Judaism

Michael Gawenda has written a deeply personal story about his Jewish identity. It comes during a period when conflict in Israel/Palestine has been painful for all. While he remains committed to a two-state future that supports the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to live in their own countries, the author critiques influential sections of the political left where acceptance has come to require demonising the Jewish state. A key message of the book is that too often on the left the only good Jew is one who publicly rejects Israel’s right to exist and remains silent when it is declared racist and nothing more than a coloniser of an indigenous population.

Eli Glasman’s début novel is aimed at a Young Adult audience, but should also enjoy a long life on adult fiction shelves. Seemingly based on Glasman’s own upbringing as an Orthodox Jew in Caulfield, a Melbourne suburb, the book is fascinating in its candid observations of the rituals, strictures, and arcane customs of Orthodox Judaism, particularly those of the Lubavitch sect, with its emphasis on outreach to non-observant Jews and its belief in the imminence of the Messiah.

The tragedy of Israel is that it wishes, simultaneously, to be a liberal democratic nation, one whose citizenship is defined by universal norms, and at the same time a Jewish state, where even Palestinians born within the borders of the country are denied full equality. I still remember my unease when I visited Israel many years ago at being asked when I, a secular Jew, intended to ‘come home’.

Judaism teaches that antisemitism is ultimately rooted in hatred of God, and that hatred of the Rabbis by ignorant Jews exceeds that of heathens, hence the worst antisemites (e.g. Karl Marx) are often renegade Jews.

Alfred Zion reveals his misunderstandings of Judaism even before his novel, The Merchants of Melbourne, begins. His Hebrew/Yiddish-English glossary translates Torah as “Pentateuch, the five books of Moses”, and Yiddishkeit as “Yiddish culture”. In fact, Torah means the whole body of Jewish teaching of which the Pentateuch consists of “mere notes”. Yiddishkeit means Jewish religious teaching and observance. Such misleading translations are matched by malicious caricatures of Rabbis. Saul, a learned Jew of rabbinic status, believed “everything was pre-ordained, even the good and evil that befell you. Struggling against one’s fate was therefore a wasted effort, if not a contradiction of God’s will” (p.97). This is the opposite of the Jewish doctrine of free will and personal responsibility.

Shalom, compiled by Nancy Keesing is I think a brilliant and moving collection of short stories.

Ms Keesing, an indefatigable compiler, has brought together for the first time a selection of Jewish stories and. arranged them in three sections, each one of which throws light on a certain aspect of Jewish life, either in Europe, in Australia over a long period, or in the present Australia-Israel conflict. This is a fine and sensitive arrangement of the stories.