With how much authority does a contemporary religious leader speak? On any given day, the answer can range from “absolute” to “negligible.” Interestingly enough, both these extremes present significant ethical issues with regard to how a religious leader conducts him or herself.

As I am an Orthodox congregational rabbi, my words and decisions are sometimes accepted as definitive and absolutely binding. Congregants turn to me for decisions regarding the most serious aspects of their lives — issues ranging from fertility struggles to end-of-life crises, and questions ranging from whom they are permitted to marry to when they are permitted to be intimate with their spouse. Implicit in their turning to me is their intention to accept my rabbinic authority. Most often, the people who seek my counsel are good friends, whose lives are emotionally intertwined with my own. Sometimes they are community members whose support — financial or otherwise — I depend upon. The potential for intellectual dissimulation on my part, for rationalizing, contextualizing, for not thoroughly exploring the facts, is everpresent. I am tempted to just make their lives easier, to find a way to tell them what they are hoping to hear. In the moment, it can even seem as if this is the correct response. But when I think about how they — the ones who have come to me with the question — define religious leadership, I know that the tempting path represents a terrible betrayal of what religious leadership entails. They have come to me seeking help in translating their faith commitments into real life. They want to know what God requires of them at this important juncture. They have hitched their own religious integrity to mine. Ethical religious leadership begins with fully appreciating what is at stake.

At the other end of the spectrum, where a rabbi’s voice carries significantly less authority, ethical challenges abound. The religious leader is charged with the holy responsibility of framing contemporary social and political issues in religious terms. In fact, to neglect this responsibility is to deny congregants the capacity to live engaged and dynamic religious lives. But in these social and political realms, our Western traditions of personal autonomy and the exercise of individual conscience trump all else. A rabbi’s most passionately held positions (for example on immigration, environmentalism, war and peace) may be respectfully rejected by a considerable percentage of the congregation. And while it is understandable for the religious leader to feel greater affinity with the likeminded, to feel less invested in the chronic dissenters would lead toward ethical failure.

Separating ideological disagreement from pastoral responsibility is a critical leadership challenge. The ability to discharge the responsibility of religious leadership is made possible by the power of empathy, not by affection. Given the ever-present constraints on a rabbi’s schedule, reasonable excuses for pastoral inattention are readily available. But, honest introspection would reveal the culprit to be lack of will rather than lack of time. The capacity to separate is a sine qua non of contemporary religious leadership.

Whenever rabbis gather and let their hair down, they often express frustration at the unrelenting reality of leadership and its attendant responsibilities, from which there is literally no vacation. What seems to make it all worthwhile is the recognition that it’s not ultimately about leadership and its burdens; it’s about trust, and the challenge to be worthy of it.

Nearly six years ago, I was invited to serve as Editor-in-Chief of a massive anthology project that would collect all the primary texts, documents, images, and artifacts constituting Jewish culture and civilization, from ancient times to the present. For the purposes of this project, expressions of Jewish culture include extracts from historical, philosophical, religious, legal, literary, exegetical, political, folkloristic, artistic documents, images, and artifacts. All ten volumes will be richly illustrated with images of illuminated manuscripts, architecture, religious objects, folk art, design, drawings, and other arts, high and low, from ancient to present times.

From the outset, the project’s sterling editorial board recognized that our foundational question, “What is Jewish culture?” needed to be followed (in good Jewish fashion) with several other questions: Toward what ends are we defining Jewish culture? Do we want to know what is essential to Jewish culture? Or what distinguishes it from other cultures? Do we want to know in order to celebrate all the cultural crations of Jews as essentially Jewish? Or to be able to weed out the supposed non-Jewish elements from it? Or to acknowledge the Jewish parts of other cultures (and by extension, to acknowledge the influence of other cultures on Jewish culture)? Do we collect only the “great works” or the most representative – including the so-called good, the bad, and the ugly? Is Jewish culture global, or is it an aggregate of many local Jewish cultures, each of them formed and defined in the interaction between Jewish and surrounding non-Jewish cultures? Are there essentially Jewish qualities to Jewish culture, or is Jewish culture itself essentially a dialectic between “adaptation and resistance to surrounding non-Jewish cultures,” as David Biale has suggested in his Cultures of the Jews? Or should Jewish culture be regarded as something that is produced mostly in relationship to itself, its own traditions and texts, as David Roskies argued in his review of Biale’s volume of essays?

Rather than pretending to answer these questions definitively, and thereby prescriptively suggesting some kind of hard and impermeable canon to be excavated by our volume editors, we have chosen to allow such questions to remain embedded in the multitude of entries to be selected by individual volume editors and their expert advisory boards. That is, insofar as any culture is itself a composite of multiple peoples, nations, languages, traditions, and beliefs, the editors have chosen to recognize the heterogeneity of Jewish culture and civilization. While at times a majority culture in ancient or modern Israel, Jewish culture has historically been more often a distinct minority culture present in the midst of other nations and peoples. Historically, there have also been any number of distinctive and parallel Jewish civilizations, some sharing common cultural traits and traditions, some with little in common beyond core religious laws and beliefs.

For our purposes, the entries of this anthology may also include texts produced by Jews but not always with explicit Jewish content. Such texts warrant inclusion if they have been inspired by Jewish texts or experiences, received by the Jewish world as Jewish texts, or codified and responded to as Jewish texts. Here the stories of Franz Kafka might be regarded as parables for Jewish experience, as might Sigmund Freud’s meditations on dreams and monotheism. This also means that instances of culture produced by non- Jews for Jewish purposes (such as illuminated Hebrew manuscripts, synagogue architecture, and headstone reliefs) may also be included.

Indeed, it is clear that this issue of “what is a Jewish text” is also one that arises most prominently in modern eras of emancipation, assimilation, and national self-definition and may have been less pressing in ancient to medieval times. Hence, questions of Jewish literature, philosophy, liturgy, music, folk art, and other forms of material culture before the 20th century may be easier to navigate than the questions that arose later, such as: What is Jewish art or photography or architecture? What makes Mark Rothko a Jewish artist? Is his iconoclastic insistence on the abstract color field after the Holocaust a gesture toward the Second Commandment prohibition of images, and if so, does that give him a Jewish sensibility?

Is there such a thing as Jewish architecture? The current generation of Jewish architects is certainly legend, but what are we to make of Gehry’s suggestion that the undulating steel forms for which he is so famous are inspired by the live carp his grandmother kept in a bathtub before turning it into gefilte fish? While I see no direct references to Jewish catastrophe in the designs of contemporary Jewish architects, the forms of postwar architecture itself have surely been inflected by an entire generation’s knowledge of the Holocaust.

What strategic purposes are served by attempting to collect in a ten-volume anthology all that this generation deems to constitute Jewish culture and civilization? I believe there are at least two large purposes, each with several parts. first, we hope that the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization will showcase extraordinary contributions Jewish thinkers, writers, and artists have made as Jews to dozens of other national cultures around the globe. As a corollary, we hope that the Posen Library demonstrates that like Jewish culture, all national cultures are comprised of multiple, often competing constituent cultures – formed in the constant give and take, the frisson between and within the cultures.

Just as we Jews express ourselves in, participate in, and contribute to national cultures around the world, and just as these national cultures bear the imprint of Jewish culture and experience, so too do these other cultures nourish our own Jewish cultures. We write our literature, poetry, religious thought, talmudic commentaries, and even treatises on what constitutes Jewish culture in many languages in addition to Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. Our Jewish world’s experiences are not only lived in these cultural and linguistic contexts, but they are framed for us and shaped by all these languages and cultures. In this way, we hope to show that Jewish culture necessarily includes the living, breathing, ever-evolving expressions of Jewish experience in all of its shapes and forms, inside and outside halakhah, and that it is animated in its constant interrogation, debate, and disputation.

Finally, the Posen Library is a model for defining national culture as distinct from nationalist culture. In this approach, we see a national culture as it defines itself by its differences and reciprocal exchanges with other cultures, whereas nationalist culture attempts to define itself as sui generis and selfgenerated, pure and somehow untainted by other cultures and traditions. National cultures grow in reciprocal exchanges with others; nationalist cultures partake in the myth of self-containment and self-creation. We know well what happens when nations and cultures attempt to purge themselves of all supposedly foreign elements; they become very small and sometimes so very depleted of inspiration and imagination.

Someone once wrote that it would be easier to write a history of American theater since 1900 without Jewish secularism than with it, because Jewish immigrants and their descendents have constituted such a huge portion of its history, writers, directors, and actors – even down to makeup artists. The same can be said for considerable sections of comic art, a field only recently treated as a respectable art form.

The genre of comic books rose out of the pulp magazine industry of the 1930s; it was centered in New York, and a very high proportion of publishers as well as artists were Jewish – mostly young men from lower-class backgrounds. It would be easy and partly true to say that they did it to make a living. The publishers, indifferent to any notion of comic art, certainly had no higher purpose. The artists, their editors, inkers and scriptwriters, wanted to make art, and comics offered the available opportunity. Some, probably a majority, were happy enough to do unimaginative, artistically poor and often deeply conservative, even racist work; they would have been happier in advertising, and a fair number of them made the better-paying career adjustment. Others sought, against all odds, to lift this lowest-rated artistic form upward into serious narrative and real artistic expression.

The best-known Jewish comic artist is Will Eisner, recognized in 2005 when he died as a makherand master of the field. Back in the 1930s, he had been among the first comic book publishers, and in the 1940s he created The Spirit. Abandoning the field for decades, he returned to champion young comic artists in the 1970s as they sought to change the field, and to complete his own life’s work with the trilogy Contract With God and the book The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Another artist-editor too often easily neglected by outsiders to comic art is Harvey Kurtzman, inventor of the most successful English-language satire magazine in 50 years (and still going strong) – Mad Magazine. Product of Brooklyn and the Bronx, like Eisner, he was a brilliant artist-editor who created a new form of commercial culture – humor that was deeply indebted to characteristically Jewish insights and yet embedded realism into comics through searing commentaries on militarism and war. Young Kurtzman came out of the antifascist experience and into EC Comics at the end of the 1940s, at a moment when the huge sales to wartime audiences and the cheap Americanism that went along with them had largely dried up. He not only researched military history across the ages, but also wrote from up close, responding to the terrible personal toll of the Korean War. Mad was a new turn, his own invention; after leaving the magazine, he never found that success or satisfaction again. But his influence remains strong upon generations of social humorists, in publications, television, and film. Or consider Art Spiegelman of Mausfame. No artist has dealt more vividly, in pictures, with the Holocaust, and none has so firmly denied theological claims at understanding it.

Mostly, Jewish comic artists have dealt with the tragedies, foibles, and comedy of daily life. Comic scriptwriter Harvey Pekar, of the awardwinning film American Splendor, has spent most of his 30 or more years writing about his life in Cleveland, working at a Veterans Administration hospital as a clerk. It is not a grand story of public triumph but the opposite: a Jewish story of endurance, irony, and empathetic moral behavior toward ordinary people. Harvey Kurtzman has often said that he got his values from his mother, a near-communist storekeeper in a ghetto neighborhood grocery. Before his death, Kurtzman spoke of his mother as a “nudge”who ferreted out the “between the lines” truth from the New York Times.

Ben Katchor, whose imagined neighborhoods of mostly Jewish inhabitants have been seen in museums across the world (and continue to be seen weekly in the Forward), had an immigrant father who backed the Morgn Frayhayt. The families left the communist experience behind and the sons (as widow Adele Kurtzman quipped to me) “didn’t need that   kind of religion” or any other. They had the ideas and ethics that were common to American Jewry during the New Deal years. For these artists and many others, comics were a means of expression that could be both under the supreme artistic control of the creator (unlike film or television) and available to ordinary Americans (unlike paintings that ended up in a museum or private home).

A longer essay would be required to cover more fully the field of Jewish comic artists – to share the work of artists who came of age during the 1960s when the newspaper comic strips began fading along with press circulation, and when the breaking of censorship rules prompted a new openness about sexuality and a host of other subjects. There is Trina Robbins, daughter of a prominent Yiddish

journalist, who founded Women’s Liberation Comics in the early 1970s and became an important historian of women comic artists. And Sharon Rudahl, who was Robbins’s collaborator on several vital stories about the Jewish- American experience in social movements from old Russia to current-day America. Rudahl, now at work on a biography of Emma Goldman, documents how Jewish women fought against inequality and exploitation, in their own families and in society at large. Such work will be vital for generations to come, as younger Jews (like other young people) increasingly “read” through pictures more than through words on the printed page.

Rare have been religionists, and it is not difficult to say why. The 1930s-’40s intellectuals and artists were secularists and assimilationists, by instinct, without thinking about the details very much. The last decade or so saw a few experiments like the one-shot Hasidic comic series of the 1970s, Sholem the Golem, which expired when its funder lost interest. Or Joe Kubert, a mainstream comic artist of the most commercial variety, who has been drawn back to historical and religious themes with a recent book on Eastern Europe of the Holocaust years. In his last years, Will Eisner, too, had more affection for the religious side of Jewish life, although he was, it appears, drawn to Judaism more as a source of morality than spiritual truth.

These figures remain rare because the young Jewish artist, often an art school graduate looking to comics as one career alternative, is by nature a free spirit. The freest spirit, or perhaps only the most successful one, is Peter Kuper (artist of the “Spy vs. Spy” page in today’s Mad), the best-known editor-artist of World War 3 Illustrated, today’s outstanding political- social comic series. He actually began to think about his career as an artist growing up in Cleveland – not far from the neighborhood

where two Jewish teenagers gave birth to Superman several generations earlier.

November is National Jewish Book Month in North America. The dedication of communal time and space to provide intensive exposure for Jewish literature — along with art expos, music festivals, film series, and other clusters of Jewish cultural exhibitions — is indicative of the continuing renaissance of Jewish culture in North America. Jewish Book Month in particular provides a useful lens for witnessing the benefits of this cultural renaissance as well as considering how to build upon and perhaps redirect its energy, creativity, and aspirations.

A typical Jewish book fair presents the full range of Jewish belief and practice: original and translated traditional texts, fiction, history, cookbooks, children’s books, sex and relationship and travel guides, and much more. Jewish Book Month marks the power of experts — and self-proclaimed experts — to deliver Jewish products to a willing and eager readership. This impetus is good for authors, publishers, host institutions, libraries, and the Jewish press. In so many ways, it is just plain good for Jews. And yet, the Jewish book fair, like so many of the offerings that constitute the current cultural renaissance, emphasizes a uni-directional process of cultural experience. Rather than being an exchange or dialogue, this format reinforces a notion that Jewish culture is driven by experts — elites with loud voices. Jewish Book Month is launched in the weeks before Chanukah, and participants primarily play the role of consumers. As much as they may make good use of the products they purchase, their role is essentially passive.

If the first step in the current expansion of the Jewish cultural landscape has been establishing modes for producing and delivering the work of culture makers to engaged consumers, the next step is expanding the nature of Jewish cultural production so that a much fuller range of the community is empowered to build a richer and more vibrant Jewish world. This initiative requires a shift in thinking from a service model — in which Jewish culture is “provided” by a host institution to a target population — to a co-production model, where the role of the institution is to provide opportunities for participants to collaborate in the development of cultural experiences and content.

Like educational programs that are increasingly moving from the model of frontal education (which places the learner in a passive role and assumes that he or she will benefit from the expertise of teachers) toward an active-learning approach (which encourages exploration, experimentation, and problem solving), cultural programs should utilize workshops, think tanks, and chevrutot to create environments in which every participant contributes as a producer and consumer of learning and culture.

Working examples of cultural co-production already exist in the Jewish world, often initiated by people in their 20s and 30s. Consider Limmud, the highly successful volunteerdriven British learning community that is anchored by a week-long event supporting fluid boundaries between learners and presenters — a model that has inspired offshoots in North America and other parts of the world. The “ritual theater” groupStorahtelling fuses art, drama, music, prayer, and study to allow worshipers to experience the weekly Torah portion through the interplay of the telling of traditional and personal stories. Scores of grassroots study and prayer groups are sprouting up around the country (some, in fact, have persisted for 40 years).

Wikis and blogs offer examples of the impact of open source technology on culture- making. There are already hundreds if not thousands of Jewish blogs, such as Jewschool. com, in which discussions are by definition a dialogue between authors and contributing readers. Many people are drawn by the click of a mouse to post book reviews on Amazon.com and other formerly strictly consumerist resources that have become meeting places allowing the ideas of non-experts to become a part of public intellectual discourse. The dynamic interplay of researching and writing of Wikipedia entries on Jewish history, holidays, and virtually every other aspect of Jewish life has enabled high school students to debate with academics about the accuracy — and neutrality — of how experts see the world.

Creating environments that blur the boundaries between culture consumers and culture producers will further invigorate the Jewish cultural renaissance and deepen meaningful Jewish connections across the demographic spectrum. Envision writing groups to supplement reading groups hosted by libraries and synagogues, or aspiring teenage artists working alongside (and being mentored by) professionals at the next Jewish art expo or film festival. Imagine seniors and their grandchildren employing home publishing tools and computer software to craft the videos and texts of their memoirs for the generations that will come after them.

We are profoundly grateful for the expertise of professionals: authors, artists, playwrights, painters, filmmakers, and musicians — not to mention rabbis, cantors, and educators — who produce Jewish content that inspires, teaches, and challenges us. We deeply value the role of experts as the facilitators of cultural renewal, guiding cultural neophytes toward meaningful creative experience and expression. Still, we call for the Jewish community to broaden the current Jewish cultural renaissance and support cultural models that will grant opportunities to a much wider range of the population to participate actively in shaping the cultural fabric of Jewish life — as producers as well as consumers.

One of Judaism’s more compelling metaphors is the teaching that we are created in the image of the Divine. If the Divine spirit represents the model for the boundlessness of humankind’s creative spirit, then we should all be empowered to seek our own world-making creative sparks.

What is the role of artistic creation in the development of a contemporary Jewish identity? From the earliest stages of my artistic career — as I became a writer and theater director — I have sought to maintain an openness to current trends in world culture while searching for a fresh dialogue with Jewish heritage. The artistic process has been, for me, a framework for cooperation not only with Israeli artists, but also with numerous Jewish artists from the Diaspora. In the fall of 1972, as a young woman, I traveled to Paris to do doctoral work in theater. I left Tel Aviv, Israel’s secular cultural center, to observe the country from a distance. I became an alien, an exile, and although I resided in the city of culture and freedom, I was exposed to a new foreignness — being Jewish. I found myself in the heart of the Jewish-European historical entanglement. And when I traveled from Paris to New York, I met American Jews who were creating Jewish cultural alternatives. In their works, I found an echo of my own search. In 1975 I went to Poland, to “my mother’s story.” These travels turned learning into an intimate part of my life and artistic endeavor. While I had sojourned to study as an Israeli, I returned as a Jew with a different awareness of the “story” to which I belong.1

An artist’s real place of study, her beit midrash, is located in the depth of her creative work. This is learning through creating, and creating through learning. Faith (in Hebrew the word faith, “emunah,” is related both to “ma’amin,” religious believer, and “oman,” artist) gives creative power to learning, to innovation, and to the pursuit of repairing the world. The essential biography of an artist, with its peaks and plummets, also takes place in the secret chambers of the creative endeavor. While one does not usually see what goes on backstage, I offer here some of the dramas that have engaged me during my artistic career.

If Hebrew theater, which was created against the background of a culture lacking in theatrical tradition, originally drew for its inspiration on the entire range of Jewish life2, then the new Hebrew literature became, primarily, the arena of Zionism’s struggle against the Old World, and against its jam-packed bookshelf. Even the most eminent critics viewed Hebrew literature as the vanguard of the struggle for secularism — a struggle that was not untainted by political ideology.

The ideological-political Zionist-Israeli clash, which cut Hebrew literature off from its sources3 and blocked off any possibility of direct dialogue with these sources (whether out of a sense of continuity or out of rebellion), also retarded the development of an original Hebrew avant-garde literature. This, at least, was my assumption at that time, as the “sea of Torah” flooded my writing-table with waves of language, and with a wealth of unique textual forms.

In the beit midrash of artistic creation, the “Jewish book” was opened before me, with all of its linguistic layers and its multiplicity of genres — the book that had been composed over the course of hundreds of years and across a huge geographic and cultural expanse. And in contrast to the European languages, which broke off from ancient Greek and Latin, the Jewish tradition bore, in all of its wanderings and amid the echoes of a multiplicity of tongues, its full literary and linguistic load, in continuous succession up to the era of contemporary Hebrew, via the Bible, the Mishna, the Talmud, the Midrash, liturgical poems, prayers, the Zohar, the rabbinical responsa, the commentaries, the Shulchan Aruch, reflection, ethics, Hassidism, invocations, missives … A unique rainbow of linguistic colors. At the same time the myriad layers of the Jewish book revealed a wealth of original literary genres, which by their very nature reflect the human consciousness in a unique manner — genres that, surprisingly, reverberate more strongly through the prism of scholarly or scientific innovation. For example, brain research and artificial intelligence or postmodernism enable us to appreciate the Internet-like “windows” of a page of Talmud, the behavioral language of the mitzvot, the realism of the rabbinical responsa, and the stylistic pastiche of the Zohar, to mention but a few.

As in the hasidic tale about the generations following the Baal Shem Tov, we too have forgotten the prayer and the place in the forest to pray. All we have left is the old story. The treasure that is Jewish culture is not familiar and not accessible to most Jews today. Even the memory of that treasure is nearly forgotten. But artistic expression has the power to awaken that memory. An existential experience, together with learning, has the power to transform both the audience and creator.

In my work, I began by excavating the “archeological site” of the “Jewish book.” I chose to dig corners at the “site” that existentially resonated for me. Rather than dusty fragments, I found buried treasures of endless inspiration. I felt that I could turn the canon of Hebrew writing, with its myriad linguistic and formal layers, into an intimate writing tool. And, as in the field of theatrical poetics in which I was able to innovate by transferring ritual forms into the theatrical space (the siddur, the morning prayers, the cycle of the year…), the traditional textual forms and their language have formed the basis for my books, enabling innovation in the novelistic genre and poetic structure. For example, my novel The Name was written as a mystical confessional prayer addressed to God; my book of prose poetry, The Making of the Sea: a Chronicle of Interpretation, was composed in a style reminiscent of a Talmud page, with a central text surrounded by commentaries. The book was written as a love poem to the Hebrew language, and to its primal erotic tension. It resonates with the voices of those who, early and late, wrote in the Hebrew language — the tongue in which the world was created by the word — the power of renewed creation, in both divine and human speech: in blessings, in learning, in interpretation, or in dialogue. my novel Snapshots presents the “wrenching story” of the modern Jewish saga through fleeting glimpses, succah-like in their transience — the succah constituting the heroine’s architectonic inspiration. (*)

The early 1990s saw the beginning of a broad cultural revolution in Israel. Alternative batei midrash, mixed secular-religious learning frameworks and women’s Torah study institutes began to appear, and the intellectual and creative ferment (in theater, cinema, art, literature) began to spread even to the ranks of Orthodox Jewry, which up until then had participated only minimally in Israeli cultural life. At the same time the Israeli literary landscape changed as well. More and more works began to be published that engaged the entire Jewish library, with an increasing depth and diversity of voices. And so, along with the developments taking place in the United States and in Europe, a broader context for the search for a Jewish literature — poetic, technical, and critical — emerged in Israel as well4. Cooperation between artists in Israel and around the world could generate a unique global chevruta, a learning group, something similar in structure to “daf yomi,” the daily learning of Talmud. We might just create a communal infrastructure for collaborative educational and artistic work that makes such experiences central to Jewish life.

For years a dialogue with the sources has been reverberating in my studio- study — a dialogue of discovery, learning, rebellion, and innovation. It has cut across my life and across historical events; it has informed my existence and my creative endeavor. In many other studies, in Israel and in other places around the world, where Jewish artists are active, ground-breaking dialogues are currently taking place with the Jewish heritage. Each of these dialogues contributes to a contemporary chapter of Jewish creativity.

1 A perception that I have discussed at length in my article: “The Case of the Jewish Biography,” Partisan Review, 2001/1 or in: The Journey to Poland, Partisan Review 1999/4; My research on Theater and Jewish ritual is described in: Jewish Titual asn a Genre of Sacred Theater, Consevative Judaism, ol 36(3), Spring 1983 or: www. All about Jewish Theater.
2 For example, the Habima Theater’s repertoire during its first years of activity as a drama studio affiliated with Constantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater staged A. Anski’s The Dybbuk, or The Golem, to mention but few. [See also]: B Harshav: Language in Time of Revolution, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.
3 Bialik and Ravnitsky’s work in collecting selected midrashic tales in Sefer Ha’agada (“The Book of Legends”) also constituted a reaction to the cultural rift.
(*) The Name, translated to the English by Barbara Harshav. The English translation of Snapshots is forthcoming, both by Riverhead Books of Penguin.
4 This school’s richness and diversity of voices call for comprehensive and detailed research.