…Now, the most common way to be post-Jewish is discarding the religion, and in the Jewish religion as in no other religion, that means discarding more than belief. It means behaviors, activities that one engages in many times every day. And that is one feature of the state that post-Jewish Israelis built.

Israelis are also not Jewish in the understanding of non-Jews, not when the purpose of their non-religious Zionism was to erase the line between Jews and the goyim, significantly a word not in use in this Jewish community, surely the first in its history.

In my visits to Arab countries and the remnant of Jewish communities in them, I learned that the Israeli practice of calling the Arabs “Arabs” was not practiced in Tunisia, Yemen, Iraq. For these Jewish communities the non-Jews around them were the same as found in Europe. They didn’t call them Arabs but goyim, just like my Polish grandmother of blessed memory. In Yemen, their accent calls them joyim. I also remember asking a little Yemenite Jewish girl in Arabic, pointing at a cow, who is her name? And she answered a behema, just like my Polish grandmother.

Only in modern, secular Israel, surely unique in Jewish history, the words goy and goyim are inert, never used. In fact, classical secular Zionists of the 20th century sneered at these words for drawing a line between Jews and the rest of mankind as a people that dwells alone, not when, they wanted, Bibi’s took tile, A Place Among the Nations…