'A Diluted American'
[CONT'D.]

By Eve Silberman

"I was an undistinguished student with no connections to any organizations," Chafets continues serenely in his Jerusalem apartment. He did not get caught up in the political upheaval of the era, he says, adding, "I wasn't part of the group of students who ran the student government, the newspaper, the entertainment–that stuff."

If there's a touch of self-satisfaction in his voice, why not? Chafets, 52, is listened to on almost all key issues involving contemporary Israel; he's a respected commentator, where he frequently appears on television and radio, and writes op ed columns. He is also the author of nine books, ranging from nonfiction to political thrillers.

The former Bill Chafets spent a junior year abroad in Israel and moved there right after graduation. He served the required three years in the Israeli army, launched a writing career and wound up, at age 29, in charge of the government press office for newly elected Prime Minister Menachem Begin. "For a young guy," he says, "it was a big thrill, getting a chance to see some of the extraordinary characters of the century."

When he left government in the early '80s after five years, Chafets began writing and publishing books. Ironically, the Pontiac, Michigan, native scored his biggest success not with a book about Israel but with Devil's Night and Other True Tales of Detroit, a work of nonfiction. A decade ago, he also helped found the influential English-language Jerusalem Report magazine, for which he's currently a columnist.

Married just before moving to Israel, Chafets and his first wife subsequently divorced. He remarried again in Israel, and again divorced. He has a daughter, Michal, 27, from his first marriage and a son, Samuel, 17, from his second.

A Host With the Most
"Between my marriages," he puts it, "I gave a lot of parties." In fact, Chafets become known among Israel's cultural elite as a great party host. "When he was less encumbered, people used to congregate at his house, almost like a literary salon," recalls Richard Roth, deputy American ambassador to Israel–and, as it happens, a former roommate of Chafets at Michigan.

Now married to Time magazine Jerusalem bureau chief Lisa Beyer, Chafets lives much more quietly than in his bachelor days. Dividing their time between the Jerusalem apartment and a Tel Aviv home, he and Lisa are busy both with their careers and their bilingual preschoolers, Jacob, 4, and Annie, 3. (Live-in help keep things running smoothly.)

"This is a good one," Chafets says of his marriage to Beyer, 37, a non-Jew from Louisiana. Marriage between Jews and non-Jews in Israel is a sensitive subject in a land where ultra-Orthodox Jews wield power well beyond their small numbers.

Just before he married Lisa (in a civil ceremony in the States), Chafets, perhaps defensively, wrote a column about the marriage for the Report. He blasted Israel for, as he describes it, "being the kind of society where a Jew and a non-Jew aren't free to marry–I wanted to say that if I wanted to marry a non-Jewish woman, it was none of anyone's business."

'You're Worse Than Hitler'
The column became one of his most controversial pieces, drawing vitriolic letters from Orthodox Jews. ("You're worse than Hitler!" one reader wrote.) "Zev has a strong personality," says former Jerusalem Report editor Hirsh Goodman, who called Chafets on his honeymoon in San Francisco to urge him to withdraw the column.

With his wavy salt-and-pepper hair, casual dress and wide-framed glasses that dominate his narrow face, Chafets looks like a stereotypical academic. He mostly speaks in a low voice, his manner reflective. He recalls that the Likud Party hired him as a writer when he answered a newspaper want ad, "because I was considered so basically unambitious and unthreatening, they made me the guy who did the actual work [in Begin's 1977 election campaign]. Lo and behold, we [the Likud party] won the election for the first time in 30 years!"

Chafets's father, a dentist, and his mother, a homemaker, were not ardent Zionists, and Chafets never thought of moving to Israel until he spent his junior year in college at Hebrew University. He arrived there shortly after the 1967 Six Day War, a time when Israelis were flush with victory.

"I got caught up in the romance of a new country," he says. "When I came here, there was truly the sense that this was a weak place that needed every single man, woman or child that could work." He returned to Ann Arbor determined to emigrate, never suspecting, however, that he would become a front-row witness to history.

As an aide to Begin, Chafets was part of the first official Israeli delegation to visit Egypt, in late 1977, at the start of the historic peace negotiations between the two enemies. The experience was both thrilling and scary. The Egyptian negotiators, he recalls, "liked to laugh and fool around, and so did we." But the Israelis, aware of threats by Egyptian ultranationalists, were anxious about their safety.

Then a minor embarrassment for the Israelis occurred when they were served–and ate–jumbo shrimps for lunch in Alexandria. "We ate up, and our press reported this violation of kosher protocol–Israeli diplomats are supposed to eat only kosher in public settings," Chafets recalls. "Every rabbi in Queens, Brooklyn and Israel went nuts." The delegation switched to kosher airline food.

Chafets greatly admired the controversial Begin. He recalls Begin's decision to bomb Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981 and how the prime minister subsequently stood up to international criticism. "I learned," he says, "how much character it actually takes to be prime minister." In contrast, Chafets contemptuously dismisses recent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: "He can't even say no to his own wife."

Still, Chafets quit Begin's administration in late 1982, in protest of the massacres of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatilah refugee camps in Lebanon. The Israeli Army, then occupying parts of Lebanon, had allowed a Lebanese Christian militia group, the Phalangists, to enter the camps, where they proceeded to massacre at least 500 Palestinians. Chafets says he resigned because "it was the right thing to do."

At first it was hard to stop being important, he admits. But he soon decided that he "had a lot to say on how the press impacts foreign policy" and pitched a book proposal to a New York agent for the subsequently published Double Vision. He followed that up with a book about Israel called Heroes and Hustlers.

Then came a book on American Jews called Members of the Tribe, part of which he researched in Michigan. Chafets recalls, "I spent Yom Kippur in a Jewish frat house at Michigan so I could write about it, and I spent time with Jews on skid row in Detroit so I could write about it."

During that visit he stumbled onto the material that became his best-read and most controversial book. In 1986, a Detroit journalist urged him to spend the night before Halloween, or Devil's Night, in the Motor City. Devil's Night had become notorious, an occasion for angry people to set fires all over the city, destroying houses, abandoned buildings and unused factories. Along with hundreds of other spectators, Chafets observed Devil's Night firsthand. "It was a completely bizarre and surrealistic scene," he recalls. "Hundreds of fires. Helicopters and garbage trucks that spotted them!"

Shocked and curious, Chafets spent several months living in Detroit and trying to understand the dynamics that exploded into an annual, infamous ritual. He researched Detroit's troubled economics, its racial polarization, its restless youth. In a particularly moving scene, he reunited with a Black friend from childhood days in Pontiac. The resulting book (excerpted in a New York Times Magazine cover story) became a best seller in Detroit. But many Detroiters were furious over Chafets's description of Motown as "America's first third world city." At one point, Chafets had to be escorted out of a Detroit TV station by police, when an angry crowd tried to storm the station.

After Devil's Night, Chafets switched to fiction. He reportedly got a million-dollar movie deal for his first novel, Inherit the Mob, though no movie has been made. Chafets sometimes taps on his insider knowledge of Israeli government for his plots. The Project tells what happens when America's first Jewish president, Dewey Goldberg, clashes with an Israeli prime minister harboring a hidden agenda.

His book sales have not been spectacular, however, and Chafets remains better known both in Israel and the States for his pithy political and social commentary. Despite his support of the peace agreement with Egypt, Chafets often took a hard line concerning Israel's relations with its Arab neighbors. After Iraq sent Scud missiles Israel's way in 1991, Chafets wrote an angry piece saying that, the next time, Israel had better start firing back. "Open season on Jews ended with World War II," he declared.

"He was originally our right-wing voice," recalls Hirsh Goodman, who hired Chafets as the Jerusalem Report's first managing editor, "but he made a real switch." In December 1991, Chafets stunned readers of the Report with a column called "Yes to a Palestinian state." He explains his shift by commenting, "The parties changed, and the world's changed. The vast majority of Israelis are in favor of a Palestinian state. The argument over left and right on Arab issues has pretty much been settled."

Today, Chafets writes less about Arab-Israeli issues and more about Israel's powerful Orthodox minority, which he frequently attacks. His own marriage to a non-Jew undoubtedly has given an edge to his criticism. Israel is torn, Chafets states vehemently, "between those who want Israel to be an open, democratic society and those who want Israel to be a closed, Jewish society dominated by Jewish [religious] law and its interpreters."

Chafets may become less preoccupied with such issues this summer, when his wife is scheduled to start working in Time's headquarters in New York City. Chafets, who has dual citizenship in Israel and the States, feels conflicted. He finds that since his marriage to Beyer, he has experienced a rebirth of his American identity. "I'm not an alienated American," he says. "I'm a diluted American."

Eve Silberman is an Ann Arbor writer.