Through the Looking Glass: Jewish America Envisions Israel

Jewish America Envisions Israel Through the Looking Glass: Jewish America Envisions Israel Review Essay Sara Horowitz Sara R. Horowitz is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director ofthe Jewish Studies Program at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (SUNY Press, 1997), and she has published widely on American Jewish literature and on feminist issues and Jewish literature. 89 Israel Through the Jewish American Imagination: A Survey of Jewish-American Literature on Israel 1928-1995, by Andrew Funnan. Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1997. Envisioning Israel: The Changing Ideals and Images of North American Jews, edited by Allon Gal. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. As our century comes to a close, one cannot contemplate the inner workings of the American Jewish community without taking into account the impact of the Holocaust and the State oflsrael. These two phenomena-the European catastrophe and creation of the Jewish state, both half a century ago--radically changed the complexion of Jewish America. No longer a community of immigrants but an increasingly disparate and dispersed group of individuals, American Jews have invested institutionally and individually in cultural awareness of these aspects of recent Jewish history. Indeed, remembrance ofthe tragedy and connection to the state have come to comprise the two pillars ofJewish American identity in our time, linking secular, religious, and cultural Jews in what one might call a civic Judaism. Both have come to represent touchstones for important values that transcend one's selfand one's time. Holocaust remembrance gardens, museums, monuments, and resource centers spring up across the country, and American Jews flock to Israel on tours, missions, and pilgrimages. At the same time, the turn-of-the-century Zeitgeist has also brought us into a mode of self-conscious contemplation. Thus we reflect on the nature of our connections to history, memory, and culture, and the complicated and often contradictory ways in which we transact our cultural values and identities. Who have we been? Who are we? What will we become as the futuristic twenty-fIrst century becomes the quotidian 90 SHOFAR Winter 1998 Vol. 16, No.2 present? For American Jews, these questions represent more than speculative, aCademic musings. They bear a hard and sharp edge as both religious and secular Jewish institutions wonder whether Jewish life in America can survive its own successes. Seeking to perpetuate itself, then, the increasingly amorphous and diverse body of Jewish Americans seeks to understand itself. Already Holocaust scholarship has begun to shift focus from knowing the past to understanding the ways in which the memory of the past resonates in the present. Across disciplines, scholars have begun to probe what has come to be called the Americanization ofthe Holocaust-that is, the sets ofmeanings that Holocaust memory has acquired in the civic arena of the United States. What do the evolving forms of Holocaust commemoration indicate about the values, security, and identities of American Jews who communally and individually remember, and imagine themselves into, the tragic European past? The resonances of the Holocaust have found voice in Jewish American imaginative literature, fIrst by survivor-emigre writers such as Ilona Kannel, then by American-born writers such as Norma Rosen, Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick, who have sought to understand our relationship to a past which is both ours and not ours, which shapes us even as we shape our remembrances ofit. Popular culturecinema , espionage novels, science fIction, and television, for example-has incorporated Holocaust memory in its function as a vehicle for the working out of Jewish American postwar identity, generating interlocking sets of understanding about the nature of Jewish destiny, antisemitism, and evil, which scholars have begun to unravel. By contrast, the relationship ofAmerican Jewry to Israel has largely eluded Jewish American letters and Jewish American scholarship until recently. Given the important place ofthat relationship in the popular Jewish American discourse, its absence in the imaginative literature is particularly noteworthy. Scholars have advanced a number of hypotheses to explain this signifIcant lacuna: that the survival of Israel has been considered too precarious to withstand the complex scrutiny of scholarship and literature; that it would be presumptuous...