Make up blog posts

David Ben-Gurion believed in the ideals that the only hope for Jewish survival is for all Jews to make Aliyah and move to Israel. As Israel’s first Prime Minister, he was a strong supporter of the Zionist movement and believed you had to make Aliyah in order to truly be a real Zionist. The many Zionist groups of the United States had conflicted Ben-Gurion’s ideals. He believed that the Jews who still lived outside the holy land were inferior to those he considered Zionist and could not handle the challenges that “real” Jews faced in the state of Israel.
Israel’s role in the identity of American Jews is that it is the land in which Judaism was founded. Not only this, but it where all three of the monotheistic religions began and home to the oldest recorded city in existence, Jerusalem. It is not only a statement of religious past, but also one of Jewish history and culture. Today, Israel is a place where Jews from all around the globe can come together and be one with each other.
The idea that all Jews should make Aliyah and become Israeli citizens, in my opinion, is not necessarily a great one. One of the best things about being Jewish is that we are connected to one another through our ideals and traditions, no matter where we live in the world. Although some believe that making Aliyah is the greatest honor a Jew can grant himself, many disagree. There are people that think when the messiah returns, he will find all the Jews and bring them to the holy land. If this is true, then why leave life as you know it behind in order to move to Israel now?

The Holocaust is not just important for American Jews to learn about their history, but is essential in order to teach humanity of the evils that can and have happened in the world. Jews have suffered throughout their entire existence and it is incredibly important that we learn how to stay unified through tragedy. After all the Holocaust was the most unfortunate event to ever happen to the Jews (or any group of people) and it was as recently as the mid-20th Century, just less than 70 years ago.

The most important aspect of contemporary American Jewish Identity has to be tradition. Jews are not like Christians or Muslims, it is not our faith that identifies us as Jews. It is our traditions and ideals that have kept us together for thousands of years and they will keep us together for thousands more to come.

The most surprising thing that I learned about this semester in Jews in the Modern world is that it was the Muslims that the Jews into their land and protected them from the Christians during the Holy Roman Empire. I had always known that the Jews had travelled all around trying to find land where they could live freely but I never knew that it was the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire that protected them. It seems like such a backwards part of history when considering the stance between Jews and Muslims today, especially in what used to be the Ottoman Empire.

This course really illuminated my family history in what happened to my Sephardic ancestors. I was very knowledgeable about what had happened to the Ashkenazi Jews, where they came from and where they ended up. But I knew very little about what happened to the Sephardim after the Spanish Inquisition. I knew that my ancestors ended up in the Netherlands, and eventually in England, but I’m glad that I learned about the struggles that the Sephardim encountered after that dark time.