Jewish writing to the mainstream of Jew-
ish literature) may be self-evident. But the
Americans challenged the Israelis' easy
repudiation of Diaspora life as a whole.
Writer-editor led Solotaroff -rejected the
image of a center and a periphery, substi-
tuting that of "two transmitting stations."
And several Americans were quick to point
out that North American Jewry offers
Israel the example of some accomplish-
ments worth imitating — especially reli-
gious pluralism and, in the phrase of
Arnold Eisen, Stanford University pro-
fessor of Religious Studies, "a modern life
rooted in religiosity."
But religion was almost as much a bar-
rier as language at this conference, sug-
gesting, to paraphrase George Bernard
Shaw, that Israelis and North American
Jews form one people separated by a
common religion. Hostility to Jewish
religion and especially to the Israeli
rabbinate on the part of some of the
Israelis produced occasional low humor
about Orthodoxy. With several notable
exceptions, the panel discussions were
marked by an undefined but palpable dis-
comfort about Judaism as a religion as well
as a reluctance either to acknowledge
Judaism's strength as a spiritual path or
to credit. it as the supporting bedrock of
Jewish experience.
From the outset of the conference, the
rolling river of literary and intellectual
discourse was intermittently blocked by
politics. The intifada cast its debris into
everything, producing the most dramatic
moments of the three days.
Midway through the first day, Canadian
translator and essayist Ruth Wisse, a fre-
quent contributor to Commentary,
castigated leftist Israeli writers for failing
to understand that "Palestinian national-
ism is founded on the ambition to destroy"
Israel. "Israel as a country under siege
with a socialist government should have
been a magnet for the Left," she com-
plained. She went on to accuse Israeli left-
wing writers of neurotically adopting "Jew-
ish self blame" and allying themselves
politically and intellectually with the
Palestinians instead of broadcasting the
message that the situation of the Palestin-
ians is the fault of the Arabs.
The oisagreements were immediate. In
angry responses, Yale University professor
Benjan:dn Harshav, translator and critic of
Hebrew and Yiddish literature, accused
Wisse and those who shared her opinions
of "ruining"Israel;Hillel Halkin, author of
Letters to an American Jewish Friend,
reminded Wisse that writers and intellec-
tuals li.ove an obligation to protest injus-
tice; Ir 'ring Howe, author of World of Our
Fathers and dean of American-Jewish lit-
erary critics, listed such Israeli abuses as
deporti.tions, blowing up houses and bury-
ing Arabs alive and then instructed Wisse
that "the guilt of neurotics is often morally
valid."

In a later panel, Haim Be'er chastised
Wisse for overlooking "the real anguish"
of the Palestinian-Jewish conflict. And the
next day, responding to Wisse's complaint
that right-wing writers in Israel do not get
translated into English, Amos Elon,
author of The Israelis: Founders and Sons,
insisted that the entire Israeli literary
establishment is all on the same side.
Wisse suggested that such uniformity
raised questions about Israel's claim to
cultural democracy.
Only novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick
came to Wisse's defense, asserting that too
few Jews, in America and Israel, have
sought to enhance Israel's position in the
media and among intellectuals. (Ozick later
reported receipt of a telegram from a group
of right-wing Israeli writers asking her to
protest the exclusion from the conference
of their end of the Israeli spectrum).

Amos Oz
dismissed Jewish
culture in the Diaspora
as on its way to
becoming a "museum
— and an empty one."

One of the running conflicts of the con-
ference involved Ozick and Israeli Arab
author Anton Shammas, whose Hebrew
novel Arabesques was well-received both
here and in Israel. In an interview in the
Northern California Jewish Bulletin, Ozick
had charged, according to Amos Elon, who
raised the issue, that Shammas, by using
Hebrew as a non-Jew, had made a "mule"
of the airborne "Pegasus" of the language.
Elon compared this to the hatred of certain
Nazi and pre-Nazi writers for the Jewish
"emasculation" of the German language by
using it for "cosmopolitan" purposes.
Ozick angrily objected that her remarks
had been distorted by the newspaper. She
had complained only, she said, that Sham-
mas, after writing Arabesques, had used
his authorship as a propaganda tool for the
Palestinian cause, thereby changing the
artistic "Pegasus" of his work into a mule.
Then she angrily rebuked Elon for calling
her a "Nazi." Elon shot back that he had
called her not a Nazi but a "nationalist
integralist," a phrase whose meaning was
not widely understood, and, apparently re-
jecting her explanation of the Pegasus-
mule remark, added, "You should be
ashamed of yourself!"
Shammas, the cause of this trouble, was

charming, smart and fierce — "a lion in a
den of Daniels," as he introduced himself.
"I am trying — mulishly — to un-Jew the
Hebrew language," he informed Ozick.
Both his politics — he called the Law of
Return "racist" for giving American Jews
greater rights to Israel than Israel's Arab
citizens, for example — and his position as
an established non-Jewish writer of
Hebrew, highlighted the potential contra-
dictions of a Jewish state that is a bi-
national secular society at the same time.
"I am your worst nightmare," he an-
nounced cheerfully, quoting Rambo, but
his remarks suggested an Israeli-Arab
identity every_ bit as complex and painful
as that of Jews in partly hostile Diaspora
cultures.
At a later panel, however, Ozick re-
minded Shammas that he publishes regu-
larly in 'Tel Aviv and Jerusalem newspapers
and even in the New York Review of Books.
"That's not oppression, Anton!" she
informed him sternly. (One wonders how
Ozick, who has dealt in her work with
feminist themes, would have responded
had Shammas suggested that the same
sentiments might be addressed to many
American feminist writers who, despite
their physical safety and secure career
paths, feel justified in calling attention to
the oppression they experience as individ-
uals and as a class). In any event, the
conference organizers are to be praised for
the controversial decision to include
Shammas.
Several panels dealt with the differing
traditions of Hebrew and American-Jewish
literature. In a panel called "The End of
Marginality in American Jewish Litera-
ture," Ted Solotaroff traced the change
engendered in American Jewish writing as
the immigrant generation gave way to
writers increasingly at ease with their
place in American society — the "avant-
garde of American Jewish acculturation,"
he called them. Unfortunately, such writers
as Saul Bellow and even Bernard Mala-
mud, as they cast off their marginality to
American society, became increasingly
marginal Jewishly. But the next stage,
Solotaroff suggested, as a core of American
Jews has become strengthened in its com-
munal identity, is writing by American
authors who are "confronting modernity as
observant Jews."
Irving Howe, responding, agreed that we
are witnessing a transition from Jewish-
ness-as-experience back to Jewishness-as-
essence. But American-Jewish writing, he
said, is now experiencing a "crisis of
subject matter." He expressed doubt that
either religious observance or the many-
faceted relationship to Israel would provide
writers with the vital thematic strength
and drama of the immigrant experience.
The marginality of many American
Jewish writers to the Jewish community
— a situation hardly imaginable in Hebrew
literature — was not fully addressed. The

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