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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3>Here are a few
notes from my trip to Israel. I had hoped to meet some religious folk there
(especially Christian Zionists) but because of the way the trip was organized,
that didn't work out. Instead I mostly talked to literary types. A few
notes.</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>1. The death of the future. <FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT
face="Times New Roman" size=3>The first Israeli I met was David Grossman. He
was (as you might easily guess) is an enormously impressive man. His face
is a beautiful register of sensitivity. Grossman basically said that the main
problem with Israel is that it's hard to imagine any future, given the
stalemate. "Israel used to have the future on the brain, constantly bright. Now
it feels like anything after tomorrow is a question makr. Nobody is making palns
for 10 years from now. Ten years form now? Who knows." Virtually evey Israeli we
met confirmed Grossman's dark diagnosis. The sense of a shared communal future
has been eclipsed. Most people want to avoid politics and tend to their gardens.
There is also a real retro culture in Israel right now, with a lot of nostagia
for the Zionist folk songs of the 1950s and 1960s. As one of my friends
explained, Israeli's are longing for a time when the future seemed brighter.
It's an odd sort of nostalgia for a future that nevered arrived.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV class=RTE> </DIV>
<DIV class=RTE>2. The fraying of social solidarity. There were very visible
displays of begging and homelessness in Jerusalem and elsewhere. This was very
distressing to some of the Israelis we talked to. The claimed it was a new
phenomenon and cited it as proof that communal ties (within Israel) were coming
apart. It seemed part and parcel of the demise of socialist hope and the
privitization program of Likud (which is not getting alot of attention in
North America). Even the military, by far the strongest glue holding society
together, is losing its adhesive power. We met several people who had various
run-ins with the military -- not refuse-niks who had a political agenda but just
people who refused to obey rules out of a personal sense of self-preservaton or
individual identity. (That being said, Israelis are still much more communal
than North American).</DIV>
<DIV class=RTE> </DIV>
<DIV class=RTE>3. Cultural loniness. Israel is in many ways a European country,
and therefore Israeli intellectuals are feel stung by what they regard as the
turn of Euorpe against their country. (They are much less concerned with the
Arab world, having little hope of acceptance on that quarter). Several people
said they feel that Israel has no friend in the world, except the United States.
Israel is in an odd position: their Arab neighbours see them as Europeans and
the Europeans see them as being part of the "Middle East" mess. Their closest
economic and cultural ties are with Europe but their military and diplomatic
ties are with the U.S. All this contributes to a sense of being
beleagured.</DIV>
<DIV class=RTE> </DIV>
<DIV class=RTE>4. Disdain for the Diaspora -- but this is a complex issue which
deserves a more detailed airing. Below is a column where I discuss this. </DIV>
<DIV class=RTE> </DIV>
<DIV class=RTE>Dismissing the Diaspora</DIV>
<DIV class=RTE>by Jeet Heer</DIV>
<DIV class=RTE> </DIV>
<DIV class=RTE>Since the Second World War, Jewish-American writers have
been enormously<BR>successful in attracting readers from all over the world,
except, oddly<BR>enough, in Israel. Saul Bellow and the <BR>late Isaac Bashevis
Singer both <BR>won the<BR>Nobel Prize, Philip Roth <BR>has had a four-day
festival in France celebrating his<BR>work, and Cynthia Ozick<BR>and Norman
Mailer are fixtures in the American literary firmament. Yet as I<BR>travelled
through Israel two weeks ago, I had trouble finding anyone<BR>interested in
these writers. (My trip, in the company of other young<BR>writers, was under the
kind auspices <BR>of the Canada-Israel Committee Cultural<BR>Mission.) Indeed,
Israelis are<BR>singularly cool toward the culture of the Jewish Diaspora,
whether created<BR>in the United States or elsewhere.<BR>The Diaspora and Israel
represent the two<BR>contrasting faces of the Jewish<BR>identity. The Diaspora
is old, whereas Israel is young. The earliest<BR>Diaspora (or dispersal of the
Jewish people into <BR>the Gentile world) took place<BR>with the Assyrian
victory over <BR>the northern kingdom of Israel around 700 BC.<BR>Since that
conquest, many other<BR>wars and migrations have caused Jews to spread across
the globe. The state<BR>of Israel was founded in 1948 mostly by refugees from
the European Diaspora.<BR>Over the last half-century, Israel's population has
been repeatedly<BR>replenished by immigration from scattered Jewish groups
returning to their<BR>ancestral home.<BR>Israel depends on the Diaspora, not
just as a source for<BR>population growth<BR>but also for moral and economic
support. Yet Israel in many ways was created<BR>to negate the Diaspora.<BR>The
raison d'être for the state of Israel is the idea<BR>that living in
the<BR>Diaspora is bad for Jews: both dangerous to Jewish safety and destructive
to<BR>Jewish culture. In looking at the Diaspora, many Israelis combine
dependence<BR>with disdain, an odd mixture.<BR>Yet there is a further twist to
this contradictory<BR>attitude: Because of the<BR>conflict in the Middle East,
it is actually much safer for Jews <BR>to live in<BR>Canada or the United States
than in Israel. Moreover, the Jewish<BR>communities in North America have been
hugely successful, not just<BR>economically, but also culturally vibrant.
Therefore, some Israelis cannot<BR>help but feel envious and resentful of their
North American cousins, even<BR>while believing that only those who live in
Israel are really keeping the<BR>authentic Jewish identity alive. When you hear
Israelis talk about the<BR>Diaspora, you feel like you are eavesdropping on a
longstanding family<BR>quarrel. <BR>There is a Diaspora Museum in Israel, but in
their day-to-day<BR>conversations,<BR>Israelis are dismissive, if not scornful,
of the global Jewish culture. I<BR>got a strong sense of <BR>the Israeli
haughtiness toward the Diaspora when we met<BR>up with venerable<BR>novelist
A.B. Yehoshua, at age 67 the reigning patriarch <BR>of Hebrew
literature.<BR>Bellow once described Yehoshua as "one of Israel's<BR>world-class
writers." When we talked to him, Yehoshua curtly refused to<BR>return Bellow's
compliment. "I would trade 20 Saul Bellows for a William<BR>Faulkner," the
Israeli novelist snorted. Yehoshua also pooh-poohed the work<BR>of other
Jewish-American writers, especially Philip Roth. <BR>These literary<BR>attitudes
are part of a general attitude Yehoshua has toward<BR>the Diaspora. As Jonathan
Shainin recently noted in The Nation, "Yehoshua's<BR>contempt for the Diaspora
is present in nearly all his novels, and it is a<BR>frequent subject in his
non-fiction as well; he has called it 'a disease'<BR>and 'immoral,' a 'neurotic
solution.' "<BR>Israel's foremost translator, Hillel<BR>Halkin, confirmed that
Yehoshua's lofty<BR>dismissal of the Diaspora is widely shared. Born in the
United States,<BR>Halkin is thoroughly steeped in the literature of three
languages: English,<BR>Yiddish and Hebrew. Halkin noted that writers such as
Ozick are rarely<BR>translated in Hebrew. <BR>Nor is there much Israeli interest
in the riches of the<BR>Yiddish literary<BR>tradition, according to Halkin. In
the past four decades, thanks in part to<BR>scholars such as Ruth Wisse and the
late Irving Howe, there has been an<BR>immense North American appetite for
Yiddish literature. The fruit of the<BR>interest can be seen in the fact that
I.B. Singer was recently inducted into<BR>the canonical Library of America.
Ironically, the memory of Yiddish is kept<BR>alive in North America rather than
the Jewish homeland.<BR>Franz Kafka was one of<BR>the greatest writers of the
Jewish Diaspora, yet even<BR>his work has <BR>a hard time winning an Israeli
audience. When we met young writer<BR>Etgar<BR>Keret, he told us that he was
rare among his literary peers in loving Kafka.<BR>For older Israeli writers, one
guesses, Kafka represents everything that was<BR>wrong with the Diaspora: He was
overly intellectual, neurotic and he wrote<BR>in the language of the enemy,
German. Israeli culture - tough-minded,<BR>nationalistic, outgoing and animated
by a joie de vivre - almost seems based<BR>on a complete inversion of everything
we associate with Kafka's name.<BR>Though<BR>chronically afflicted by
persecution, the Diaspora flourished not only<BR>in North America and Europe but
also in the Middle East. Well into the 20th<BR>century, cities such as Cairo,
Damascus and Baghdad were major Jewish<BR>cultural centres. This ended when the
conflicts between Israel and its<BR>neighbours turned Arabic-speaking Jews into
refugees. These Middle Eastern<BR>Jews (known as Mizrahim in Hebrew) found an
uneasy home in Israel. As<BR>immigrants, they learned Hebrew and slowly watched
their culture disappear.<BR>I<BR>got a sense of the bittersweet fate of the
Mizrahim when I talked to<BR>novelist Orly Castel-Bloom, whose parents came to
Israel from Cairo. Over a<BR>pleasant seafood dinner, Castel-Bloom told me she
wanted her son to learn<BR>Arabic so he can work in military intelligence rather
than the regular army.<BR>However, her son said he didn't want to learn such a
"dirty language." His<BR>remark is especially shocking when you consider that
his grandparents and<BR>all his maternal ancestors for many generations spoke
Arabic. In rejecting<BR>Arabic, he is rejecting part of his own Diasporic
heritage.<BR>For an outsider, the<BR>Israeli chilliness toward that Diaspora is
puzzling and<BR>sad. After all, the nearly 3,000-year history of the Diaspora is
not only<BR>the story of persecution and flight. It is also a tale of creativity
and<BR>growth, often under difficult circumstances. The children of the
Diaspora<BR>include Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Marx and Einstein. These figures have
enriched<BR>the global culture, including of course Israeli culture. <BR>In
rejecting the<BR>Diaspora, Israel runs the risk of becoming provincial
and<BR>culturally stunted. But perhaps the geopolitical insecurity of
Israel<BR>contributes to its cultural lack of confidence. On that happy day
when<BR>Israelis no longer worry about their physical survival, they might then
be<BR>ready to come to terms with the continuing vitality of the
Diaspora.<BR>National<BR>Post<BR><BR></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>