Remembering Theodore Bikel, Israeli

The late actor and musician Theodore Bikel, who played an important part in American and American Jewish cultural life, spent twelve years of his youth in pre-state Israel. That experience was later memorialized in important recordings of Zionist and Israeli folk songs, as Edwin Seroussi writes:

A lot has been (and will be) written about Bikel. Most obituaries stressed, with a substantial measure of justification, his cosmopolitan persona or his career as an American theater and movie actor, entertainer, and folk-song revivalist. . . . Bikel made a career out of his cosmopolitanism by assiduously playing the “other” on the stage or on the screen, exploiting his virtuosic capacity to speak, and also to sing, in countless languages.

However, in Bikel’s mind, the Israeli period of his life remained a vivid experiential presence. Bikel lived in . . . Tel Aviv from 1938, when he arrived from Vienna with his family as a fourteen-year old refugee, to 1946, when he moved to London to pursue a career as a professional actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. . . .

The genesis of Bikel’s career as a professional singer was marked by his first landmark [record] of songs, eventually titled Theodore Bikel Sings Songs of Israel. . . . [T]here was a demand [at the time] for Israeli “products” among North American concentrations of Jews, and Bikel was the right person at the right time and place. The sound and the packaging of Bikel’s album catered to this Jewish market and its imagination of the new Israel. The suggestive cover of Theodore Bikel Sings Songs of Israel—[in the producer’s words], “a kibbutz girl in the kibbutz uniform and pert hat, . . . her sun-bronzed legs marching happily across a field with a hoe on her shoulder”—which we now know was in fact a fake, visualized Israeliness as the target audience wanted to imagine it: a young, hard-working laborer firmly attached to the land, free from the shackles of religious Orthodoxy and sexually appealing.

Read more at Jewish Music Research Center

More about: American Jewry, Arts & Culture, Israel & Zionism, Israeli music

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF