Remnick Does Haaretz

Anyone who knows me also knows I'm a magaholic, and that there's little I enjoy more than a great magazine. (In fact, I take great pleasure in merely good or even flashily mediocre magazines, and my subscription addiction borders on the pathological.)

I also get a serious readerly woody for great newspapers, a love first kindled while fighting for sections around our family's ink-stained, paper-cluttered dining room table in Ottawa.

Finally, as this blog makes clear, I've got a long-standing fascination with Israel and Israeli culture and politics.

So just imagine how many degrees of heaven I was in, when I opened the latest issue of The New Yorker to discover an in-depth feature (by editor-in-chief David Remnick no less!) about the influential left-wing Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz (whose English edition I read on a regular basis online and which I devour whenever I'm in Israel).

It's a fascinating profile of a complex publication -- that rare paper where the publisher actually pushes his editorial staff to be more radical, more provocative, and risk alienating readers more than they often want to. The title says it all: "Haaretz prides itself on being the conscience of Israel. Does it have a future?"

Read it and decide for yourself.

A Kibbutz Divided

The magazine from Haaretz published a long and fascinating, if a little depressing, feature article about the strife at Kibbutz Hanaton. The kibbutz was founded in 1984 by American immigrants of Conservative Judaism background. (For those who don't know, Conservative is "medium" on the spectrum of religious Judaism—with Reform on the "mild" end and ultra-Orthodox on the "spicy"... or maybe vice versa. You get the point.)

Like many kibbutzim, Hanaton fell on hard economic times and its membership dwindled. The kibbutz took in young men and women from a secular youth movement—but then voted against letting them become full members. The divide became ideological: The new youth-group members wanted the kibbutz to remain collective and become a centre for socially progressive education. The older members wanted the kibbutz to privatize—i.e., to become a "renewed kibbutz"—and maintain its character and vision as a bridge between secular and religious Judaism. (Interestingly, the situation at Hanaton goes against the trend that religious kibbutzim have tended to stay more communal than the secular kibbutzim.)

Now, the two sides apparently barely speak, and the older Conservative members are trying to expel the younger secular idealists. In the end, nobody's vision of equality and cooperation has succeeded, not once they were pitted again each other. As the kibbutz rabbi lamented in the article:

"Kibbutz Hanaton was founded with the aim of becoming an influential voice, of instilling more connectedness in Israeli society. ... They founded a school here that was supposed to be the place where the dichotomy in Israeli society between the religious person and the secular person was broken. But what's happened is that this place that was supposed to be a meeting point became a scene of total lack of understanding, of anger and hot tempers."