Moral Dilemmas: Negotiating Jewish-American Critique in Israeli Literary Discourse

• In Event: Israeli Scholarly Comparative Perspectives on American Jewry and American Jewish Studies

Abstract

The Israeli reception of works by Jewish-American writers constitutes a fascinating juncture between the two major competing Jewish cultures of our time. Significantly, Israeli culture was not only confronted in this way with an often challenging concept of (American) Jewish identity, but also had to face itself in the proverbial mirror by encountering its own representations that were harbored by the Jewish-American literary imagination. Focusing on the 1970s and 80s, this talk discusses the ideological negotiation in Israeli intellectual and public discourse of translated works by Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, which offered some unflattering portrayals of Israeli ethics and values. I will show how Israeli critics dealt with such critique—particularly regarding Israeli forcefulness in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict—by faulting the writers with assimilatory tendencies, diasporic cosmopolitanism, or with embracing Christian values. These responses could be seen as an attempt to bolster Israeli identity vis-à-vis the Jewish American competition across the ocean, while highlighting Jewish/non-Jewish difference and boundaries in order to imply the desirability and supremacy of the Israeli alternative to American Jewish life.

Author

• Omri Asscher, University of California, Los Angeles