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Jewish Atheists Are Perfectly Kosher
How Zionism liberates even lobster-loving secular diaspora Jews
I’m one of those prosciutto and lobster-loving Jewish atheists who quotes George Bernard Shaw: “I’ve been an atheist all my life and I thank God for it.”
I’ve never lived in Israel, and, at 70, likely never will, though I’ve visited the world’s only Jewish state five times since 1971. The best full immersion course in Russian I ever had was visiting my Latvian wife’s Jewish friend, little Lyuba (5’0"), who in 1992 emigrated from Latvia to Israel with her gentle giant gentile Latvian husband Visvaldis (6’2") and her entire extended family. So gentiles wonder why a sovereign Jewish Israel is important to secular diaspora Jews like me, whose religiosity score is as low as Richard Dawkins’, Christopher Hitchens’ and Sam Harris’.
My tall, blond native Yiddish-speaker father viewed all religions as a fraud and hated going to synagogue. My paternal grandfather had a traditional orthodox education and survived the 1903 Kishinev pogrom as an 8 year old boy. But he lost his religion when his orthodox father was murdered by a Ukrainian Cossack in 1919 while he was serving in the Jewish Legion in the not yet but soon to be mis/re-named mandate of the ex-Ottoman territory of Palestine. So why should Jewish sovereignty have been so…
