This week, as tables across the globe become the gathering point for Passover Seders, one implicit note will be the regenerating narrative of exodus in Jewish history. But often overlooked in this narrative is the way that exoduses, either forced or self-motivated, give birth to new Jewish communities in our own day. And few American cities are more emblematic of this, I’d argue, than my hometown of Houston, Texas, where roughly 400 South African Jewish families have settled, stayed, and grown from the late 1970s to the present. Although, as often happens, their assimilation process was not without its hitches—as the story of one of their early experiences reveals. “We went to each of the synagogues and they each said, ‘Unless you become a member of the synagogue, you can’t come to the synagogue,’ ” Dr. Les Nowitz recalled, of his first holiday in town. “We said, ‘We just arrived, we came here in June, we don’t know where we want to join and what we want to do.’ There wasn’t one synagogue that would allow us to come into the synagogue for services. So, we sat on the Katy Freeway near the swimming pool in the apartments where we were living. We came from an environment where there was no such thing as needing a ticket to get into synagogue.” Of course that environment, though perhaps less formal or demanding, had also grown precarious. By the time a 1980 census estimated that the Jewish population of South Africa had reached its apogee at 119,000, a significant number of the country’s Jews had already left. With myriad political crises, including the battles to end apartheid, deepening, the South African Jewish community had begun scattering across the globe by the late 1970s, settling in Europe, Australia, Israel, Canada, and America. For a group that traces itself mostly—80 percent by conservative estimates—back to Lithuania or the Baltics, this dispersal began to reduce one of the most historically singular groups in modern Jewish history. Today the Jewish community in South Africa numbers around 70,000, with an average reduction of nearly 2,000 each year.

What’s your take on the Weinstein Co.’s decision to release the film without a rating? They did that, obviously, so that they can reach children under the age of 16, which is their primary audience. The intent of the film, as I understand it, is to change the behavior of how children related to other children in terms of bullying. It’s really their only choice, if they want to reach children under 16. It’s great if parents want to take their children to see this film, but on the hand, if children want to see this film, and they don’t want to go with their parents, they should absolutely be able to.

Denizens of D.C. and history wonks (by no means mutually exclusive groups) are fond of explaining why Washington’s alphabetical street layout does not include a J Street among its lettered grid. Across the city’s four quadrants, every letter has its own street all the way from A through W (sadly X, Y, and Z didn’t make the cut, either), excepting J. One moth-eaten myth is that Pierre L’Enfant, the city’s original designer, had a beef with John Jay, the first chief justice, and left “J” out as a slight. The truth is actually that until sometime in the mid-19th century, the letters “I” and “J” were difficult to distinguish from each other. As usual, the explanation is much closer to pragmatic than exciting. On Saturday, J Street, the organization designed to be a liberal counterweight to the more hawkishly pro-Israel AIPAC, kicked off its third convention under the banner of “Making History,” history being something the group has assiduously tried to avoid becoming. As its 2,500 participants gathered, it seemed as though the group might have found some footing. Nearly a quarter of this year’s attendees are college students from over 100 different universities in five different countries. This young, 650-strong contingent was the point of much attention, as they were featured parading through the conference’s opening plenary on Saturday night. It was announced that J Street U, the organization’s campus outposts, had reached 33 colleges.

Apart from the religious camp (owing to the structure of its religious identity), apart from the camp of the secular extremist right (owing to the violence of its fantasies), and apart from the post-Zionist left (owing to its humanitarian-cosmopolitan vision), all other political and ideological camps in Israel grasp and articulate the fact that a binational state in Eretz Israel is a dangerous and unfavorable possibility, both in the short term and (more particularly) in the long term. Despite this fact, we stride, as though out of necessity, toward the establishment of a binational state, an entity which at some stages of Zionist history was viewed as a plausible possibility, and even as a laudable one in some circles. Even if many of us believe that it is possible to prevent the creation of such a state through forceful political steps, there still remains an obligation to prepare for it, both intellectually and emotionally, just as we prepare for other states of emergency. The aim of such preparation is to guarantee that a binational state will not undermine Israel's democratic structure, and will not completely destroy the Jewish-Israeli collective identity that took shape over the past several decades.

But for those who believed in and dreamed of an independent Jewish-Israeli identity which, for better or for worse, stands up to the test of dealing with a national-territorial reality entirely its own, a binational state represents a broken dream, a surefire source of demoralizing conflicts in the future, as was proven by the failure of binational experiments around the world that involved peoples who were closer to one another than are Jews and Palestinians in terms of religion, economics, values and history.