Anti-Semitism and the North American Novel

Laura Z. Hobson’s The Gentleman’s Agreement, a best-selling 1947 novel, brought American “genteel” anti-Semitism into the limelight, especially after it was turned into a movie. It was preceded, and partially inspired, by a Canadian novel called Earth and High Heaven, also a loosely autobiographical account of interfaith romance and concealed but intense anti-Semitism. The author of the latter, Gwethalyn Graham, was a Canadian Christian who had had a romance with a Jew, while Hobson was a Jew who had fallen in love with a gentile. Both novels were part of a wave, writes Rachel Gordan:

The 1940s were a decade when several novelists tackled the topic of anti-Semitism. Saul Bellow’s The Victim (1947) and Arthur Miller’s Focus (1945) are among the more highly regarded of these novels today, in large part due to their authors’ status in the pantheon of American Jewish writers. Yet middlebrow novels, including Graham’s and Laura Z. Hobson’s, had greater impact on readers. Magazine serialization, bestseller status, and news of their purchase by Hollywood studios contributed to their popularity in the 1940s. With brief or no mention of the horrific anti-Semitism of wartime Europe, these novels were praised for holding up a mirror to bigotry at home even as North American soldiers fought more frightening instances of racial hatred abroad. To American commentators, these “social-protest novels” filled a uniquely American need to feel superior to their wartime enemies when it came to questions of national morality. To wring one’s hands over the discrimination of country clubs, hotels, and playgrounds—against the backdrop of Nazi Germany—was a variation on today’s “humble brag.” The United States and Canada may have had problems when it came to anti-Semitism, but in comparison to Europe’s, it was impossible to deny that theirs was the lesser evil.

Read more at Moment

More about: American Jewish literature, Arthur Miller, Canadian Jewry, Fiction, Saul Bellow, The Gentleman's Agreement

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