children do not have the same automatic commitment to the Jewish state.
Out of this lack of connection springs a general state of indifference and ignorance to the State of Israel. Of the five people interviewed (of whom two plan to live in Israel next year), three knew nothing about the flotilla-related violence near Gaza, one had a general sense that the events involved Israelis killing people, and only one (the Israeli) knew what had actually happened.
Where do they get their news? Well, Lutsky gets it from her family. The other four garner their news about Israel mainly from their Yahoo homepage/YahooNews.
According to comScore, last December YahooNews drew almost 130 million unique visitors — the highest total of any news site. That puts a lot of power over Jewish teen opinion into the hands of those who choose the Yahoo headlines.
Even when students are exposed to pro-Israel information, it is removed from the rest of their lives. They may talk about Israel at family dinners, youth group events and Jewish summer camps but what’s discussed there stays there.
Nicolet junior Hannah Sandock remarked that Israel Day at her summer camp is “inspirational, but inspiration normally falls flat when you leave. It makes you want to find out more, be active, but you don’t afterwards.”
‘It’s our home’
Every single student interviewed — and they come from a range of non-Orthodox backgrounds, from a Conservative Israeli to two who never go to synagogue — offered the same rationale for Israel’s existence: “Jews need somewhere to go.”
“It’s the only Jewish country in the world,” said Uri Ish-Shalom, a junior who is returning to Israel — his birthplace — at the end of the summer. It’s important “to keep the Jewish race alive, to give the Jews a homeland. It’s always a place for Jews to go.”
Sandock agreed: “Jews have always been kicked from place to place to place…. It’s ours. We finally have somewhere.”
“It gives the Jews a homeland and something to look to. It’s a home,” said Anatoli Berezovsky, a senior.
This remarkable uniformity suggests a few things. First, deep within Jews lies an awareness that we are in exile. Though America may be good to us, it is our host country and not our home. (Alternatively, perhaps Israel-as-homeland is the only rationale they’ve been taught and have not contemplated deeply Zionism and Israel.)
Second, it speaks to a deep desire to stand up for our people. Sandock listed a litany of wrongs committed against the Jews, including the Holocaust and Inquisition.
But Israel proves “that the Jews are strong. We can fend off all the strong countries around us,” she said. The Israel-the-strong narrative combats the seemingly endless harping on Jewish victimhood that students say they are tired of hearing.
For all the apparent dispassion about the Jewish state, Lutsky reported lively debates among her friends that perfectly reflect Israel-related discussions worldwide.
“When I talk about it with my [non-Nicolet] Jewish friends, everyone has their own opinion. It always ends up in a yelling match.”
Chronicle intern Keith Lewis graduated from Nicolet High School last month and will attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall.
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