Haim Watzman

To: His Excellency President Rufus T. Firefly
From: His Notsogoodency Haim Watzman, Freedonian Ambassador to Israel

As you will recall from my earlier report, this morning I was summoned urgently to the foreign ministry in The Capital That Must Not Be Named. (As you know, the ministry is actually located in Jerusalem, but in accordance with international diplomatic custom we do not acknowledge this.) I knew from news reports that the summons was with regard to the screening, in Freedonian movie theaters, of a film portraying four members of the Jewish race as bumbling idiots who foment world war. We understood through diplomatic channels that Deputy Foreign Minister Canny Babylon’s superior, Foreign Minister Avigor Tuberman, was especially incensed by the fact that one of the said Jews was portrayed as speaking with an Italian accent rather than a realistic Russian one.

You may have heard that Mr. Babylon has, in his brief tenure, developed his own unique and sophisticated diplomatic tactics that have brought many ambassadors to their knees. But, President Firefly, you need not fear — as a seasoned and senior member of our country’s foreign service, I was prepared. I was determined to stand up to this baboon-faced flunky and defend the honor of Freedonia. [Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg

My apologies to readers for being away for a while. My new article is up at The American Prospect.

Walking along the beachfront street in Akko recently with a social activist from the town’s Arab community, I looked up at a sign and saw I was at the corner of Shlomo Ben-Yosef Street. Then I looked again just to make sure. Really, I’m embarrassed I was surprised. Naming the street after Ben-Yosef showed an entirely predictable blend of bad taste and flagrant educational incompetence.

Akko, on the northern Israeli coast, is an ethnically mixed city: Arab citizens of Israel make up a little more than a quarter of the town’s 53,000 residents. The rest are Jews. Today’s relations between the two communities are just short of explosive, but I’ll leave that story for another time. Akko was entirely Arab until May 1948, when the Haganah — the proto-army of Israel — conquered it. Afterward, those Arabs who stayed in the town lived in the walled Old City, later spreading to nearby neighborhoods. The beachfront thoroughfare, which runs into the Old City, is named after the Haganah. This must be painful for Arab residents, but it follows an old, unwritten principle: To the victors go the street names.

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Haim Watzman

It’s six thirty-five a.m. as I pull my bike into Jerusalem’s Malha train station. The sun is rising over seam where the Pat neighborhood’s low, long public housing projects abut the houses of Beit Safafa. A handful of inchoate off-white clouds float through the air like empyrean amoebas, seeking to grab unwary prey in fluffy pseudopods. I lock my bike at the rack and take the escalator up to the station two steps at a time. The security guard, usually stationed downstairs, has set up her table at the top today, to escape the chill. She’s padded in a thick parka, but I’m warmed up from my bike ride and raring to get on the train. I’ve got work to do.

The train ride from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv takes an agonizing 80 minutes—agonizing if you are in a hurry to get to a meeting or if you are one of those high-powered high-tech guys who get apoplectic when they discover that there’s no cell phone reception for half that time. But if you are on your way to visit your mother-in-law, as I am, it’s heaven.

And I don’t mean that longer is better when the trip is to my mother-in-law’s apartment. We get along just fine. What I mean is that in the two hours and forty minutes that I will spend on the train today, to Tel Aviv and back, I’ll get nearly an entire day’s work done. The cars are comfortable, roomy, and quiet. They’re equipped with tables to put your laptop on and sockets to plug it into. There’s no internet to tempt me and none of the distracting paperwork that sits on my desk in my office at home. It’s just me and the book I’m translating, and there’s nothing a translator needs more than a place he can focus. And in this modern age, such places are few and far between. [Read more →]

Haim Watzman

Every translator’s been there (and I was, just this week). A client says he showed your work to someone else, who proceeded to mark it up with improvements. The client deduces that you gave him a bad translation. Go convince him that there can be two good translations of a single text.

The final product will differ depending on a range of strategic and practical choices that every text forces a translator to make.

“No one can tell [the translator] how Homer affected the Greeks, but there are those who can tell him how Homer affects them,” wrote Matthew Arnold, decrying some of his contemporary translators of the ancient Greek classics. Guernica has published “A Competition,” a short story by Sami Berdugo, giving me the opportunity to say something about how the story (published on-line in Hebrew by Ynet in two parts, here and here) affected me, and how Dan Ofri’s translation affected me, and how those two experiences differed. [Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg

So the furious reaction to Netanyahu’s settlement freeze has made you think that maybe, just maybe, it’s actually for real, and that he has become a pragmatist? Nope, he’s the same old Bibi, as I explain at the American prospect:

“No Entrance To Bibi’s Freeze Inspectors,” reads the long, professionally printed banner hanging at the eastern entrance to Ariel. Ariel has a reputation of being a relatively moderate settlement. Its residents are mostly secular suburbanites; its eternally re-elected mayor belongs to Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s mainstream right-wing Likud. The Ariel finger — the heavily settled strip of land joining Ariel to Israel — is one of those blocs that centrist Israeli politicians insist will stay in Israeli hands under a peace agreement.

But the suburbanites, like the hard-core ideologues of the religious right, are furious at Netanyahu’s declared freeze on building in the settlements. When police and building inspectors showed up this week at Tzofim, a smaller settlement closer to central Israel, to seize a bulldozer being used for illegal construction, an angry crowd blocked their way. One policewoman was hospitalized, apparently with internal injuries, after protesters pummeled her.

The settlers’ response might give the impression that Netanyahu is serious about the freeze, that he has moved toward the center, that he has accepted the need to compromise on the West Bank’s future. Impressions can be misleading. Netanyahu remains what he was in his first term as prime minister in the 1990s — an ideologue, but a weak-kneed one. Under U.S. pressure, he makes concessions that are sufficient to incense his right-wing allies but never enough to allow progress toward peace. The settlers’ fury has more to do with their own fears than with Netanyahu’s actions. [Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg

I have a new piece in Hadassah magazine describing how Israel created the ultra-Orthodox community as we see it today, with its life-time students, large families and poverty:

I’m standing in the Kerem Avraham neighborhood of Jerusalem. Across the street is the stone building where Amos Oz, Israel’s most famous novelist, grew up in a small apartment. Back then, in the 1940s, Kerem Avraham was home to “petty clerks, small retailers, bank tellers or cinema ticketsellers, schoolteachers or dispensers of private lessons,” as Oz writes in his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness. They observed the last vestiges of Judaism—candles on Friday night, services on Yom Kippur—and avidly argued fine points of Zionist ideology.

When it was time for Amos to start school, his father faced a dilemma. Party-linked school systems educated the Jewish children of Manda­tory Palestine. One school within walk­ing distance belonged to the socialists of Labor Zionism, the other to the Orthodox Zionists of the Mizrahi movement. Oz’s father, however, was a right-wing secularist. He chose the Mizrahi school because the “red tide was on the upsurge in our land” and the socialist school might turn the boy into a Bolshevik. He felt the religious school posed no parallel risk because “religious Jews…with their synagogues would disappear off the face of the earth in a few years.” [Read more →]

Haim Watzman

Last monthafter Saturday morning services at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, I stood up in Rabbi Andy Bachman’s spacious study. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Were the personal stories of life in Jerusalem and Israel-forged humor of my Necessary Stories presentation going to click with the 50 sophisticated New Yorkers I found before me?

I’m happy to say that it went splendidly. From the start, people laughed in the right places—the best indication that they were engaged and entertained. And when the audience started breaking up before I’d had a chance to present my final segment, it wasn’t because they were bored. They explained that the children’s activities being held in parallel were coming to an end and that they had to pick up their kids.

Kudos came later by e-mail: “Haim Watzman transports his audience both in time and place in an authentic, heartfelt and intellectually thought-provoking performance,” wrote Doris Traub. David Greenberg, to whom I owe thanks for helping arrange the appearance, gave me this blurb: ““Haim Watzman brings the Israeli experience to life in a way that a history book never can. He reminded me again why Israel means so much to me. Mr. Watzman’s program was at once funny, thought-provoking, wise and enjoyable.” [Read more →]

Haim Watzman

“It’s their land and they can do whatever they want with it,” Roni shrugs. Now, I should explain that a Roni shrug is a geological event. His ninety-minute daily workout in the pool and the weight room has given him shoulders that undulate like a massif in an earthquake. At middle age, he’s got the physique of a seventeen-year old. He’s also got the same annoying macho bluster. This model male knows everything unequivocally, especially where the power lies.

I’m trying to persuade Roni to join the fight to save the Jerusalem Pool. We’re standing in said pool’s scruffy, humid men’s locker room, suiting up. A few weeks before, the management had put up signs announcing that it would no longer renew annual memberships. The owners of the property, who also run the pool, wanted to demolish the pool and build three luxury apartment buildings.

“Just because you own a piece of property, it doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with it,” I say. [Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg

My new article on whether Israel is a democracy is up at The American Prospect:

Infant mortality among Arab citizens of Israel is two and a half times higher than it is among Jewish citizens. One out of two Israeli Arab college graduates is out of work. Arabs make up 6 percent of the civil service, though they are over 15 percent of the country’s citizens. National testing shows Arab fifth- and eighth-graders trailing Jewish pupils in math, science, and English, and the gap is widening. That’s not surprising, since Arabs suffer much more poverty, and the national education system spends considerably more per Jewish child than per Arab child.

This a just a selection from the last few weeks’ news reports on the ethnic gap in Israel — not that inequality is big news. The most clichéd phrase in Israeli political discourse is that the country is a “Jewish and democratic state.” The phrase is overused precisely because of the tension between the two adjectives, because of the majority’s insecurity over whether both can be achieved at the same time. (The minority generally presumes it can’t.)

The standard line of the country’s boosters is that it’s the only democracy in the Middle East. The most concise criticism is that it is an “ethnocracy,” as Israeli political geographer Oren Yiftachel argues in his 2006 book of that name. An ethnocracy, he explains, is a regime promoting “the expansion of the dominant group in contested territory … while maintaining a democratic façade.” Looking at this debate in light of two new books by Israeli scholars and of a faded and remarkable document that I’ve just read in the Israel State Archives, it seems both sides could be right. [Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg

My new article on the right’s difficulties with the army is up at The American Prospect:

Driving through the West Bank recently, I picked up two hitchhikers. Both wore the long, thick sidelocks and extra-large skullcaps that have become the mark of young men on the religious right, especially among settlers. Since they were what Israelis call army age (what Americans would call college age), the conversation turned to military service.

Despite Israel’s universal draft, the hitchhiker in the back seat said he didn’t intend to serve. The Israel Defense Forces, he argued, hurts Jews — a point he presumed was obvious from the “uprooting” of settlements in Gaza four years ago and the occasional dismantling of tiny, illegal settlement outposts in the West Bank more recently. Besides that, he said, the IDF “doesn’t want to kill Arabs because it wants to look nice in the world.” He didn’t want to die because commanders were too concerned with Arabs’ lives. As a student at a yeshivah — a religious seminary — he had a deferment, and he intended to keep it till he was past draft age. [Read more →]

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at Moment Magazine:

My son and I found the story one Shabbat when he was home from the army. We slipped out of morning services a bit early to study Vayikra Rabba, an ancient collection of midrash. If I hadn’t decided to make aliyah before he was born, he’d now be coming home for weekends from college, not the IDF. If we lived in America, perhaps his Hebrew wouldn’t be good enough to study midrash in the original, though that’s less certain. Sometimes I wonder about whether there’s a grand meaning to that choice I made years ago, before he was born, some significance an inch beyond the reach of words.

That morning, though, we were just reading a strange set of folk tales inserted into the midrash. In one, a man’s wreath of magical herbs protects him from a snake’s venom. In a second, a hoopoe wants to build his nest in a hole in a stump in a rabbi’s orchard. There’s a board nailed over the hole, so the hoopoe brings an herb that dissolves the nail. The rabbi hides the herb so thieves don’t use it to “destroy creation.” In another tale, a man sets off to make aliyah from Babylon. Along the road he sits down to rest and sees two birds fighting. One kills the other—and then brings an herb and places it on the corpse, which returns to life.

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Haim Watzman

“Write a short descriptive passage,” suggested the red-headed creative writing teacher who sat uncomfortably at the head of the table. We eight acolytes bent our heads submissively, pondered, and began to write.

We sat at a long narrow table, in a long narrow room, in the Haim Hazaz Writers’ House in Jerusalem’s Old City. A brisk walk of a bit over half an hour had gotten me there from the apartment in Baka that I’d recently moved into with my wife Ilana, following our marriage just a few months before. Ilana was pregnant and I did not yet know that the appearance of our first child would herald a long period when I’d have to work hard to suppress my creative urges and apply myself to supporting my family. I planned to be a writer. In Hebrew.

That didn’t seem to be a far-fetched goal at the time. I had a good command of my adopted language. I’d spent my first year in Israel in Hatzor Haglilit, a development town up north more forgotten and forsaken than Brigadoon – when visitors chanced on that mythical Scottish town once a century, they at least found it charming and were tempted to stay. Hatzor was a centrifugal village – whoever could get out left, and those that remained did so only because they were at the bottom of the bucket. There was little to do and nowhere to do it, nothing worth seeing and nowhere to see it, and only two inhabitants who spoke English. My ulpan Hebrew was quickly supplemented by street slang and underclass argot.

Beyond that, I forced myself to read Hebrew as much as I could. I refused to buy a newspaper in English (and in any case, The Jerusalem Report didn’t exist yet). [Read more →]