I may not agreed with all the specific examples and politics mentioned, but the overall theme of the essay hits home. Jacob Donuts and Democarcy by Stuart Schoffman 04/98 My first historical memory is of the death of Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president. The year was 1952, and the Jewish state and I were both four years old. My mother stood in our linoleum-floored kitchen in Brooklyn and began to cry as the news came over the radio. Weizmann, a Russian Jew gone British, was a figure that first-generation American Jews identified with and deeply loved -- and that shmaltzy primal experience, I might speculate were I now on the couch, fated me to make aliyah someday, and become an "Anglo-Saxon." I still can't say those words with a straight face. Not "aliyah" ("going up"), though it is true that I'm not entirely persuaded that I've ascended to a higher link in the Jewish food chain just by moving here. It's "Anglo-Saxon" I always have trouble with. To me, the image that comes to mind is the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, not my fellow immigrant parents in their kitchens in Jerusalem. A Jewish "Anglo-Saxon" is so oxymoronic a notion as to impart a permanent glaze of alienation from Israeli society. Oddly enough, we didn't think of ourselves as Angle-Saxons in Flatbush. We were Jews, just plain Jews -- an Orthodox shul most of the time, a Conservative synagogue (half a mile closer) when it rained -- and everyone we knew was Jewish. I understood I was a member of a minority group, but I sure didn't feel like one. Until I moved to Israel. The first Israelis I encountered were counselors in summer camp, rugged Sabras in open-necked shirts and rolled-up shorts. My childhood take on these undoubtedly sterling young people was that by and large they considered themselves superior, yet seemed unfamiliar with roll-on deodorant. I suppose I was a fledgling Anglo-Saxon even then, different from "real" Israelis, feeling a tad superior myself. One of the camps I went to in the 50s and 60s was near a town in upstate New York that had a sizable population of Huguenots. They used to hang out at the far shore of our lake and we called them "Hugies" for short. I doubt any of us knew at the time that these were descendants of French Protestants who emigrated to the New World a few centuries back in search of religious freedom. As Protestants in a Catholic (or at least lapsed Catholic) country, they were out of place in their own land. The Huguenots were totally off my mental map until recently, when it dawned on me that many Angle-Saxons in Israel, myself included, are like Huguenots: pluralist Jews in an establishmentarian Orthodox country -- card-carrying religious dissenters. The first time I heard the words "Angle-Saxon" used with Jewish connotations was in 1968, when I came here on a visit with my family. We traded houses for the summer with my father's sister, who lived in a charming Jerusalem development called Nayot, then known as the "Anglo-Saxon shikkun" because it was built for families in which at least one spouse had to be an "Anglo-Saxon." I realized then that we were a breed apart. My aunt and uncle made aliyah in 1947, and I grew up on heroic tales of how they had subsisted on boiled grass during the Arab siege of Jerusalem. It seemed romantic to me, though I knew boiled grass wasn't my cup of tea. I admired those swashbuckling young American Zionists of my own generation, ideological heirs of the Mahal (overseas volunteers) of the War of Independence, who had the nerve to drop everything and make the leap in 1967. I like to imagine that had the Six-Day War lasted six months, I couldn't have kept myself away; by now I'd be a 30-year veteran, a naturalized Sabro-Saxon. In which case I might well look at someone like me and say: Nu, what took you so long? No wonder you feel like an outsider! What can I say? I converted to Anglo-Saxonism at the advanced age of 41. And though I have spoken Hebrew from the cradle, and can read Rashi fluently without vowels, every time I get a financial statement in the mail I can't tell if they owe me money or I owe them. Every time I open my mouth, the accent, thick as cheese, gives me away as a greenhorn. Admittedly my Sacramento Zoo baseball cap may also have something to do with it. And maybe I would be more easily assimilated if I could finally abandon my quixotic campaign to teach my fellow Israelis not to cut into line at the post office. The truth is, of course, that Israel has become a much more Anglified place in the decade I've lived here. At the Ministry of Interior you take a number, like at a delicatessen; hand-to-hand combat training is no longer required. Israeli teenagers, raised on a steady diet of "Beverly Hills 90210", possess a facility in idiomatic English their parents can only envy. The fabled delights of Anglo-Saxon cuisine have infiltrated this shish kebab backwater -- if Howard Johnson is here, can Roy Rogers be far behind? You would think all this would make the Anglo-Saxon feel at home at last, but no. Why? Because Dunkin' Donuts is not the same as democracy. By which truism I mean the following: To many Israelis, American olim of recent vintage fall into two categories: freiers and extremists. Only a freier, a glutton for punishment, an out-and-out fool, or a congenital loser would willingly place himself and his children in the line offire, would forgo streets paved with gold for the narrow alleys of Jerusalem or the clogged highways of Tel Aviv. Unless of course you're an extremist. To make aliyah in 1948 or 1967 -- that was idealism. To come during Lebanon, the Intifada, the bitter religious/political culture war that felled Yitzhak Rabin -- this is madness. I'm sure I'm not the only Anglo- Saxon who exhaled heavily upon learning that Yigal Amir was not of American origin. After Kahane and Baruch Goldstein, the expectation was not unreasonable. If there's been a single moment, since I made aliyah, that has forged my Anglo-Saxon consciousness, it was four Purims ago when Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron, and a Knesset member from Meretz said out loud that American Jews "export all their dreck" to Israel. I've never expected anyone to pin a medal on me for making aliyah, but hey, is this the reward I get for casting my fate with the Jewish state? It was exactly then that I realized how much anger there must be in the collective Israeli unconscious at American Jews, and at the tiny Anglo-Saxon minority who represent them here. Anglo-Saxons are often highly motivated folks, actively involved in promoting the causes they believe in: public health, environmentalism, women's rights, civil liberties, Jewish education, Arab-Jewish coexistence, economic development, and, not least, West Bank settlement. Problem is, in the public mind the Anglo olim who seem to have had the biggest impact on Israeli life have been the right-wingers, the most extreme of whom have contributed mightily to the dark fissures that undermine the Zionist enterprise. For progressive Israelis, the ultimate triumph of Anglo- Saxon culture in Israel was the election of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister. They see the MIT diploma, the spin doctor Finkelstein, the shameless photo ops with wife and tots, the inner- circle aides with thick Anglo accents and American passports, and to them, this is all quite sinister. Even as they profit from the Americanization of Israel, they are struck by its cruelest irony. Ramat Aviv looks at Bibi and sees not John F. Kennedy, but Dr. Irving Moskowitz of Miami, the messianic bingo czar. Thus on some deeply embedded level, evry Anglo-Saxon, every busload of UJA tourists, every PizzaHut, is an irritant, a reminder that Israel's brilliant mosaic of ingathered exiles is infuriatingly incomplete. If only the English-speaking Jews, that immense reservoir of talent, liberal values, and votes, had come here in a great wave! Had not just run guns, bought bonds, funded the rescue of world Jewry, given money for hospitals and orchestras and parks, dispensed bottomless bushels of gratuitous advice, but put themselves on a plane and stayed. Had been a driving force in the Knesset, like Shas and the Russians. Had drawn upon their own history as a thriving, well-accepted minority to make Israel a fairer, more level-headed, less desperate society. Not long ago, I asked Eli Amir, the Iraqi-born novelist who has long served as the director of the Jewish Agency's Youth Aliyah department, how he envisioned the next stage of Israeli nation- building. "If half a million American Jews will come to Israel, this will be Israel's true redemption," he said. "It may not be politically correct to say so, but the previous immigrants came from dictatorial, authoritarian regimes. We need new immigrants who come from liberal political traditions, societies that have checks and balances. The Conservative and Reform will come here, they'll bring their openness and pluralism. Every Jew arriving from the United States will feel renewed by contributing a new identity to the Israeli nation." A jolly good pipe dream for the new millennium. All of 2,000 Jews (not counting returning "yordim" and their families) made aliyah from the States in 1996; last year, the number was down to 1,800. Still, if Jewish experience has taught us that there's nothing so dreadful it can't happen, it has proven too that the most implausible miracles are a regular part of our story. Until the great day comes, the marginality of the Anglo-Saxon will remain its own reward. After all, being outsiders for 2,000 years made the Jews not only fearful and conflicted, but witty, resourceful and confident. Being a Jewish outsider in a Jewish country -- now isn't that the best of both worlds?