Can Israeli Culture Survive The American Challenge?

...For all this, I am convinced that Israel is the place where a Jewish person is most likely to retain his or her full, independent identity, if only he or she struggles for that identity and is not seduced by a false one...

...Israel has been diminished in the eyes of American Jews, because it has become less Israeli...

...They perhaps remember that, indeed, part of the revival of Jewish life in America was made possible by the state of Israel as a social and cultural challenge, and that they still have not created an autonomous culture with true, inner creative powers...

...As long as they and those like them exist in Israel, then there is a nether Israel, which is also a heavenly Israel...

...What will be the case for those whose personality has not been molded by that experience...

...To the degree that it is the result of the acts of individuals, it is far more dependent on a social and national leadership that offers challenges and goals to the society...

...We must not bow our heads and take this as the last word, because a strong and independent cultural center in Israel is not only beneficial to its citizens, who will prefer to remain there rather than migrate to another center of attraction, but it is also beneficial to the Jews of the United States, for whose development the state of Israel, during the first 30 years of its existence, was an extraordinary factor...

...The future is theirs, and they will provide the answer to the great challenge-—to maintain Israel as a historical and spiritual necessity for all the Jews of the world...

...The rabbinical seminaries of the Reform and Conservative movements, chairs of Jewish studies in universities, Jewish publishers, Jewish writers, Jewish magazines like MOMENT, congresses and organizations responsible for various areas of culture and Jewish survival (like B'nai B'rith), are the workshop producing the soul of the old-new nation known as American Jewry...

...These young people are now the age I was when I came into my own...

...These young people have the reform of the world in their hands...

...perhaps, internally, the process of assimilation proceeds at*an accelerated pace...

...Adapted from a much longer article entitled "Alexandria: On Jews and Judaism in America" that appeared in The Jerusalem Quarterly, Winter 1989...

...It became part of the ethnic identity of American Jews and a source of inspiration in Jewish studies...

...Is the culture established in Israel a positive, rich and interesting one...

...Is there any chance for Israeli renewal in response to the Jewry of New York/ Alexandria, which, paradoxically, challenges Israel today, just as the state of Israel challenged New York and what it represented during the 1950s...

...Just as, over long years, it has failed to create new social goals, it has also failed to create new cultural goals...

...As the proverb has it: Without a vision, the people run riot...

...The more Israel diminishes itself, the more it will become a kind of extension, neighborhood, a suburb of New York...

...Is it possible to find an equilibrium between the democratic and liberal aspirations of a young nation and the theocratic tradition of the representatives of an ancient religion who are seeking to dominate it...

...Perhaps this flourishing might be merely superficial...

...The inner reinforcement of Israeli values in Israel is of concern not only for the Jews of Israel, but also for the Jews of the United States...

...welfare activity, and a factor for change...

...But it does—at least so far...

...This is serious work, proper, and significant, but it must be looked at with open eyes and without burying one's head in the sand...

...It is ridiculous to sermonize: Cultural development is not the result of a decision and determination made by groups of intellectuals but it is rather the product of social and economic forces...

...Now Israel must give her own answer to the challenge of New York...

...You wonder how, with such a high percentage of intermarriage, with the increasing penetration of Jews within the American social establishment, a kind of Jewish pseudo-culture still manages to flourish...

...Israel was a catalyst, a component in the organization of U.S...

...Israel, on the other hand: Rather than offering American Jewry a center for imitation and an old-new language brought to life, a new culture, the Jews of Israel have found a model for emulation in America, so much so that the attractive power of the American center sometimes outweighs that of the Israeli center...

...Developments in America, however, are distancing Jews from the Zionist solution because they do not feel they need Zion in order to live a Jewish life...

...In the worst case, there will only be one...

...The burning issues facing us are: Is Israel still at the forefront of the Jewish people...

...They have simply lost their identity, and instead of the lost identity, the doors and windows have been thrown open to a new identity, which can no longer measure up successfully against the cultural identity of the opposing center: New York, which in so many ways represents a cultural magnet as powerful as Hellenistic Alexandria 2,000 years ago...

...The cultural identity of Americans who identify themselves as Jews is fostered by cultural institutions that translate Judaism into the language of American Jews, whether the translation is verbal or semiotic (the transfer of rituals and customs...

...In the best case there will be two different cultures...

...The content of such autonomy as they have is based mainly on nostalgia for an old world and on the nightmare of the return of past dangers, although in the meanwhile, frameworks for renewed contacts with the content of the tradition have been erected, despite neglect of most of the forms in the area of language and way of life...

...It's hard to say whether assimilation is only at the margins or at the center too, because Jewish identity is cultivated by those with the closest affinities with Judaism...

...Only time will tell whether the mammoth translation effort being carried out in the United States will consolidate American Jewish culture and give it its own identity, or whether it will flatten out the culture and deprive it of its uniqueness...

...The people have not exactly run riot...

...A person who reforms himself reforms the world," said S. Y. Agnon...

...Nevertheless, anyone who belittles that enormous translation project, though it comes at the expense of the bilingual and bi-cultural existence of the Jewish people, simply doesn't know what he's talking about...

...New York/Alexandria had to demonstrate that it was possible to maintain an interesting Jewish identity in a foreign, pluralistic, and democratic societv that permitted Jewish existence free of the pressure of anti-Semitism...

...ON MY MIND I do not know whether they are fighting a rear-guard battle, which will culminate in suicide or self-destruction, or whether they are the "glowing coal in the ashes of the altar" (Chaim Nachman Bialik), a "smoldering log saved from the fire," or yet whether they are "the great workshop of the national soul...

...What is the relation between political independence and the national establishment...

...It sought to prove that it would not disappear or assimilate, because it had created sources of strength and independent existence for itself, while drawing components of its identity from the environment, from the tradition, from Israel and from the autonomous, indigenous myths it created for itself...

...At that lime New York had to deal with the Zionist challenge: How and why was it possible to live as a Jew in New York while the Jewish people was renewing itself in its land, and the forefront of the Jew ish people was no longer the Lower East Side but rather the Galilee and the Negev...

...The development of Israeli culture during the Yishuv period (the Jewish settlement of Israel prior to the establishment of the state) was made possible mainly by a unique constellation of cultural forces that were at work at that time, but it was also possible because the Yishuv had spiritual leaders who sought and found certain ways of implementing the cultural possibilities immanent within the new society...

...Those who went bankrupt in this matter were not traditional Jews but rather the vanguard of new Israeli culture—Labor Zionism...

...I believe that Israel is the optimal solution to independent Jewish existence, and I am convinced of this to the depths of my soul, perhaps because I, unlike most other Israelis, have seen the downfall of European Jewry, which failed in its effort to assimilate and paid the heaviest price imaginable for that failure...

...American Jewish culture, with all its translations from Hebrew and other languages, will swamp Hebrew culture...

...and they love the culture of Israeli life in its most beautiful and positive manifestations...

...they devote themselves to social challenges...

...Still, in an almost non-rational way, I bring to mind the faces of young men and women whom I know, whose personality encompasses everything that, in my youth, seemed to be the essence of the new Israeli character (values which I myself, to my regret, have left behind by now): They are satisfied with little, contemptuous of materialism, and dedicated to their work...

...What is the degree of American assimilation in Israeli culture...

...The second generation of social, political, and cultural leaders has not even tried to play a role of that kind...

...But this is the historical experience of only a small proportion of the Israeli population, a proportion that decreases with each death notice...

...If the character of Jewish life in America is still unrefracted, as I have come to see in a one-year sojourn here, I must acknowledge that in Israel too Jewish life trembles on the edge of definitio'h...

...How will the Israeli balance of forces act...

...Something of the kind has happened...

...Translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green...

...American Jews live in an easily assimilated, syncretistic culture...