Want Zionism To Survive? Keep It Simple.

Earlier this week, I attended a conference organized by the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. The topic was Israel and the media. Maybe it was that 14th cup of coffee, or maybe the superabundance of smart people congregating to discuss our shared obsession, but as the panels progressed and breakfast turned to lunch, I began having hallucinations.

In my daydream, I was visited by a gaunt young man with an inky black beard. Like many of the conference attendees, the young man was a Jewish journalist. Like us, he spent hundreds of hours grappling with anti-Semitism and violence, trying to make sense of a world that seemed less stable and more perilous each day. He, too, fretted about the limits of his profession, and wondered how to reconcile the affinity he felt for his hunted people with his belief in the universalist and humanist values of his fellow cosmopolitan intellectuals.

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