(RNS) — This is what you need to know about me. I love independent bookstores. When I visit a new city, they are the first places I seek out — along with local coffee places. I have visited some of the greatest bookstores in the world. In those stores, you will find salespeople who really know books, and people who really love them and the ideas that those books contain.
I have never visited a bookstore that carries only books I like, with only ideas I cherish.
Frankly, I would not want to.
Which brings me to a bookstore in east Jerusalem — the Educational Bookshop.
The Educational Bookshop sells many books that are pro-Palestinian and deeply critical of Israel and its policies. It’s like entering a bookstore in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and finding books by Haredi rabbis — some of them with ideas you might not like, either. To paraphrase the Sesame Street song: Those are the people in their neighborhood.
But, for those who like bookstores, the Educational Bookshop is a significant place. Many Israeli Jews shop there as well. The Bookshop also carries books that are pro-Israel, written by Jews.
Because bookstores are breakfast buffets of ideas: You take what you like; you leave the ones you don’t.
This past week, Israeli officials raided two branches of the Educational Bookshop. They confiscated books and detained the owners. The officials found one copy of a children’s book, “From the River to the Sea,” which they claim incites terrorism. The book was in a store room.
Some of my readers will say: Meh. That’s what happens when you have books that are anti-Israel. Israel is waging a war against terrorism, and that war is waged on bookshelves, as well.
Not so fast.
This is why American Jews should be concerned. The free exchange of ideas is the hallmark of any democracy. No free exchange of ideas; no democracy. It really is that simple.
When the tyrants and authoritarians come, the first thing they come for are the books. Students and faculty burned “subversive” books at Humboldt University in Berlin in 1933. It was the coming attraction to what would unfold. Heinrich Heine knew this: “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.”
This is also what Jews know. Judaism is built on controversy, perhaps more than any other religious tradition. Judaism, at its best, has enshrined and cherished the minority opinion. Look at a traditional Hebrew sacred book: The text is in the middle and the words of commentators surround — one might even say dance around — that text. The commentators would be from different times and places. If they could be together in person, they would have vociferously disagreed with each other.
But there they are on the page, living together in relative shalom.
(“Judaism at its best” — Jews have not always been at their best. The opponents of Maimonides burned his books and they fought each other. The Jewish leaders of Amsterdam excommunicated the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. This June will be the 80th anniversary of that dark moment when Orthodox leaders burned the prayer book that Mordecai Kaplan had written. So, we don’t always get an A in this area.)
Why is this conversation so crucial — to American Jews and for Israel?
Because of the perennial debate: Can Israel be both a Jewish state and a democratic state?
I believe the vast majority of American Jews believe that it can be — and that it must be.
That is what the authors of Israel’s Declaration of Independence wanted, as well:
The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture …
True, the vision of an Israel that has divested itself of its democratic, pluralistic ideas would give nachas (great pleasure) to Ben Gvir, Smotrich and most likely, Netanyahu.
But, in so doing, Israel will give credence to its harshest and even friendliest critics.
It will feed those who hate us and would do violence against us.
It will further imperil the relationship between Israel and American Jews.
It will greatly imperil the already strained relationship between Israel and the next generation of American Jews. They will only support an Israel that is democratic.
Those prospects frighten me far more than a coloring book that sits on a shelf in the back of a bookstore.
Let us bring this conversation home.
In the past few weeks, it has become clear that while MAGA says they want to make America great again, many of us worry about those things that have always made America great — its democratic institutions.
I have joined thousands of Israelis in the streets, chanting: “Demokratiya!”
The time is coming when we will be in American streets with that same chant.
On the playlist in my soul, there is that song by David Bowie and Pat Metheny — “This Is Not America.”
Is there an Israeli version — “Zo Lo Yisrael” — “This is not Israel”?
There should be. There must be.
Too much is at stake.
