The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, January 8, 2006

Making aliya: U.S. Jews who move to Israel

By Amy Woods Butler

In his new book, Aliya, Liel Leibovitz, a ninth-generation Israeli living in New York, portrays several Jews who have followed the author's path in reverse: Each grew up in the United States and then immigrated to Israel.

Why, asks Leibovitz, would Jews leave a society that has offered them the greatest safety, the greatest opportunity for cultural and economic advancement and the greatest acceptance by others, in order to live in a land "plagued by violence, poverty and petulant politics"?

In three intimate portraits of American Jews in Israel, he attempts to answer just this question.

The first, and perhaps most interesting, story is that of Marlin Levin and his wife, Betty. Marlin grew up in the provincial town of Harrisburg, Pa., where he returned as a young man after fighting in World War II. Floundering in a civilian life that felt empty and self-serving after his wartime experience of battling the evils of Germany and Japan, Levin was struck by the thought that now, in 1947, his ancestral people needed his help as much as his fellow Americans had just a few years earlier.

Newly married to a young woman who shared his dream of helping to establish a new homeland in Palestine, Marlin spent his honeymoon with Betty on a ship bound for Haifa. The British, who had ruled the area since the fall of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in World War I, began their withdrawal shortly after the Levins' arrival in Palestine, clearing the way for a war that would erupt just months later between neighboring Arab nations and the new Jewish state.

As a reporter and amateur photographer, Levin was well-equipped not only to assist in the founding of this new state, but, nearly six decades later, to recollect in keen detail the happenings of those early years. In the manner of a New Journalist, Leibovitz seeks to penetrate into the mind of his subjects, depicting historical events from the highly personalized viewpoint of each character. So while we learn of attacks by the Arabs and the Jewish underground in the days leading up to the end of the British Mandate, we also read of the quiet festivities enjoyed by a group of American expatriates in Jerusalem on New Year's Eve 1947, as they eat canned goods sent from the States and sing "Auld Lang Syne" while silently contemplating the trials that lie ahead.

IN DEFENSE OF A BORDER

Leibovitz has chosen periods of great historical significance for the settings of his portraits. Mike Ginsberg, a Brooklyner by birth, moved to Israel with his family as a young boy, only to return to America five years later. Inspired as a teenager by a visiting Israeli paratrooper, Ginsberg convinced his mother to return with him to Israel in 1969, when Israelis had begun their migration to territories which had been under Arab control until the Six-Day War of 1967.

Where American kids sent to boarding schools on the East Coast may spend afternoons refining their game of lacrosse, Ginsberg attended a boarding school that conducted military training exercises several times a week to prepare its students, male and female, for their future compulsory service in the Israeli army. At 19, he took part in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, an experience that helped solidify his allegiance to his adopted country.

After his discharge from the army, Ginsberg moved to a kibbutz in northern Israel, just steps away from Lebanon, intent on defending a border that the Israeli army itself no longer bothers to patrol, a border that was breached in 1980 by terrorists with devastating effects for the sleeping members of the kibbutz.

The third story focuses on a family from Queens, New York, who moved to Israel in 2001, seeking a life of greater spirituality in a place "where one lived Judaism instead of merely talking about it." Leibovitz illuminates the differences between Sharon Kalker and Sharon's parents, Holocaust survivors fleeing Europe.

Sharon's mother, having registered in 1945 to board two boats - one headed for America, the other for Palestine - determined to take whichever boat came first. The ship bound for America arrived first, settling her fate.

A half-century later, driven by desire rather than persecution, Kalker kissed her aging parents good-bye and moved with her husband and children to Israel, where she and her family experienced the fear of terrorism, the heartbreak of divorce and the solace of finding a sense of belonging.

GLIMPSES OF A SOCIETY

For many American readers, Jews and non-Jews alike, the most interesting parts of this book will not be the sometimes awkward characterizations of the immigrants, but the occasional glimpses of Israeli society itself: its practice of lumping all Jewish immigrants from Englishspeaking countries together under the term "Anglo" to describe those they consider "gullible, overly polite, nebbishy milquetoasts, not entirely compatible with the bravado of the Israeli national character"; the Israelis' constant preoccupation with terrorist attacks; the pervasive spirit of socialism stemming from the state's earliest beginnings; and the specter of discrimination between the Ashkenazi Jews and their darker-skinned fellow Jews from Africa and the Middle East.

Since 1947, 100,000 American Jews have made aliya. In his search for the reasons why, Leibovitz has come up with motivations as unique as the people he portrays, from the desire to help build a new homeland to a quest for a more meaningful existence. The one thing they all have in common, however, is an abiding desire to find a place they can claim as their own.