[DOWNLOAD] "Ideologically Incorrect Responses to the Holocaust by Three Israeli Women Writers (Lea Goldberg, Shulamith Hareven, Ruth Almog) (Critical Essay)" by CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Ideologically Incorrect Responses to the Holocaust by Three Israeli Women Writers (Lea Goldberg, Shulamith Hareven, Ruth Almog) (Critical Essay)
- Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 114 KB
Description
The literary responses of Israeli writers to the Holocaust--those writers who did not experience the Holocaust directly--have been closely related to the Zionist project: the theme of the national destruction has been integral to Jewish revival in a sovereign Jewish state. To a large extent, Israeli literature followed the vicissitudes of the mainstream and kept in line with the shifting horizons of the Zionist concept of the Diaspora and the Holocaust. At the time when the literary canon adhered to the Zionist ethos of Jewish spiritual and cultural rebirth in the land of Israel, Lea Goldberg sought post-Holocaust redemption in the theological reform of Christian-Jewish relationships in the spirit of the Enlightenment. At the time when increasing Zionist alignment with the Holocaust victim fostered literature viewing Israel as safeguard of the Jewish people, Ruth Almog saw the redemption of the post-Holocaust world in the ethics of mending the world that the Holocaust event engendered in the children of victims and perpetrators alike. At the time of prevailing mainstream Israeli self-perception as the victim of another Holocaust, Shulamith Hareven saw the healing of the Holocaust trauma essential to the integration of Israeli society into the Levantine-Mediterranean culture. These alternative narratives question the choices made and the roads taken. Three historical periods shaped the Zionist attitudes to the Holocaust: the era of the Holocaust and the first decade of the state; the Eichmann trial and the Six Day War in the 1960s; and the post-1973 war to the mid-1980s period. Zionist pioneers dogmatically pursued the ethos of the "new," strong and independent Jew in the land who will eradicate the history of victimization of the Diaspora Jew. The "new" Jews of the 1948 War Generation--a term coined by Gershon Shaked (A New Wave 11-13; born in the 1920s and 1930s)--actualized, to a remarkable degree, the erasure of the exilic history. This was the generation of the "collective self" of the native sabras: like the cactus, after which they were named, these Israelis were externally brash but internally good, and they immersed themselves in building the nascent state (see Oz Almog). This generation subscribed to the doctrine of the "negation of the Diaspora," a dogmatic injunction to obliterate Jewish Diaspora past. The following excerpt from David Ben-Gurion's speech delivered to a group of youth leaders in 1944 at the height of the Holocaust, illuminates the centrality of this doctrine: "Galut [Diaspora] means dependence -material, political, spiritual, cultural, and intellectual dependence ... Our task is to break radically with this dependence and to become masters of our own fate--in a word, achieve independence ... independence in the heart, in sentiment, and in will" (Ben-Gurion 609).