The Diaspora and Israeli Culture By Jeet Heer National Post (July 22, 2004) Since World War II, Jewish-American writers have been enormously successful in attracting readers from all over the world, except oddly enough in Israel. Saul Bellow and the late Isaac Bashevis Singer both won the Nobel Prize, Philip Roth has had a four-day festival in France celebrating his work, Cynthia Ozick and Norman Mailer are fixtures in the American literary firmament. Yet as I traveled through Israel two weeks ago, I had trouble finding anyone interested in these writers. Indeed, Israelis are singularly cool towards the culture of the Jewish Diaspora, whether created in the United States or elsewhere. The Diaspora and Israel represent the two contrasting faces of the Jewish identity. The Diaspora is old, whereas Israel is young. The earliest Diaspora (or dispersal of the Jewish people into the Gentile world) took place with the Assyrian victory over ancient Israel, around 700 BCE. Since that conquest, many other wars and migrations have caused Jews to spread across the globe. The state of Israel was founded in 1948 by refugees from the European Diaspora. Over the last half century, Israel’s population has been repeatedly replenished by immigration from scattered Jewish groups returning to their ancestral home. Israel depends on the Diaspora, not just as a source for population growth but also for moral and economic support. Yet Israel in many ways was created to negate the Diaspora. The whole logic of Israel’s existence rests on the idea that living in the Diaspora is bad for Jews: both dangerous to Jewish safety and destructive to Jewish culture. In looking at the Diaspora, Israelis combine dependence with disdain, an odd combination. Yet there is a further twist to this contradictory attitude: because of the political situation in the Middle East, it is actually much safer for Jews to live in Canada or the United States than in Israel. Moreover, the Jewish communities in North America have been hugely successful, not just financially well-off but also culturally vibrant. Therefore Israelis cannot help but feel envious and resentful of their North American cousins, even while also believing that only those that live in Israel are really keeping the authentic Jewish identity alive. When you hear Israelis talk about the Diaspora you feel like you are eavesdropping on a longstanding family quarrel. There is a Diaspora Museum in Israel but in their day-to-day conversations Israelis are dismissive, if not scornful, of the global Jewish culture. I got a strong sense of the Israeli haughtiness towards the Diaspora when we met up with the venerable novelist A.B. Yehoshua, at age 67 the reigning patriarch of Hebrew literature. Saul Bellow once described Yehoshua as “one of Israel's world-class writers." When we talked to him, Yehoshua curtly refused to return Bellow’s compliment. “I would trade twenty Saul Bellows for a William Faulkner,” the Israeli novelist snorted. Yehoshua also pooh-poohed the work of other Jewish American writers, especially Philip Roth. These literary attitudes are part of a general attitude Yehoshua has towards the Diaspora. As Jonathan Shainin recently noted in The Nation, “Yehoshua's contempt for the diaspora is present in nearly all his novels, and it is a frequent subject in his nonfiction as well; he has called it ‘a disease’ and ‘immoral,’ a ‘neurotic solution.’” Israel’s foremost translator Hillel Halkin confirmed that Yehoshua’s lofty dismissal of the Diaspora is widely shared. Born in the United States, Halkin is thoroughly steeped in the literature of three languages: English, Yiddish and Hebrew. Halkin noted that writers like Ozick are rarely translated in Hebrew. Nor is there much Israeli interest in the riches of the Yiddish literary tradition, according to Halkin. In the last four decades, thanks in part to scholars like Ruth Wisse and the late Irving Howe, there has been an immense North American appetite for Yiddish literature. The fruit of the interest can be seen in the fact that I.B. Singer was recently inducted into the canonical Library of America. Ironically, the memory of Yiddish is kept alive in North America rather than the Jewish homeland. Franz Kafka was one of the very greatest writers of the Jewish Diaspora, yet even his work has a hard time winning an Israeli audience. When we met the young writer Etgar Keret, he told us that he was rare among his literary peers in loving Kafka. For older Israeli writers, one guesses, Kafka represents everything that was wrong with the Diaspora: he was overly-intellectual, neurotic, and he wrote in the language of the enemy, German. Israeli culture – tough minded, nationalistic, outgoing and animated by a joie de vivre – almost seems based on a complete inversion of everything we associate with Kafka’s name. The Diaspora flourished not only in North America and Europe but also in the Middle East. Well into the 20th century, cities like Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad were major Jewish cultural centres. This ended when the conflicts between Israel and its neighbors turned Arab speaking Jews into refugees. These Middle Eastern Jews (known as Mizrahim in Hebrew) found an uneasy home in Israel. As immigrants they learned Hebrew and slowly watched their culture disappear. I got a sense of the bittersweet fate of the Mizrahim when I talked to the novelist Orly Castel-Bloom, whose parents came to Israel from Cairo. Over a pleasant sea-food dinner, Castel-Bloom told me she wanted her son to learn Arabic, so he can work in military intelligence rather than the regular army. However, her son said he didn’t want to learn such a “dirty language.” His remark is especially shocking when you consider that his grand-parents and all his maternal ancestors for many generations spoke Arabic. In rejecting Arabic he is building a barrier against not only his Middle Eastern neighbors but also part of his own Diasporic heritage. In a better world, the Mizrahim could have acted as a bridge between Israel and the Arab world. However, because of bitter enmity created by many wars and the pressures of assimilation, the culture of the Mizrahim Diaspora is being submerged under Israeli nationalism. For an outsider, the Israeli chilliness towards that Diaspora is puzzling and sad. After all, the nearly 3,000 year history of the Diaspora is not merely the story of persecution and flight. It is also a tale of creativity and growth, often under difficult circumstances. It was the Diaspora that allowed Jews to free themselves from the heavy weight of religious orthodoxy and enjoy secular liberty. The children of the Diaspora include Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Marx, Einstein, and Arendt. These are figures who have enriched the global culture, including of course Israeli culture. At its best, the Diaspora has been cosmopolitan and forward-looking. In rejecting the Diaspora, Israel runs the risk of becoming provincial and culturally stunted. But perhaps the geo-political insecurity of Israel contributes to its cultural lack of confidence. On that happy day when Israelis no longer worry about their physical survival they might then be ready to come to terms with the continuing vitality of the Diaspora.