Israelis are bold and visionary, passionate and generous. But they can also be grandiose and self-absorbed. Emerging from the depths of Jewish history and the drama of the Zionist rebellion against it, they have a deeply conflicted identity. They are willing to sacrifice themselves for the collective, but also to sacrifice that very collective for a higher, and likely unattainable, ideal. Resolving these internal conflicts and coming to terms with the trauma of the Holocaust are imperative to Israel's survival as a nation and to the stability of the world.
Alon Gratch, a clinical psychologist whose family has lived in Israel for generations, is uniquely positioned to confront these issues. Like the Israeli psyche that Gratch details, The Israeli Mind is both intimate and universal. Intelligent and forthright, compassionate but sometimes maddening, it is an utterly compelling read. Drawing on a broad cultural and historical canvas, and weaving in the author's personal and professional experience, The Israeli Mind presents a provocative, first-hand portrait of the Israeli national character.
Israelis are bold and visionary, passionate and generous. But they can also be grandiose and self-absorbed. Emerging from the depths of Jewish history and the drama of the Zionist rebellion against it, they have a deeply conflicted identity. They are willing to sacrifice themselves for the collective, but also to sacrifice that very collective for a higher, and likely unattainable, ideal. Resolving these internal conflicts and coming to terms with the trauma of the Holocaust are imperative to Israel's survival as a nation and to the stability of the world.
Alon Gratch, a clinical psychologist whose family has lived in Israel for generations, is uniquely positioned to confront these issues. Like the Israeli psyche that Gratch details, The Israeli Mind is both intimate and universal. Intelligent and forthright, compassionate but sometimes maddening, it is an utterly compelling read. Drawing on a broad cultural and historical canvas, and weaving in the author's personal and professional experience, The Israeli Mind presents a provocative, first-hand portrait of the Israeli national character.
The Israeli Mind: How the Israeli National Character Shapes Our World
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Overview
Israelis are bold and visionary, passionate and generous. But they can also be grandiose and self-absorbed. Emerging from the depths of Jewish history and the drama of the Zionist rebellion against it, they have a deeply conflicted identity. They are willing to sacrifice themselves for the collective, but also to sacrifice that very collective for a higher, and likely unattainable, ideal. Resolving these internal conflicts and coming to terms with the trauma of the Holocaust are imperative to Israel's survival as a nation and to the stability of the world.
Alon Gratch, a clinical psychologist whose family has lived in Israel for generations, is uniquely positioned to confront these issues. Like the Israeli psyche that Gratch details, The Israeli Mind is both intimate and universal. Intelligent and forthright, compassionate but sometimes maddening, it is an utterly compelling read. Drawing on a broad cultural and historical canvas, and weaving in the author's personal and professional experience, The Israeli Mind presents a provocative, first-hand portrait of the Israeli national character.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466882010 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Press |
| Publication date: | 03/14/2025 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 289 |
| File size: | 644 KB |
About the Author
Dr. Alon Gratch is a New York-based clinical psychologist, organizational consultant, and author. He has been on the faculty of Columbia University and worked with clients such as Pepsi, Colgate-Palmolive, the NFL and NYPD. Dr. Gratch is the author of two previous books, If Men Could Talk and If Love Could Think. He has written for both academic and popular publications, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Read an Excerpt
The Israeli Mind
How the Israeli National Character Shapes Our World
By Alon Gratch
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2015 Alon GratchAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8201-0
CHAPTER 1
WHO IS AN ISRAELI?
When I was nineteen, the Israeli Defense Forces sent me on a special mission. It was 1976, and I had just finished my basic training and a short tour in the Gaza Strip. Together with another soldier, a recent immigrant from Iran, I was assigned to manage a philanthropic "library" housed in an old Arab building in the Yafo section of Tel Aviv. The library was the brainchild of a seventy-year-old, retired army officer who, as he himself put it, "decided to continue to serve" as long as possible. Working as a volunteer, he provided all interested IDF units a free monthly delivery of books and magazines. Telling the world he was purchasing the publications, the old man — our boss — actually had an arrangement with a national distributor to pick up discarded foreign-language residuals at no cost. Thus, every month we would package and dispatch dozens of boxes containing a strange admixture of challenging European classics and bubbly American magazines: Nabokov's Ada and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, along with Woman's Day, Family Circle, and Good Housekeeping.
But these were merely the cover — literally and figuratively — for what was at the heart of our highly popular book packages: Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, and a couple of hard- core German publications, reserved for high officers and other favored visitors. When senior officers would drop by for a visit, the old man, who was also a veteran of the French resistance in World War II, would open a bottle of pinot noir before sending them off with their own personalized packages. There were also Playgirl magazines, but those our boss found too distasteful to distribute, so they just sat, collecting dust in a hidden back room. These were the butt of our jokes because, once a month, when we picked up the magazines from our supplier's warehouse, we would stop and chat with one of its employees, a young Arab man whose job was to go through all the Playgirl magazines and, page by page, blot out with a black marker all male genitalia. But one day we arrived at the warehouse to find that our buddy had lost his job, his services no longer needed. The distributor had lost a lawsuit brought on by the Israeli equivalent of NOW, which claimed that Israeli women were paying the full cover price for the magazine and were therefore entitled to the full product.
This improbable but true story captures a moment of great change in Israeli society. The decline in idealism and military heroism among the younger generations, the increasing influence of Western values and lifestyle, and the Israeli version of the feminist revolution are all here. All have been discussed by Israeli sociologists as the forces that radically transformed Israeli society in the 1970s. And the story's main characters — an idealistic yet corrupt European gentleman; an intellectualized, young, Ashkenazi sabra; a struggling, new immigrant; a self-effacing Arab; along with a supporting cast of testosterone-driven soldiers and officers, some religious, many from North African or a multitude of other ethnic backgrounds — tell the story of the particular fragmentation that characterized Israeli society at that time. Divided along cultural, religious, ethnic, class, and political fault lines, none of these people would normally affiliate with each other.
But the truly strange thing about this story is that it's not strange at all. Indeed, the twin themes of change and fragmentation have been a constant throughout Zionist history. Pick any decade and both will be there. The immigration of almost a million people from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, for example, links both themes. That population shift would be the equivalent of the United States absorbing within several years some 35 million immigrants who speak no English and have a unique lifestyle, culture, and ethnic identity. Indeed, in a few short years, the Russian immigration drastically changed the face of Israel and added a new element to its fragmentation. American journalist Richard Ben Cramer described at least six distinct subgroups within the Israeli population: the Ashkenazi sabras, born in Israel from European families, the Sephardim who originally came from Arab countries, the Russians, the Ashkenazi ultraorthodox, the Sephardic ultraorthodox, and the West Bank settlers. These are further divided along socioeconomic, cultural, and, of course, political lines. As Cramer point out, some of these "tribes" generally don't talk to each other, and some even have their own language and media.
"'Who is an Israeli?'" says sociologist Oz Almog, "is a very Israeli question." But, whereas for the political scientist or sociologist this question is about how Israel is changing, or about the characteristics of the various subgroups, the psychological inquiry is about the effect of change and fragmentation on individual — and national — character development.
WAR, PEACE, AND OTHER CYCLES OF CHANGE
Perhaps the best metaphor for change and how Israelis are affected by it was provided by the second Palestinian intifada (2000–2005), during certain periods of which suicide bombings took place almost daily deep inside Israel's population centers. In a typical sequence of events, a Palestinian bomber would detonate himself in a crowded Israeli café, shopping mall, or market; blood and pieces of human flash would splash across tables, clothing racks, or trees; emergency police and medical teams would arrive to evacuate the injured and dead; media vans with television cameras and journalists would appear; special, religious SWAT teams would collect body parts and tissue residues; cleaning crews would wash floors, walls, and furniture; and in a short time, sometimes within a day or two, the establishment would open its doors for business as usual as if nothing had ever happened.
Amplified, this dramatic sequence of change from ordinary, if boisterous, street life to terror, destruction, and death, and back again, is the story of war and peace in Israeli and Zionist history. The sense of today's Tel Aviv — vibrant, sophisticated, sensual, cultured, and securely self- indulgent, indeed, one of the top beach-city tourist destinations in the world — is vastly different from that of the frightening days of that last intifada, when hotels were deserted, their elevators shut down, and their walls covered with rust. Today's buoyant mood was nowhere to be seen amid the then-omnipresent feelings of dread and despair.
Of course, this was only one chain in the cycle of war and peace that has settled upon the Holy Land since the early decades of the twentieth century. Starting in the 1920s, with almost predictable intervals averaging in the single digits in number of years, a major, violent conflict erupted. Some wars dramatically changed the country's size and borders. Some exposed the average Israeli to whole new populations and cultures. Some ushered in an era of self-confidence and euphoria; others announced a time of self-doubt and annihilation anxiety. Some defined young Israeli soldiers as selfless, genuine heroes; others cast them as the oppressors of women and children. Some wars resulted in unity, others in division. Some were only seen on television; others exploded deep in the midst of civilian life. Some triggered political change; others entrenched incumbent powers. Likewise, each period of stability or peace brought its own change. Some saw the loss of land, others the expansion of settlements. Some triggered religious revivals; others allowed for the rise of secular liberalism. Some led to dramatic economic expansion, others to increased international isolation, economic stagnation, and social unrest. Some such periods were accompanied by negotiations, others by the pursuit of unilateralism. Some rekindled feelings of hope and held up the possibility of genuine reconciliation; others proved illusory, merely increasing mistrust of Arabs or the world at large.
A similar cycle of change has characterized the Zionist enterprise from the start in terms of population. The pre-Zionist immigrants to Palestine were mostly disciples of European rabbis and persecuted Jews motivated largely by religious zeal and messianic ideas. The Zionist immigration waves that started at the end of the nineteenth century consisted mostly of fiercely secularist Jews, many influenced by the socialist vision, who sought to work the land and establish agricultural communities. While each of these waves had a unique signature — one dominated by German professionals, others by able-bodied Russians who founded various paramilitary units — these were still mostly European Jews. But in the first few years after the declaration of independence, when the Israeli population more than doubled, a majority of the new immigrants were Sephardic Jews from Arab and North African countries. Most of these were poor, many were uneducated, and a large number had been persecuted and forced to leave their homelands. Once in Israel, most had to live in tent cities for years, integrating slowly into Israeli society. Subsequent immigration waves were from North America, Ethiopia, South Africa, and France. These were much smaller but were nevertheless significant in altering the human landscape in many parts of Israel. Most recently, as noted earlier, was the huge Russian immigration of the 1990s.
The cycles of arrival and absorption of such diverse groups of immigrants repeatedly exposed both the previous and new immigrants to foreign cultures, languages, lifestyles, and values. Other equally dramatic population shifts over the years were caused by border changes and variable birth rates. The percentages of Arab Israelis and orthodox Jews within the population have significantly increased. Israel's largest city, Jerusalem, for example, used to have a large, secular Jewish majority. At present, only about 40 percent of the population consider themselves secular Jews, 35 percent are Arabs, and over 20 percent are religious, mostly ultraorthodox Jews.
In Jerusalem and elsewhere, not only the human landscape has changed so radically. As Amnon Niv, a Jerusalem city engineer in the 1990s attests, starting in the early 1970s, in one generation Jerusalem underwent the kind of architectural and physical transformation that takes most cities decades or even centuries to achieve. And the pace of building and development in many parts of the country continues unabated. Other important changes taking place in a few short decades included the revival of biblical Hebrew and the transformation of a quasi-socialist, collectivist society into an individualistic, American-style, free-market economy. Last but not least, a tiny, poor, and existentially threatened country quickly became an economic and military regional power with the capacity to destroy its enemies at will.
So what happens when you grow up with, live in, or immigrate to a world of constant, dramatic change? On the positive side, you become an expert in adapting to, and creating, change. You learn how to learn new skills, how to navigate new rules, how to deal with people very different from yourself, how to improvise, how to manage uncertainty, how to start a new lifestyle, if not a new life. You understand that conventions, organizations, and landscapes are temporal. You become aware of your cognitive and emotional reactions to such extreme conditions as threat and vulnerability, and also triumph and power. In this respect, being an Israeli is like going through interminable basic training for the global information age, which is all about making change your friend. This is one of the reasons that every other young Israeli you meet in New York City is an aspiring, accomplished, or failing entrepreneur. It's one of the reasons that a country whose population size ranks 101 in the world has produced about 125 companies, almost all high-tech, that trade on the New York stock exchange. That's more than any other country in the world except the United States and Canada.
But all this agility has a downside. Israelis don't particularly value general norms of conduct. They have a basic disrespect for plans, rules, and procedures, which means the existing order cannot be taken for granted. Israeli history can count on one hand the number of prime ministers who completed a full term in office. Each new wave of immigration brings to the country a large group of displaced, shell-shocked individuals who for a long time try to decipher the erratic rules of a new land that often greets them with suspicion. The natives, recent immigrants themselves, often don't know whether to admire or pity the new arrivals, and how to relate to their culture and traditions. Similarly, each new wave of construction in the West Bank is met inside Israel proper with doubt and ambivalence: Are these the true heirs of our Zionist heroes of yesteryear or a band of lunatics, fanatics? And, of course, questions of basic identity are inner-, not outerbound. Are we a David or a Goliath? A small, powerless people struggling to outsmart the hostile powers surrounding us or a nation of aggressive warriors subjugating our helpless neighbors? Is this our permanent and only homeland, the one place where Jews can feel safe from persecution, or merely another brief and unsustainable episode of Jewish sovereignty? In other words, the negative flip side of adaptability is emotional and cognitive instability.
THE PROFESSOR AND THE TAXI DRIVER
A Hebrew University professor recalls how in a recent memorial service for a relative, a family member spoke of the deceased's love for the Bible. He cited the story of Ishmael, considered by Muslims their biblical ancestor, and how Abraham cast him away. It was a clear, liberal-left allusion to how the Israelis mistreat the Palestinians now. Soon thereafter, another family member stood up and countered with his own speech, about the deceased's love for the biblical sites of the Land of Israel. The same basic discourse, perhaps in a less rarefied form, is likely to take place every time you enter a taxi or board a bus anywhere in Israel. The radio will blast the latest news or perhaps music, but either way, the cabby or a fellow passenger will spew something to the effect of "These goddamn yefey nefésh" (essentially "bleeding-heart liberals") or "These frigging settlers."
In addition to the "tribal" fragmentation noted above, Israeli society is split along several other dimensions that overlap only to an extent with those subgroups. Chief among them in everyday Israeli consciousness is the political, left-right divide. While this type of split is commonplace in many democracies, in Israel, politics is intensely personal. Of course it is. Whereas in most countries the outcome of the political debate determines what kind of a state you get to live in, in Israel, it determines whether you get to live. Finally, Israel is a small place with an interpersonal culture of permeable boundaries — your business is everybody's business — so you simply can't escape the political. In a gossipy tidbit of conversation, an Israeli friend recently denounced a mutual acquaintance that he last saw many years ago as "literally the most despicable human being I've ever known." But he then added, "His only redeeming feature is his politics."
Another remarkable aspect of the Israeli political divide, one that is perhaps unparalleled among the nations, is that it's thousands of years old. Embedded in the social fabric of Jewish, Zionist, and Israeli history, it is breathed in from birth by every Israeli baby. As the eminent, late Israeli philosopher Hugo Bergman observed, Judaism has always had two competing trends: a loving, forgiving one, and a separatist, combative one; one seeking to please the gentiles and one hostile to them. In antiquity, the conflict was between those favoring accommodation with the neighboring imperial powers and those advocating full independence. In biblical narrative, for example, the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah furiously denounced any foreign policy that failed to accommodate the regional superpowers, prophesying it would bring about national destruction. The book of Kings, on the other hand, condemned King Manasseh, who ruled Judea for almost half a century, for his sinful appeasement policy toward the Assyrian empire.
This division continued even after the destruction of the Second Temple and well into the history of the Jewish Diaspora. Many rabbis who lived after the anti-Roman Bar Kokhba rebellion of 132–35 CE, which resulted in the final extermination and exile of the Judean Jews, accused Bar Kokhba of being a false messiah. Other rabbis, as well as many of their followers, considered Bar Kokhba a hero of biblical proportions. The subsequent heated debate over the idea of a messianic return to national sovereignty in Jerusalem yielded the then-famous Talmudic Sanhedrin curse of "Blasted be the bones of those who calculate the date of the coming of the Messiah." This debate continued through the Middle Ages and beyond, often focusing on how to respond to the humiliation and persecution of the Jews in the Diaspora. While a majority supported leaving matters in God's hands so as not to provoke the czar's wrath, some always called for more militant action. Some rabbis would speak of the glory of armed rebellions, going as far as sanctioning the use of arms on the holy Sabbath.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Israeli Mind by Alon Gratch. Copyright © 2015 Alon Gratch. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Rabbi, I Object
One. Who is an Israeli?
Two. It's Easier to Change a Song than a City
Three. The Whole World is Against Us and the World is Silent
Four. Crying While Shooting
Five. Anatomy of a Cliché
Six. There's No Place Like Masada
Conclusion: Saying No, Getting to Yes
Epilogue: Dinner in Jerusalem