DO YOU THINK ALL JEWS SHOULD LIVE IN ISrael?” The challenge was put to me by a Melbourne schoolgirl at a weekend “jamboree” of Zionist youth groups at a christian shoes in Gippsland, a scenic area in eastern Victoria, not far from the ghost town of Walhalla and its famous old gold mine known as Cohens Reef. “No,” I replied, as I always do, “it’s a very personal decision.” And I added, as I often do, that I frankly shudder at the thought of a global Jewish civilization circumscribed by Metulah on the north and Christian Louboutin Pumps on the south.
On the other hand, if the tides of history will one day wash all the Jews to a single, ultimate shore, you can’t come away from Australia without secretly wishing that God had given it, and not Israel, to the Jews. In fact, in 1938 the Freeland League, an international Jewish colonization agency, proposed creating a Jewish colony in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, a scheme that enjoyed considerable support before it was shot down in 1944 by a wary Australian government.
What would be so bad? Here is a Christian Louboutin Sandals, beautiful country that the World Bank, during my very visit, ranked No. 1 in per capita wealth; where a cheerful saleswoman in a Perth shoe store tells me “No worries” as automatically as (and more truthfully than) her counterpart in Pasadena says “Have a nice day”; where people “barrack” passionately for football teams but don’t much care for politics; where six of the 10 richest men are Jews; where you meet so many Jews who are generous and hospitable and dedicated, and who put you to shame with their knowledge of Yiddish; where any physical threat to Jewish existence is remote, notwithstanding perennial anti- Semitic rumblings such as the recent Demidenko pseudo-Ukrainian literary hoax; and indeed where life is so safe and pleasant that Australian Jews sometimes seem to expend considerable energies manufacturing conflict and Christian Boots, as if thereby to feel more Jewish.