In his second lecture on R. Meir Simcha of Dvinsk for Torah in Motion, history professor Marc B. Shapiro says: There’s a whole school of thought that says aliyah (moving to Israel) is not important until the Messianic era.
I was looking on the internet today [on one of the Jewish news and gossip sites, perhaps VosIzNeias]. A.B. Yehoshua gave a talk that said that only Jews who live in Israel are real Jews. Those who live in the diaspora are half-Jews. And you have all these am haaretzim (ignorant ones) criticizing him and they’re all ignorant because they spend all their time on the internet instead of learning Torah. Not one knew enough to point out that A.B. Yehoshua — no Torah scholar — was giving the Ramban‘s position.
