All this occurred against a
backdrop of the strong possi-
bility of Jews again struggling
with who they are as a people
and as individuals. The prob-
ability of the stilling of guns
and the stilling of passions in
the Middle East meant that
Jews had to start sifting
through their multi-layered,
sometimes conflicted but al-
ways indelible allegiance to Is-
rael and determine how a
decline in crises in the Jewish
state — with its freeing of Jew-
ish spirit, Jewish time and
Jewish money — might force
them to rely more on their
faith for sustenance and less
on the surrogate, "civil" reli-
gion which Israel had become
for so many on these shores.
Also central to this probable
shifting of identity and ener-
gies was the Holocaust's place
in the Jewish imagination and
sense of peoplehood and histo-
ry. In December, audience re-
action to Schindler's List — a
remarkable film improbably,
but masterfully done by Steven
("E.T.") Spielberg — again
proved that the Nazi-engi-
neered genocide has a corn-
lling, permanent place in our
moral house of horrors. And
the unexpectedly sustained in-
terest in the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington — 750,000 vis-
itors by last November, seven
months after it opened; as
many as expected in its entire
first year; 62 percent of these
not Jewish — meant that
Americans are open to the cru-
cial lessons and the limitless
grief of the Shoah.
But with Holocaust survivors dying,
with issues of spirituality becoming more
paramount, with reasons for actually be-
ing Jewish being questioned, then the
Holocaust's role in Jewish life and
thought may slightly recede into Jews'
psychic background: It may become less
primal, less visceral, while always being
acutely felt, sharply remembered.
In fact, exactly because of the two sets
of handshakes and the vitriol between
blacks and Jews, because of the re-
assessment of Israel and the Holocaust
in Jewish life, 5754 may be remembered
as a pivotal year, one in which spirit and
soul encountered realities of politics and
homeland — and didn't flinch; in which
notions of communal purposefulness
clashed with grand flights of rhetoric,
both here and abroad — and didn't re-
treat; in which the idea of modern peo-
plehood began to conjoin with notions of
modern soul-hood — and didn't wince,
falter or blush.
A King, A Handshake
And Terror
T
he monarch of Jordan has
long been known as "the little
king," but there was nothing
diminutive about his presence
at the White House on July 25. He and
Israel's prime minister signed not quite
a peace treaty, but the closest thing to
one, and agreed to all sorts of compacts
(linking roads, air traffic, phone lines,
electric grids; opening two new border
crossings). This milestone in a march to
a regional peace was capped by a phrase
that was a slap to Palestinians and, es-
pecially, to Yassir Arafat: Israel promised
to respect the "present special role of the
Hashemite kingdom of Jordan in [the]
Muslim holy places of Jerusalem."
The Jordanian-Israeli signing came
six weeks after Mr. Arafat had promised
to wage ajihad, a Muslim holy war, to
regain Jerusalem, and only about 35
days after about 250,000 Israeli right-
wingers had marched in Jerusalem in
the opening salvo of their "battle for the
defense" of the holy city. They chanted
not only the obligatory "Death to Arafat,"
but a new, more ominous, more in-
ternecine slogan: "Death to Rabin."
The route from the Arafat-Rabin hand-
shake — which preceded last year's Rosh
Hashanah by a mere two days — to the
Hussein-Rabin handshake was not filled
with the elation that had marked the
first White House ceremony. That had
quickly evaporated as, not unexpected-
ly, extremists on both sides did their best
to derail the peace process: After a Jew
One step back, one step forward: Palestinians mourned victims (above left) of the massacre at the Hebron mosque by Israeli
settler Baruch Goldstein (below left). PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat is hoisted after he crossed into Rafah on his way to Gaza City.
0)
CNJ
CC
LU
CO
LU
F-
LLJ
C/3
61