Published: 22 August 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
ISABEL KERSHNER's new book looks at generational change within Israel’s diverse communities. ELHANAN MILLER asks the New York Times correspondent what she found.
On June 7, 2015, Israeli president Reuven Rivlin delivered a landmark speech which would come to be known as “the four tribes speech”. In it, he outlined Israel’s societal transition from a country defined by a clear secular Jewish majority with small minority groups, to a country with four “tribes” almost equal in size: secular Jews, National-Religious Jews, Ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Arab Israelis. These tribes, Rivlin argued, are struggling over “who we are and who we want to be”.
In her new book, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel’s Battle for its Inner Soul, veteran journalist Isabel Kershner uses Rivlin’s tribe paradigm to produce a snapshot of contemporary Israel. But her tribes are more complex and elusive than Rivlin’s. She dedicates entire chapters to the Mizrahi struggle over access to the Asi Stream in Kibbutz Nir David, the disgruntled second-generation Soviet immigrants, and the country’s burgeoning high-tech sector.
Chapter seven of the book, titled Haredi and Israeli: Having it all, offers a fresh look at Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox society. A fascinating conversation with digital journalist Yanki Farber, representing the new Haredi generation of iconoclastic activists who no longer conform to diktats of the rabbis, sheds light on the dramatic changes within the community.
"If you want to understand what's happening now on the streets of Israel, you have to look far back. It goes very deep."
Farber, who served in a designated Haredi battalion in the army, dismisses the fears of mainstream Israel of an Ultra-Orthodox takeover of Israeli society. Only five of the 15 siblings in his family had brought 10 children into this world, he tells Kershner. “That’s fifty. The rest have two or three.”
Kershner told The Jewish Independent: “I really tried to look at the generational changes within each of these communities and as a whole. Where does that leave us? How do they all fit together, or not?”
Kershner has been covering Israeli politics and society since she moved to Israel from the UK in 1990. A graduate of Oxford with a specialisation in Arabic, she spent 17 years writing mostly on Palestinian and Arab affairs for the Jerusalem Report magazine. Then, 16 years ago, she switched to The New York Times, where she has been serving as Israel correspondent.
In writing the book, Kershner admits she was wary of her analysis clashing with the objective voice expected of a journalist. “A reporter is not supposed to give away opinions, but I wanted to write a book that was penetrating and analytical enough to go beyond the type of reporting one would do in the newspaper,” she said.
However, since the book was released in the US in May, readers have found it neither superficial nor polemical, she said. “Unlike an article where you are limited to 1000 words, in a book you have the space to give everybody their voice. You certainly tell readers what you think about what your subject has said, but once you’ve got the sum of all the voices in there, there’s a certain fairness to it.”
Kershner’s fear of coming across as too journalistic notwithstanding, the book features the juicy, colourful writing of a good feature article. Here is how she describes the office of Behadrei Haredim, Yanki Farber’s ultra-Orthodox online news site:
On Behadrei’s white Formica conference table, even the used paper cups were declared kosher, stamped with a Shomrei Shabbat logo indicating that the disposable tableware company strictly observed the rules of the Sabbath. But nothing here was black and white. Just as the politicians straddled and mediated between the two worlds, so did Haredi journalists, particularly those working in the less rigid digital media or radio as opposed to the traditional party newspapers.
One prominent voice included in the book is that of Haim Gouri, the “warrior poet.” Kershner said Gouri grew emotional when addressing the “changing of the guard” in Israel, where secular Ashkenazi veterans like him, who fought in the Israeli war of independence, were now being insulted on the street as traitors “because they were perceived as left-wing and therefore disloyal.” Gouri’s lengthy conversation with Kershner would be one of his last. He passed away in January 2018.
The book, which Kershner started writing in 2017, was mostly written during the COVID lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. It ends with Netanyahu’s victory in the national elections on November 2022, mentioning the legal reforms he planned to put in motion.
Many books have been written about Israeli politics in recent years, but none have focused on its vibrant and diverse society in the way that The Land of Hope and Fear does. Kershner tries to break down stereotypical portrayals of the country’s social groups and give the reader a more intricate, and often more companionate point of view.
“If you want to understand what's happening now on the streets of Israel, you have to look far back. It goes very deep.”
More than anything, Kershner is out to humanise the Israeli story to outside observers. “Wherever you go in Israel, your find yourself surprised. You know, everyone has a story.”
The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel’s Battle for its Inner Soul, by Isabel Kershner, is published by Scribe
Photo: Isabel Kershner (Elhanan Miller)
