When Israeli Americans meet, there’s politics, partying and pride
HOLLYWOOD, Florida (JTA) – Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, his Israeli-born wife, Miriam, and Haim Saban, the Israeli-American entertainment mogul, entered the deck of the pool complex at the Diplomat Hotel here on Saturday night and chose a table to sit around and well, schmooze.
Never mind the frantic security detail that scrambled to find ropes and stanchions to create a cordon and to signal to other pool-goers that this bit of territory was occupied, thank you very much. Saban and Miriam Adelson took up a chaise lounge and leaned into one another, speaking in low tones.
Adelson scrolled through his smartphone, occasionally brushing away the cigar smoke emanating from Shawn Evenhaim, one of the businessmen who with the Adelsons and Saban founded the Israeli American Council 11 years ago.
From relatively modest beginnings, the IAC has become something of a powerhouse. I asked Shoham Nicolet, another founder of the IAC and its current CEO, why an organization that three years ago was barely able to get congressional backbenchers to show this year managed to score Vice President Mike Pence; Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
“I think that it’s a fact that you have two major donors from two parties,” Nicolet said, referring to Adelson, a powerhouse who is close to Republican Vice President Pence, and Saban, a major fundraiser for Democrats. And then added: “It’s also 10% of Jewish Americans.”
IAC estimates that Israeli Americans, including Israelis who have emigrated stateside, their children and Americans who have made aliyah and returned, comprise some 600,000 people.
In its fifth year, the perennial question the conference dealt with is how do Israeli Americans fit into the larger American Jewish firmament.
Breakout sessions on Saturday morning included, in English, “The interdependence of Diaspora and Israeli Jewry,” and simultaneously and more bluntly, in Hebrew, “Israeli-American: Contradiction or harmony? Coping with a split personality.”
Dilemmas persisting from past years include how Israelis cope with the American Jewish social universe, and how one copes with American Jewish criticism of Israel.
At the session on interdependence, Dani Dayan, the consul general in New York, said life and death decisions are not the place for American Jewish pressure.
“We Israelis will make the decisions and will not put up with being punished,” Dayan said, and then hesitated; “punished” seems misplaced. “Or to find a better word than ‘punished’ – met with indifference. We may be Jewish, but our marriage is Catholic,” he said of Israelis and the Jewish Diaspora. “There is no divorce.”
This year, the most striking dilemma on how to resolve the Israeli and American Jewish identities is how to deal with antisemitism. For much of its existence, the IAC has taken up the gauntlet against hostility to Israel. The massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue in October is something different, a primordial violence divorced from national struggle, from a past that Israelis believed the existence of the state they love had been obviated.
“I never thought that in my lifetime I would worry again about being a Jew,” Tzippy Holand, a Holocaust survivor, said Thursday in presenting an award to two Pittsburgh police officers, Michael Smidga and Daniel Mead, who helped end the killing at the Tree of Life synagogue complex, when an antisemitic gunman killed 11 worshippers. “If we don’t do everything we can to support Israel, we are not going to have a home and we are not going to have where to escape to.”
“It’s a great pleasure to serve with a man who has made the alliance between America and Israel stronger than ever before,” Pence said on Friday, citing US President Donald Trump’s vocal support of Israel, in particular his move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem and his withdrawal from the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal.
On Sunday, Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the US added: “There’s never been an administration – not just a president – who’s been more supportive of Israel than the Trump administration,” he said.
Schumer and Pelosi, both Democrats, barely mentioned the president in this venue, perhaps wary of attacking him on his turf, and instead made the case that Democratic support for Israel has not diminished.
“If this capital crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid. And I don’t even call it aid, our cooperation with the State of Israel,” Pelosi said.
Schumer and Pelosi spoke a little of Trump’s seeming indifference to the consequences of bigotry, particularly after the deadly August 2017 neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, when he said there were “fine people” among the marchers and the counterprotesters.
“When antisemitism rears its ugly head, it must be rebutted strongly and immediately,” Schumer said. “We need the Jewish community to do that, but we also need the non-Jewish community to do it.”
“There are no ‘nice people’ on both sides,” Saban said. “The bad people are antisemites, period, there are no ‘nice people’ over there.”