We hosted Shabbat dinner last night for Jeff Kaye, Vice President of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, who spent a few days in Washington on his way to New York to attend the annual meeting of Americans for BGU. Kudos to Edie for preparing a delicious dinner of salmon, green beans, tomato-artichoke salad, mashed celery root, and poached pears and cake. Jason Pressburg, DC leader of A4BGU, brought four bottles of very nice Negev wines, and we had a variety of people, most of whom we did not know and most of whom are probably 40 years younger than we are. One couple even brought their two month old daughter with them.

It was really a nice evening, with a lot of pleasantries and laughter, and then the conversation became more serious as it turned to the effect of the Gaza War on American Jews. And what I heard surprised me.

Our younger guests, most of whom work for Jewish organizations and all of whom have connections with Israel. They all seem concerned, and not only in an academic way, about the future of Jews in America. They all seem to feel, to some extent, physically unsafe. They are worried about pro-Palestinian demonstrations turning violent. They are frightened by the “Free Palestine” signs they see everywhere and report that whenever “Free the hostages” signs were put up, they were immediately taken down. They all know people who have stopped wearing visible signs (jewelry or kippot, for example) of being Jewish, and talked of people taking down the mezzuzahs on their houses. They talked of being afraid that neighbors would shun them or turn against them.

We had a long talk about Israeli and diaspora Jews are affected by what happens here or there. How interconnected their fates seem to be, yet how their actions are not always sensitive to that interconnectivity. We didn’t really talk much about splits within the Jewish community, but that is obviously a factor, as well. It was all very interesting and, I must say, disturbing. I should add that our guests were not fans of Israel’s right wing government or current prime minister. They were not Jewish supremacists. Just normal folks, whose lives are oriented towards the Jewish world.

Okay, another matter. I recently bought a signed copy of a biography of New Yorker journalist, the late A. J. Liebling, written by my college classmate Ray Sokolov. Then I learned thatvtoday would have been Liebling’s 121st birthday. I saw a quote of his that perhaps I resemble. Something like: I can write better than anyone who writes faster than me, and I can write faster than anyone who writes better than me.

Happy Saturday.