While at first fairly secular after moving to Israel, I have in recent life become considerably more observant — I am shomer Shabbat and shomer kashrut — and am attempting to fill in the gaping holes in my Jewish education.
I received my undergraduate degree from Temple University in Philadelphia. I did my MA at Hebrew University and then returned to the U.S. and did my Ph.D at Princeton in economics. I specialized in international and urban economics and later developed a specialty in finance. After that, I taught for a couple of years at Oberlin College while also working at the Federal Reserve Bank.
Here in Israel I taught first at the Technion and then moved to the University of Haifa. I've also taught at Berkeley, at UCI, at Central European University, Tel Aviv University, University of Nantes, and Athens Laboratory for Business Administration.
I made aliya in 1981. My parents made aliya shortly after me. My dad had come full circle from his hachshara days. He passed away in 1991. My mom lives in Netanya.
I'm married to Dr. Pnina Ohana Plaut, granddaughter of Rabbi Nissim Ohana (chief rabbi of Egypt and later of Haifa), zt'l. She is a transportation engineer and city planner at the
Technion. We have three sabra kids: Yara, 16; Elad, 14; and Shiloh, 12.
We understand you had a real health scare not too long ago.
Two-and-a-half years ago I had kidney cancer. I made it a topic in my book The Scout, which is set against the background of an intensive care ward, and some of the religious ponderings in the book are related to the near-death situation at the time. Now, thank G-d, I am recovered and fit as a fiddle, or as near abouts as you can be at age 51.
How do you find the time to write as prolifically as you do?
I wake up each morning and force myself to read Ha'aretz, the Israeli far left newspaper. Then I face a choice. I can either walk around all day enraged and curse people and scream at my kids and provoke my wife, or I can release it all in an Op-Ed piece or commentary and then smile at the world and pet the cat and sniff the flowers. In other words, it is psychotherapy for me and keeps me out of a straightjacket.
Are you an optimist or a pessimist regarding Israel's future?
There's an old Israeli joke: The pessimist says things are awful, while the optimist says things could not possibly get worse.
If Amram Mitzna is elected, I have my doubts as to whether Israel will survive. If he loses, we buy time. Israel needs to follow the first rule of medicine: you cannot always cure problems, but your first moral obligation is never to make them worse. For the past decade, Israel's governments have been ceaselessly making things worse.
It is conceivable that there will develop a counter-reaction to the Oslo era. Just like Oslo was a byproduct of Israel self-doubt, self-denial and self-hatred, so it is possible that the rebound-reaction will be a reassertion of Jewish pride, a return to Jewish roots, a return to Judaism by those segments of society that sought liberation through deJudaization.
But let us be clear. Jewish tradition teaches us that we cannot just sit back and count on miracles as an automatic entitlement, nor take their occurrence for granted. We cannot count on Divine intervention always to rescue the Jews from the folly of their leaders. Israel's survival is in danger thanks to the mega-stupidity of its political elite and its chattering classes. The fact that these people are still out inventing new formulas to make Oslo ''work,'' rather than demanding immediate Reoccupation and DeNazification, shows how uncertain are the prospects for Israeli survival.
How do you view the state of Jewry at the end of the secular calendar year 2002?
In a recent essay in Commentary, David Gelernter wrote, ''Most American Jews, I would bet, know more about Christianity than about Judaism.'' He then added that they do not know much about Christianity either. I would say the situation is even worse in Israel. And in Israel the ignorance threatens to produce not only assimilation, but the destruction of the country with all that this implies.
