Ruth Gavison, one of Israel’s foremost jurists and political theorists, died last week at the age of seventy-five. Allan Arkush remembers her not only for her intellectual accomplishments, passionate commitment to Zionism, and her deep moral sense, but also for her “approachability” and other personal qualities:
Ruth was effortlessly eloquent, in English no less than in Hebrew, but she didn’t rely solely on her words. What she did with her hands was simply incredible. I won’t even try to describe it. Go to YouTube, watch one of the dozens of her lectures that have been posted there. You’ll see that it’s possible to gesticulate mellifluously.
Watching Ruth in action, I felt like I was watching a colorized version of an old newsreel of a Zionist Congress. I half-expected that any minute Chaim Weizmann would show up and give me a glimpse of his own inimitable magic. Ruth embodied the bottomless and tireless devotion to the cause that made the state of Israel possible and that sustains it to this day.
[But] I don’t want to leave the impression that Ruth was single-mindedly focused on Jewish questions. She was deeply rooted, but she was also very cosmopolitan. When she came to the United States, she met with many and diverse friends, Jewish and non-Jewish, including prominent political theorists and legal scholars who had no particular interest in Israel. In [an] email [to me] last month, . . . she added that she was playing the piano and reading a lot about early 20th-century personalities and events. She singled out Stefan Zweig, and Muhammad Asad and The Road to Mecca, and “assimilationist Jews facing the challenges of Eastern and Western Europe. Fascinating. Something altogether different from Zionism.” Knowing that this might surprise me, she added a last word: “N’daber” (We’ll talk). I wish we still could.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/8293/ruth-gavison-1945-2020/