Bridging the Two Cultures

Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture

by Edward Skidelsky

Princeton University Press

Sitting on the judging panel for this year’s Wingate Literary prize, I noticed several patterns emerging. One was the length of most of the entries; it seems that following the model of the 37 volume Babylonian Talmud, many Jewish authors cannot seem to express themselves in less than 600 pages. Another is their secular bias: while there is a proliferation of American Jewish books on Judaism as religion, UK Jewish writers are more likely to steer clear, preferring the safety of Jewishness as culture, warm families, and an ever decreasing Yiddish vocabulary.

The overwhelming trend however, is of an abundance of books dealing either with Israel or the Holocaust/Second World War era. The focus on these two areas is hardly surprising; they continue to be the foci of Jewish identity for a large numberof Jews. It is, however, disappointing that there is not more focus on other aspects of Jewishness. A Judaism that is rooted in the memory of the Shoah and a connection with Israel holds little promise for survival and renewal, at least for those of us in the diaspora. Is there no space for Jewish philosophy, religion and culture, for a Judaism of ideas rather than a Judaism of survival? Read more

Elena Shvarts (1948-2010)

Elena Shvarts, the Russian poet, died earlier this year. As one of her translators I found myself summing up her life and works over and over again — a sad task, and one which feels somehow intrusive and limiting: the condensing of a life of poetry into three paragraphs, mostly for people who are not yet readers of her poems; an element of marketing, to win over the non-readers; a few anecdotes and beautiful phrases… Nothing of the bewilderment and disbelief we feel in bereavement, or even of the nature of bereavement which deceives us, tells us we should wait for more poems, convinces us it is impossible that the wise and eloquent voice is no longer at the end of the phone line in a St Petersburg flat. Read more

Why, Let the Stricken Deer Go Weep

By Elena Shvarts
Translated by Sasha Dugdale

Queen:     If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?
Hamlet:     Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not seems.

Hamlet, Act One, Scene Two

I

In February 1942 the Leningrad Theatre Institute, or at least, what was left of it, was evacuated from besieged Leningrad to Pyatigorsk, together with the Philharmonic and Radlov’s Theatre Company. They had barely settled or begun recovering a little from their starvation, when the Germans began a sudden and unexpected offensive in the Caucasus and reached Pyatigorsk with unimaginable speed. The soldiers and the town’s administration all fled south to Tbilisi. Almost everyone in the Theatre Institute set off in their wake, the students walking, some hitching lifts on the last military lorries going in that direction. Initially my Mother and her friend had the luck to be offered a ride, but then the soldiers began harassing them, and finally, angered by their aloofness, they threw them back out onto the road. Read more

On the Track of Family History

There are some documents that, as a conscientious writer, I am glad to have read only after the publication of a novel, even though they are extremely interesting and contain potentially useful information. In the first part of this decade, when I was researching the first half of the twentieth- century for the history of the time and of my family, and reading the literature of the period, I did not know that my maternal grandmother had an uncle called Carl Ludwig Franck. Read more

The Smile on the Dog

JM: It’s a pleasure to be conducting this virtual Q&A – although I have a lurking suspicion that our friends at the Jewish Quarterly have cast me, the Everything is God guy, as Felix Fidley to your Cass Seltzer, a role which I am uniquely unqualified to play.  As the title of my book suggests, my own theology is closer to pantheism (or panentheism) than it is to the relatively primitive classical theism debunked in your (and Seltzer’s) appendix.  So I’d like to start there: Given the way you frame the book’s climactic debate on ‘Does God exist?’ do you agree with today’s neo-atheists that the ‘God’ in question, the ‘God’ that is most relevant to our contemporary moment, is really the old time religion God of providence and punishment?  Personally, I’ve always felt that Dawkins, Hitchens, et al, are setting up a straw man, that only fundamentalists believe as they describe.  Is your sense that the real ‘atheism versus religion’ debate today is indeed between old time religion and rational, scientific philosophy, with no significant role for panentheist Hasidim, Tielhard-style Christians, feminist theologians, or the myriad of other religionists with more contemporary theologies?

RG: It’s nice to make your virtual acquaintance, Jay, and I’ll try to answer your questions as best I can, while maintaining a novelist’s prerogative of ambiguity. Trained as I am as a philosopher, a field in which we battle against imprecision and ambiguity, I’m hyper-sensitive the deliberate application of ambiguity in literature.  A novelist has to create spaces into which the reader’s own point of view moves so that it can inhabit the work and make it into an experience of its own—one hopes pleasurable, though no novelist can secure this for every reader. That is the diceyness of the game. A novel is not an argument but rather a template for experience.  This difference between argumentation and literary experience is the subtext that runs through this novel, which takes as its backdrop the contemporary reactivated atheist/religion debate.  It’s one of the themes of the novel that the binary choices presented in the debate hardly exhaust the possibilities.  That’s why Cass says about the arguments and counter-arguments in his Appendix, which I reproduce at the back of my novel, that they don’t capture all that there is to the matter.  The Appendix is only the Appendix, and the text of the matter, our lived experience,  is something else. Read more

From Judaeophobia to Islamophobia

Many books have been written on anti-Semitism. The past decade has seen the publication, in today’s Europe, of a flood of writings on hostility to Arabs and Islam. And yet, very few researchers have located the Judaeophobia which appeared during the second half of the 19th century at the root of contemporary European nation-building. Similarly, very few research proposals have examined the role of Islamophobia in today’s effort to construct European unity. Of course, works have been published on the emergence of hostility to Islam, but the issue has not been investigated in depth, on the cultural level, for Europe as a whole. Read more

Brno

Why Brno? A place, many would say, distinguished only by its lack of distinction, set at the very heart of Europe but always in the shadow of its mighty neighbour Vienna or its more distant cousin, Prague. A capital of course, but only a regional capital, of South Moravia. The writer Jirí Kratochvil, a native of the place, makes it clear in his prose poem ‘How to Paint a Picture of Brno’: ‘Brno is a city on which there lies the curse of provincialism.’
And yet in a curious way — I’ve never lived there, and visited only a handful of times — Brno has occupied a large part of my life ever since the day, four years after the Iron Curtain came down, I first crept cautiously into the city. Read more

Postcards from the Edge

Hello, there,

After a long, weirdly warm Jerusalem winter spent in the presence of heavily armed soldiers and suspicious security guards — many Fridays a large white surveillance zeppelin hovered over town, staring down on noontime prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque and making a macabre mockery of the festive atmosphere that usually attends the launch of a hot-air balloon — I was eager to get away. Read more

Unothering the Other: Ajami/The Infidel

If you’re making a film that wants to attack or explode prejudice there are two approaches. One is comic: ridicule, satire, and sheer irreverence are its means.  The other is tragic: to bring an audience into close empathy with the Other, and with other ways of life, making them as familiar as possible to us, and then treat us to the sadness, pain and horror that go along with that ‘othering’ — even, or especially, if the oppressor doing the othering is ‘self’. Read more

Through the Looking Glass

A few weeks ago I stood by the tomb of Abraham in Hebron hearing the recitation of the amidah, the rhythm of those familiar words of prayer suddenly accompanied by those of a Jewish poet that came to my mind in that moment. I felt moved and connected in ways I had not foreseen. The last time I was in that part of the world I was in my gap year, an eighteen year old enjoying the life of a secular kibbutznik before heading on to Oxford. This time I had arrived at Hebron after a very different journey, one that took me both deeply in to my Jewish culture and showed it to me from the other side of the mirror, so to speak, challenging many of my previous assumptions. Read more

Bil’in, My Village

It was mid December 2004 when the bulldozers first showed up in my village Bil’in. Without my knowing it, this was the opening salvo for what would become one of the longest and most influential grassroots campaigns against the Wall that Israel is building in the occupied West Bank. Read more

Route 443: The Legal Illusion

On May 28, for the first time in close to a decade, Palestinian traffic was allowed on Route 443, a main highway running through the West Bank. The story behind Route 443 represents not only a watershed moment in the history of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, but also highlights what is legally and morally wrong with it. Read more

Towards Democracy

As a British-born Israeli who works to overcome internal divisions within Israeli society, I watched the recent hard-fought British elections with considerable envy.
While comparisons between societies and political cultures are always problematic — and certainly those made between two as different in history and circumstances as our own — such an exercise can nevertheless provide helpful insights. The purpose in this case is not to castigate or excuse the current state of Israeli democracy,  it is rather to offer some explanations into its current fragile state and propose some strategies for improvement. Read more

Delegitimising the Delegitimisers

I first recall hearing the term ‘delegitimisation’ applied to Israel six or seven years ago at a rather turgid conference in Brussels, when Nathan Sharansky presented it as part of his 3D test for unfair criticism of Israel. The way you could detect this ‘new antisemitism’, he said, was if the critic was applying double standards to Israel, demonising the state, or delegitimising its very existence. Cute and tricksy, I thought at the time. But it seems to be a concept which has now come into its own. Delegitimisation has become the catchword of defenders of Israel, a new battle-cry in the fight to defend the Jewish state — and, if some are to be believed, one which presents an existential threat to its existence. Read more

My Jewish Oeuvre

It was 1987. I was working as a documentary maker in television. A puzzle was eating away at me. It had dawned on me that I saw nothing on TV that reflected the lives of the ordinary Jewish folks I had grown up with. No characters in dramas or sitcoms. No documentaries. No British Lennie Bruce or Woody Allen. No nothing apart from Miriam Karlin’s character in The Rag Trade, an East End sweat-shop sitcom that had been out in the early sixties and reprised briefly in the seventies. And Jack Rosenthal’s Barmitzvah Boy. Why? Read more

Bad Karma

‘Fifteen shekels a month can guarantee your daughter one hundred thousand in the event of your death. Do you know what a difference one hundred thousand can make to a young orphan? It’s exactly the difference between life as a lawyer and as a receptionist in a dentist’s office.’

Since the accident, Oshri had been selling policies like crazy. It wasn’t clear whether this had to do with his slight limp or with the paralysis in his right arm, but people who’d sit through an appointment with him would take it all in, and buy everything he had to offer: life insurance, loss of earning power, complementary health insurance, you name it. At first Oshri kept recycling the one about the Yemenite who was run over by an ice cream truck the very day he bought his policy, on his way to pick up his daughter from kindergarten, or the one about the guy from the suburbs who’d laughed when Oshri had offered him health insurance and one month later called in tears, having just received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Read more

100 years of Kibbutzim

Twelve young Romanian Jews, ten men and two women, marooned on a barren plot overlooking the Sea of Galilee. The year was 1910 and the place, named Degania A, neighboured the remote Arab village Umm Juni in a Palestine still under Ottoman rule. As the dawn of a new way of life that many later regarded as epitomising Israel, the state-to-be, it was an inauspicious beginning yet also the stuff of legend. The founders of Degania A could almost be seen as twelve latter-day children of Jacob, progenitors of future tribes. Determined to ‘redeem the land’, smash the class system and radically transform the Jewish condition through the dignity of manual labour, they went where others feared to tread. Degania in Hebrew and Umm Juni in Arabic both mean ‘cornflower’ but conditions were harsh, the soil was stubborn and malaria was rife. Their experiment was virtually snuffed out later that year, only to be refreshed by a new garin (seed or unit) of Russian pioneers in 1911. Read more

Bloch

I…am a Jew, and I aspire to write Jewish music, not for the sake of self-advertisement, but because I am sure that this is the only way in which I can produce music of vitality and significance — if I can do such a thing at all … I believe that those pages of my own in which I am at my best are those in which I am most unmistakably racial, but the racial quality is not only in folk themes: it is in myself! Read more

This Thread of Life

DG: When I write I want to be invaded by the people I’m writing about. What does it mean to be another human being? What does it mean to be you or to explore this filament, this thread of life and light and warmth that goes through another human being? I can reach it only through writing.

PA: Having worked in film a bit over the years I feel that writing is akin to acting — there is a similar psychological process. An actor is trying to embody another human being, to become someone else. The actor has his or her body whereas the writer has his pen. If you can do it successfully I think there’s a conviction that a reader will automatically feel. It’s a mysterious process, one which connects to the idea of play, of being a child again. Read more

Dispossession, Discrimination, and Civil Disobedience in Sheikh Jarrah

The May 14th demonstration began as any other. Some 400 protestors convened in the small park in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah as they have done each Friday for months. The bus from Tel Aviv unloaded activists from the coastal city; the circle of drummers, the trade mark of the Sheikh Jarrah movement, began infusing the event with electrifying rhythm. A line was forming in front of the stand in the back where activists and visitors can stock up on ‘Free Sheikh Jarrah’ tee-shirts. Yet the atmosphere was more tense than usual. Read more

Zamoscz

More precisely than I
Remember the story he told
Of a garden that grew
By the fortress, he pictured
The little gentile hunchback girl.
A general’s daughter? Something like that. Read more

Walking the Past

I have spent many years of my professional life as a lawyer and human rights activist struggling to save Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank from being used to establish illegal Israeli settlements. But as the years passed more settlements were built and the landscape in the region where I lived was vanishing. Even after it was affirmed in a 2005 report sponsored by the Israeli government that 40 per cent of the settlements were established on land that Israel acknowledges as privately owned by Palestinians, nothing was done to remove them. To my great dismay, law and legality did not prove to be decisive weapons in our battle against Israeli colonialism. In 2008 I published Palestinian Walks, a book that described the vanishing landscape of Palestine through a series of six walks I took from 1979 to 2007. Read more