More than 450 people gathered last week to hear a renowned American Israeli author and journalist offer his thoughts on the current political and religious divisions in Israel, American support for Israel, Israel’s future and the nature of today’s antisemitism.
Yossi Klein Halevi is an American-born Israeli author and journalist, who is particularly well known for his books including “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor” (2018), “Like Dreamers” (2013) and other titles. Halevi is also a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.
Halevi was the featured speaker at Beth Tfiloh Congregation’s Dahan Lecture on Tuesday, May 7. This year’s iteration of the annual lecture took place in Beth Tfiloh Congregation’s Dahan Sanctuary. The event has been taking place since 2014 and is sponsored by the Haron Dahan Foundation.
The lecture took the form of a Q&A between Halevi and Rabbi Chai Posner, Beth Tfiloh Congregation’s senior rabbi.
Before Halevi and Posner turned on their mics, the crowd was buzzing with excited pre-event chatter and greetings as community members filed into the sanctuary to pick their seats.
During the lecture, Halevi discussed the nature of antisemitism and how it’s changed yet stayed the same.
“Antisemitism is when a given civilization attributes its most detestable qualities, whatever a particular society regards as the worst offenses, and attributes that to the Jews,” Halevi said.
Halevi continued to explain anti-Zionism as part of this mechanism, turning the Jewish state into the symbol of racism, colonialism and genocide.
Halevi also said that be believes antisemitism in the United States will get worse.
However, Halevi said that part of how society can combat antisemitism must come from changing how the Holocaust is taught.
“It’s not the absence of Holocaust education, it’s not that there isn’t enough Holocaust education, it’s that the Holocaust education that young people are being raised with is the wrong education,” Halevi said, referencing a piece he had written in April for The Times of Israel.
According to Halevi, Holocaust education often only emphasizes the more universal lessons of the Holocaust, with many educators equating antisemitism with generic racism.
Halevi referenced a quote, which he attributed to Jacob Talmon, an Israeli historian, saying that Jews needed the more universal lessons of the Holocaust but that non-Jews needed to understand the more Jewish implications.
Near the end of the lecture, Posner asked Halevi what should be giving people hope.
Halevi answered from his own experience, having made aliyah in 1982, which was the year the First Lebanon War took place.
“I made aliyah into a society that was basically dysfunctional,” Halevi recalled. “To see Israelis tearing each other apart over war — war always united us — was this tremendous shock.”
Halevi likened arriving in Israel to the division that was present at that time to the situation immigrants have faced arriving to a deeply divided United States in recent years.
“You have immigrants coming into America — which America do I join? That was the question that I had,” Halevi said.
Despite the deep divides present then, Halevi’s message of hope was that all of the issues that divided the Israeli people at the time have either been resolved or greatly healed.
“The divide was brutal, and there still is a divide, but it’s no comparison, and so in so many ways the issues that seemed insurmountable in 1982 just gradually diminished or disappeared completely, and so one thing that I’ve learned is never to freeze a frame and say, ‘This is Israel,’ because there’s always another turn in world news,” Halevi said. “It’ll be better, it’ll be worse, but it’s going to not be this.”
Halevi said that continuous change is part of what gives him hope because Israel is dynamic, constantly moving forward and changing.
Halevi also attributes his present hope to how dramatically Israel came together in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack.
“When you look at how we pivoted from pre-Oct. 7 to immediately after Oct. 7, we entered one of our most united states,” Halevi said.
While he does not believe that level of unity will last indefinitely, Halevi said that it demonstrated “that we still have the capacity to come together as a people.”
