TUESDAYS FREE ALL DAY EVERY WEDNESDAY FREE (20 to choose from) LUNCH OR $3.99 20% OFF DINNER APPETIZER TOTAL BILL ON YOUR with Lunch or Dinner! FOR SENIORS Arts & Entertainment OMELETTES includes toast & hash browns BIRTHDAY Israeli Artists: Between Two Worlds *till noon every day *must show proof We have two private rooms for 35 people per room for any occasion! Okfli IRE 33080 Northwestern Highway West Bloomfield, MI Phone: 248-539-8300 • Fax: 248-539-8303 Hours: Mon-Fri 10-9 • Sat & Sun 9-9 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, Receive • Catering available at all locations 10% Off • Coupons are for all locations Total Bill including Hercules Family Restaurant at 12 Mile & Farmington Not valid with Specials. Not valid with any other offers. With coupon. Expires 12/31/08 Visit us at www.leosconeyisland•com Israel's Thriving National Narrative THE GALLERY RESTAURANT ‘zpi 14 ( Enjoy gracious dining amid a beautiful atmosphere of casual elegance BREAKFAST • LUNCH • DINNER 01' A OPEN 7 DAYS: Rochelle Furstenberg MON.- SAT. 7 a.m.- 9:30 p.m. SUN. 8 a.m.- 9 p.m. Bloomfield Plaza • 6638 Telegraph Road and Maple • 248-851-0313 ftiftiou 'ill. ....N01 , - e• -..4 -, 1,1" . IL Special to the Jewish News 1 380420 Nh Tapas • Appetizers • Brick Oven Pizzas • Desserts • Catering • Sunday Brunch • Live Music • Patio Opening Soon • Opera Specials • New Spring Menu • Patio Now Open Small Plates-Royal Oak 310 S. Main St. Small Plates-Detroit 1521 Broadway 248-543-3300 www.smallplates.com 313-963-0497 1382180 C18 May 15 • 2008 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.