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Reviewed by:
  • Inextricably Bonded: Israeli Arab and Jewish Writers Re-Visioning Culture
  • Ranen Omer-Sherman (bio)
Inextricably Bonded: Israeli Arab and Jewish Writers Re-Visioning Culture. By Rachel Feldhay Brenner. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. ix + 349 pp. $35.00.

In the recent past, a number of Israel's major critics of modern Hebrew cinema, art, literature, theatre, and other forms of national culture have been attentive to the dynamic forms of self-interrogation the state's artists express when it comes to the historical displacement of the Palestinian people as well as the continuing marginalization of Arab-Israelis in the troubled state created by Zionism. Ammiel Alcalay, Nurith Gertz, Yosefa Loshitzky, Gila Ramras-Rauch, Ella Shohat, and Dan Urian are bold exemplars of this important trend; in myriad ways, their probing work seems to implicitly respond to the haunting imperative voiced by Salman Rushdie in The Moor's Last Sigh (1997): "When the whole of life was like this, when an invisible reality moved phantom-wise beneath a visible fiction, subverting all its meanings … how could any of us escape that deadly layering? How could we have lived authentic lives? How could we have failed to be grotesque?" (184). Or to bring us closer to the issue at hand, there is Gertz's revealing paradigm of a psychological repression that doggedly haunts the Jewish state in Myths in Israeli Culture (2000): "ever since its formation, Israeli Jewish society has been connected with Arab [society] as if it were its Siamese twin. … The Arab perceived as the 'ultimate Other' by Israeli Jewish society is the one who defines this society" (21). Joining these important critical interventions is Rachel Feldhay Brenner's strikingly innovative study of the varieties of Israeli ethnicity and authorial identity, which many will likely regard as one of the most provocative, and cogently defended, perspectives to date. Her illuminating exploration of the narrative response to the historical trauma felt by Arab writers, and the historical guilt that has stirred Jewish Israeli writers, will likely endure both as a canonical text of postcolonial literary criticism and as a lucid introduction to some of the most dynamic currents in Israeli literature.

One of the most striking aspects of Inextricably Bonded's many laudable 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 [End Page 221] 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. 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. She also masterfully analyzes the receptions of canonical works by generations of Israeli scholars as well as the wider public. Throughout, Brenner produces highly original readings of culture and texts, 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 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...

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