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PARTISAN REVIEW
has succeeded beyond all expectations. Israelis are utterly involved with
Israeli realities, which are bound up in their native soil; and their con–
tact with European controversies is mediated through the Hebrew lan–
guage. The problem of language becomes the primary obstacle for the
interested audience. When Zionists in the past rejected the Diaspora,
they did so as
olim,
as immigrants-new and old-and as products of
Europe. Most of them had a command of a number of languages. The
new Israeli is not multilingual.
Public debate is nourished by the academic community, cultural fig–
ures, politicians, and interested members of the general public. In Ger–
many, the public debate is borne on the shoulders of that stratum
known as the
Bildungsburgertum,
i.e., the educated middle classes.
Among this class, general education, i.e., that which is not rewarded or
compensated, is not directly related to a profession and is not an imme–
diate resource, but a status symbol. In Israel, during and for a while
after the pre-State period of the Yishuv, there existed similar models
along the lines of the Eastern European Jewish intelligentsia. But the
further Israel moves away from Europe, the greater the distance
between these models and the country's current situation. A compari–
son of the scope of Russian-language newspapers and magazines in
Israel, which serve less than a million emigrants from the former Soviet
Union, with equivalent activities in a majority Israeli society, speaks
more eloquently than anything else about this phenomenon. [n the cur–
rent, highly charged, dominant political reality, with the absence of a
broad-based intellectual tradition, and the lack of mastery of European
languages, it is extremely difficult to look over the fence. And perhaps,
above all, this is due to the power of time which, despite all the
rhetoric, distances and dulls the horrors of the Holocaust, turning Ger–
many and its debates, despite all the declarations, into just another
place three-and-a-half-hours' flying time from Ben-Gurion Airport.
