https://www.jns.org/opinion/reflections-on-aliyah/
This week marks the 43rd anniversary of my aliyah. In July 1977, I arrived in Israel for what I had thought was going to be a 12-month stint. But when I completed the one-year program for overseas students at the Hebrew University the following summer, I returned to the United States not to remain there, but to tie up loose ends. These included informing the University of Chicago, where I had spent my freshman and sophomore years, that I wouldn’t be back in the fall, and persuading my parents in New York that I hadn’t lost my marbles.
The latter turned out to be less of a problem than I had anticipated. I wasn’t dropping out of school, after all; just finishing my degree at about one-tenth of the price—and in a much warmer climate, both literally and figuratively.
Indeed, the campus of the U of C hit arctic temperatures in the winter, requiring everyone to wear down coats, fur-lined water-proof boots, thick gloves and ski masks with which to confront the fierce winds. It was also a chilly environment for a teenager like me, who registered as a Republican in my second semester as soon as I turned 18, preferred Motown to what the kids on the block in my largely Hispanic and black neighborhood in Manhattan called “white music” and announced to my uber-liberal peers—all of whom read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and called marriage “no more than a piece of paper”—that I was in college to find a suitable husband.
As if that weren’t sufficient cause for being ostracized or not taken seriously, I openly argued against affirmative action and disagreed with the mantra that abortion is an issue of a woman’s right to reign over her “own body.”
Nor did I join the “amen crowd” ranting against the recently ended Vietnam War and looking askance at the lone veteran among us. He impressed me as a hero—manly in the way that I believed a guy should be, not someone whose flaws or misfortunes prevented him from dodging the draft. Nothing like the liberal Jewish boys I knew, whose way of impressing a date in those days was to let her pay for her own dinner.
