Stuart Schoffman

I was less than two years off the boat when we launched The Jerusalem Report, still a new immigrant, oleh hadash. A decade later, to borrow a Herzlian prefix, I'm an Altneu-oleh, an old-new immigrant. Today, a million foreign-born Israelis are newer arrivals than I am, but I gotta tell you, there's something in that Nordic blood of ours that makes us Anglo-Saxons - I still can't get over that wacky label - greenhorns for life.

It is true enough that one no longer needs a brown belt in tae kwando to brave the mob at the Interior Ministry - these days you take a number, like at Zabar's. The drivers are as menacing and irrational as ever, but I've got that one under control: I drive as infrequently as I can, and certainly never for pleasure. The situation has worsened in recent years, as the number of cars in Israel has increased faster than the square meters of asphalt to accommodate them - a grim Malthusian phenomenon sweetened only slightly by the recognition that our clogged streets and highways are an indicator of American-style prosperity.

And how Americanized - in other words, globalized - we have become! The Fashion Channel and Italian game shows, "Baywatch" dubbed into Turkish and the NBA playoffs at 3 a.m., and satellite dishes sprouting on our rooftops - soon it will be just like the Old Country: 600 channels and nothing to watch. In 1990 - how long ago it often seems - friends who came to visit would bring us Grape-Nuts as a house gift; now I can buy Pringles at the corner grocer. With e-mail, the Internet and cheap phone calls, being Here is pretty close to being There.

The more American Israel becomes, the more American I remain, and my children too. Not so long ago, speaking as much Hebrew as possible was a Zionist imperative for Anglo immigrants. Today, to impose a precapitalist Ben-Yehudish ideology on your kids is heretical and foolhardy.

The tragic zenith of Israel's mimicry of America was the political assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, but the irony does not stop there. Yigal Amir pulverized once and for all the myth of Israeli purity that had nourished American Jewry since the founding of the state. Overnight the real Israel was laid bare - a Gordian tangle of hope and hysteria, innovation and atavism, a balagan of breathtaking accomplishments and heavy problems made heavier by their Jewishness. Did we pour all that passion into Israel (American Jews ask themselves), so it could become a bewildering amalgam of Dodge City and Silicon Valley, Boro Park and Toys R Us? Let the Israelis wrestle with the Arabs and each other, we'll build day schools in Duluth.

Even as Jews the world over, in this high season of soul-searching, pray (as ever) for the rebuilt Jerusalem and the end of exile, the Jewish state is more appealing, as a place to live, to Christian Ethiopians and atheist Russians of Jewish ancestry than to our kinsmen in Connecticut. While we contemplate that, chastising ourselves (as ever) for lack of reverence and faith, tell me this: Is there anything more inspiring - to a columnist, anyway - than irony?