The Post-Zionist Condition

Abstract

1 In the summer of 1991, the first issue of the Israeli journal Teoria Ubikoret (Theory and Criticism) published an essay of mine on Anton Shammas, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, who wrote the Hebrew novel Arabeskot (Arabesques).1 In this essay I traced Shammas’s subversion of the Jewish ethnocentrism of the Hebrew literary canon.2 Shammas’s novel reveals how the Hebrew canon in Israel, in the guise of the apparently neutral term Hebrew Literature, which only apparently bases itself on the Hebrew language as the common literary language of Jews and Arabs, has in fact imposed an exclusionary policy. That is, in order to enter its realm, those who write in Hebrew must be Jewish. Shammas, I argued, sought to de-Judaize the Hebrew language and turn it into a language shared by all Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike. Now, twenty years later, Teoria Ubikoret has published a different essay of mine, this time on Tuvya haholev (Tuvya the Dairyman), Dan Miron’s Hebrew translation of the great Yiddish writer Shalom Aleichem’s novel Tevye der Milhiker. I claim that while Miron’s Hebrew indeed Hebraicizes Aleichem’s Yiddish, it also moves in the opposite direction; it Yiddishizes Hebrew, giving Yiddish a prominent presence in the Hebrew translation and thus decentering Israeli subjectivity and undermining the cohesive force of Hebrew.3 These essays span two decades. The first article was nourished by the utopian assumption that the existence of the Israeli state meant that its national identity would be Israeli, while the second was written after this hope had been smashed to smithereens. And so, instead of the reterritori-