Daniel Gordis and Asael Abelman on the Personality of the New Jew
The Tikvah Podcast
Tikvah
4.6 ā¢ 620 Ratings
šļø 15 July 2022
ā±ļø 70 minutes
šļø Recording | iTunes | RSS
š§¾ļø Download transcript
Summary
Before the state of Israel was founded, some early Zionists argued not only for the recovery of Jewish political sovereignty, but also for the emergence of a new type of Jew. This āNew Jew,ā as they called it, would be free of Judaismās bookish habits and the weight of diaspora Jewish history and be able to take the reigns of the newly independent Jewish polity.
Three-quarters of a century after Israelās founding, what is the state of the New Jew?
Last month, theĀ MosaicĀ columnist Eli SpitzerĀ contendedĀ that Israelās 21st-century success made it outmoded. Looking around Israel today, he sees the fascinating reemergence of older, diasporic forms of Jewish life rather than the triumph of the New Jew. On the same day that Spitzer published his short reflection, theĀ MosaicĀ contributorĀ Daniel GordisĀ publishedĀ a newsletter in which he came to the opposite conclusion: the state of Israel, he thinks, is ānot the end of the Jewish people, just the end of a certain kind of Jewish people.ā To him, the New Jew is alive and well.
What could we do but convene a conversation on the matter? In this conversation, Gordis spoke with the Israeli historian Asael Abelman andĀ Mosaicās editor Jonathan Silver about the the New Jew, the Old Jew, and the types of human personalities that the state of Israel tends to cultivate. This discussion took place live on Tuesday, July 12, in front ofĀ Mosaic subscribers.Ā
Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We tend to think about modern Jewish nationalism, the movement to reclaim and reassert political sovereignty in the land of Israel, as a social and political movement, which of course it was. |
| 0:19.0 | But for key Zionist thinkers, Berdicevsky, |
| 0:22.7 | Brenner, Chernikovsky, A. D. Gordon, it was not only about the reassertion of political |
| 0:28.2 | and national sovereignty. Zionism also held out the revolutionary promise of creating |
| 0:34.2 | not only a Jewish commonwealth, but a new Jewish citizen who could be fitted to discharge the civic obligations of the new Jewish Commonwealth. |
| 0:43.3 | It wasn't only a new state, it was a new type of person that these thinkers sought to forge. |
| 0:49.3 | Now, the writers I'm talking about here make intricate arguments, and I am abstracting to try to distill |
| 0:55.5 | and essentialize them. But the argument in brief is that the conditions of the European |
| 1:00.1 | diaspora created in the Jews a submissive, pathetic, weak personality. Rabbinic legalism made |
| 1:08.8 | them neurotic, and the need to be on good terms with Gentile authorities |
| 1:12.6 | made them pathetic, and no dignified state could have neurotic, pathetic, nebishes formed the core of its |
| 1:20.7 | citizenry. So these thinkers dreamed of a new Jew, a Hebrew, that would be a different cultural |
| 1:26.3 | type cured of the deformities of the diaspora. |
| 1:29.7 | A few weeks ago, the British educator and writer Ellie Spitzer published a column for us at |
| 1:34.7 | Mosaic called The End of the New Jew and the Rebirth of the Old. |
| 1:39.3 | Now, to summarize, he basically argued that Israel's political and technological success is by now so overwhelming |
| 1:46.2 | that this second Zionist ambition to create a new type of person has given way to the re-emergence |
| 1:52.5 | of older forms of Jewish behavior, including, crucially, the revitalization of Jewish |
| 1:57.9 | religious life in Israel, something that many of the architects of the |
| 2:01.8 | idea of the new Jew would have opposed. Now, as it happened, on the same day that Spitzer |
| 2:06.7 | published his column, the writer and educator Daniel Gordas, published his own reflection in |
| 2:12.5 | his substack newsletter, Israel from the inside, and that piece was called 10 spies, 60 Israeli teenagers, |
... |
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