Israel at 60: Where have all the heroes gone?

Jewish Bookweek 2008 was over in March, but the audio recordings of the sessions are still making their way to the web.

A fascinating new arrival is a panel discussion entitled Israel at 60: Heroes and Anti-Heroes, featuring Hebrew University Professors Shlomo Avineri and Menahem Brinker and genders studies scholar Hannah Naveh, who is Dean of the Katz Faculty of the Arts, Tel Aviv.

The presentation starts with a short film of an interview with Israeli literary lion Amos Oz, who makes the provocative claim that Israeli literature has no more heroes because it has won its national liberation struggle.  Rather it is the Palestinians who have heroes now.

Following the Oz interview, the three scholars enter a lively discussion of the place of the hero and the heroic in Israeli myth and literature.

Literary scholar and peace activist Brinker made the claim that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was Israel’s last authentic hero of the Zionist pioneer epic.

For me, the murder of Rabin symbolizes the end of the epic part of Israel and the high aspirations of Israel, and what comes later must be something, I think, lower than what was before…  In another epoch such a character, that turned from a soldier into a peace seeker, and asked by his chauffeur, when he was delivered to hospital, ‘does it hurt’ and he says ‘it hurts but not terribly,’ a myth will be created around him….  [But our modern skeptical age] is finished with heroes. And even our real heroes will be drawn by literature and by memoirs in a very prosaic, skeptic and relativistic way.