Many of us who support Israel have watched with a mixture of sadness and resignation as the Israeli army attacked militant strongholds in Gaza, killing about equal numbers of soldiers and civilians. This incursion was inevitable. The daily barrage of rockets from Gaza into Israeli towns, deliberately killing and injuring civilians, destroying homes, and completely disrupting life has increased steadily, and the range and size of rockets has increased too.

What would any other country do? The response, deemed disproportionate by many critics, was directed at armed enemies, and about fifty of them were killed. The civilian deaths were much more than regrettable–they were tragic. Of course, the fact that the terrorists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad live and attack Israel from positions embedded among innocent civilians makes “collateral damage” inevitably greater.

No doubt this action was coordinated with Condoleeza Rice’s visit to the region over the last few days. Yesterday at a joint press conference, both she and Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni seemed subdued and cautious. Rice condemned the rockets and supported Israel’s right to defend itself while cautioning it against causing civilian casualties. Livni declared that Israel withdrew from Gaza and dismantled Jewish settlements there in 2005 because it has no desire to be there.

Meanwhile, West Bank leader Mahmoud Abbas and his government had suspended peace talks with Israel in protest against the Gaza incursion—a perfectly reasonable and even pro forma response. However, as Rice announced, talks will now resume.

Also predictably and wisely in both political and strategic terms, Israeli Defense Minister and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced the evacuation of three or four illegal outposts to settlements in the West Bank. This is potentially very important.

Even the United States under George W. Bush has repeatedly condemned the construction of these outposts (there are twenty-six in all) and called for their elimination. The fact that this announcement comes immediately after the Gaza incursion and the Rice visit cannot be accidental. We have to hope that this is the beginning of a series of pragmatic concessions by Israel to the inevitable reality of a Palestinian state.

Also below the radar in the past few days is the announcement that the ancient and beautiful West Bank city of Jericho will soon begin to get its electricity from Jordan instead of Israel, a small but meaningful step toward Palestinian independence. This of course would not have happened without Israeli agreement, possible because Jordan has cooperated with Israel for many years.

These initial steps show that Israel accepts the two-state solution and that progress is being made, but more must be done. The rest of the illegal outposts must be eliminated soon. Aggressive investment, both private and public, in cooperation with Jordan, must be undertaken quickly to revitalize the West Bank economy and give its people hope. And some steps must be taken to ease travel restrictions and reduce the number of check-points that pepper the West Bank. I have watched them work; they are not usually inhumane but they are thoroughly humiliating and place a net of strangling restraints on Palestinian economic activity and therefore on legitimate Palestinian dreams.

Yes, easing the check-points involves risk for Israel. But the risk of missing the present opportunity for peace is much greater. Gaza will continue to fester for some time, but the leadership in the West Bank, their dispute with Hamas, and the great wish in the Bush administration for near-term progress present a window of opportunity. If Israel lets it close without real action, there is no telling what the cost may be.

One midnight in May of 2000, I sat with a group of Palestinians in beautiful Jericho, sipping syrupy coffee under a vast dome of stars while children played around us. The fathers of these children had been in Israeli jails during the first intifada, but in 2000 they were looking toward the future and hoping for peace with dignity.

Notwithstanding the second intifada, the illegal expansion of Jewish settlements, Israel’s war with Hezbollah, and the civil war in Gaza, I am sure that they still hope for nothing more or less than peace with dignity for themselves and their children, and that means independence. For its own sake as well as theirs, Israel had better start giving it to them soon.

Many in the American Jewish community received in the last few days a book called Standing With Israel, by a Jewish author, David Brog, mailed out by Christians United for Israel. Some of my best friends, both Jewish and liberal Protestant, get the heebie-jeebies when they see this stuff. I used to, but here’s why I don’t any more.

Last spring the Jewish community of Atlanta was invited to join the congregation of Trinity Chapel, a suburban “mega-church” in Powder Springs, Georgia. In a more-than-two hour program in a vast modern chapel seating 4,000 people, I saw and heard the things that changed my mind.

First, in this long program with many speakers, there was not one mention of Jesus, and there was not a single cross displayed anywhere; they had all been taken down. But there were plenty of blue-and-white flags with Stars of David.

Second, speaker after speaker apologized in one way or another for centuries of oppression of Jews by Christians. One said, “Countless times the Jewish people have had to stand alone against this oppression. We are here to tell you that you will never again stand alone.” Huge applause.

Third, there were four Jewish Holocaust survivors present. They were introduced by name in a solemn ceremony, and one of them came up onto the stage to light a large memorial candle. Standing ovation.

Fourth, several speakers, pastors of the church, turned centuries of Christian theology upside down. Instead of the classical secessionist or replacement theology, according to which Jews must convert or be damned, they expressed their strong belief that the Jewish people are their elder siblings and represent their roots, that Jews are God’s chosen people and must be protected by every God-fearing Christian. Loud applause again and again.

Fifth, there was no talk of end-times and no hint of an idea that Jews must be gathered to Israel in order for Jesus to return. I am not saying that no one in the Trinity Chapel believes that, but if they do it was certainly far in the background, as was any idea that the Jews will convert in the “last days.” Since I don’t believe in the second coming of Jesus, I am not worried.

What I did hear was an intense belief in the Bible—including the Jewish Bible–and an acceptance of it as theological proof that Jews have a right to the Land of Israel. No-one, the preachers said, can claim to believe in the Bible without supporting the right of Jews to have a Jewish state in the Holy Land. This too came up again and again to thunderous applause.

As Standing With Israel shows, Christian Zionism has deep roots going back at least to the mid-1800s. Lord Balfour was one, as was Orde Wingate, who helped create the Israeli army; so, to a lesser extent perhaps, were Winston Churchill and Harry Truman. They were not evangelicals, but their Christian beliefs strengthened their Zionism, and it is doubtful whether Israel would have come into being without them.

By the way, the Christians of Trinity Chapel put their money where their mouth is. Trinity alone had already raised $90,000 and rebuilt a Jewish community center in the north of Israel near the Lebanon border—a center destroyed by Hezbollah rockets in the summer of 2006. They raised a lot more that evening and still much more since.

One speaker, a lay leader of the church, pointed out that “our Jewish friends” had recently celebrated the holiday of Purim. She began to give an eloquent précis of the Book of Esther, clearly leading up to an object lesson about the evils of anti-Semitism. When she mentioned Haman’s name, thousands of Christians stamped their feet and booed.

How did they know to do this? Obviously, from a lot of experiences they had in that church when Jews were not present. It is inconceivable that the spirit of this evening, including the deep respect for Jews as Jews, was anything other than an authentic outpouring of affection and admiration for both Israel and the Jewish people.

“What is it you like about them?” an ultra-liberal Jewish friend asked me the other day. “Is it their stand on abortion or on gays? Or is it their belief that Israel should never give up any land for peace?”

In fact I don’t like any of those things about them; I like them, not their views on every subject. I also love my wife, my kids, my brother, and my friends, every one of whom has opinions on important issues that I don’t always share. I like the evangelical Zionists because they like and respect me for what I am, and because they fiercely defend Israel and the Jewish people. Given the opportunity, I will tell them what I think about other issues and try to persuade them, but if I don’t succeed there will still be a bond.

Not just Brog in Standing With Israel, but journalist Zev Chafetz in A Match Made in Heaven, about “the weird and wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance,” and other Jews of all denominations have concluded as I have: With friends like these…Jews can breathe a little easier, and so can the Jewish state.

Last week, within twenty-four hours, I got emails from old friends I respect with forwards on opposing sides of this question. One was from a small group of distinguished attorneys, mostly Jewish, decrying an anti-Obama smear campaign and passing around information, mostly from the National Jewish Democratic Coalition, attempting to show that Obama supports Israel, period. The other was from two physicians, professors at top-ten medical schools, whom I knew many years ago as students at Emory; both were very distressed about what they had recently learned about Obama–mainly from right-wing bloggers.

These incompatible views reflect an unpleasant debate going on in the Jewish community about Obama’s real views. The debate is thoroughly intertwined with politics, and it includes what has been called a smear campaign from the right, condemned by a formal letter from top leaders of non-partisan Jewish organizations, including Abe Foxman of ADL and Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. It also includes expressions of very serious doubt about Obama from staunch Democrats like Alan Dershowitz.

My own politics, for the record, include working on the 1972 presidential campaign of Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to run for that office, and a New York Times op-ed supporting Jesse Jackson for president in 1988—a piece that produced hate mail from fellow Jews. Nevertheless I can’t give Obama a pass, not because I am sure what he will do about Israel but because I am not.

Here are the facts. The NJDC rightly points to evidence that Obama is a staunch Israel-supporter.  They quote his speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee meeting last March, in which he described flying over Israel’s narrow waist in an IDF helicopter, spoke movingly of the Holocaust, supported Israel’s right to respond to Hezbollah with force, decried Iran’s hate-mongering and strongly opposed any future access it might have to nuclear weapons. He said, "We must preserve our total commitment to our unique defense relationship with Israel by fully funding military assistance and continuing work on the Arrow and related missile defense programs. This would help Israel maintain its military edge and deter and repel attacks from as far as Tehran and as close as Gaza." He has said similar things on other occasions since, usually but not always to Jewish audiences.

Furthermore, Obama co-sponsored legislation enabling sanctions against Iran and also the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, which fully supports Israel’s right to respond appropriately to terrorist attacks. Finally, he wrote to our U.N. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, saying, “the Security Council should unequivocally condemn the rocket attacks against Israel, and should make clear that Israel has the right to defend itself against such actions.” These are deeds, not just words, and they strongly support Israel.

So what’s the problem? For one thing, two weeks after his reassuring AIPAC speech, he made the now-famous gaffe, “Nobody suffers more than the Palestinians.” His later claim to have meant from the failures of the Palestinian leadership gave rise to some understandable skepticism. Asked at the Iowa debate about America’s best friends, he spoke eloquently about NATO and Japan. As Susan Estrich (a Clintonite) put it, “Obama didn’t get that this was the Israel question.” So Brian Williams tried to help him, but he continued to fumble. Mistakes are forgivable, but what people say off-the-cuff can be more informative than what they say in prepared speeches.

As for the AIPAC speech, many politicians spoke at that conference as always. Some, like Hillary Clinton and Mitch McConnell, spoke with great conviction. Obama, famous now for his political passion and eloquence, did not. The legislation he co-sponsored had very wide support in Congress. And his letter to the UN Security Council, dated Jan. 22, 2008, has to be seen in the context of an increasingly intense bid for the White House.

But some other facts on the ground are concerning. These have to do with the people around Obama, especially the ones he has chosen to advise him on foreign affairs and the Middle East in particular. George Soros is one; he has been a relentless critic of Israel and of Jewish-American support for Israel, has used his vast wealth to support its severest critics, and advocates pressuring Israel to deal with Hamas.

Another is Samantha Power, a distinguished writer on genocide who does not seem to grasp the role of the Holocaust in the history of the Jewish state. She said recently that America’s foreign policy makers “defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and…replicate Israeli tactics” because “special interests dictate the way in which the ‘national interest’ as a whole is defined and pursued.” It is obvious from the context that she means Jewish Americans. She also implicates Israel in the lead-up to the Iraq war; while this claim has become a staple of anti-Semitic rhetoric, it is well known that Israel privately opposed the war as destabilizing to the region, supporting it (like a good ally) only when it became inevitable.

Zbigniew Brzezinski is a third key Obama Middle East advisor; this relic of the Carter administration helped shape Carter’s increasingly strident anti-Israel views, and has published countless articles attacking the Jewish state and its Jewish-American friends. For some reason, he has been exhumed by the candidate of the future; Alan Dershowitz is one loyal Democrat who has called on Obama to get rid of Zbig. Dershowitz supports Hillary.

Last but perhaps most disturbing is Robert Malley, who famously tried to rewrite the history of the Clinton administration’s  peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians; contrary to the clear description of President Clinton, Dennis Ross, and others directly involved, Malley blamed Israel for the failure of talks that Yasser Arafat walked away from. (President Clinton, in contrast, said that Arafat had “been here fourteen days and said no to everything.”)

This is Barack Obama’s Middle East advisory team–and we have not yet mentioned his personal pastor and long-time friend Jeremiah Wright, who has for many years used his pulpit for venomous anti-Israel and borderline anti-Semitic sermonizing; the church has given an award to Louis Farrakhan.

Obama also has Dennis Ross on his foreign policy bench, and that is a balancing sign, but as it stands most of his close advisers are very bad for Israel. It is noteworthy that Martin Peretz, New Republic editor, centrist Democrat, and staunch friend to Israel, has pronounced Obama unequivocally pro-Israel.

But there is little doubt that the other two candidates left standing would be more predictable; the panel of Israeli experts assembled by Ha’aretz, the left-of-center “New York Times of Israel” has ranked Obama markedly lower than any other serious candidate since the start of this presidential season.

The standard reply to the criticism that Obama lacks experience is, Don’t worry, it will be who he appoints that matters. Well if, as is often the case with candidates, campaign advisors are likely to get the relevant government jobs, we can legitimately wonder if an Obama administration would be a true friend to Israel.

Fortunately there is an easy way for Obama to remove all doubt among Jewish voters: He can get rid of his anti-Israel advisors. Until he does that, questioning whether his fine speeches on Israel will lead to good deeds is no right-wing or even pro-Hillary smear campaign, it’s just common sense.

What do you do with a Lubavitcher Chasid who once spent two years in army tactical intelligence? Make him principal of one of the scariest junior highs in the South Bronx, of course.

Last Friday’s New York Times had a front-page article on 39-year-old Shimon Waronker, who not only fits this improbable description but actually has made the school work. The photo just below the fold showed the Chabadnik in his suit, tie and velvet yarmulke, with his hand on the shoulder of a smiling African-American boy, surrounded by other pleasant-looking minority-group kids. It’s not a scene I remember from my junior high in Brooklyn, where the principal was a battleaxe who never smiled at anyone.

It’s also not what you would have run across in 2004, when Waronker arrived. Gangs roamed the schools and threatened kids, smoking, drinking, and who knows what else was common in the bathrooms, attendance levels were ridiculous, and the school had ripped through six principals in two years. It was ranked one of the twelve most dangerous schools in New York, and rumor said the strange Jew who thought he could handle it would be gone by the end of his first year.

Not only is he still there, the Chancellor of New York City’s schools wants to “clone him.” Attendance is over 93 percent, and although the school still has a lot of catching up to do, its test scores have gone up so much it got an A on the city’s report card. (A note to the Chancellor: Orthodox Jews are keen on reproductive technology, and even human cloning is kosher for some purposes.)

Who is this miracle worker? He was born in Chile and spoke only Spanish when he came to Maryland with his parents at age 11. ROTC and army service came along, after which he began thirsting after Torah. As a baal t’shuvah (returning Jew) studying at a yeshiva, he found his personal path, but his calling was teaching, and his drive to repair the world led him to Mayor Bloomberg’s principal-training academy.

When he showed up in the South Bronx, many people were skeptical to say the least. Not only did it look like culture shock, it looked like an impending train wreck. Black-Hat-and-Beard meets Hip-Hop? One mother wanted to know if the new Jewish principal was planning to charge the kids for lunch.

His military experience came in handy—“textbook counterinsurgency,” he says. He held elections to co-opt the popular kids and gave them lessons in leadership. (“It’s like they figured out our game,” one fifteen-year-old complained.) He required khaki pants and white shirts as uniforms and suspended students for things like slouching and yawning in class. He asked some teachers to patrol the roof with walkie-talkies on Halloween to prevent a hail of potatoes and eggs as happened in previous years. “You control the heights, you control the terrain,” he said.

He also sent most of the school for etiquette lessons at an upscale restaurant, bought them all copies of a book on “The Five Secrets of Teen Success,” and gave the boy pictured in the photo—he was getting into fights but Waronker thought he was promising—a copy of (are you ready?) Jane Austen’s Emma, “so he could see a different world.” That, plus daily meetings with the youngster helped a lot.

Innovative academic programs now make the school stand out, including bilingual classes mixing native Spanish or French speakers with English speakers, and special-interest academies within the school. Field trips from camping to museums and West Point broaden the kids’ world. Waronker’s dedication is legendary; at one point his wife (they have six kids) teased him, saying he should sleep on a cot at school instead of bothering to subway home to Crown Heights. Above all perhaps, his personal touch with students, parents and teachers made the difference.

And of course, he believes God has helped him. But why not at a yeshiva in Crown Heights? “We’re all connected,” he says. Many would say he is also helping God complete the work of creation. Shimon Waronker is good for the world and absolutely, totally good for the Jews.

(This entry is based on The New York Times report by Elissa Gootman and the C.I.S. 22 School Profile at insideschools.org.)

On a warm winter evening a few weeks ago, three rabbis I am fond of—one Orthodox, one Conservative, and one Reform—returned to Atlanta to talk about what it’s like to be Israeli—or to try to be. Although retired from local pulpits, each has a well-earned national reputation.

Emmanuel Feldman has written many books and was for decades the editor of the distinguished Orthodox journal Tradition. Our improbable friendship began a quarter century ago when I first moved to Atlanta. After he told a group of students about the need for strict construction of Jewish law, I asked him what the ultra-Orthodox men of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem think when he walks by without payes (side-locks) or a long black coat.

His keen sense of humor about himself carried us through that and other little rough spots. He does have a huge grey beard and lowering eyebrows that can seem intimidating until you are struck by the mildness in his eyes and voice. (Once when he came to talk to a class of mine, my young blond non-Jewish secretary said, “He really looks like a rabbi!”) Passion for Torah smolders out of him. He is the eighth generation of rabbis in his family, and his son (“Feldman the Ninth”) took over his pulpit. “Feldman the Tenth is running around the aisles of the shul these days,” he used to say, “but we don’t yet know which one he is.”

He’s famous for recruiting ba-alei t’shuva—returning Jews—building a great synagogue from a base of at least five hundred of them. I once asked him the secret of his success. “People would come and say, ‘Teach me to keep the sabbath and keep kosher,’ and I would say, ‘No, choose one.’”

Yet as a young rabbi in the late 1940s he arrived at what would be his lifelong pulpit and threatened to leave with his wife the day before Rosh Hashana because the congregants had taken down the mechitza—the partition between the sexes. It went up again.

The second, Arnie Goodman, has been a friend for twenty years. I belonged to his synagogue and (a few times a year at least) heard his elegantly crafted, precise sermons that reminded me of the Jewish gift for logic, interpretation, and law. He is in fact an attorney as well as a leading rabbi, and sat for years on the Conservative movement’s law committee.

Once he consulted me because I had written (for The New York Times) about biological factors in homosexuality. He wanted to understand whether it was a choice, and I explained that it usually isn’t, although of course any of us can in theory choose celibacy. His desire to know was intense. The committee issued a sort of encyclical about sexuality—humane, not legalistic–that clarified and liberalized the Conservative Jewish view.

Arnie came to my wife’s hospital room the day after her mastectomy. An avowed atheist, she kicked all other visitors out of the room, looked him with her classic steely gaze, and said, “What do you have to offer?” Whatever it was, it was not conventionally religious, and it did indeed comfort her. He also comforted my children after her death, and he helped me to keep them Jewish. Although there were many things in Jewish law that he could not and would not bend, he never looked down from a holier height. He saw the law as a living, growing tree the ancients had planted, to come to fruition in the future in ways not even Moses could envision. No wonder his congregation had two thousand families.

Stanley Davids was the third and the one I knew least well, but my one significant encounter with him was telling. While my wife was struggling with cancer he was too, but his was thought much worse. Both were much too young. Someone sent me a series of sermons he gave on what it was like to face death; they were remarkable–genuine emotion, philosophic calm, vulnerability, resolution, and a deep sense of the value of life. Since Margie was at the time consulting many kinds of healers, I asked him to see her, and he did. Although we were strangers to him, he helped her greatly.

As life and luck would have it, he has outlived her by a decade and appeared on that stage at Atlanta’s Hebrew Academy in January with my other two rabbi-friends. The three sat in easy chairs in a “living-room” setting, having a chat moderated by Cheryl Finkel, a distinguished Jewish educator of legendary warmth who built Atlanta’s Solomon Schechter School, the Epstein School, from a handful of pre-school children into a major institution.

All agreed it was difficult but important to live in Israel. Rabbi Feldman said he was always jet-lagged and hoped he always would be, acting as a human bridge between the two great Jewish communities. But for him, the real bridge is Torah. Rabbi Goodman said it helps to be crazy to be a Zionist, but he has to be there because it is where God and the Jewish people met. Oh, and his grandchildren, who speak Hebrew so fast he has to tell them to slow down. Rabbi Davids has on the wall of his apartment the proclamation of Israel’s statehood; it reminds him that the infamous British White Paper was nullified in the same language that ill-considered vows to God are nullified in the Kol Nidre prayer on the Day of Atonement.

It was remarkable to see them together. Rabbi Davids works toward a day when Jews of all denominations, along with their rabbis, will get equal treatment in Israel. He also fervently believes in Palestinian rights; when he says “Next year in Jerusalem” in Jerusalem, it is no contradiction, because the real Jerusalem, which will be Jewish but fair and pluralistic, is not yet there. He dreams of a time when Torah will flow not just from the text but from our lives.

Feldman, on the other hand, the Orthodox guardian of Torah, disparaged the silence of Jewish Americans when Israeli soldiers dragged Jewish settlers out of Gaza. On this point Goodman had for me the last word, quoting the Conservative law committee: If you want to influence events in Israel, you have to have your feet on the ground there. Davids urged people to take their children to Israel; they can’t live off your memories, they have to make their own.

Feldman related a telling story. He got into a fender-bender the day before coming to Atlanta, and the other driver screamed at him relentlessly in Hebrew, yet he interrupted himself long enough to yell, “Come sit in the car with me, it’s cold out there.” This perhaps is the essence. The disputes are real and disturbing, but the sense of solidarity, of mutual protection and defense, is even stronger.

Ideologies are not the essence of persecution—jealousy, fear, and hatred are. But when these basic human emotions begin to mobilize, they invariably search for one or another kind of twisted logic to make them seem reasonable. Time-honored lies are recruited to fan the emotional embers into flames, and by these lies people persuade themselves and each other that they are doing the right thing. Here are some of them:

1. “Jews run the world.” Contrary to this claim, repeated a few years ago by the prime minister of Malaysia, the Jews have always been weak. The great Jewish gifts to the world—monotheism, the Ten Commandments, resistance against tyranny—were born in a tribal kingdom squeezed between great empires, nurtured in bitter exiles, and annealed in genocide. This led them to a belief in one all-powerful God who could protect them, laws that maintained decency in the face of perverted power, and a searing sense of injustice that goes beyond religion and persists today.

2. “Jews don’t fight, they get others to fight for them.” This too was among the prime minister’s slurs. In fact, ancient Israel was born in violence, as were both Temple and Torah Judaism, and Jewish warriors were always revered. A Roman emperor bragged that he had conquered them when no one else could. The Jews did not have an army of their own for two millennia, but they fought bravely and well for many nations. Where they were discriminated against, they fought for the right to fight. And when they had a chance to return to their own land, they fought like few people have ever fought before or since.

3.“Jews keep to themselves and keep others out.” New genetic evidence demolishes this myth. Jews in every part of the world show a strong mix between Semitic or Middle Eastern genes and those of whatever people they lived among. Russian Jews are in part Russian, Moroccan Jews Moroccan, and so on for every Jewish group in the diaspora. Joseph marries the daughter of an Egyptian priest, Moses the daughter of a priest of Midian, Ruth (a Moabite) becomes the ancestor of King David and the Messiah, and Esther saves the Jews by marrying a Persian king. Non-Jews have been imported and welcomed through marriage and/or conversion throughout Jewish history.

4. “Jews always stick together.” Jews have in reality always fought and bickered among themselves, especially at the level of institutions and movements, and the weakness it caused has been deadly. The destruction of both the first and second Temples was due in part to this infighting, and it threatens Israel today. In addition, Jewish patriots fought on opposite sides in the major wars of Europe and in America’s Civil War, killing each other out of loyalty to larger nations or groups, some of which later savagely turned on them.

5. “Jews came from afar and conquered Israel from outside.” All archeological and historical evidence points to the opposite conclusion. Jewish culture and religion arose in villages in the hills of Galilee and Judea by a continuous process of change. It was created and built up by people who had been there from time immemorial and it was recreated anew in every generation. Some Jews were carried off as slaves in Egypt and Babylon and the Romans later drove them out of the land, but the Jews as a people always had a presence there, and always belonged there far more than anywhere else.

6. “Being Jewish means adhering to Judaism, and nothing else.” Contrary to this claim, the Jews have been a people—not just a religion–from the beginning. In fact, they were a people first. Despite the tremendous power of Judaism and the role it has played in ensuring Jewish survival, in every generation some Jews who rejected religion have played key roles in Jewish life and in mediating Jewish contacts with others. Jews were a people before Judaism, and although they have welcomed countless others into their fold, they are still a distinctive people today.

7. “Jews are always weeping and lamenting.” Jews suffered terribly, but they celebrated life. They sang their warriors’ praises in joy, raised their children in joy, prepared for the Sabbath in joy, danced with the Torah in joy, learned and taught it in joy, practiced professions and made money in joy, traveled the world in joy, and returned to their dangerous homeland in joy. They sang, made jokes, mocked their painful daily lives with countless jokes, quips, and proverbs, and taught their children how to rise above suffering. Jews love life.