Posted by David Bernstein:
David Brooks on Israeli Culture:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_04_12-2009_04_18.shtml#1239997279
[1]Brooks:
Israel is a country held together by argument. Public culture is
one long cacophony of criticism. The politicians go at each other
with a fury we can't even fathom in the U.S. At news conferences,
Israeli journalists ridicule and abuse their national leaders.
Subordinates in companies feel free to correct their superiors.
People who move here from Britain or the States talk about going
through a period of adjustment as they learn to toughen up and talk
back.
Ethan Bronner, the Times' Jerusalem bureau chief, notes that
Israelis don�t observe the distinction between the public and
private realms. They treat strangers as if they were their
brothers-in-law and feel perfectly comfortable giving them advice
on how to live.
One Israeli acquaintance recounts the time he was depositing money
into his savings account and everybody else behind him in line got
into an argument about whether he should really be putting his
money somewhere else. Another friend tells of the time he called
directory assistance to get a phone number for a restaurant. The
operator responded, "You don't want to eat there," and proceeded to
give him the numbers of some other restaurants she thought were
better.
I'll add two anecdotes. When I was in Tel Aviv in December, it was 70
degrees and sunny during the day. Nevertheless, most Israeli children
were bundled up in winter parkas. Needless to say, my kids were
wearing spring or summer clothes. You probably have guessed the
punchline: complete strangers kept haranguing me about how it's cold
out, and my children need to be wearing coats.
Also, a Jewish colleague of mine was in Israel for a wedding. As part
of his security check at the airport upon his departure, the security
official asked him if he was Jewish. He said yes. He was then asked if
he had a bar mitzvah (which is usually the precursor to asking you
which part of the Torah you read from, or where your bar mitzvah was
held, or what synagogue your family belonged to). He replied, "no".
The security official responded, "well, you really should consider
it."
And I'll also second Brooks on this: "As an American Jew, I was taught
to go all gooey-eyed at the thought of Israel, but I have to confess,
I find the place by turns exhausting, admirable, annoying, impressive
and foreign." Indeed, I find it very foreign, even though I speak
Hebrew well enough to carry on a conversation, have an Israeli wife,
and went to Zionistic Jewish schools where many of my teachers were
Israeli.
The foreigness of Israel isn't that surprising, in context, beyond the
most obvious points mentioned by Brooks. While the vast majority of
American Jews are descended from the great wave of Eastern European
immigration from 1880-1920, around half of all Israeli are of Middle
Eastern or North African ancestry. Israel has a much higher percentage
of Holocaust survivors and their descendants than the United States,
as well as a much higher percentage of immigrants from the former
Soviet Union. Jews are a majority, not a minority. (Almost) everyone
does military service, including extreme leftists. Reform and
Conservative Judaism, which dominate American Jewish life, have made
little impression on Israel. Non-Orthodox Jews in Israel rarely attend
synagogue, even on High Holidays, and, for obvious reasons, there is
no such thing as a Jewish community center, or Hebrew School, or
Jewish Summer camp, or other markers of the American Jewish
experience. Until 25 or so years ago, Israelis lived in the kind of
statist environment (where it took seven years to get a phone from the
state-owned telephone company) that Americans would find absolutely
unacceptable. And so on.
References
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/opinion/17brooks.html?_r=2&ref=opinion
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