107 6 Chosenness and the Exclusivity of Truth 1 Reuven Firestone I grew up in a religiously liberal Jewish American home in which respect for the “other” was always held as an important value, and I believe that it was articu- lated in both religious and secular humanist language. On the other hand, I lived in a larger community that was considerably more conservative and largely homogeneously white, English-speaking, and middle class. I experi- enced no overt anti-Semitism as a child and felt completely at home in my white, middle-class environment. When I had just turned eighteen, with enough units to graduate from high school one semester before the end of the academic year, I earned some money and then flew in the early spring of 1970 to Europe to “see the world.” My travels were a mind-opening experience through which I learned, among many other things, that I was not nearly as independent and daring as I had hoped. I became quite lonely traveling by myself; so ater a month or two, I headed for Israel in order to connect with some acquaintances there. I had never visited Israel and knew very little about the country. Although unaware at the time, I realize in retrospect that I had a firm expectation that the Jewish Israelis would be happy heroes, while the Arabs would be untrustworthy and quite less civilized. hese were expectations that I had picked up from the larger environment in which I was raised. hey clearly did not originate from my family. To my surprise, however, my first experiences in Israel turned these expectations on their heads. I observed unhappy Jewish Israelis acting quite unheroically—sometimes violently and barbarically—and I became fast friends with two elegant and cosmopolitan young Palestinian Muslim men two years my senior, who lived in a village on the West Bank and worked in the Old City of Jerusalem. he story of these unfolding experiences will someday be written because it is both entertaining and, I think, emotionally touching, and perhaps even enlightening, but this is not the place for that. I ended up living for some months that spring and summer in the Muslim Quarter of Old Jerusalem, and then on a Jewish border kibbutz. I was blessed with a wonderful set of experi- ences and friendships in both communities that taught me to appreciate and respect (even if I didn’t understand) the cultural, religious, and national tradi- tions that so deeply informed the collective world views of these peoples. As I piece together the issues that have moved me down the particular path of my adult life, I realize that those spring and summer months were pivotal experiences for me. Much of my professional and personal energy has since been devoted to the quest to understand the intricacies of the relation- ship between Jew and Muslim, Israeli and Palestinian, and “self” and “other.” 0001249417.INDD 107 0001249417.INDD 107 2/5/2011 2:47:40 PM 2/5/2011 2:47:40 PM