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Ties of the heart In many ways, the Israel of Dvir Winternitz' time resembles the armed camp it was in Eric Weiss' day. The pockmarks of war are all over. Visual rat-a-tat-tats decorate the remains of the old British police station in Safed, tattooed there in 1948. There are archery slits in the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, put there by Crusaders, and in the slits are gouges where Jordanian machine guns were inserted in 1967. Mount Hermon, the highest point in the country, has a ski area and a listening post tuned to Syria. Military barracks along the highways look like ramshackle prisons surrounded by rolling spirals of razor wire. Army checkpoints sprout up along major highways at the slightest rumor of trouble. It can be a harrowing place to live. This is real war, with real terrorists blowing themselves up in the midst of everyday life. Words turn to rocks, rubber bullets to real ones. It gets on everybody's nerves -- including those of Jews outside Israel. Every now and then, some American Jew will float a trial balloon, asking if maybe it isn't time to put some distance between "us and them." Many American Jews -- including Eric Weiss -- tend to be more sympathetic to the Arabs than many Israelis are. Shouldn't some of the $2.3 billion America sends to Israel each year in foreign aid go to the West Bank, to Gaza, many Americans ask, to help the Palestinians climb out of their despair? And is it time for Israelis to go it alone a little bit, some wonder? After all, they aren't Holocaust survivors trying to carve out a homeland any longer. And there's Lebanon. Once, all Israel's wars were fought for the country's survival. But Israeli troops occupying neighboring Lebanon? Still, the questions tend to be short-lived, and the answers will come from a place in the heart, from the ties that bind families, no matter how much distance or circumstance separate them. It is these ties of the heart that Naomi Weiss considers in her search for what it means to be Jewish. Like many American Jews in her generation, Weiss has immersed herself in Judaism, going to classes and attending lectures. What does a homeland mean to Jews who don't live there? How do we get past the Holocaust? "A lot of second-generation kids like me have a layer of sadness that was passed on by their parents," she said. In many cases, it was full-fledged depression. "We didn't have normal childhoods because they kept us so close to them because of what they'd been through. One of my friends says, 'My mother can't let go and neither can I.' "
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