The Image of the Fragile Ashkenazi Jew

Abstract

The article examines the various presentations of Ashkenazi Jews in Israeli fiction. Ashkenazi identity in Israel is controversial both in everyday life and in fiction. However, the literary and artistic manifestations of Ashkenazi Jews are quite different from their political and social image. Ashkenazi Jews are usually portrayed as the intellectual, economic, and professional elite, and also as those who were responsible for the inequality between Jews who immigrated to Israel from Europe and Jews from Arabic countries. They are depicted by the Israeli media as those who forced the oriental Jews to settle in remote towns in Israel, thus denying them the ability to move up the social ladder. The arrogant, upper-middle-class Ashkenazi is often absent from Israeli literature. Israeli artists of Ashkenazi origin present themselves in autobiographical literature as “weak” or “problematic” and they add a “fragile” aspect to the Ashkenazi identity. The Ashkenazi Jew is depicted as an insecure figure who agonizes over fears and childhood traumas. The image of the “fragile Ashkenazi,” appears in some of the most prominent Israeli writing: Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, David Grossman’s A Horse Walks into a Bar, and Gila Almagor’s book and film Avia’s Summer. Ashkenazi Jews in Israel, immigrants and descendants of European Jews, are the largest ethnic group of Israel’s population.1 They are sometimes portrayed in the media as an elite group that dominates the judicial system, economics, universities, and the intellectual elite in Israel.2 Ashkenazi Jews are often described as an ethnic group that exploited immigrants of Mizrachi origin, Jews who immigrated from Arab and Muslim countries and their descendants in the early years of the State of Israel. A documentary3 based on detailed research recently screened on Israeli public broadcast TV reveals how the Ashkenazi leadership took advantage of these immigrants during the large waves of immigration between 1948 and 1963. The documentary, entitled The Ancestral Sin (Salach Po Ze Eretz Israel), shows the methods used to forcibly settle in Israel new immigrants from 1 Statistical Abstract of Israel, (2018). Table 2.24 – Jews, by country of origin and age, 2017. 2 Shabi 2008. 3 Deri 2017.