I begin Friday reading this New York Times article:
Israel, Mired in Ideological Battles, Fights on Cultural Fronts
JERUSALEM — There have been fights over books, music, plays, funding for the arts and academic awards. This being Israel, they have been underpinned by fierce rhetorical exchanges about democracy, fascism and zealotry, identity, the future of the state and the fate of Jews.
A new front in the culture wars opens nearly every week, ripple effects of shifts in Israeli demographics, attitudes and politics that are shaking the society.
The latest was an attack on Wednesday by a far-right group on beloved leftist literary icons including Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, writers who have been considered the voice — and conscience — of the state for years. The group, Im Tirtzu, began a poster campaign calling the writers “moles in culture,” which prompted accusations of McCarthyism and worse, even from many on the right.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several members of his conservative coalition joined the chorus of condemnation over the vilification of such Israeli cultural pillars. But some of those same ministers have been behind many of the other battles. The previous round was the brainchild of Miri Regev, the divisive and conservative minister of culture and sport, who wants to deny state money to institutions that do not express “loyalty” to the state, including those that show disrespect for the flag, incite racism or violence, or subvert Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
Ms. Regev said that the aim of this “Loyalty in Culture” initiative, proposed as an amendment to a budget bill, is “for the first time to make support for a cultural institution dependent on its loyalty to the state of Israel.” She added, “I won’t be an A.T.M. — I have a responsibility for the public’s money.”
For one well-known poet, Meir Wieseltier, the law “brings us closer to the rise of fascism and exposes its true face.” But Isi Leibler argued in The Jerusalem Post that the government is “not obliged to subsidize the demonization of the nation” and should instead support “the inculcation of love of Israel.”
The steady stream of such conflicts, over what cultural works the state should promote for schoolchildren to read or for citizens to see and hear, is part of a political drama in which the politicians of a new generation are jockeying for position as leader of the so-called nationalist camp.
The cast includes Ms. Regev, 50, a rising power in Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud Party; Ayelet Shaked, 39, an outspoken hard-liner from the more conservative Jewish Home Party; and Naftali Bennett, 43, the education minister and head of Jewish Home.
The Israel they represent is more religious and less beholden to the values and inheritances of the old, Europeanized elite and its dwindling left. They are unapologetic in their nationalism, supportive of both poorer Jews of Sephardic — Middle Eastern, or Mizrahi — background and of settlers in the occupied West Bank, and unmoved by criticism from international leaders and liberal activists.
“It’s not just a culture war, it’s political, demographic and social at the same time,” said Nahum Barnea, one of Israel’s most influential columnists. “The core of the struggle is: Who is the dedicated elite, who are the legitimate heirs to the Zionist movement that built the state?”
Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, said the culture wars reflected “a growing sense of siege” that Israelis felt from the region and the world.
“This has set off the deepest fears in the Jewish psyche, fears that Zionism tried to free us from,” he explained. Instead of feeling as if they are in “a normal nation among nations,” he said, many Israelis are heading back “to a statist version of the old Jewish ghetto, and the Israeli response increasingly is to view those of our fellow citizens perceived to be in league with this process of siege, or encouraging it, as collaborators.”
But Mr. Leibler, The Jerusalem Post columnist, defended Ms. Regev and Mr. Bennett as trying to “restore a climate that nurtures love of Israel and promotes pride in Jewish heritage” after years when “far-leftists, postmodernists and even post-Zionists took over the Education Ministry.”
This month, the left-leaning daily Haaretz highlighted internal discussions in the ministry about what artistic works might be considered “politically undesirable” for high-school students. Among the criteria, the newspaper said, were whether artists would perform in West Bank settlements and declare loyalty to the state and to the national anthem, something that is particularly problematic for Israel’s Arab citizens.
Internal discussions are not policy, but even this report drew stinging responses, with Oded Kotler, a prominent Israeli actor and director, comparing Israel to the Soviet Union and telling Israel Radio, “There’s a real culture war underway here, but the war from that side of the political map is a harbinger of zealotry, darkness and coercion.”
Mr. Kotler infuriated the government and the political right last summer when he compared its supporters to “cud-chewing cattle.” That was in response to Ms. Regev’s effort to freeze state funding for an Arab theater in Haifa because of a play about a Palestinian prisoner who murders an Israeli soldier. The production, “Parallel Time,” had enraged the right and Mr. Bennett banned school trips to see it.
It makes sense to me why Israel through its government wants to control its culture in a pro-Jewish direction. It equally makes sense to me why gentile nations, including Germany, would want to control their culture in a nationalist and nativist way, which will often be anti-Jewish.
The Jew is the ultimate other, the ultimate stranger, and not even the angels like strangers.
Later on Friday, I watch this 1997 German movie:
Comedian Harmonists succeeded in Europe. U.S. President Bill Clinton told critic Roger Ebert it was among his favorite films of the year, although the movie did not get widespread release, hence reception in the United States.
Bernd Reinhardt of the World Socialist Web Site called it “an exciting film which is well worth seeing and which pays proper attention to the sextet’s music.” He also remarked on the film’s attention to historical detail and the importance of its theme of musical internationalism.
The movie contains a joke set in a German school.
Teacher: “What race do the Jews belong to?”
Child: “The semites.”
Teacher: “What race do the Germans belong to?”
Child: “The anti-semites.”
If you’ve ever snapped Nazi salute all alone in the bathroom, or put on tefillin in shul, you’ll know the surge that comes with strengthening your identity. The stronger your in-group feeling, the more likely you are to dislike outsiders.
The movie is about a music comedy troupe that developed in 1927 Germany and was very much in sync with Weimar Germany. The troupe was at least half-Jewish.
The troupe spent a lot of time in brothels. They thumbed their noses at the conventional German morality. They promoted decadence.
One Jew in the movie falls in love with his favorite hooker and asks her to marry him. When she says yes, he gets very serious.
Ho: “What’s the matter?”
Jew: “I’m very religious. If we are to marry, you will have to convert to Judaism.”
And so she does and they have a very Jewish wedding.
When the Nazis take power, they also take control of the culture, just as Israeli is currently, and they stop the group from performing.
If you perform publicly mocking the gentile majority, you might receive some unpleasant consequences.
Near the end of the movie, at a party at the home of Julius Streicher who proclaims himself a big fan, a Jew in the group refuses to sing a German folk song.
Almost at the end, the protagonist rants to a member of the group who just divorced his wife because of Germany’s new race laws: “Racial differences have indeed become irreconcilable differences.”
The Jewish members of the group leave Germany and have long lives. The Jew who married the ho moved to San Francisco and became a cantor. They remained married until his death at age 97
