Israel is different from most countries in one important way.

Just before I left Madison to start a Fulbright Fellowship in Jerusalem, I spoke to one of my professors. “Israel made a big mistake when it did not make English the official language.” And from his perspective, he was right. The country had been under British rule from 1919-1948, so English would have made perfect sense as a continuation for the fledgling state. His beef was that of a professional. In those days, Israelis often had awful English. My late father described it as people speaking with marbles in their mouths. As an international researcher, he would have found a presentation by an Israeli scientist hard to understand. While brilliant, they often could not be understood. I can attest today that pretty much everyone in Israel speaks some level of English, and those who deal in the international realm have outstanding English skills.

So why didn’t the founding fathers of the modern state of Israel go with English which would have hastened Israel’s international acceptance? Those involved in the formation of the state of Israel understood that their project was not just one of setting up a physical country with a lot of Jews in it. And while many of the early Zionists were not religious and some quite anti-religious, they understood that their program involved a rebirth of the Jewish people after the destruction of the Holocaust. Hebrew language, a Jewish calendar, and an emphasis on Jewish history were central to the program of setting up the new country. If one wants to do an oversimplified breakdown of the Jewish people at the time of the founding of Israel, it might be as follows: non-religious Zionists, religious Zionists, orthodox neither for nor against the State, orthodox opposed to the state on religious grounds. The Zionist project was to return a people to a land where they had always been........

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