A Jewish-Israeli Artistic Genius

Yosl Bergner has for decades been a leading figure in Israeli art. Bergner grew up in Montreal, the son of the great Yiddish-language poet and essayist Melekh Ravitch. Ruth Wisse reflects on her longstanding friendship with Bergner, who will turn ninety-five next month, and on his career as an artist. Although today best known for his paintings, he also drew illustrations for the work of Franz Kafka and the Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz:

Melekh Ravitch began translating [Kafka’s work] into Yiddish in 1924. Yosl was proud that his father had been the first Yiddish writer to recognize Kafka’s genius, and the illustrations he did for Ravitch’s book were part of the Kafka series that cemented his international reputation. Yosl himself felt a powerful artistic affinity with Kafka, and he adapted the style of Kafka’s marginal line drawings for his Kafka works. Nonetheless, I don’t feel in Yosl the angst that Kafka conveys, and—at least for me—this is much to Bergner’s advantage. Kafka did not feel at home in his German language, did not feel at ease in his bourgeois home, did not love and honor his insensitive father, did not feel comfortable in his own skin.

In a widely quoted image from a letter to his friend Max Brod, Kafka describes Jews “with their hind legs fastened to the Jewish traditions of their fathers and with their forelegs getting no ground under their feet. The despair thus ensuing translates into inspiration.” Yosl understood such anxiety, but he had already found his footing and was moving forward. Part of this was thanks to Ravitch, who was content to have his son become an artist—as long as he did not give him too much competition—and Yosl, who is a terrific storyteller, obliged his father by choosing another medium for his art. . . .

Whereas Kafka’s father had transitioned from Yiddish to German and downplayed his Jewishness in becoming a respectable Czech burgher, Ravitch after World War I moved culturally in the opposite direction. He left his native German and Polish languages to speak Yiddish and moved from Vienna into the heart of Jewish Warsaw. As the son of such a father—one who rebelled against the bourgeois ideal by becoming a Yiddish writer—Yosl could legitimately take up a career of art. . . . We are accustomed to rebellions of sons against fathers, but Yosl came at modernism from the other side: Ravitch the modernist may have dulled for his son some of the novelty of novelty.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Arts & Culture, Franz Kafka, Israeli culture, Jewish art, Modernism, Montreal

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