Jonathan Safran Foer: Not the Great American Jewish Novelist

In Here I Am, his new novel, Jonathan Safran Foer chronicles the unhappy and dissolving marriage of Jacob and Julia Bloch, two highly educated, upper-middle-class American Jews. In addition to finding the novel filled with “joyless prose about joyless people,” Alexander Nazaryan deems Foer’s attempt to write a profound work of American Jewish literature simultaneously kitschy and pretentious:

Because Here I Am concerns Jews and sex, comparisons with Philip Roth are inevitable. They are also misguided, in good part because Foer is less than half of Roth’s age and couldn’t possibly have the same preoccupations. Yet he tries, as if the responsibility of being a Jewish American novelist required of him protracted shows of thematic fealty to his miglior fabbro. For Roth, Judaism was substratum, a world to which he always returned but was never afraid to leave. . . . For Foer, it is a carapace into which he retreats whenever the fundamental business of writing fiction true to life surpasses his abilities of observation. . . . If kitsch has a “fairy-tale glow,” as Theodor Adorno once said, then Here I Am is positively radiant. . . .

About halfway through the novel, Foer swaps the plight of the Blochs for that of Israel. Israeli cousins come to visit Jacob; as they arrive in Washington, an earthquake rocks the Middle East, potentially leaving Israel weakened relative to its Arab neighbors. Passages about sexting are replaced by passages about the Palestinian issue. Call me prurient, but I preferred the sexting, especially since Foer’s depiction of Israelis seem as complex as that of You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, that little-remembered comedy in which Adam Sandler plays an Israeli soldier living as a hairdresser in Manhattan. Say what you will, at least Sandler tried for laughs. I haven’t a clue what Foer was trying for.

Read more at Los Angeles Times

More about: Arts & Culture, Israel, Jewish literature, Philip Roth

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society