Except for the first few paragraphs that touch politics, this article hits home. Jacob My Fellow Lunatics by Stuart Schoffman April 21, 1994 For 40 years in the Old Country, I was but a humble Jew. Then I committed aliyah, and blimey, I became an Anglo-Saxon. An Anglo-Saxon, moi? Prince Charles, he's an Anglo-Saxon. Vanessa Redgrave. Ex-president Chaim ("Vivian") Herzog, perhaps, but me? I'm a yidl from the Yeshiva of Flatbush - yes, the very alma mater of Dr. Baruch Goldstein. In their quite understandable scramble to attribute the Hebron massacre to a crazy American - as opposd to an extremist Israeli settler - distraught Israeli politicians and pundits resorted to language that made me feel more Anglo-Saxon than usual, more estranged from th Israeli mainstream. Goldstein, we kept hearing, was a "foreign implant" from a Brooklyn "swamp". American Jewry sends its "dreck" (said a Knesset member) and it "lunatic children" (said the newspaper Ma'ariv) to Israel. It's hard not to take a wee bit of umbrage. The other day - a month after the massacre - a Yeashiva of Flatbush alumna living in Jerusalem phoned me, rather upset. Tell them in your column, she pleaded, that all of us Flatbush graduate in Israel aren't crazy right-wingers. Tell them about Stanley Sperber, conductor of the Haifa Symphony, or Prof. lihu Katz, founding father of Israel Television. Not to mention, I said, my kid brother Josh, crackerjack civil-rights lawyer. But trotting out a list of upstanding Anglo-Saxons from the environs of Avenue J skirts a larger point. Israelis don't think that all immigrants from Brooklyn are Kahanists. Yet they do seem to think, deep down beneath the welcome-wagon pieties of aliyah and klita - immigration and absorbtion - that there's something seriously peculiar about Americans who come here to live. When, on that fateful December day in 1988, with the Intifada at full boil, I showed up at the L.A. airport with my U.S. passport freshly stamped with an Israeli immigrant visa, the El Al security guard looked me up and down and exclaimed: "Oleh hadash? Shiga'on!" This last word is slang for, roughly, "Whoa, far out!" - but the word means madness, of course, from the same root as "meshuggeh". Given Israel's robust inferiority complex - and despite the Zionist credo that a Jewish state is per se superior to the Diaspora - it is difficult for many Israeli to fathom why anyone in his right mind would pass up the fatted American calf for a cramped, war-torn Levantine country where you work at three jobs and still finish the month with a negative bank balance. Weell, obviously it's irrational for a Jew to make aliyah from the States - as opposed to, say, Ukraine - in the Econ 101 sense of the word. Part of the Anglo-Saxon dilemma is that our reasons for moving here tend to involve things that secular, fashionably cynical Israeli elite take for granted or don't entirely understand. We may come because we like the idea of no longer being a minority group; of living in a place where they don't roll Easter eggs on the president's lawn. Maybe we come because we don't want to miss out on the greatest experiment in Jewish sovereignty since the Maccabees. Or, amazing enough - even if our heads are bare and we don't live in Samaria - we may actually come in search of meaning and spirituality. Shortly after I landed in Israel, word got out that this unknown Hollywood screen-writer had just made aliyah, and to my great bemusement I found myself profiled in Yediot Ahatonot and interviewed on radio and TV. Why on earth, people wanted to know, did you come here, when so many of our filmmakers head in the opposite direction? I didn't come here as a career move, I said. Then why? I would give answers like the ones above, and I remember the woman from Yediot peering at me across the cappucino and saying, "Do you really believe all that stuff?" Of course if I'd been wearing a yarmulke, I'd have seemed much less the rare bird. A secular Israeli has no problem figuring out why a religious Jew would move here, he just can't identify with it. Yet he still might wonder - even out loud, as happened to an Orthodox friend of mine, an internist who couldn't find a good job here - whether an American doctor who came on aliyah wasn't somehow substandard, maybe one step ahead of the malpractice sheriff. In my own more cynical moods I get the feeling that Anglo-Saxons are perceived as belonging to a sort of 4-F club: fools, fanatics, failures and freiers - meaning suckers or softies. We're nuts to come, here, and don't have what it takes to stick it out. After all, don't half the American immigrants leave? Yes, and sometimes it's easy to see why. My choicest Anglo-Saxon blues story is about the time I went to the hospital for a bone-marrow test. The hematlogist ignored my request that he dose me with intraveneous Valium (as I told him my American doctor used to do) before he punched a hole in the small of my back, assuring me that a local anesthetic would suffice. After I nearly blacked out from pain, he said to me unblinkingly in English: "This is Israel. We take it harder here." You're telling me. It ain't quite Yankee, go home - far from it - but I've had enough off-putting encounters here to feel more of an outsider as an American in Israel than I ever did as a Jew in America, possibly excepting the year I spent in central Texas. So why do I stay? Because on balance I feel utterly at home, crazy as that may sound. Within a mile of my house in Jerusalem, in an area known in Hebrew as Emek Refaim - David battled the Philistines here - live many hundreds of Anglo-Saxons, some Orthodox, some not, Peace Now supporters and Gush Emunim sympathizers, who speak English at home, watch "Knot's Landing" on cable and the insufferable dinosaur Barney of video, drink espresso in the same cafes, daven in the same shuls, and in general spend most of their time associating sith one another. If I'd emigrated at age 20, I might have turned out otherwise. There are plenty of veteran Anglo-Saxons who regard themselves as Israelis lekol davar, in every way, and wouldn't dream of living as I do - or of feeling as cheerfully marginal. Not for them an internal diaspora, an Anglo ghetto within Israel. I appreciate that position, but me, I guess I'm a sucker for irony. I enjoy being an immigrant - it feels so Jewish. In the new multicultural Israel I choose to live in, assimilation is passe'. We Anglo-Saxons are like unapologetic Jews in the Old Country, only more so. We stick together in vibrant, stubborn communities. We're clannish. Peculiar, even, and proud of it. I wouldn't have it any other way. For with whom in the world do I have more in common, for Pete's sake, than my fellow lunatics?