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Israel Must Remain a Jewish Majority Country
BY HERBERT CHUBIN
IN HER ESSAY published in
the March 8 issue of the Jewish
Daily Forward, Sari Bashi, a
Jewish human rights lawyer
and the research director at
Democracy for the Arab World
Now (DAWN), faults Israel
for not granting citizenship to
Palestinian residents of Gaza
and the West Bank. She says
Israel “grants citizenship to
Jews and their descendants,
including millions of Arab
Jews like me, descended from
Arabic-speaking families
in Iraq, Morocco and other
Arab countries. But it denies
the rights of citizenship to
Palestinian residents of Gaza
and the West Bank, even
though nearly half of them
descend from refugees from
what is now internation-
ally recognized as the State
of Israel, and all of them live
under Israeli rule.”
What kind of logic must a
person use to reach such an
illogical conclusion? Tens of
thousands of Jews have given
their lives in the past 100-plus
years to create a Jewish majority
country — the only one in
the world — and hundreds of
thousands of Jews have sought
refuge in that Jewish majority
country during the same time
period. Yet Bashi asserts that
Democracy for Palestinians
can only be achieved once
Israel ceases to be a Jewish
majority country.

How does one respond? By
reminding her, and others who
think like her, of the conse-
quences that befell Jews when
Israel did not exist, and based
on history, will happen to Jews
if Israel ceases to exist as a
Jewish majority nation.

In 1948, Israel was estab-
lished with the help of the
United Nations in a portion
of the Jews historic homeland.

Since then, hundreds of
thousands of Jews have found
safety in Israel. Bashi conve-
niently forgets to mention that
most Jews were forced to flee to
Israel from the Arab Muslim
majority countries that she
refers to above, with only the
cloths on their backs.

Hatred for Jews has existed
for millennia, but inten-
sified with the beginning of
Christianity. For almost 2,000
years, generation after gener-
ation of Christians sought
revenge against Jews for the
alleged murder of Jesus Christ.

This desire for revenge has
taken on a life of its own.

World War II laid bare
this phenomenon. Despite
being persecuted themselves
by Nazi Germany, many of
the citizens of the conquered
European countries assisted
the Nazis in murdering their
Jewish inhabitants. Some
were so committed that,
even after the war ended,
many surviving Jews were
murdered by their fellow
countrymen when they tried
to return to their homes.

Should Israel cease to exist,
will any country or group of
countries offer sanctuary to the
seven million Jews that live in
Israel? One only has to look
back at 2,000 years of history
and to World War II for the
answer. All the leading nations
of the world, including the
United States, found reasons to
keep us out during World War
II, directly contributing to the
deaths of millions of Jews.

There have been three
mass extinctions of Jews by
Christians: first during the
Crusades, followed by the
Spanish Inquisition and, in the
past century, the Holocaust. In
between those events there was,
and still is, ongoing persecu-
tion of Jews. According to the
Pew Research Center, Jews, now
largely concentrated in Israel
and the United States, number
only one fifth of one percent
(0.2%) of the world’s population.

Contrary to popular belief,
there has not been a reemer-
gence of antisemitism; it never
went away. Antisemites again
feel that they can openly express
and carry out their hatred for
Jews without fear of retalia-
tion. For example, according to
the ADL, in the United States
there were 2,100 incidents of
antisemitism in 2019, a 12%
increase, the most in any year
since the ADL began tracking
them four decades ago.

The continued existence
of the Jewish majority State
of Israel must be ensured for
future generations of Jews both
living in Israel and living in the
diaspora. As such, Palestinians
must never be allowed to
achieve through diplomacy
what they have been prevented
from achieving through the
force of arms: the end of Israel
as a Jewish majority nation. l
Longtime business executive
Herbert Chubin, a Philadelphia
native, moved from Yardley to
Bethesda, Maryland, eight years
ago. He is now retired.

The Surfside Tragedy Recalls South Florida’s Long Hold on
the Jewish Imagination and Reality
BY THANE ROSENBAUM
UNTIL A 13-STORY building
inexplicably collapsed in the
middle of the night, placing the
whereabouts and lives of 159
residents in doubt, few gave
Surfside, Florida, very much
thought before last week. The
14 JULY 8, 2021
town was, after all, a South
Florida misnomer. There’s no
surfing. The white caps on the
Atlantic Ocean never provide
enough tubular lift. The people
of Surfside skew older. Nearly
half its 6,000 residents are
Jewish, and of those, many are
Orthodox. You can call Surfside sleepy,
but even that wouldn’t describe
it. Nothing truly special had
ever happened there. Now, with
a tragedy so titanic — and still
unfolding — its name will become
synonymous with misery.

To the casual observer,
Surfside was a breakaway
township from its more widely
known neighbor, Miami Beach,
just to its south. Those over the
border on Miami Beach, and
in Bal Harbour, the village to
Surfside’s immediate north, for
many decades had good reason
to regard themselves as South
Florida’s very own Old City of
Jerusalem — a mixed enclave
with a major Jewish quarter, and
a bit more decadence.

Surfside didn’t have the
Art Deco Jazz Age sparkle or
swinger elegance that the Eden
Roc and Fontainebleau hotels
offered back in the 1950s into the
’70s. In Surfside, the Americana
was the swankiest hotel. It
once showcased a very young
Jackson 5, long before any Billie
Jean took notice of Michael. A
rare excitement, but the town’s
residents didn’t beg for more.

JEWISH EXPONENT
Surfside enjoyed the stillness —
on land and sea.

I know about Surfside. I grew
up on 74th Street on Miami
Beach. The horrific spectacle
that FEMA has now declared to
be a national emergency site is
on 87th Street. By the time the
Champlain Towers was built in
1981, I had long decamped for
college and then New York.

I frequently return to Miami
Beach, but mostly in my imagi-
nation. Many of my novels have
featured scenes with Miami
Beach as the backdrop. My last
one, “How Sweet It Is!”, selected
by the City of Miami Beach as its
Centennial Book, is a nostalgic
return to 1972 — a valentine,
I call it — when Miami Beach
was, oddly, the center of the
world. During
that summer,
Miami Beach hosted both the
Democratic and Republican
nominating conventions. Unlike
the infamous Democratic
National Convention in Chicago
in 1968, the Miami Beach police
somehow avoided clubbing
the heads of Vietnam War
protesters. Jackie Gleason, who no longer
had his TV variety show — once
filmed live on Miami Beach —
was palling around with his
buddy, Frank Sinatra, who had
recently retired for the first time.

You could find them drinking
See Rosenbaum, Page 23
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



O pinion
Photo by Mike Morgan
Hello Darkness
BY SANFORD D. GREENBERG
“WELL, SON, YOU ARE
going to be blind tomorrow.”
It was a strange thing to hear
someone say. Strange that he
should use “son” when none of
us in the examining room were
related to him. Strange, too,
that he could speak with such
assurance about such an awful
outcome: Blind? Tomorrow?
Oddest of all, though, was that
the person — the “son” — he
was addressing was me.

been working at and expecting
to become fell into a black hole,
along with my sight.

Back in Buffalo after the
surgery that blinded me, I fell
into a despair that at times
seemed total and boundless. I
still felt compelled to learn, to
become someone, to have an
impact on the world, but how
to do that when a well-meaning
social worker had already told
me that the best employment
I could reasonably expect was
making screwdrivers.

I had been campaigning for
Jack Kennedy before glaucoma
shut me down, dreaming of
law school, perhaps of entering
politics myself. And now this —
darkness morning, noon and
night. Three factors combined
to pull me out of the abyss. Two
I will mention here; the third
gets ahead of the story.

First, Sue and my family
were towers of strength, even
The spine of my life, though, what has held all
these years together, has been my promise to
God, my tikkun olam.

I was 20 years old, in the
prime of my young life. After
growing up impoverished
in Buffalo, N.Y., I had won a
full scholarship to Columbia
College. Now I was a junior,
immersed in a world of schol-
arly riches, surrounded by
intellectual luminaries and
the seemingly endless cultural
delights of the surrounding
city. I had a wonderful
girlfriend, Sue, and some of
the most steadfast pals a guy
could ever ask for, including
my roommate, an architecture
student with a rare talent for
music: Arthur Garfunkel, or
“Art” as the world would soon
come to know him.

And then the ophthalmo-
logical surgeon I had been sent
to see in Detroit spoke those
unforgettable words, “blind
tomorrow,” and all that I had
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM though everything they had
been expecting of me — and me
of myself — had been turned so
savagely on its ear. Second, that
spring of 1961 after I lost my
sight, Arthur took a plane to
Buffalo to see me, not to pat my
hand and say everything was
going to be A-OK, but to inform
me that I was coming back to
Columbia, that I was going to
graduate with my class, that
he would be my eyes, my guide
dog, my scheduler, really my
everything until I could better
fend for myself.

“That’s insane!” I told him. “I
can’t. Don’t you see, I’m blind!”
But I did go back. And it all
came true just as Arthur had
known it would. I graduated
with my class, Phi Beta Kappa
and as its president. Graduate
school followed, at Harvard; at
Oxford as a Marshall Scholar;
as a White House Fellow under
Lyndon Johnson. Sue and I
married and started a family.

I succeeded beyond all my
expectations as an inventor
and entrepreneur.

In time I got comfortable
enough to reflect on the course
of this life that had once seemed
all but extinguished, and that’s
when I realized the enduring
power of the third factor that
rescued me from despair: the
sacred vow — what’s known
in my Jewish faith as a tikkun
olam — I had made a resolution,
newly sightless and still hospital-
ized, to do all I could to help end
blindness, for everyone, forever.

The course of my life, I
came to see, had been shaped
by a loving wife and family, by
wonderful friends like Arthur,
by invaluable mentors like
David Rockefeller, by my own
iron determination to succeed
not by the terms of my blind-
ness, but by the goals I set for
myself before my vision was
ended, and by the willingness
of so many others to support me
in that quest. The blind are, of
necessity, a dependent nation.

The spine of my life, though,
what has held all these years
together, has been my promise
to God, my tikkun olam. In its
service, I have favored compa-
nies that serve health needs.

One I founded created the
first database tracking antibi-
otic resistance globally. I’ve
also accepted time-consuming
government positions that
serve the medical common-
weal, such as chairman of
the federal Rural Healthcare
Corporation. In the private
sector, I’m chairman of the
Board of Governors of the
renowned Wilmer Eye Institute
at Johns Hopkins University.

High marks, I used to tell
myself, at least for trying. But
a promise to God or whatever
higher power or cosmic calling
you believe in is an inviolable
undertaking, graded on a scale
far more demanding than
numbers can account for. And
JEWISH EXPONENT
by that measure, I kept thinking
that I was looking through a
glass darkly. But what was I to
do? Blindness arrives by many
roads. Would we have to kill off
an entire transportation system
to make it go away?
Finally, I sought the advice
of a friend far wiser than I. In
my memoir, I write about what
followed: my meeting with
Dr. Jonas Salk, his magnani-
mous spirit and his wonderful
response when I finally
gathered my courage to ask
how he had conquered polio,
especially three words at the
end of his answer — words
that have also stayed with me:
Just end it!
That, I realized almost in the
instant, was the liberation I had
been looking for to see my tikkun
olam through: Don’t get hung up
in the weeds of moving forward.

Start where you want to end and
rearrange the world to get you
there, just as Jack Kennedy did
with his vow to land a human on
the moon before the end of the
1960s, just as Martin Luther King
Jr. did with his poetic evocation
of a more just America, and just
as Jonas Salk did by working
backward from his vow to end
polio to a vaccine that actually
did that. Sometimes the shortest
route is what seems the longest
way around.

Has it been easy? No. More
than two decades would pass
before my wife and I established
the Sanford and Susan Greenberg
Prize to End Blindness and
awarded $3 million in December
2020 to 13 scientists and
researchers who have made the
greatest progress toward eradi-
cating this ancient scourge.

Is success a sure thing? No
guarantees there either. Perhaps
blindness is an injustice tragi-
cally endemic to the human
condition, a burden resistant
to the wonders of science, to
be randomly distributed across
all of time. But given my own
life experiences, given all the
good fortune that has come my
way, given the resources at my
disposal, not to attempt to end
blindness would be the biggest
injustice of all.

That’s the essence of a tikkun
olam, to pursue perfection even
if it should prove unattainable.

But here’s my deepest secret: I
absolutely believe that blindness
can be ended, that justice for
those of us forced to go through
life in the dark half-light of the
unsighted is well within our
reach. l
Sanford D. Greenberg is founder
of End Blindness, chairman of the
board of governors of The Johns
Hopkins University’s Wilmer Eye
Institute and author of the memoir
“Hello Darkness, My Old Friend.”
STATEMENT FROM THE PUBLISHER
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