Haviv Rettig Gur: Can Israel rebuild the Jewish people?

My son and unindicted co-conspirator Haviv Rettig Gur has written an important essay on contemporary Jewish peoplehood for the Times of Israel.

Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. That fact, the millions of Jews shot and incinerated at the hands of European insanity, will go down in history as the single greatest calamity in Jewish memory.

But even as Jews have taken great care to study and teach about the Holocaust’s human toll, they have paid relatively little attention to the cultural cataclysm it represents.

At the start of the 20th century, European Jewry was the center of the Jewish world. This is a simple demographic fact: central and eastern Europe accounted for 70 to 80 percent of the world’s Jews and were home to most of the infrastructure of the Jewish world: religious seminaries, cultural production in a Jewish language, and all the major ideas that drove the Jewish response to the dilemmas of modernity — emancipation, Zionism, socialism, haredism.

The surviving Jewish world of 1945 was comparable to an America that had lost all its coastal metropolises to nuclear war. That existential dilemma of the post-war Jewish people was not simply to remember the dead, but to rebuild the organizational capacity — the funds, the motivation, the dedicated personnel — to build a new Jewish civilizational center.

After 1945, there were only two communities that were up to the job, the Zionists in Israel and the Jews of America. And their success was stunning.

Read more: Can Israel rebuild the Jewish people? | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/can-israel-rebuild-the-jewish-people/#ixzz35ukGYB7o