History and Responsibility: Hebrew Literature and 1948

This is a conference currently taking place at Stanford under the auspices of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies. Since so many familiar faces are here (Mickey Gluzman, Anita Shapira, Dan Miron, Hannan Hever), I thought it would be interesting if I shared some of my impressions.

The level of discussion was very high (and often heated, as befits a controversial subject). The panelists were a mixture of literary scholars and historians, and it is this aspect which I found most stimulating. I think that interdisciplinary dialog is the way of the future in the humanities. So the debates of what actually happened in 1948 (the responsibility of the yishuv for the Naqba; the weight of the Holocaust; the culpability of the Palestinian leadership) meshed with the discussions of the poetics of trauma, Benjamin's messianic time, and Agnon's spatial imagination. If this meshing was a little rough at times, it was also exciting.

Strangely enough, what I found missing was politics. Surely as the Arab Spring (or is it already the heated summer?) is going on and as Syria is slaughtering its dissidents, you'd expect a little more of a global perspective than the neverending debate of who did what to whom 63 years ago.