New reader of the blog and found this post very interesting. I'm a secular American Jew who found himself working for a Palestinian news wire in the West Bank for the last year. Occupying (no pun intended) the bizarre space between being a Arabic speaker (who had previously lived in Cairo) and not a Hebrew speaker, but also one who grew up in a Jewish neighborhood, attending religious school and went to services - I was able to travel between Israel and Palestine with a degree of access into both cultures.
In terms of "Jewish Exptionalism," I was struck by the mundane nature of Israeli society. The push for education and professional success does not seemed to be as ingrained in Israeli society as in American Jewish society, and the pre-war Jewish communities. I though about great secular Jewish theorists of the early 20th c: Max Weber, Freud, Einstein, etc. I think something that drives the great creative and intellectual achievements of the Jewish community over the past 150 years has been it's ability to stand with one foot in and one foot out of post-enlightenment western culture. We're not totally a part of it, and we're not complete outsiders, we can look at it from a unique angle. In the Jewish state, that unique position is gone, and with it, something of the modern Jewish experience.
Hey,
New reader of the blog and found this post very interesting. I'm a secular American Jew who found himself working for a Palestinian news wire in the West Bank for the last year. Occupying (no pun intended) the bizarre space between being a Arabic speaker (who had previously lived in Cairo) and not a Hebrew speaker, but also one who grew up in a Jewish neighborhood, attending religious school and went to services - I was able to travel between Israel and Palestine with a degree of access into both cultures.
In terms of "Jewish Exptionalism," I was struck by the mundane nature of Israeli society. The push for education and professional success does not seemed to be as ingrained in Israeli society as in American Jewish society, and the pre-war Jewish communities. I though about great secular Jewish theorists of the early 20th c: Max Weber, Freud, Einstein, etc. I think something that drives the great creative and intellectual achievements of the Jewish community over the past 150 years has been it's ability to stand with one foot in and one foot out of post-enlightenment western culture. We're not totally a part of it, and we're not complete outsiders, we can look at it from a unique angle. In the Jewish state, that unique position is gone, and with it, something of the modern Jewish experience.
Just a few thoughts.