Part 2

A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man's Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance
by Zev Chafets

(Page 2 of 3)

In the summer of 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. I supported the war and defended it to the international press. The PLO had created an armed, hostile ministate on Israel's northern border (just as Hezbollah did a generation later), and having grown up a bridge away from Canada, I believed that sovereign states had a right to expect peace and quiet from their neighbors.

The Christians of Lebanon were allies of Israel in the war, and Begin was happy to have them. They were impressive fellows, but unfortunately, Begin overestimated their fighting spirit and underestimated their hatred of the Palestinians. After Israel conquered Beirut in the late summer of 1982, Christian militiamen massacred Palestinian Muslims in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

Israel was blamed for this, and rightly so: the occupying powers have the obligation to protect civilians. But Begin bitterly resented the charge that he was responsible. "Christians murder Muslims and they blame the Jews," he said. "This is a blood libel."

This sounded self-pitying and false to me. It certainly wasn't a position I wanted to defend to journalists. And so I quit.

For the next decade I wrote books and helped found the Jerusalem Report. It was at the magazine's first anniversary party that I met Lisa Beyer. She was the new Time bureau chief in Jerusalem. One thing led to another. We fell in love and decided to get married.

Lisa isn't Jewish. Her mother is a very lapsed Cajun Catholic, her father a born-again Pentecostal who once spoke in tongues on Jim Bakker's Praise the Lord television show. When the time came to fly down to her hometown, Lafayette, Louisiana, to meet the family, I felt like Woody Allen on the way to visit Annie Hall's grandmother.

That weekend, two of Lisa's elderly Cajun aunts happened to be visiting. Although it is not the custom in Lafayette to discuss politics at the dinner table, the aunts talked about the upcoming gubernatorial race. Both, it turned out, were planning to vote for David Duke, the former head of the Louisiana Ku Klux Klan. They were mad at Duke's opponent, Edwin Edwards, over some arcane local issue, but still, rooting for Duke struck me as rather extreme. Lisa was amused by my attempt to nod my way through the conversation, but I thought I covered up pretty well.

After dinner the aunts announced that they would teach me bourré, a Cajun card game. As we sat down at the kitchen table, one suddenly called to Lisa's mom, "June, bring in the sheet."

The sheet? What was this, some sort of Klan game? "What do you need a sheet for?" I asked.

"You put it down when the table's sticky," said one. I saw they were grinning. They had seen Annie Hall, too.

The next day we went to meet Lisa's father. As we settled down in his living room I pointed to a picture of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. "Reminds me of home," I said.

Lisa's dad didn't know we were planning to get married. "Since you live in Israel, am I right in assuming that you're a Jewish fella?" he asked.

"Yes."

There was a pause. A long pause it seemed to me. Then he said, "It is my belief that the Jews are God's Chosen People."

"Well, sir," I said, "in that case I've got some very good news for you about your future grandchildren."

Lisa and I spent nine years in Israel and then moved to the United States. It was a deal we had made before our wedding-stay until my eldest son, Shmulik, entered the army, then go to New York so she could continue her career. I joked that it was a triumph of feminism over Zionism but I was very unhappy about leaving. A consolation was that, in August 2000, Israel appeared to be in the final stages of making peace with the Palestinians.

We bought a house in Pelham, New York, a Westchester suburb popular with journalists and literary types. We had decided to raise our two children as Jews, which meant joining a synagogue. But when I called the rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center, a Conservative synagogue, the rabbi informed me that we wouldn't be welcome. The Conservative movement, he explained, follows the rule of Talmudic Judaism: only the offspring of a Jewish mother are born kosher. Our kids, with a gentile mother, are ipso facto goyim. He suggested I join a Reform temple, where they aren't so choosy about racial bloodlines. I did.

I saw the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon through Israeli eyes, as part of a worldwide jihad. To my amazement, many neighbors and friends didn't see it that way. Some viewed it as a discrete act of terrorism, like Timothy McVeigh's bombing in Oklahoma City. Others felt that the United States had it coming. At a party not long after the attack, a friend took me aside and warned me that people-by which he meant liberal Christians like himself-were starting to grumble about American support for Israel. The Bush administration was very committed to Israel, wasn't it? And weren't some of the Bush advisers well, neo-cons? You could see how that might upset the Arabs. Maybe a more balanced American policy would help straighten things out.

The main culprit, as far as my friends were concerned, was George W. Bush, followed closely by Republican Christians. Wasn't Osama bin Laden just a bearded version of Pat Robertson? And did you hear that Jerry Falwell blamed the attack on American promiscuity and immorality? The fact that Falwell and Robertson and the other Christian fundamentalists were on their side of what Bin Laden called "the jihad against Jews and crusaders" didn't seem to register with many of the liberal Jews. As far as they were concerned, the real enemy was George W. Bush and his Christian supporters.

Lisa and I were invited to the fiftieth birthday party of a close friend. The party was held in a cozy Riverdale Inn. Most of the guests were journalists, writers, and academics; many, like my friend, were very successful and quite well known. Almost everyone there was Jewish, a fact commented upon by each of the few gentiles who rose to give a toast.

As for the Jews, they mostly mixed their tributes to the birthday boy with insults directed against the recently reelected George W. Bush.

"A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man's Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo - Evangelical Alliance", Zev Chafets, January 2007. Used by permission of HarperCollins www.harpercollins.com. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Zev Chafets was born and raised in Pontiac, Michigan. After graduating from the University of Michigan, he moved to Jerusalem, where he spent thirty-three years in politics, government, and journalism, including a stint as director of the government press office for Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. Chafets is a former columnist for the New York Daily News, as well as a founding editor of the Jerusalem Report magazine and the author of nine books of fiction, media criticism, and social and political commentary.