Israelism

The non-Jewish community does not understand

our fixation, our obsession with Israel.

Good evening and welcome to 2018!

To the 2016!

2019!

Taglit-Birthright Israel winter mega event!

Summer mega event!

Right here in Jerusalem!

The eternal power of our people.

Is there anyone here

from the United States of America?

What's your name? Where you from, brother?

I'm Michael and I'm from Detroit, Michigan!

Everybody knows somebody who was in the army.

Israeli soldiers, they're hot, they're awesome,

they're strong,

they're everything we could all want to be.

Um, my name is Israel Han, I'm from Brooklyn, New York.

I came around Birthright in 2016.

I joined the army four months after I finished Birthright,

ditched my flight back to America,

and I'm still in the army now!

Yeah! Army Israel high!

Wonderful words. That's beautiful.

Israel!

The first time I've been to the United States,

I met so many nice people

Jewish Americans would tell me things like,

"We like you, but we don't like Palestinians",

even though that I'm the only Palestinian they know.

Of course around that time, I would take it personally,

but then you come to realize that people do not know.

They know nothin' about Palestine and Palestinians

or have no idea about what Palestinians are goin' through.

Coming into Palestine for the first time,

I remember asking people, "What do you think?

Should I do it?"

And the response that I always got was you know,

"You're gonna be killed."

As a curious young person like, "What is this thing

that is so horrifying that you can't bear

to let me see it?"

Like, "Is it that bad?"

(Indistinct chatter, laughter in distance)

Found in the depths of my family's house.

I found some of my Hebrew... Hebrew textbooks

from elementary school.

My Israel.

Congratulations to Simone Zimmerman

for winning the Israel Jubilee Contest.

February, 1998. I was seven.

I had like a pretty traditional Jewish upbringing.

I grew up in LA.

I went to a Jewish day school,

kindergarten through the end of high school.

I went to Jewish youth group, Jewish camp.

I have family in Israel.

I lived in Israel in high school on an exchange program.

Israel was just treated like a core part of being a Jew.

So, you did prayers and you did Israel.

Israel's something that I feel so passionately about.

Like it's you know, it's... it's my greatest passion.

Um, everything Israel.

I became a Jewish educator

after my daughter started Hebrew school.

I started teaching second grade.

During the years, I did fourth grade also.

And just to be able to start them

on this wonderful journey.

I mean if... if you b... it gets in your blood.

And we teach Israel at the day school very well.

We introduce them to the food,

and to the music, and to the culture,

in addition to the history and the geography.

Figure out which one is the Israeli flag.

Draw a circle around every time you see the symbol

of the state of Israel.

Draw your own symbol of the state of Israel.

We also celebrated holidays obviously.

So, Hanukkah, Israeli independence,

all of it together.

Can you separate Israel and... and Judaism?

I don't know. I can't.

You know, some people I think can.

To me, it's the same. Yeah, you can't separate it.

Israel is Judaism and Judaism is Israel.

Um, and that is who I am, and that is my identity,

and I think every single thing that I experienced along my life

has melded into that.

Like there was never you know, a divide for me.

I grew up in a conservative Jewish household

in Atlanta, Georgia.

Israel was a central part of everything we did in school.

My elementary and middle school, as well as my high school,

both had organized trips to Israel

which was touted as

one of the most important things you could do.

Do you wanna go to Israel, too?

Yeah!

We wanna go! We wanna go!

We wanna go! We wanna go!

We wanna go! We wanna go!

We wanna go! We wanna go!

When I visited Israel for the first time,

when I was eight years old, I put a note in the Kotel,

in the Western Wall, saying

that one day I hope to live in Israel and prosper.

Every one of our kids should be going over,

not for ten days

but for a minimum of a semester or a year.

Every time I send somebody over to Israel,

they come back all of a sudden, they feel totally different

about who and what they are as Jews.

When I was a teenager and I went to Israel,

it was amazing to me to travel in this place

where Hebrew was a language that I finally got to speak

on the street with people, and where Jewish Heroes,

the streets were named after them.

We're planting seeds

that eventually a... are gonna blossom.

Does the average congregant understand

that I'm teaching them to become Zionists?

Probably not, but it is part of my madness,

so to speak.

I learned about Israel

as this great miracle of Jewish history.

For thousands of years, we were persecuted

and Israel is the place that you can go to be safe.

My grandfather's family made it to Israel.

His immediate family were some of the only ones

who escaped the Holocaust.

Many American Jews, if not most people I know,

have family or friends that live in Israel.

Israel is the insurance policy.

It's still... today a Jew doesn't have to worry

where is he gonna go, God forbid.

Even here.

No holocaust survivor will say to you,

"It could never happen again."

Uh, I was born in Poland, 1940,

uh, not a good place for a Jewish kid to be born.

My parents were separated.

My father went through a series of camps.

Who knows why I survived

and a million and a half Jewish children perished?

And so, Israel became very, very significant in my life

even though 6,000 miles away.

I probably visited Israel over 100 times in my lifetime.

Um, you know, as we sit now,

my granddaughter is there for two weeks

and they're in high school.

I did have many friends in Israel growing up

and every time I would visit Israel,

I felt closer and closer.

(Indistinct chatter, laughter in background)

The Jewish summer camps would always bring

a big contingency of Israelis

to try to drive Israeli culture within the camp

and connect the American Jews to Israeli culture.

So, when I was in high school,

I went on this Jewish youth trip to Israel

and one of the programs we did was called "Gadna",

where we spent a day pretending to be soldiers

in the Israeli army.

We wore army uniforms

and stuff like that was just sort of a normal part

of what our childhood looked like.

At summer camp, in the middle of the night,

they would wake us up and take us out.

Sometimes that was to pull pranks,

and other times I remember doing military games,

using the command "pazatza", "sneaking around".

So, anytime the commander, who was one of our counselors,

said "pazatza", we would all get on the ground,

and they made a game out of it,

simulating being in the military,

and sneaking around, and having to be a part of that.

On youth programs that I participated in

in Israel,

you could spend a whole week on an Israeli army base,

wearing army uniforms and going through

a sort of simulation of basic training,

and that's where some people you know,

learned to shoot guns for the first time.

It's not just regular military games,

it's specifically using Israeli military commands,

often with Israeli counselors giving them.

When you're a young kid that really drills it into you

that this is something important

and I wanted to be a part of that.

We often talked about the ways that you could be

a good supporter of the Jewish people.