Another response to Yoav

Yoav's letter

I was touched that you thought that my tiny letter should get such a reply, and so I have no choice but braking down your post and explain why you'll keep failing and all because you are looking for the coin under the wrong streetlight.

1.MS is perhaps an important thinker in Germany, but us Israelis don't know a thing about her, from the information I could gather about her on the Internet (most of it in German), I see why she is an important critic, but if there is no true dialogue between her and Israeli writers - what's the point?

2.most of the Israeli poetry of the 20th century is not religious.
studying Hebrew from the dictionary or from linguistics is boring, not to say it should be banned, and I'm saying that after two years of studying editing. Hebrew as it should be, and as it taught is like making love with the help of a guidebook, like Amichai once wrote about traveling with a map.

3.I know that Nationalism's stocks are not very high right now, still, this is the middle east. you need both religion and nationalism to figure it out. you wrote"the tragedy of this state, is that before a culture was created a state was formed as an offspring of European ideology, perhaps the most bastard son of the German ideology." but it isn't true, the Israeli culture had poets and writers and a very important book called The Bible to draw from and a comment like this shows you lack historical prospective.

4.as always it's interesting to hear what you think about philosophers but the truth is, you are wrong about that point too. the ideological leaders of each party were the philosophers. perhaps they were not always very deep, but you must remember that the holocaust and the Israeli wars, and the Ethos of being a pioneer and not studying of one hand and the high-classes Ethos practically killed any chance of having major intellectuals. I guess that the future will bring major intellectuals who would not be educated in Israel.

Yoav

My reply:

Yoav,

For a change I think this is an important discussion to have, because in the more than four years we've known each other, apparently we never had them and I can hardly explain why. Let me turn to your letter now.

Margarete Susman: That 'you' Israelis don't know a thing about Susman is hardly surprising, it's seldom to find a literatus in Germany of our generation who can remember her name, but then again they aren't too acquainted with Goethe or Hölderlin, so it doesn't really give me much information. There was certainly a dialogue between Susman with Agnon and Amichai (both via Nelly Sachs), the letters attesting this are getting watered down by the dampness at the National Archives where I found them in recent months, not to mention the long accounts of the exchanges (that also include Jacob Taubes) that she beautifully describes to Scholem, the letters to Buber, etc. All of which belongs to Erwin Von Bendemann and he doesn't even know they exist. This attitude of 'but US Israelis don't know a thing about her, what's the point?' I find quite disregarding. In principle I've never agreed with this ethnocentric view at all, and I might even agree with Taubes when he says that for many Jews and certainly for Israelis, Christians don't exist yet.

Nationalism: Sure the stocks of 'nationalism' are not at the highest peak now, and I definitely agree that religion and nationalism are the key to figure out not the Middle East but the whole history of Modernity since its roots in the 17th century. At the same time the Middle East is as much part of European history as anything else, firstly because together with an old 'family rift' there're the remnants of collonialist and imperalist times all through the region and no less in Israel, in fact the Middle East does clarify many things in European society today. The Arab problem is not new, it has been pounding the doors of the formerly imperial Austria since the 13th century and each century comes closer and closer. That there were Hebrew writers before the creation of the state is certainly true and that the Bible is one of the key texts is beyond argument, the point made wasn't literary in the restricted sense... it is a point fingering at the whole of the realm of culture. The State in its current structure is undeniably somewhere in between British colonial law and German ideology of the imperial state. Sure it is the Middle East and one needs be realistic, and I think this realism can only be attached in a mixture of the most vexing despair and pessimism together with the most reckless hope.

Philosophers: The ideological leaders of each party were the philosophers? Well, that calls for a definition of what the difference between philosophy and ideology is, in fact a philosopher can never be an ideologist and this is something that puts Marx in the whole very long history of German letters as the only philosopher-ideologist and certainly a very failed one, who in fact overturned the Western tradition toward its most negative axe, a mistake that not even his spiritual father Hegel could have even thought of in his magic soothsaying called 'Phenomenology of the Spirit'. And the few people who were philosophers, they could never become party leaders, ideology is also a word not in the best position now and I refuse to label ideology (therefore progress and doom, both of them are not a source of faith of whichever kind it be, but plain superstition) as philosophy. I certainly remember the Holocaust, in fact much better than most of my Israeli contemporaries... and I entirely disagree on the role it plays on the life of the state now, I'm tired of their endless ranting... I'll never delegitimize the Holocaust as the most tragic hour of the Jewish people but at the same time I don't believe that being the stakes as they're in our generation, we might be able to continue doing politics out of pity for much longer. Politics, as the classical theories say, is certainly about enemies, about respect, about standing and the Machiavellian 'not being so good'... and weeping about the Holocaust is good for PR, but whenever I hear the speeches given to the very people who are citizens of the country and how they're educated about it, excuse me if I say this... but I can only laugh hysterically. The Israeli wars are a different matter altogether but yet part of the same story. Certainly there were no chances to have any major intellectuals, albeit... out of the Holocaust an innumerable bunch of poets, writers and philosopher did come out and spread all over the West. I don't want a future where the 'leading intellectuals' have to be educated abroad, because it's simply a repetition of the same failures but with reverse dialectics... if in fact the country can't produce at all a new generation of intellectuals that will not look at the immediate past as something neither erroneous/despisable or as the ultimate shrine of wisdom and glory, then we've really missed the train... not only as a state but also as a people. That the Jews remain prominent intellectuals is true... but that whatever sank in the abyss of Auschwitz is any similar to what there's today is an absolute lie. I wish one day you would come to Germany and visit those houses and hear the stories about the life that was, and even to experience the ammicability and open friendliness of that life today... then you could understand my claims slightly better, not without realizing as well that the political tragedies of Jewish society overall stand unchanged today for almost two hundred years.

Let's leave it at this point for now and we'll return to the Hebrew editing next week, I spent the whole day translating a text of Kästner into English and am thoroughly exhausted.

Best

Ari