Israeli Culture Research Articles

Health Literacy Policy in Israel – Culturally Appropriate Health Systems

Abstract Background The diverse culture in Israel created the need for developing and implementing a national policy for culturally and linguistically appropriate health services. The need stems from trends in immigration to Israel, various levels of religiosity, and the ethnic diversity of the veteran population. Health literacy plays a prominent role in this policy. Methods A national policy directive was developed and disseminated by the Israel Ministry of Health calling for culturally appropriate health information to the public, communication while receiving healthcare including ongoing staff training, health promotion intervention, and research for needs assessment. Results The national policy has been implemented for the past five years in primary care, hospitals and non-governmental health organizations. Cultural health liaisons have been integrated into primary healthcare teams in over 30 community clinics caring for Ethiopian immigrants, telephone translation services are available for Amaharic/Tigrinia, Russian and Arabic speaking communities, quality healthcare standards defined on topics such as of diabetes, and training of staff on cultural sensitivity continuously conducted. Culturally appropriate printed and digital sources of health information are available for diverse ethnic and religious communities. Appropriate health promotion intervention is routinely implemented on healthy lifestyle, early detection, and self-care, focusing mainly on NCDs and system navigation, supported by applied research and evaluation. Conclusions The policy implementation was the result of significant investment by stakeholders at all levels and requires support for sustainability regarding health literacy, health behaviour and health outcomes. Resource allocation is necessary for assessment and outcome measurement, and for applying more participatory methods for policy development, training, implementation and evaluation.

Introduction: Amos Oz’s two pens

ABSTRACT Often regarded as the country’s leading intellectual, the Israeli novelist and political essayist Amos Oz (1939–2018) was fond of describing himself as using two different pens, the first used to write work of prose and fiction, and the other – to criticize the government and advocate for a political change. The idea behind this special issue is to revisit the two pens parable by bringing together scholars from various disciplines to assess Amos Oz’s dual role in Israeli culture and society as an immensely popular novelist and a leading public intellectual. Next to offering an intellectual portrait, this introduction highlights some of Oz’s seminal works, examines their reception, revisits key political and literary debates he was involved in, and traces some of the connections between the two realms of his activity.

Amos Oz: The lighthouse

ABSTRACT Yigal Schwartz, Amos Oz’s long-time editor and a prominent Oz scholar, reflects on the author’s impact on Israel culture.

Students’ physical victimization in schools: The role of gender, grade level, socioeconomic background and ethnocultural affiliation

Prior research on students’ school victimization has mainly centered on the effect of students’ personal characteristics, namely gender and grade level. Although students’ personal traits cut across all cultures, a question too often overlooked is whether victimization patterns remain similar for different cultures and ethnicities. Further, gender and grade-level patterns may change across different ethnic and cultural contexts. This study employed analysis of variance to explore physical victimization patterns in schools by students’ gender, grade level (fifth or eighth grade), and ethnocultural affiliation (Arab or Jewish) using a nationally representative sample of students in Israel (N = 75,060). Because school violence may increase in the context of poverty, the study controlled for school and student socioeconomic background. The unique structure of schools organized around language and culture in Israel allowed for identification of systematic dissimilarities and commonalities among distinct ethnocultural groups of students. Greater victimization emerged among male, lower-grade, and minority-status students. The findings further indicate that ethnicity and culture not only influenced the level of students’ physical victimization, but also significantly changed the effect of gender and grade level across ethnocultural groups. Interaction effects showed a greater gender gap at eighth grade, compared with fifth grade, and a greater grade-level gap among minority students, compared with majority students. The increased gender gap across grade levels was more pronounced among minority students compared with majority students. This paper discusses the complex influence of culture and ethnicity on students’ victimization, considering socioeconomic status, distribution of authority, age hierarchy, and gender roles across cultural contexts. Directions for future research that will allow for greater cross-cultural understanding and implications for more effective and context-specific schools practices are discussed.

Natan Zach’s Poetics of Erasure

Natan Zach has often been described as the most influential Hebrew poet in the second half of the 20th century. Indeed, the scholar Dan Miron described him as a poet who had “reached the deepest part within us,” and as a “cultural leader” and “cultural hero.” Yet when Miron went on to detail Zach’s immense influence on other poets, he described his poetic legacy in exceedingly limiting formal terms such as “the use of enjambment” or “the magic of the unexpected rhyme, seemingly out of place.” Miron’s reading is symptomatic in the way it uses, indeed echoes, Zach’s own critical idiom. In this essay I will read Zach’s early volume Shirim shonim (Other poems) (1960) by focusing instead on what I term his “poetics of erasure.” For in these poems, Zach has left no evident traces of his own biography: his arrival as a young child in Palestine; his parents’ emotional breakdown following their immigration; and his own sense of homelessness in a Zionist culture that immersed itself in the “Negation of Exile.” In this manner, Zach's “escape from personality,” to use Eliot’s famous dictum, ultimately provided Israeli culture with a new modality of mourning. For in a national culture that repressed exilic languages and inhibited expressions of social suffering, Zach provided a new form of elegiac writing that had no explicit content, expressing a melancholic sense of loss thorough the breakage of poetic form.

‘Together in the tech trenches’: a view of Israel’s innovation culture

ABSTRACT The Israeli defence industry is a frequently cited factor when explaining Israeli’s innovation success. This, however, only partly explains why so much innovation is occurring in one place. We focus on the cultural values most relevant to predicting innovation – in-group collectivism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance – We then illustrate, in two studies, how these cultural values combined with four local factors that might be responsible for the Israeli culture of innovation: the Israeli defence industry, determined informality, an anti-hierarchical culture, and hubris. In addition to these four local factors, we predict that a mix of Western-Eastern culture and leadership values such as medium level of in-group collectivism, low power distance, and low uncertainty avoidance lead to high levels of innovation. In Study 1, we interview a panel of six experts who are key figures in the Israeli information technology industry; In Study 2, we survey thirty MBA students, asking them about the sources of Israel’s innovation culture.Theoretically, our study proposes a new look at innovation from a cultural perspective. By extending previous research, this study highlights the way in which the combination of collectivistic Eastern and individualistic Western cultures, accompanied with the four local factors examined, leads to exceptionally high levels of innovation. Empirically, this study reveals the cultural and local aspects that may contribute to the development of innovation clusters worldwide.

Peugeot–“motion and emotion” the language of license plates as an advertising medium and its connection with Israeli society

ABSTRACT In urban centers, many residents commute to work and are exposed to visual input displayed on cars around them. License plates become a space utilized by advertisers to display advertising messages. This is an instance of the presence of language in the public space, or the linguistic landscape of an area. The purpose of the present study is to analyze linguistic and visual elements of license plates in the Israeli linguistic landscape. The study positions the license plates as a medium that conveys messages reflecting Israeli society and culture. We focus on the advertising texts on license plate frames and examine the messages they carry about the car and the car owner. Through a content analysis of such texts, findings point to varied linguistic-visual elements in the license plates from a linguistic landscape perspective, such as the presence of languages and the flag, including the empowerment of the car company and the car itself, the driving experience, driver’s superiority and dream realization, and the personal relationships between the driver and the car. We conclude that today cars are not only vehicles taking us from place to place, but are also associated with power, emotion, freedom, superiority, and self-expression.

The Americanisation of Israeli housing practices

The UN Resolution 181 of 27 November 1947, which called for the establishment of a Jewish state in parts of Palestine, was one of the only votes backed by both the USSR and the USA. Both superpowers saw the future state as a potential ally. Though being long affiliated with the American agenda, the young state of Israel did possess several Soviet-like characteristics during the early rule of the socialist Mapai party. One of the young state’s key projects was the construction of new industrial towns and residential neighbourhoods. These environments corresponded with ruling socialist ideology as they consisted of affordable, repetitive, and customised public housing estates. The growing alliance with the USA in the 1960s significantly influenced the Israeli culture and economy, as both underwent a process of ‘Americanisation’. This included the promotion of liberal values, such as privatisation, entrepreneurialism, and individualism. ‘Americanisation’ largely affected the local built environment. Through an intense process of privatisation, the former monotonous publicly built housing estates began giving way to new privately constructed projects. Ultimately, what began as a tool of self-expression was taken over by large-scale private corporations. The early public housing estates first turned into private houses, and later into a commodity. This article aims to reveal how the Israeli allegiance with the USA affected its local culture and economy. Leading to a transformation in the system of housing production, it replaced the former socialist housing approach with a market-driven one. The article focuses on five adjacent settlements located beside the Green Line and the West Bank: Kibbutz-Eyal (1950), Tzur-Nathan (1966), Sal’it (1977), Kochav-Yair (1986), and Tzur-Yitzhak (2005). Analysing their development, the article shows how the growing privatisation process altered the development of the built environment while adapting to changes in local politics, culture, and economy.

On Steir-Livny's Is it OK to Laugh About It?

On Steir-Livny's Is it OK to Laugh About It? Nikita Lobanov Is it OK to Laugh About It? Holocaust Humour, Satire and Parody in Israeli Culture. By Liat Steir-Livny. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2017. 208 pp., ISBN 978-1910383353. US $74.95 In this book, Liat Steir-Livny engages with a series of themes in and around the controversial phenomenon of Holocaust humor in Israeli society and, by examining a variety of aspects of this genre, discusses how its role in Hebrew culture is a double-edged sword. First, she employs critical textual analysis to explore humor based on the genocide in a variety of genres, ranging from jokes and TV programs to comedic skits and political transcripts. Second, she provides a multimedia content analysis that allows for an elaborate investigation of the gathered material. The result is a convincing blend of data from different media sources found in Israel, other countries, and global online spaces. The first three chapters provide a theoretical framework of the book. Steir-Livny goes to great lengths to expand on the multilayered nature of Holocaust humor and how it touches every aspect of Israeli life, including history, activism, popular media products, and Holocaust remembrance itself. Furthermore, Holocaust humor in the online realm is addressed in all its multifarious glory—social media, blogs, YouTube, and podcasts. An important clarification is the difference between Hebrew and Israeli humor and how the latter is shaped by the conflict with the country's Arab neighbors. The author is balanced in presenting different views on Holocaust humor, sometimes criticizing with historians such as Alan Rosenfeld how comedians trivialize the tragedy, while others, [End Page 126] such as Viktor Frankl, adopt jokes as a healing tool. Steir-Livny highlights how Holocaust humor creates paradoxes, especially when politicians and common citizens from opposing camps accuse each other, with different degrees of ironic detachment, of being Nazis. The second part of the book examines Holocaust humor from multiple critical perspectives, such as generational divides and the effect on Israeli society of popular YouTube videos of Hitler's downfall. The fourth chapter focuses on the changing perception of the Holocaust, describing the presumed cross-generational saving qualities of humor. According to the author, this phenomenon is a defense mechanism, characterized by misplaced sanctification. The numerous texts discussed by the author emphasize that the memory of Holocaust trauma encompasses the whole of society blurring time, uniting past and present. This emphasis leads to the fifth chapter, which describes initiatives around alternative Holocaust Remembrance Day, where, with the help of black humor and a carnivalesque atmosphere, moments of seriousness and sadness are juxtaposed with laughter. Steir-Livny affirms that these rituals maintain respect for the Holocaust while allowing Israeli citizens to deal with the trauma through friendly gatherings, levity, and moments of intimacy. Chapter 6 criticizes the commodification of the Holocaust, highlighting how the black humor in Israeli society foregrounds the ambiguity of this transformation of the Holocaust into a product that is "just like others." The cynical attitude of Israeli reality TV and some public figures' statements regarding the Holocaust have encouraged satirists to use the tragedy to create parodies such as "The Camp," a fake audition for a show where participants are willing to become Kapos and abuse barrack-mates for their "15 minutes of fame" (110). Chapter 7 deepens the emphasis on cynicism as it addresses Holocaust satire and parody brought about by Israeli authorities, such as the speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on October 20, 2015, in Jerusalem that blamed the Holocaust on Hajj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Arab mufti at the time. The response of the Israeli left wing was both serious—noting the historic inconsistencies of the speech—and humorous, for example, in the creation of "The Mufti made me do it" memes that took Netanyahu's logic to absurd lengths. Both sides criticized the other for politicizing the Holocaust, increasing its traumatic effect on contemporary Israeli society. Chapter 8 provides a detailed discussion of how Israel's memory of the Holocaust is divided along ethnic lines—between Israeli citizens of North [End Page 127] African origin and those of European origin. The representations of...

The community settlement: a neo-rural territorial tool

ABSTRACT The Israeli Community Settlements are small-scale non-agricultural villages that consist of a limited number of families and a homogenous character. This method began to be used by the Israeli government and its different planning agencies during the 1970s as a tool to strengthen the state's territorial and demographical control over the Israeli internal frontiers of the Galilee, the West-Bank and along the Green-Line. Unlike earlier settlement methods that relied on ideological values such as labour, agriculture, redemption, identity and integration, as part of the nation-building years, the Community Settlements promoted a more individual and neo-rural lifestyle. In this paper I ask to show how the Community Settlements formed the new leading tool for a national agenda, in correspondence with the changing ideals in Israeli culture, moving from a quasi-socialist society into a market-driven neoliberal one. Later, suburbanising the neo-rural phenomenon.

Body Image, Emotional Eating and Psychological Distress among Bariatric Surgery Candidates in Israel and the United States.

Background: The present study aimed to examine the relations between body image dissatisfaction (BID) and psychological distress variables among bariatric surgery candidates from two distinct cultures in Israel and in the United States. Methods: A sample of consecutive pre-surgical bariatric candidates was recruited from a Bariatric Center in Israel (N = 114) and a Bariatric Center in the Unites States (N = 81). Body image dissatisfaction (BID-BSQ8), suicidal ideation (SBQ-R), depressive symptoms (PHQ-9), anxious symptoms (PHQ-7), and emotional eating behaviors (EES), were measured. Mediation models were assessed using path analysis. Results: BID was positively correlated with suicidality, depression, and anxiety in both samples. The relations between BID depression and anxiety were mediated by emotional eating in both cultures. However, the relation between BID and suicidality that was mediated by emotional eating in the Israeli sample, was reflected in a direct link between BID and suicidality in the US sample. Conclusion: Our findings confirm the adverse effect of BID on psychological distress among surgery candidates in both cultures, emphasizing the intercultural similarities related to emotional eating behavior. Physicians and other health professionals are encouraged to be more attentive to this specific behavior.

Россия – Израиль: культурные параллели и ассоциации

The article presents a description and philosophical analysis of the history and prospects of the multifaceted Russian-Israeli cultural dialogue, demonstrates its continuity over a long period of the development of the two peoples. Much attention is focused on considering the way some natural landscape sights and monuments of the history and culture of Israel became an organic part of Russian culture, when and how they turned out to be connected with it, what their significance and relevance are in the national cultural heritage of Russia and how they relate to each other and overlap in the dialogue of cultures. The authors stress that Russian and Israeli cultures can be regarded as quite similar to each other in some respects, first of all ideologically, philosophically, artistically, and aesthetically, because both of them rely upon the same ideas of the world and man, the ideology of a special mission and destiny of the country as well as on the belief that their historical development is predetermined by a higher power. The factual material gathered and analyzed by the authors of the article enables them to conclude that there is a wide range of historical parameters, parallels and points of contact that bring Russian and Israeli cultures closer together, stimulate an intercultural com­munication and revive a mutual interest in the exchange of cultural achievements. The article can be used as a practical guide in the search for com­mon cultural values to optimize and develop the diplomatic relations between the two countries, it might help to plan and forecast socio-cultural cooperation in the context of increasing globalization.

Correspondence and Care

Correspondence and Care Sara K. Day In Jack Cheng's See You in the Cosmos (2017), eleven-year-old Alex dreams of exploring the universe and making contact with the aliens he's sure that he will find. To prepare, he begins a series of recordings on a hand-me-down iPod that he has spray-painted gold, a twenty-first-century version of the Golden Records that his idol Carl Sagan sent into space. These recordings chronicle Alex's journey to set off his own rocket, a trip that introduces him to new friends and forces him to confront challenges to his seemingly unbreakable optimism. Reading Alex's missives—or listening to them in the award-winning audiobook version—gives us insight into a child's desire for connection, the value of correspondence (in whatever form it takes), and the potential for the things that we write and say today to inform the understandings of future audiences. Just as significantly, they reveal the importance of having our dreams supported by those around us. These themes, which drive Cheng's novel, also inform the four articles in this issue, which ultimately share common interests in correspondence and care. Elissa Myers's article "'Something More Than Invisible': Agency as Care in Girls' Amateur Periodicals" draws on feminist care theory—especially Eve Feder Kittay's concept of the doulia—in order to examine a network of late nineteenth-century female amateur journalists. Focusing in particular on The Violet, a periodical created by Zelda Arlington, Myers explores the ways in which both the newspaper itself and Arlington's written efforts to recruit and support other young women's participation centered gender (rather than age) as a means of collectively finding agency in a male-dominated activity. Through the findings of her archival work, including not just issues of young women's newspapers but also the letters that they exchanged among themselves, Myers argues that these young journalists' correspondence and collaborations demonstrate the importance of expanding our understanding of the kinship model. Daniel Feldman likewise explores the importance of correspondence—both in terms of letter writing and recognizing similarities between historical moments—in his article "Address Unknown: German Children's Literature about Refugees." In particular, Feldman considers the role of epistolary narratives in [End Page 101] recent German children's literature about the Holocaust and the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis; he also traces their common interest in the role of family in confronting changing ideas about national identity. While the article focuses on the ways in which such literature about migratory children might affect future citizens—both native and immigrant alike—Feldman also calls us to recognize the larger implications in term of empathy for refugees on a global level. Although the latter two articles in this issue are less concerned with letter writing, they do illustrate a key point raised in Feldman's discussion—specifically, the idea that "children's literature itself represents a mode of correspondence between generations that offers a forum for dialogic exchange between adults and children, ancestors and offspring, polyphonic voices from the past and heterogenous archetypes of the future regarding the most vexing problems of each era" (page). In "Fatherhood, Childcare, and Leadership in David Grossman's Literature for Children," Einat Baram Eshel emphasizes the importance of reading the celebrated Israeli author's children's books through an intergenerational lens. Noting the temptation to read many of Grossman's father figures as representations of the "new father"—a late twentieth-century trope that reconsiders gender roles in parenting—Baram Eshel locates his children's books within the larger contexts of Israeli culture, Grossman's own experiences as a father, and ongoing conversations about parental authority. Finally, Allison Layfield considers the ways in which Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games series capture—and, to varying degrees, challenge—cultural ideologies about warfare in "Gaming the System: Militarization Narratives in the Hunger Games Trilogy and Ender's Game." While Card's and Collins's novels were published decades apart and written in response to different conflicts, Layfield argues, they all capture the degree to which war has become spectacle in modern times, as well...

O clamor dos pobres: uma interpelação à consciência religiosa e à fé cristã

O clamor dos pobres, tema deste trabalho, interpela a consciência humanitária das pessoas e é um forte questionamento à consciência religiosa e à fé cristã. Apesar disso, a opção preferencial pelos pobres, consagrada no Documento final da Conferência Episcopal realizada em Puebla de Los Angeles, é causa, até hoje, de muitas controvérsias dentro e fora da Igreja. Tendo presente esse contexto, o presente artigo tem como objetivo apresentar a ressonância do clamor dos pobres no contexto da Conferência de Puebla; demonstrar que esse clamor não é recente: está presente desde a Antiguidade, e foi contemplado nos primeiros textos sagrados, inclusive da cultura religiosa de Israel e da Religião Cristã; repercutir sobre esse clamor das multidões empobrecidas, na contemporaneidade. A pesquisa é bibliográfica, a partir do Documento Oficial das conclusões da Conferência de Puebla; de análises críticas feitas por teólogos latino-americanos, bem como de artigos e livros de autores do campo epistemológico das Ciências da Religião. Os resultados alcançados apontam sobre a atualidade do tema, uma vez que observa-se em toda parte uma crescente onda de empobrecimento e, ao mesmo tempo, um crescente descompromisso e intolerância para com o clamor das grandes massas excluídas.

Foodways and The Ethnicization of Yemeni Identity in Israel

The transformation of Yemeni food practices in Israel illustrates two contradictory processes. Yemeni Jewish immigrants used food in the process of becoming Israeli, but also to reimagine and preserve Yemeni-ness. To do both, they had to negotiate western stereotypes and pressure to assimilate into “modern” Israeli culture, while creating a single, homogenous Yemeni ethnic identity. Additionally, Yemeni food narratives evince a critique of Israeli absorption policies, and challenge aspects of Zionist ideology, while at the same time calling for inclusion in Israeli society and declaring their Zionism.

Diasporic stances, homeland prisms: representing diaspora in the homeland as internal negotiation of national identity

ABSTRACTThis paper suggests that images and stances associated with the diaspora in the homeland culture offer a unique prism through which internal tensions in homeland collective identity may be dissected and understood. We believe it is worthwhile to broaden the spectrum of inquiry of recent research on quantifiable diaspora economic and political involvement in homeland nation-states to the inherently fluid, abstract realm of cultural representation. The paper implements this research orientation by offering a preliminary discussion of homeland-construed representations and stances of the diaspora, based on the case study of Israel. Israel is a particularly useful case for our purposes because of the degree to which the diaspora serves as a ‘significant other’ for the homeland national culture. Our claim is that two main prisms, or frames of reference, which we label as ‘minority stance’ and ‘authenticity,’ designate Israeli views of its diaspora that prove fundamental to Israeli national self-definition. The degree of authenticity ascribed in Israeli culture to representations and practices associated with the diaspora is contingent on the positive or negative value attributed to them as embodying a ‘minority stance,’ that is, to the diaspora giving central importance to its environing host society in its own identity and self-understanding. Using Greek culture as a comparative point of reference, we suggest that these prisms may be but two examples of various homeland ‘filters’ on the diaspora experience – filters which pertain to the homeland society’s ongoing internal negotiations of identity and symbolic boundary-work.

The Fear of Religionization of Israeli Cultural Worlds: Response to Horit Herman Peled and Yoav Peled

The Fear of Religionization of Israeli Cultural Worlds: Response to Horit Herman Peled and Yoav Peled

Why Draw Flowers?

Botanical art and illustration, presented alongside scientific descriptions, were at the heart of Jewish national projects during the British Mandate in Palestine-Israel and following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Looking back, we recognised three prominent women artists who contributed widely to many such botanical projects: Ruth Koppel, Esther Huber and Bracha Avigad. This study aims to investigate the plant images these three artists have created. We will do so by using the approach of visual anthropology while focusing on two main aspects: the connection between botanical illustration and national identity, and the link between botanical art and gender. This study is the first to demonstrate that botanical art in Israeli culture has been gendered, with women doing most of the work, in agreement with findings from Western culture.

A secular holy land: pagan images, Jewish motifs and national identity – reflections on Dorit Feldman’s artwork

ABSTRACT Dorit Feldman is a prolific Israeli artist who over the course of several decades has focused on images of wide landscapes that integrate geological, cartographical, and archeological layers.Amongst these stratified landscapes are scattered pagan images such as Classical architecture, the remains of ancient synagogues, the image known as the “Mona Lisa” from Sepphoris, and a thick book that arouses connotations to the Bible or to history in general. The basic assumption underlying this study is that the analysis of a contemporary work of art that combines ancient images and motifs requires an initial analysis of their original significances. This in turn leads to a discussion of their metaphorical meanings in relation to the modern-day experience. In the case of Feldman's works, the issues that arise are those of the relationship between religion, land, and a place; idolatry in Antiquity and its current manifestations; the significances of pagan images in a Jewish context in Antiquity in relation to contemporary Epicureanism; secular Judaism and religion; and the multilayered pluralism of Israeli culture. This study is anchored in the wider field of Classical reception studies, and thus incorporates ancient sources and research material on Antiquity as well as the contemporary experience.

Reverie and Reading: Encounters with Modern Jewish Culture in the Work of Alan Mintz

Reverie and ReadingEncounters with Modern Jewish Culture in the Work of Alan Mintz Anne Golomb Hoffman In his last book, Alan Mintz described Agnon's creation of a narrative persona who is not so much "a consumer or a beneficiary of the tradition of sacred song that goes back to the Temple" as someone who is "himself a belated link in that chain."1 I'd like to highlight the belatedness of our friend, Alan, as fundamental to his critical practice: the concept of belatedness brings the writer or the critic into the long line of conversation—debate, interpretation, elaboration—that is so central to Jewish tradition. The very distance from the sources serves to energize the creativity of the writer or critic under the sign of belatedness. In fact, I think this awareness occasioned Alan's goal in undertaking his last unfinished project of an Agnon biography that would have included reflections on his own Jewish journey. I didn't know Alan in the years when he made the decision to leave Victorian literature and pursue Jewish studies, but I'm intrigued to imagine his deliberations as he came to choose modern Hebrew literature rather than midrash or the medieval piyyut. Modern Hebrew literature offered Alan a field of engagement with existential issues that were close to his heart. It positioned him, moreover, to highlight belatedness as a mode of critical reflection well suited to our modernity. From the vantage point of the twentieth-anniversary issue of Prooftexts in 2001, Alan looked back to his first encounter with Agnon as a college freshman writing a [End Page 430] paper in Hebrew on the novella Bilvav yamim (In the Heart of the Seas). He would translate this essay into English a few years later and rework it as a critique of American Judaism for the inaugural issue of Response, the journal he helped to create in 1967. Reflecting with some bemusement on his own youthful passion as a critic of American Jewish life, Alan nevertheless found, on returning to Agnon's novella in 2001, that his earlier encounter had been driven just as much by "the desire to experience the poetry of religion." Whatever his youthful frustrations with mid-century American Judaism may have been, returning to the novella gave Alan the pleasure of an experience of reading that made him feel again that he "was peering directly into the inner romance of faith and hearing its music in its original tones." Looking back, he found evidence in his earlier reading that "I was ready to listen, and grateful to be given the chance to seize through the reverie of reading what could not be given to me in life."2 The word "reverie" comes up occasionally in Alan's writing and suggests something of what literary experience made available to him. The phrase conveys awareness of a reader's absorption in a text as something that is outside and yet part of the self. In this instance, for Alan, the reverie of reading opened the potential space of absorption in Hebrew literature. As he noted elsewhere, Hebrew provided "the internal resources to negotiate the distance between old and new. Substitution, retrieval, containment, synthesis, reconciliation—all the dynamics of cultural change could take place within Hebrew literature because in that medium alone did the new meanings and old meanings exist simultaneously."3 In a 1984 essay on the siddur for the anthology Back to the Sources, Alan took note of the "roomy space of the synagogue service," highlighting its capacity to hold the currents of Jewish life.4 For Alan, Hebrew language and Jewish literary traditions offered spaces in which we might hear the voices of past and present mingling, arguing, and interacting in an ongoing conversation. This is abundantly evident in Ḥurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, a major opening move in a career devoted to the roomy spaces of Jewish textuality. Alan tells us that the motivation for the project grew out of the need to historicize the Holocaust. Yet, while his original intention may have been "to take the Holocaust literature of one interpretive community, Israeli culture and Hebrew literature, and read it against the...