Word: diaspora
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...past, Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora have shared a natural tendency to rally round the flag in times of crisis. With few exceptions, this has been necessary because controversy makes Israel easy prey for anti-Semites and anti-Zionists. But now, in the aftermath of Shatila and Sabra, Jews are refusing to rubber stamp Israel's policies. Doubt that was once kept inside is now expressed openly...
...striking that the harshest critics of the Begin government in this sordid fiasco are Jews, not Gentiles; Israelis, not the Diaspora. Nor were those assailing the government exclusively members of the Labor opposition. The right-win newspaper Maariv wrote: "This whole affair, which outrages and disgusts, cannot be ended simply by a statement of sorrow. Someone is responsible here and has to take the consequences." And Eitan Haber, military correspondent for the pro-Begin paper Yediot Ahronot claimed: "Government ministers and senior commanders already knew during the hours of Thursday night and Friday morning that a terrible massacre was taking...
...trouble is that this world has not provided the Jews with much redemption. Instead, the main events in Jewish history, until the founding of Israel, consisted mostly of disasters: the destruction of the Temple, the Diaspora, the Holocaust, each devastation considerably more terrible and unimaginable than the one it followed. These days Begin cites Genesis as the font of his politics, but his abiding source is the Holocaust, as it is for much of Israel. To the importance of individual death in Judaism, the Holocaust added a national significance. Here was the death of deaths, 6 million gone. Just...
...author says that the Jews have traditionally valued mercy because it is only through the mercy of the strong that the victims of the diaspora can survive. But the diaspora is no longer. Israel exists and fights, not relying on the mercy of its neighbors for its life. And the neoconservatives represent men of wealth and power in this country who likewise seem to have lost any need for mercy. It is a grim view, but Shorris doubts the Jews' ability to retain sensitivity to moral considerations after achieving a degree of material and political success...
...when Jakov Lind was an eleven-year-old schoolboy, the Nazis goose-stepped into his home city of Vienna, sending him fleeing to Holland and a lifetime of Diaspora. Something more than a Jew without a country, Lind became a displaced artist as well, without a sure tradition or even a language. He wrote at first in German; now he uses English. He lives in London, in New York, in Majorca. He has variously conducted his literary experiments in short stories (Soul of Wood), novels (Landscape in Concrete), autobiography (Counting My Steps) and even scores of radio plays...