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Reflections on a Wandering Life.....

Sunday, April 17, 2005

Met a guy from Israel at the coffee bar this morning. He told me he was from Jerusalem, but it came out later that he is teaching at Princeton, so he no longer lives in Israel. I asked him what he thought about Sharon pulling out of Gaza. He said, "We think it should have happened a long time ago." I told him that this differed quite a bit from the stuff I was hearing on INR (Israel National Radio). But he was from Israel. He had obviously grown up there. I was wondering if perhaps the difference in perspective might have something to do with this. I told him that the talk show hosts I was listening to on INR, were obviously Americans who had moved to Israel quite recently. It isn't jut their accents. It's the fact that all the talk shows on INR give out an American 800 number. So American Jewish intelletuals are sitting at their computers listening to a live broadcast from Jerusalem (actually internet radio has about a three minute delay), and calling in live on an American toll free number. The show is plainly designed to appeal to Jews in America, not just in Israel.

Well, the guy I was talking to said, "Yes, most of the American Jews who have come recently are pretty right-wing." It's interesting that the future politics of Israel will be influenced very largely by where the largest number of immigrants happen to come from.

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