I loved Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union and took it as an exploration of rosy nostalgia and distopian fantasy as two poles of modern Jewish thought. Then into my mailbox comes a letter from Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon himself, on behalf of Peace Now. They write:

In imagining a vibrant but endangered Yiddish-speaking homeland for the Jews in an alternate-history Alaska, Michael’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union draws freely on both of these Jewish imaginative traditions, these differing modes, making a kind of funhouse-mirror prediction about a Jewish future. But there is another powerful strand in the Jewish way of thinking about the world and our place in it, a kind of imagination that focuses neither on the past with its glories and disasters nor on the future, whether shining or dark. It is the tradition embodied in the final word of the organization on whose behalf we are writing you today: it is the tradition that embraces, and devotes itself, to the imperatives of the now.

What has to happen now, as they argue, is for the State of Israel to negotiate a two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority. That requires putting aside both fundamentalist nostalgia and paralyzing fear. Israel can only have a decent present and future if it addresses the Settlements issue and negotiates permanent borders.