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Does Jewish Literature Have to Be Depressing?

Nov. 23 2016

Taking this question as their point of departure, the scholar and critic Ruth Wisse and the novelist Dara Horn engage in a wide-ranging examination of modern Yiddish literature and Jewish literature more generally. They note a tendency in Yiddish fiction not only to avoid happy endings, but to avoid conventional endings altogether—and to shy away from the presumption, perhaps Christian in origin, that even tales of suffering and woe should come to a redemptive conclusion. (Video, 73 minutes; free registration required.)

Read more at Jewish Review Books

More about: Arts & Culture, Jewish literature, Mendele Mokher Seforim, Yiddish literature

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic