Resisting Allegory, or Reading “Eli, the Fanatic” in Tel Aviv

• Published in: Prooftexts Vol. 21; no. 1; pp. 103 - 112
• Main Author: Hana Wirth-Nesher
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bloomington Indiana University Press 01.01.2001
• Subjects: Allegory; Antisemitism; Blackness studies; Communities; Criticism and interpretation; Holocaust; Holocaust survivors; Jewish authors; Jewish culture; Jewish identity; Jewish peoples; Jews; Political extremism; Portrayals; Reading; Roth, Philip; Roth, Philip (American novelist); United States; Israel
• ISSN: 0272-9601; 1086-3311; 1086-3311
• DOI: 10.1353/ptx.2001.0010

Since the Six-Day War, and more intensely since the Yom Kippur War, Israeli culture has come to see continuities where it had previously seen only ruptures, and has come to understand where it formerly was quick to judge. Israeli students have pointed out that in the climactic scene between Eli and the greenie, white paint is splashed on them both, and that the latter conveys his message to Eli in pantomime. [...]all [Eli] saw of the greenie's face were two white droplets stuck to each cheek." [...]times have changed in America as well, exemplified by the recent Beachwood, Ohio, zoning controversy that pitted Orthodox and non-- Orthdox Jews against each other over the construction of "religious buildings" by observant newcomers to the community One of the greatest challenges for a Conservative or a Reform Jew like myself living in Israel is not to succumb to the demonizing of the Jewish "other," despite the knowledge that I am the demon for ultra-Orthodox Jewry. Maybe "Eli, the Fanatic" is a far more wrenching story to teach in Tel Aviv today than in Pennsylvania twenty years ago because it forces Jewish Israeli students to regard two distant "others": Jewish Americans and ultra-Orthodox Jews.