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Eric Herschthal
New York Jewish Week
B
y any account, the artist Ohad
Meromi was doing just fine in
Israel.
After graduating from Israel's pre-
eminent undergraduate art school, the
Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, in
1992, Meromi had a string of high-profile
exhibits across the country. The Israel
Museum in Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv
Museum of Art both gave him solo shows.
The Dvir Gallery, a leading art dealer in
Tel Aviv, represented him.
"I was doing well for myself in the art
world in Israel',' Meromi, now 40, said.
"Then, I felt that, I don't know, I wanted
to see the larger world. Its a very intense
and interesting scene" in Israel, he said,
"but it's very small:"
By 2002, Meromi was enrolled at
Columbia University in New York City.
Since graduating in 2004, he has been
represented by Manhattan's Harris
Lieberman Gallery. Earlier this year,
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Israel's Thriving
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the Foundation for Contemporary Arts,
founded and overseen by Jasper Johns,
awarded Meromi one of its 12 annual
grants, each worth $25,000.
"Do I imagine myself staying in New
York? No," he said. "But am I going back to
Israel? No."
Meromi is just one of many young
Israeli artists who have recently moved to
New York and who are unsure if they will
stay. Collectively, this new generation of
artists has upgraded the profile of Israeli
art considerably, but it has also raised
questions about the future of Israeli art
more generally.
There is the philosophical: What
makes their art"Israeli" now? But also the
more hard-bitten: Can an increasingly
globalized Israeli art scene still provide
meaningful commentary on the issues
at home? And then, perhaps most press-
ing: Is Israel losing some of its brightest
talent?
Some leading curators in Israel
think not. "I'm very optimistic in the
fact that they'll return to Israel," said
I
sraeli literature is flourishing',' says
Dan Laor, professor of Hebrew lit-
erature at Tel Aviv Uthversity. "In the
last 25 years, Israeli literature has become
international. The Nobel Prize award to
S.Y. Agnon, in 1966, demonstrated that
Hebrew literature is not only part of the
culture of Judaism but a part of modern
culture in general."
During the early days of the state,
Israelis sought fiction shaped by the
Zionist narrative, the secular ethos of
return and renewal of ancient Jewish
sovereignty.
And yet Israeli literature since 1948
might be characterized by the desire to
escape the heroic mode, the large, collec-
tive myth, to find one's own small, still
voice.
Writers began to qualify the Socialist
Zionist myth of the sabra, the "New
Jew," already in the 1948 generation of
Moshe Shamir, Aharon Megged and S.
Yizhar, who challenged the accepted
truths about heroism long before the
post-Zionist historians. The Yizhar-like
sympathy for the Arab dovetailed with an
anti-Establishment trend that emerged in
the 1950s and '60s.
The writers of the early '60s, includ-
ing Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and Aharon
Appelfeld, who were known as the
"Generation of the State," took sovereignty
for granted. Influenced by Agnon, they
wrote about lonely, existential individu-
als. But they couldn't ignore the national
situation entirely. And individual charac-
ters often became symbolic of national
concerns.
Much of the disillusionment with the
founding Labor Party establishment came
to a head in the aftermath of the Yom
Kippur War, and the 1977 Likud victory
over Labor marked the end of the secular,
male, Ashkenazic centrality in Israeli fic-
tion.
As the power of the Old Guard dimin-
ished, other groups became more impor-
tant in the cultural dialogue.