פובליציסטיקה ישראלית לנוכח ביקורת מוסרית-פוליטית ביצירות של סול בלו ופיליפ רות

Abstract

This article examines a representative case of Israeli publicist responses to the moral-political critique by American Jewish authors, focusing on the reception of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet. These novels were first published in Hebrew translation in the early 1970s, against the backdrop of a heightened mythologization of Israel in the American Jewish mainstream and concurrently with Israel’s early occupation of the West Bank. Roth’s and Bellow’s works include some highly unflattering images of Israeli militancy and chauvinistic nationalism. Israeli literary critics tended to respond to the authors’ moral-political critique by framing it as inauthentically Jewish or as incorporating non-Jewish influences. In this way, Israeli responses sought to undermine the validity of the authors’ critique by implying a framework of Jewish identity in which Israeli culture was symbolically preeminent. Ultimately, this tendency demonstrates how the subterranean struggle between homeland and Diaspora has informed and infused the conversation among the two Jewish communities with respect to contemporary Jewish ethics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.