Love and Borders: A Lecture by Israeli Writer Dorit Rabinyan
On October 19th and 20th, Israeli writer Dorit Rabinyan visited Boston University for a two-day residency, where she visited several Jewish Studies classes during the day and gave a public lecture in the evening at the Elie Wiesel Center. At 7pm on the 19th, Ms. Rabinyan spoke about her third novel All the Rivers, which was written following an eight-year hiatus from writing and came to be at the center of a political scandal.
To welcome the audience, Professor Michael Zank gave a few opening remarks to introduce Ms. Rabinyan, thanking Professors Abigail Gillman, Mira Angrist and Nahum Karlinsky who had hosted Ms. Rabinyan in their classes. He introduced her talk as an illuminating reflection on “the agony and exhilaration of writing,” and spoke about how her novel All the Rivers balances a compelling love story with the complexities of politics.
Ms. Rabinyan began the evening by remarking upon the importance of literature in encouraging empathy. “We taste what it is to be someone else,” she said, which we cannot do in a storytelling medium like film or television. She then went on to explain that All the Rivers transformed from a work of art into a political statement when the Israeli Ministry of Education removed the book from high school reading lists.
The love story at the center of the book between an Israeli Jewish woman and an Arab Palestinian man in New York came from Ms. Rabinyan’s own experience in 2002 when she met secular Palestinian artists while living in Brooklyn and formed close relationships that radically changed the way she thought about her home in Israel. Israelis, she argues, are not encouraged to empathize or get to know their Palestinian neighbors, and that this lack of understanding prevents the conflict from ever moving toward peace. Tribalism and isolation helped the Jewish people survive in diaspora, and Ms. Rabinyan respects these instincts while suggesting that Israeli people would benefit from rejecting the fear of losing their Jewish identity. Her book became an immediate bestseller following the controversy in Israel, yet according to Ms. Rabinyan she “would rather trade a stable democracy for more sales of my books.”
Her words inspired a lively discussion about how literature and politics collide and about her particular attitude toward the Israeli government’s charges of her book as “dangerous and assimilationist.” All the Rivers focuses on a specific love story between two young people living away from home in the United States, and Ms. Rabinyan discussed why she chose to set her romance far away from the center of the conflict in order to comment on how different one’s country of origin looks when outside of it.
The evening concluded with Ms. Rabinyan signing copies of her book and mingling with attendees over refreshments.
Photos by Lauren Andrea Lucia Hobler
