Israel, Germany, and your community

What happened? What caused so many fine lawyers to conclude that that they’d be better off sharing space and intellectual resources in some other office?

Of course you could ask the same question about any community or, for that matter, any nation. Famines, plagues, religious persecution, and other life-and-death issues used to drive people from one place to another. But today the average American moves once every five years and for far less momentous reasons.

Lisa D’Amour’s suburban allegory Detroit, currently at Philadelphia Theatre Company’s Suzanne Robert Theatre, implicitly asks: In an age when many people can choose to live anywhere, why do people live where they do? And how do their individual choices strengthen or undermine communities? (To read my review of Detroit, click here.)

Einstein’s exodus

Germany’s anti-Semitism in the 1930s, to cite another example, triggered one of the greatest brain drains in history, as brilliant Jewish scientists like Albert Einstein, Leó Szilárd, Hans Bethe, Lise Meitner, Otto Frisch, and Rudolf Peierls fled Germany for more welcoming countries. The result was a critical mass of brainpower that helped the U.S. develop the technology that defeated Germany and its allies during World War II. After that war, in Israel, a similar mass of brainpower created major innovations in irrigation, medicine, and communications that have benefitted the entire world.

Since the birth of Israel in 1948, that country has produced 12 Nobel Prize winners. Germany, with a population ten times that of Israel, has produced 55 over the same period. You might be tempted to conclude that Israel has created a more welcoming environment for genius than Germany has. But history — and our perceptions — refuse to stand still.

Ultimate irony?

This month both the Economist and the New York Times reported an ironic phenomenon: Thousands of young, middle-class Israelis have recently relocated to Germany. Berlin — yes, Hitler’s former capital city — now numbers at least 5,000 Israelis and possibly more than 15,000. One central neighborhood has at least three Israeli restaurants, a synagogue, and a Jewish cemetery.

So what on Earth draws Israelis to the birthplace of Hitler’s Final Solution? At a time of economic stagnation and seemingly perpetual warfare in Israel, Berlin offers (according to the Times) economic and physical security, not to mention a “cosmopolitan flair, vibrant arts scene and advanced public transportation.”

“I cannot see the future here,” one 35-year-old Tel Aviv computer technician told the Times, without a touch of irony at the notion that an Israeli Jew was seeking a better life in Germany.

What are we to make of this situation?

1. The world changes imperceptibly every day, and eventually those changes add up. Germany was once a genocidal madhouse. Today, arguably, it’s a saner and more pacifist country than either America or Israel.
2. Germans learned a useful lesson from Hitler’s “Master Race” experiment: Diversity matters in nations just as it does in schools and colleges. Too much exposure to people just like you produces paranoia and boredom. Given their druthers, many bright young Israelis now prefer to hang out in a worldly city like Berlin than a relatively parochial Jewish community like Tel Aviv or Haifa.
3. Economics trumps politics and faith, at least for the thinking classes. If a community or a country can’t deliver jobs or safety, it can’t expect its best and brightest to stick around.
4. In a fallible human world, guaranteed prosperity and security are delusions. To the extent that any of us can be assured of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that assurance rests above all on our willingness to work at sustaining those freedoms daily, wherever we happen to find ourselvces— not just for ourselves, but for everyone.

It’s something to think about next time you contemplate moving downtown or to the suburbs or to California. Those places are changing even as you move there, and your own movements will make a difference. Ask anyone who used to live in, say, Detroit or Camden, or anyone who still lives there.