Ziva Shamir’s culture war

I first met Professor Ziva Shamir about 20 years ago through her seminal book, "The Vagrant Bard: Avant-Garde and Alterman’s Poetic Style," a look at Nathan Alterman’s poetry through the lens of modernism. Since then, I have recommended that excellent book as an introduction for people who want to learn about the work of one of Israel’s greatest poets.

Shamir, who took her first steps into the world of literature research in the late 1960s, has written many books, mostly about Hayim Nahman Bialik and Alterman. Now she has published her latest work, "The Child Is the Father of the Man," about Bialik’s long narrative poems for children. For 40 years, she taught in the Hebrew literature department at Tel Aviv University. After her retirement, she continued to teach at Kibbutzim College and the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. She offers an uncommon perspective about the intellectual world in Israel.

Last June, Shamir published a sharply critical essay about the state of humanities in Israeli academia. Her essay caused an uproar not only in academia, but also the media. Shamir, a former chairwoman of the Education Ministry’s literature committee, stuck to her own subject as a researcher and interpreter of literature, but drew conclusions about the humanities in general.

“Few intellectuals of our time are worthy of the name,” Shamir wrote in her essay. “This age of postmodernism, despite its enlightened appearance and its supposed dedication to humanism and humanitarianism, is becoming an age of fundamentalism that does not encourage independent thinking, research or questioning. Today, many of the academics, writers and media professionals are keeping mum. Willingly or not, deliberately or not, they are sweeping the truth that they keep secret in their hearts under the rug.”

Shamir warned, “A situation is developing in which all questions have answers that are known and prepared in advance. This is not only happening in ultra-Orthodox society, but mainly in the group that calls itself ‘liberal.’ Secular groups have invented various sorts of dogmatic new ‘religions’ for themselves (such as gender studies, queer studies, postcolonialism, ecology and so on), whose basic premises are sacrosanct and may never be questioned.”

Shamir makes it clear that these fields are worthy of study, but “on condition that they are not turned into sacred dogmas and those who question their axioms take their lives in their hands.” She says that most studies in feminism, for example, are not descriptive, posing questions and attempting to answer them. Rather, they are “prescriptive, tendentious pseudo-research that dictate action, and the facts and statistics that they present will not change the results, which are known in advance.” From experience, she says, “Anyone who tries to probe the validity of the axioms of these new ‘religions’ that have been made part of the humanities, social science, political science and even law, will be quickly shunned and pilloried.”

She says, “Very few will dare admit openly that several departments in Israel’s largest universities, like many places around the world, are now on the most radical fringe of the political map, and quite a few fields of study long ago gave up solid research for fashionable ‘discourse.’” In certain departments, says Shamir, it is impossible to express all opinions freely because the “defenders of free speech” will set up an immediate outcry and boycott any ‘non-standard’ speech without delay. They will condemn the speaker vociferously and delegitimize him publicly.

“Nobody will even admit that in quite a few departments, many of the lecturers can no longer be trusted, since they are tainted by extreme radical thinking. They use the objects of their research and the subjects they teach as nothing but a platform on which to proclaim their extreme political axioms,” Shamir says.

“We are experiencing rapid changes in the 21st century, and these changes are not skipping over the study of literature. Once upon a time, the literature department was the most popular one in the humanities. A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz recall that in their time, there were hundreds of literature majors in their graduating class, and today, only a few students sign up.”

“There are local explanations and global ones. Here, the matter is of critical importance because Hebrew literature was the dove that heralded Zionism, the rebirth and the re-establishment of the State of Israel. We must not allow it to become the raven that heralds its destruction, God forbid. Without Hebrew literature as a glue that binds us together, we have nothing to look for here. In the past, we had the prayer book, and if the public should lose Hebrew literature as a glue that binds us together, what will be left for us? The music on Israeli TV shows? Madonna’s songs? What will be left as culture?”

“Their role is to train future generations, to develop the field of study so that the teachers at the universities will publish studies too. It’s also to train students who will be literature teachers in the school system, who will pass the torch to their own students. The university is an agent of culture, and it is losing this role because ‘discourse,’ which looks for the coin at the foot of the lamppost, will take the place of research.”

“It happened in the outside world during the revolutions of 1848, and in Israel during the rebirth of Zionism, the first waves of immigration and the fight for independence. The status of literature was high at that time, and this status was reflected in literary criticism and research. During the first years that the Bialik Prize existed, it was awarded almost exclusively to literary researchers. [Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion wrote to Alterman about the latter’s work, ‘The Seventh Column’: ‘No column in our military ranks surpasses the fighting strength of your column.’

“During the Cold War, apolitical methods were developed in literary research — the New Criticism in the West, and formalism in the East.

“This was also the heyday of the universities. During that time, highly motivated, sincere people studied literature. Today, some of the researchers are nothing more than political hacks who get grants from the European Community and similar places, and vie with each other to portray Israel as ugly.”

“During the 1960s, it was harder to get into the English department than it was to be accepted to law school. Back then, people were attracted to literature departments because the teachers there based their statements on serious research supported by facts and statistics, not on guesses pulled from mid-air. Also, literature still had a special aura. Later, people complained, maybe with some justification, that the New Criticism was mistaken in that it took the work out of its context. Then people started talking about context. Eventually, they forget the text. They neglect it completely.

“Today, people beat around the bush. They’ve forgotten that the purpose of all the tools of literary theory and all the disciplines, including history, psychology and philosophy, is to improve our understanding of literary works, because what are we studying literature for — to learn the author’s life story? And since we have ‘psychologists’ and ‘sociologists’ who never took a single course in these subjects, the disciplines have been lost because of too much interdisciplinarianism.”

Shamir, who was born in 1946 in Israel and received her doctorate in 1980 for her work on Bialik’s early poetry, says, “Disastrous things have happened in our postmodern world. The worst of them is political bias. In many studies being published today, the greatest people of Hebrew literature — Bialik, Alterman, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Shai Agnon and others — are merely a platform for presenting a radical opinion held by an instructor. These literary greats never belonged to the political fringe. They climbed a high mountain and looked in all directions. They were the observers of the house of Israel. They would not recognize their own images as some of the contemporary research portrays them.”

Shamir talks about how the transformation of research into “discourse” pulled the level of the humanities and the social sciences down. “The field of literary research has become a farce in many cases,” she says firmly.

“Students are not attracted to these departments today, and it’s not just because there’s no chance of making a living. They know that the lecturers’ statements are worthless because they can’t be trusted. There are quite a few instructors who don’t let the facts confuse them. They have formed their opinions in advance.

“Postmodernism emphasizes that there is no truth. Everyone has his or her own truth. But people forget that there is a hierarchy among the various truths. So when they create this kind of relativistic situation, it’s no wonder that these departments have lost their value. At one time, it was obvious that the school system and the universities must never be politicized. But since then, the door has been broken down and the mezuzah has been desecrated. All the ghosts and demons have gotten inside, everything is wide open and fair game, and the dance of death is going on in the universities.”

“Yes. There are lecturers who commit political harassment. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference when it comes to the fine points of what is allowed and what is not, but it’s important to know that political harassment is like sexual harassment. Lecturers in classes have authority over their students. Add to that the fact that low-ranking staff members are dependent on their superiors for years.

"This leads to phenomena that are similar to cloning. A department head collects people around him who think as he does. Sometimes, the staff member behaves at first like one of the anusim [the Jews of Spain who were forced to convert to Catholicism during the time of the Inquisition, also called Marranos]. Later, they end up ‘converting’ because they have no choice. When a language teacher gives the class a sentence for analysis such as ‘IDF soldiers at checkpoints act like neo-Nazis,’ what is there to talk about? Israeli academicians call abroad for the boycotting of Israel and its educational institutions — and then they’re astonished when the rug is pulled out from under them.”

Shamir finds the phenomenon of “copying” in academia, which has gone beyond all bounds in this age of the Internet, particularly disturbing.

“There is no longer any difference between source and imitation, and the Internet gives legitimacy to that,” she says. “In a world where people call the most artificial and fake thing ‘reality,’ maybe one shouldn’t expect more.

“Today, you find academics who cut and paste — and for that they receive honors and awards. An absurd situation has been created. If you copy a photograph on Google without permission, you have to pay a heavy fine.

"But your entire life’s research can be copied and you can’t go to any ethics committee at the university about it. True, people have always copied. But it’s gotten worse because of the Internet and also because university heads don’t care.”

“People can commit just about any despicable act under the aegis of academic privilege. What is there to stop a person from lying to a university committee? The whole idea of promotion in this manner is out of date. The universities were supposed to be temples of knowledge. Certainly they can find a better way to learn of a staff member’s accomplishments than the duplicated letters they receive as forced recommendations from professors.”

“That’s another absurdity, certainly when it comes to a field like Hebrew literature. If you receive a letter of recommendation from a researcher abroad, it is worth more than a recommendation from a researcher in Israel because it supposedly provides international recognition. Obviously, that’s utter nonsense. When it comes to Hebrew literature, the important people live right here, and their colleagues throughout the world should jump for joy if they get letters of recommendation from researchers who live in Israel.

“In the places where I traveled, I saw lecturers in Hebrew literature who had red carpets rolled out for them here in Israel, but over there they taught at a much lower level. It may sound prestigious to teach Hebrew literature at the Sorbonne, Columbia, Yale or Princeton, but that’s a sham. Hebrew literature is frequently taught there in translation, but reading ’A Simple Story’ by Agnon without Agnon’s Hebrew is like reading a dime novel.”

“I have two suggestions. Every year, the Education and Culture Ministry should give generous scholarships to outstanding students — 30 to 50 students, the sort who are on fire about their subject, so that the field won’t fade away and they will be able to pass the torch to the next generations. In addition, all students who major in practical fields ‘where they can make a living’ should be required to audit a few courses in Hebrew literature, Jewish history, Bible and so on. Also, we should wait until this awful state of affairs blows over.”

“I have a friend, a literary researcher who published essays on Agnon back in the day. One day, she saw that a program was being launched at Yale or at Princeton for capital-market analysts, and only graduates in literature were being accepted. It turned out that people who know how to analyze text properly have the talent to be capital-market analysts.

"She retrained, and today she’s one of the most important analysts in the United States. That goes to show that serious textual analysis is a discipline. All the rest are just auxiliary tools that help people understand the text better.”

“Literature and literary research are connected vessels. Each nourishes the other. Literature also needs an interpreter who can shed light on it. The Enlightenment-era poet, Judah Leib Gordon, once lamented, ‘For whose sake do I labor?’ He thought he would be the last Hebrew poet.

"Fortunately for us, he was wrong. All is not lost. Always, when it seems that everything is being destroyed, new things are created at the same time. Since the teachers’ colleges still teach the discipline without political leanings, there’s a chance that the field of literature won’t become extinct.”