Over green tea in Amichai Chikli’s office, with sweeping views of Jerusalem’s Har Hotzvim high-tech neighborhood and surrounding mountains, JNS asked the Israeli minister for diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism how he defines “Diaspora.”

“I look at it very—from the tachlis side, the pragmatic side,” the 43-year-old minister, who arrived at the meeting in February toting a bike helmet, told JNS. “We are in a pragmatic framework. We are in a government office. So ‘the Jews who live outside of Israel.’ The Diaspora. As simple as that.”

The bookshelves in Chikli’s office suggested an omnivorous reader: Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer’s 1862 Seeking Zion , which advocated for agricultural training for Jewish settlement; an apparent copy of Judah Halevi’s 12th-century philosophical work

See Full Page