Inextricably Bonded: Israeli Arab and Jewish Writers Re-Visioning Culture [Hardcover]

Rachel Feldhay Brenner (Author)

Book Description

Series: Studies on Israel | Publication Date: December 15, 2003

    Despite the tragic reality of the continuing Israeli-Arab conflict and deep-rooted beliefs that the chasm between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs is unbridgeable, this book affirms the bonds between the two communities. Rachel Feldhay Brenner demonstrates that the literatures of both ethnic groups defy the ideologies that have obstructed dialogue between the two peoples.
    Brenner argues that literary critics have ignored the variety and the dissent in the novels of both Arab and Jewish writers in Israel, giving them interpretations that embrace the politics of exclusion and conform with Zionist ideology. Brenner offers insightful new readings that compare fiction by Jewish writers Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, and others with fiction written in Hebrew by such Arab-Israeli writers as Atallah Mansour, Emile Habiby, and Anton Shammas. This parallel analysis highlights the moral and psychological dilemmas faced by both the Jewish victors and the Arab vanquished, and Brenner suggests that the hope for release from the historical trauma lies—on both sides—in reaching an understanding with and of the adversary.
    Drawing upon the theories of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Emanuel Levinas, and others, Inextricably Bonded is an innovative and illuminating examination of literary dissent from dominant ideology.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"By comparing Arab writers whose literary language is Hebrew with Jewish Hebrew writers, Brenner helps establish a balance and rebuts the exclusionary definition of Israeli literature. Her original analysis ties the Zionist rejection of the Jewish Diaspora to the denial of the presence, and subsequently, of the rights, of Palestine's Arabs. The book's scope and structure provide a fresh perspective on one hundred years of cultural and political conflict."—Gershon Shafir, University of California, San Diego

"Rachel Brenner presents a brilliant comparison of texts, but more important, she suggests a model of interpretation and interrelation that can be applied to other literatures and other conflicts."—Nili Gold, University of Pennsylvania

From the Back Cover

"By comparing Arab writers whose literary language is Hebrew with Jewish Hebrew writers, Brenner helps establish a balance and rebuts the exclusionary definition of Israeli literature. Her original analysis ties the Zionist rejection of the Jewish Diaspora to the denial of the presence, and subsequently, of the rights, of Palestine's Arabs. The book's scope and structure provide a fresh perspective on one hundred years of cultural and political conflict."-Gershon Shafir, University of California, San Diego

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press; 1 edition (December 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0299189600
• ISBN-13: 978-0299189600
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,116,236 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Deeply thought-provoking literary analysis of the literature of identity, October 28, 2005

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This review is from: Inextricably Bonded: Israeli Arab and Jewish Writers Re-Visioning Culture (Hardcover)

One of the most striking aspects of "Inextricably Bonded's" many worthy accomplishments is Brenner's persuasive dismissal of the notion that the internal post-Zionist critique of Israel's writers and historians is truly a new ideological or even "subversive" development. She achieves this by paying close heed to many early articulations of disapproval of institutional Zionism's varied roles in dispossessing the indigenous Arabs of land and society (among them Yosef Eliahu Chelouche, a founder of Tel Aviv, and the philosophers Ahad Ha'Am and Martin Buber). In light of increasingly shrill debates over this term (Zionists of the right predictably label the 1990s generation of "post-Zionist" historians and cultural critics as Jewish self-haters or worse), Brenner sensibly declares that the Zionist movement always encompassed a tradition of intense self-interrogation and moral argument. She also masterfully analyzes the receptions of canonical works by generations of Israeli scholars as well as the wider public. But what really stands as most innovative in her approach are her elegant comparative studies of the fiction of three Arab-Israeli writers, Emile Habiby ("The Pessoptimist"), Atallah Mansour ("In a New Light"), and Anton Shammas ("Arabesques") all of whom have written in Hebrew or published their works for Israeli readers in translation, alongside canonical works of several Israeli Jewish writers, including David Grossman, Amos Oz, and A.B. Yehoshua-all familiar writers in Europe and North America.

Throughout, Brenner produces highly original readings, masterfully demonstrating the peculiarly entwined nature of the realms of psychology and politics in the Israeli forum of art and politics. Subsequently, the author understands Israeli identity as having defined itself against a repressed Jewish Other, or history, as well as through its discriminatory practices vis-à-vis external and internal Arabs. As counter-narrative, Brenner cogently argues, the cumulative impact of the writings of Arabs and Jews in Israel, in spite of their disparate sociopolitical perspectives, effectively "restores the visibility of the Arabs in the `empty' land and calls into question the unequivocal Zionist claim to the land...by contrast, the story of the suffering that the triumphant Jews inflicted on the defenseless, defeated Arab population invokes the history of Jewish persecution and victimization in the Diaspora. Against the doctrine of exclusion, the literary representations reassert in the Israeli consciousness the denied histories of the Palestinian Arab and the Diaspora Jew."

Though Brenner always adds unprecedented insight to the broad ethical and political questions raised by the presence of the Other, a fascinating secondary issue, that of the peculiar nature of canon-formation often surfaces as a crucial dynamic. For instance, many readers (aware that Rushdie, Kundera, Solzhenitsyn, and others achieved their international fame as dissident writers at the cost of total repudiation at home), will be struck by the fact that Yehoshua, Oz, and Grossman, while deviating sharply from accepted political lines and cultural myths, nevertheless "gained canonical legitimacy from the cultural establishment that was founded upon the ideological orientation they defied." Without straying from her primary focus, Brenner skillfully addresses the ways that writers themselves (as well as their most sympathetic critics) often employ rhetorical strategies of a shared national identity to mitigate the effects of their radical writings in otherwise undermining the most precious myths of the Zionist revolution. Brenner raises uncomfortable questions about whether the literary work's dissenting messages about justice and displacement, once its author achieves canonical status, is ultimately neutered of its political potency.

Her answers are at times partial and at best uneasy but always thought-provoking. A further reason that this study will prove so eminently useful for scholars and teachers alike is that nearly all of the works discussed are readily available in English translation. "Inextricably Bonded" strongly warrants our appreciation and attention as one of the most innovative studies of modern Hebrew literary criticism, especially for its forceful demonstration that the identity politics of both Israeli Arab and Israeli Jewish writers together produce a dynamically "bi-ethnic" rather than a narrowly "national" body of literature. What Brenner so brilliantly reveals throughout this adroit analysis is that over the years the fraught realm of Arab and Israeli identity politics has provided art with a highly charged source of imaginative inspiration. Most importantly, literature clearly does matter in the "real world," for as she comes to affirm, however fragile the hope: "The readiness to tell one's story and to listen to the story of the other signifies mutual recognition, which alleviates fear. Attention to the story of the other signals the ability to transform the knot of violence into a dialogic interaction." To Brenner's lasting credit, the intertwined identities and destinies eloquently addressed in "Inextricably Bonded" go a very long way toward powerfully affirming the moral urgency of that claim.