Tragedies of Jewish Liberation: Mapping Hebrew Literature Between the Occupied Territories and Global Capital

Abstract

Tragedies of Jewish LiberationMapping Hebrew Literature Between the Occupied Territories and Global Capital Rachel Green A review of: Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadow of the Intifada by Adia Mendelson-Maoz. Pp. xxiv + 242. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2018. Paper: $39.95. Signatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivty in Israeli Fiction. By Oded Nir. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. Paper: $32.95. On the surface, Oded Nir's Signatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivity in Israeli Fiction and Adia Mendelson-Maoz's Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadow of the Intifada may seem to have little in common. Nir's monograph is a comprehensive and exceedingly bold re-conceptualization of Hebrew literary history from the "totalizing" vantage point of the historical materialism of Fredric Jameson, and the World-systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein, Robert Brenner, and the Warwick Research Collective. Mendelson-Maoz's, on the other hand, is an artfully crafted, theoretically eclectic, spatio-ethical reading of select Hebrew texts published primarily between 1987–2007 that thematize Israeli experience, both military and civilian, during the period of the two Intifadas. Beyond sharing a partial chronological focus (the timeline of Mendelson-Maoz's book corresponds to roughly chapters four through seven of Nir's), each monograph articulates important aspects of the "tragedy"1 of Zionism and the State of Israel as vehicles for Jewish liberation. It is a tragedy that emerges in these studies as a set of seemingly unrelated failures, each socially repressed to different degrees. One tragic failure – Nir's focus, although he does not use the [End Page 259] word "tragedy" – is economic: despite its early socialist ideals, he posits, the Yishuv and its successor state became thoroughly capitalist and unequal, raising some Jewish boats while submerging many others. The other tragic failure – Mendelson-Maoz's focus, although she does not use the word "failure" – is political and sociocultural: that the project of Jewish liberation has morphed into the oppressor of millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, a state of affairs which Israeli culture has struggled to address, much less acknowledge. Analyzing literary excavations of these failures and of their implications, the two monographs under discussion here craft timely, and as I will argue, implicitly interrelated interventions that thoroughly reinvigorate Hebrew literature and Hebrew literary studies. Borders, Territories, and Ethics brings the spatio-ethical to longstanding ethical discourse in Israeli literature and culture, echoing most immediately Yochai Oppenheimer's Me'ever la-gader: yitzug ha-'aravim ba-siporet ha-'ivrit 1906–2005 (Barriers: The Representation of the Arab in Hebrew and Israeli Fiction 1906–2005; 2008). Signatures of Struggle, on the other hand, marks the beginning of a wholly new economic turn in Hebrew literary criticism, evidenced in rising interest in neoliberalism, histories of capital, and economic precarity. Recently published complementary works include Kfir Cohen-Lustig's Maker of Worlds, Readers of Signs: Israeli and Palestinian Literature of the Global Contemporary (Verso, 2019), which considers the impact of shifts in material production upon both Israeli and Palestinian literatures. Nir and Mendelson-Maoz's monographs share many strengths. In addition to their novel theoretical frameworks, both bring to the attention of an English language readership myriad works not yet available in translation. Signatures of Struggle, in particular, must be credited with reinvigorating decades of Hebrew literature, making long forgotten, maligned, and in some cases, seemingly uninteresting texts sparkle anew with energy and immediacy. Nir even reveals that he has selected some texts, such as Natan Shaham's Tamid anaḥnu, (Always We), precisely because of the scorn visited upon it by established critics (p. 78). Borders, Territories, and Ethics in turn excels at historicizing complicity and liberal guilt in the Israeli cultural sphere; its account of "yorim u-bokhim" (shooting and crying) in the second chapter should be of particular interest to scholars working on these issues. [End Page 260] ________ Signatures of Struggle advances the intellectually audacious idea that the State of Israel as represented in Modern Hebrew literature represents not the triumph, but rather, the failure of the Zionist collective project. It is comprised of a theoretical introduction and seven body chapters, each...