150 quotes found
"The occupation made it very clear to me that there was something wrong, and I started to ask myself all kinds of questions and came to the conclusion that Zionism is negative and bad, and that we are oppressing the Palestinians."
"Everyone fights with their abilities - the Israelis have helicopters and rockets and the Palestinians have nothing but themselves and some very primitive home-made explosives."
"I grew up in an Israeli culture where suicide attackers are really heroes. Look at Samson, who in order to fight the Philistines in Gaza made the theatre collapse on himself and all the civilians there. He is a very big hero among Jewish children. I grew up on the myth of better suicide than surrender. So what is so special about suicide bombers?"
"I don't understand why people would find my views abhorrent. If you ask any Israeli to put himself in a similar situation of occupation and oppression for 36 years - everyone would say they would do the same, including [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon. I never heard any similar criticism from those Israelis who are shocked by the killing of women and children in suicide attacks, of an Israeli rocket attack that kills Palestinian civilians."
"I don't support such actions or see this as the solution, but I can very well understand how suicide bombings became a very popular way of fighting - first, because it is quite successful; secondly, because people are ready to risk everything in order to achieve some progress in the national struggle."
"Like the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, whom Steven Weinberg attacked in his 1996 New York Review of Books article on Sokal's hoax, Bohr was notorious for the obscurity of his writing. Yet physicists relate to Derrida's and Bohr's obscurities in fundamentally different ways: to Derrida's with contempt, to Bohr's with awe. Bohr's obscurity is attributed, time and again, to a "depth and subtlety" that mere mortals are not equipped to comprehend."
"Astonishing statements, hardly distinguishable from those satirized by Sokal, abound in the writings of Bohr; Heisenberg, Pauli, Born and Jordan. And they are not just casual, incidental remarks."
"While Einstein's belief in an objective reality is similar to that of Weinberg and Sokal, his arguments for his conception of reality are not. In fact, Einstein was no "naive realist," despite such caricaturing of his stand by the Copenhagen orthodoxy. He ridiculed the "correspondence" view of reality that many scientists accept uncritically. Einstein fully realized that the world is not presented to us twice-first as it is, and second, as it is theoretically described-so we can compare our theoretical "copy" with the "real thing." The world is given to us only once - through our best scientific theories. So Einstein deemed it necessary to ground his concept of objective reality in the invariant characteristics of our best scientific theories."
"By using only simple analogies and intuitively appealing, yet misleading, metaphorical images, Bohr established supposedly necessary connections between acausality, wave-particle duality and the impossibility of an objective unified description in the quantum domain. One needed no technical knowledge of quantum mechanics to read Bohr's operational analysis of mutually exclusive experimental arrangements consisting of bolts, springs, rods and diaphragms. While publicly abstaining from criticizing Bohr, many of his contemporaries did not share his peculiar insistence on the impossibility of devising new nonclassical concepts-an insistence that put rigid strictures on the freedom to theorize. It is on this issue that the silence of other physicists had the most far-reaching consequences. This silence created and sustained the illusion that one needed no technical knowledge of quantum mechanics to fully comprehend its revolutionary epistemological lessons. Many postmodernist critics of science have fallen prey to this strategy of argumentation and freely proclaimed that physics itself irrevocably banished the notion of objective reality."
"In an exchange several months after his New York Review of Books article, Weinberg admitted that the founders of quantum theory had been wrong in their "apparent subjectivism," and declared that "we know better now." What exactly do we know better now? Do we know better that one should not infer from the physical to the political realm and if yes, why? Or do we know better that the "orthodox" interpretation of quantum physics the one that confidently announced the final overthrow of causality and the ordinary conception of reality is not the only possible interpretation, and that, ultimately, it might not even be the surviving one?"
"The opponents of the postmodernist cultural studies of science condude confidently from the Sokal affair that "the emperors ... have no clothes." But who, exactly, are all those naked emperors? At whom should we be laughing?"
"We find ourselves in agreement with most of the points made in Mara Beller's article "The Sokal hoax: At whom are we laughing?". … Beller is right to point out that this quasi-religious attitude can arise in any field, even in physics. Thus, many physicists have for years blindly repeated Bohr's and Heisenberg's views on the foundations of quantum mechanics, without having a clear idea of what they meant. We are pleased to note that the grip of the so-called Copenhagen orthodoxy is weakening and that physicists are beginning to consider alternative views on foundational questions with an open mind."
"Indeed, in 1998, after the physicist Alan Sokal mocked humanists for delving into physics to support their ideas in a way that seemed ignorant at best and zany at worst – in what has come to be known as “Sokal’s hoax” – historian Mara Beller published an article in Physics Today entitled “The Sokal hoax: at whom are we laughing?”. She cited remarks by Bohr – but also by Heisenberg and Pauli – to make the point that in this respect physicists could sometimes be as zany as humanists, and there is no neat way to distinguish between the two."
"I read the Beller article in Physics Today. In fact, I’ve read several of her articles before: she writes very well. She of course has a point about Bohr’s intractable language; I’ve spent many hours myself trying to make some sense of it all. To the people with less patience than I, I’m sure it’s not obvious that they should struggle to find some meaning there. That’s exactly why someone has to get in and say something reasonable about (a modernday version of) the “Copenhagen interpretation” before things get out of hand."
"Shapin’s admirable essay misses, however, the point of Mara Beller’s piece in Physics Today (1998). Beller is not urging a more thoughtful attitude on physicists by pointing out that the wisdom of Bohr would sound like nonsense if it came from sociology or cultural studies. Quite the opposite. She is denouncing the great icons of quantum physics for uttering what she takes to be nonsense, and she is urging scientists to clean up their own act before they get on with the business of mocking others."
"Mara Beller has probably succeeded in making what may well be the first truly penetrating assessment of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Physicists have been too much in awe of the mystique of their topic to have done anything comparable. [...] I am sorry if this role reversal of old and new is an anticlimactic answer to three quarter century of Copenhagen riddle. Mara Beller made me do it!"
"I'm just about to cross the street to Café Rimon when I see Natalie sitting on the shaded patio and my heart skips, trips and falls over itself."
"The day Lily meets Lana is her two-week anniversary in Israel. She's lying on her belly in the dried grass outside the apartment building she now calls home, watching insects through her macro lens. She's sweating in her faded blue jeans and Converse high-tops. Then a shadow eclipses her sun."
"Years later, when they are old, sitting on a porch somewhere overlooking the sea, someone would ask them how it all started, and he'd say, as soon as he saw her on the other side of the drinking fountain at the immigrant camp, he knew. (first lines of book)"
"It was my sister, Lizzie, who told me. Her voice-transmitted through telephone lines that ran underneath seas and borders from Sha'ariya, our Yemeni neighborhood at the edge of a suburb east of Tel Aviv, to this guesthouse counter in the Thai island of Ko Pha-ngan-echoed faintly. "Zohara," she said. Not Zorki, I noted. "You have to come home." You have to come home, a tinny version of her repeated."
"I woke up with an urge to write, to document everything [they] had shared with me about the women's songs. For the first time in forever, I felt inspired by something. The idea of oral poetry that was created and disseminated by a community of women fascinated me, the fluidity of it, the riffing and rewriting and borrowing, which stood against the idea of authorship as it was known and celebrated in the West. There was so much more I wished to know. (Chapter 14)"
"Maybe that's why the two of them felt so connected. Both waiting, both missing an integral part of themselves, the constant ache in their bodies throbbing like a phantom limb. (chapter 16)"
"Jerusalem, a city surrounded by thick forests and rolling hills, where the air was fresh and cool, where everything was ancient, biblical, suffused with meaning. (chapter 18)"
"On bad days, I looked at the paleness of the sky, and all I could see was how deeply fucked up everything was, how much the pain radiated from the earth, fury bubbling up like hot lava underneath the surface. Other days, mostly at the beach, I would breathe in the saturated air and be filled with gratitude. Despite everything, this was the only home I knew. Flawed, imperfect, but home. And though my sense of belonging was fractured, still I belonged here more than anywhere else. Maybe that's why I held on to this dream of peace so desperately. I needed to believe we were heading somewhere better. If peace came, maybe we would finally be able to let out the breath we'd been holding for forty-seven years, and exhale. (chapter 19)"
"Whatever resolve and certainty he had felt in the past few weeks had melted away. Strangely, there was some lightness in the unknowing, like a clenched fist had been unfurled. (chapter 34)"
"Growing up, I had often felt out of place in my own country, a feeling I couldn’t comprehend or name until much later. It had to do with my father; grief shakes the foundations of your home, unsettles and banishes you. It might have also had to do with the exclusion of my culture from so many facets of Israeli life, with not seeing myself in literature and in the media, with being taught in school a partial history about the inception of Israel that painted us as mere extras. Or perhaps that failed sense of belonging was an Israeli predicament, because how does one feel at home when home is unsafe, forever contested? When the fear of losing is so entrenched in us it has become a part of our ethos?"
"Home is collecting stories, writing them down, and retelling them. Home is writing, and it grounds, sustains, and nourishes me. Home is the page. The one place I always, always come back to."
"Leaving, I discovered, did not cure my displacement, but rather reinforced it."
"Home became the liminal space in between-between identities, between cultures, between languages- and I was content claiming that space as my own, pleased to be different."
"The sky cracked open like an eggshell"
"I would wish that I was the one leaving because that would be better than being left behind"
"I know about death…Our country is haunted by its dead, weighed down by loss and remembrance."
"I delight in the sound of Yemeni rolling out of my mouth, rejoice in accentuating the letters in that deep, melodic way, feeling as though in my own small way I'm keeping something alive-an endangered language, yes-but also more personally, our past, my childhood, as though in using these words I am channelling my ancestors."
"Writing in a second language...is like wearing someone else's skin, an act akin to religious conversion."
"Being away from home and its prejudice toward the Arabic language allowed my body to remember Arabic, lament what was lost, and reclaim my own Arabness."
"Mizrahi Jews, some of whom came later than Ashkenazi, faced prejudice and inequity in Israel. Their need to assimilate required an erasure of their past, a denial of their heritage and language, which wasn't just foreign, or diasporic, but also associated with the enemy. Yiddish and other European languages were also lost, but Arabic was more politically charged. Despite sharing roots with Hebrew, which should have made it feel familial, it became viewed as dangerous, and hearing it instilled fear."
"There are two Arabics I long for-my ancestral tongue and the language of this place-or is it really one? Arabic existed alongside my mother tongue for generations, a sister language whose words are often recognizable: bayit and beit, yeled and walad. They share many words, a similar ring, an etymological root, a lingual family, and yet they are estranged. If this is not a parable about the state of this region, I don't know what is."
"Some days I feel a physical ache for Arabic, a tug in my heart. How do you miss something you've never known? Can a language be lodged inside your body, folded into your organs, the same way we inherit memories from our ancestors, like trauma? How else can you explain the warmth that spreads inside my body when I hear it? The yearning?"
"Celebrating Yemeni Jews and Mizrahi stories has been one of my goals with this book and my work, in general. I think what you describe here is a common misconception in North America, because Ashkenazi Jews are a majority there. Not so in Israel, obviously. We’re talking 50-50 [population split], which is another thing people in North America are surprised to hear. But despite this, disparities in higher education and income still persist. And Mizrahi authors have still not made it into the canon in Israel, so most Israeli literature that is being read in Israel and abroad is written by Ashkenazi authors. I wanted to grant my community a place in literature. (2025)"
"(Do you think things are getting better here in terms of people’s understanding about the differences between Jews from different cultures?) AT There definitely seems to be more in the media now, and more books by Jewish authors whose background isn’t Ashkenazi. It’s improving, for sure. I feel like there’s more awareness about Mizrahi and Sephardi inclusion within Jewish spaces. But I still have to be that person who says things on social media, like, when there’s a post about Jewish food and the entire conversation is Ashkenormative, “Actually, that is not Jewish food. That is Ashkenazi Jewish food.” (2025)"
"I returned to Israel after 20 years in Canada because I wanted to see if I belonged here. The jury is still out. I’ve been gone for so long that I feel a little bit like an immigrant here, in Israel, too. This may be a case of the immigrant predicament: you no longer belong anywhere, or maybe you belong everywhere? I think my writing tries to make sense of that question (2022)"
"(Is her memoir consciously undergirded by feminist assertions of agency, and standing up to patriarchy?) I think this is an essential element of my memoir that is rarely discussed. As a young woman, it absolutely felt subversive and defiant in a way, wishing to break free from patriarchal expectations of me. But also, the fact that it felt so radical was on its own a testament to how oppressed women still are. It really shouldn’t be such a big deal, you know, to want to be free, to follow your heart. (2022)"
"The revolution of Mizrahi artists in Israel is really exciting and something I craved as a child, growing up without seeing myself portrayed in literature or history classes. I find the idea of what it means to be Jewish to be pretty narrow also outside of Israel. The majority of the books translated from Hebrew have been mostly by Ashkenazi authors, and so hopefully this book might contribute just a tiny bit to the act of complicating Jewish identity and showing that there’s more to Jewishness and more to the Israeli story. (2016)"
"I think there is an expectation when writing about Israel for it to be political, to be about the conflict, the situation (“hamatzav”) and this can be frustrating for someone not inclined to focus specifically on war stories. I’m interested in many conflicts: cultural clashes and dynamics within families and romantic relationships. I also wanted to capture how the political situation is always in the background: the way we live our lives with the sense of contention that is always present but not always on the forefront. The question is also what is political, because to me the book is political. My decision to write strictly Mizrahi characters was a political decision for me. To shed light on characters who are marginalized in Israeli society was also a political choice. Whenever I watch news from other places these are the things I want to know too: I want to see the family dynamics and love stories, and how people live amidst tragedy and war. This is one of the things I think fiction does best. (2016)"
"I never read Mizrahi writers or writers of color growing up, and never found myself or my family reflected in the books they assigned to us in school. I actually believed that there were no published Yemeni writers in Israel (of course they existed but I didn’t know that, because they had not received media attention, and were not taught in schools). It made me feel as though our stories weren’t worth telling and as though my dream of becoming a writer myself was far-fetched. The exclusion of Mizrahi writers (and Palestinian writers) in the school curriculum, to me, is an act of erasure that has yet to be rectified, and one which puts limitations on children’s dreams. It infuriates me. So as a result, my favorite poets growing up were all male and Ashkenazi, like Yehuda Amichai (whom I still love), Natan Zach, David Avidan. (2016)"
"maybe the best place is the in-betweeness, or the search for a home and a belonging, which is a very Jewish theme, or the act of wandering, the movement between places. In my twenties I wanted to believe that. I romanticized wandering and wore my nomadic lifestyle on my head like a crown, but it wasn’t a sustainable choice and eventually I got tired of travelling and living without some stability. So what is the best place on earth, then? Ultimately, the place where you feel most at home. In my case, it might have to be wherever my husband and child are. And other times, or actually at the same time, it is the page. (2016)"
"You’ve been writing your whole life, having published your first poem at age ten. What drives you to write? AT I can’t explain it. It’s like love. I feel like it chose me, not the other way around. (2015)"
"you write what you have to write. Life is too short to censor yourself. (2015)"
"…So much of the writing process is done in the privacy of your own home, often in your pajamas, so I love that research forces me to get out of the house, try new things, meet new people. It keeps me from getting too comfortable and pushes me outside my comfort zone. Despite writing about places I know and communities I'm familiar with, there was still a lot of research to be done, and thank God for that! It would be really boring to write only about stuff I know so well that I never have to leave my desk to explore..."
"I've always been a storyteller. Before I could write, I used to make up stories and tell them to my friends and family. They were always really dramatic, with ghosts and people falling into holes in the ground, and ships lost at stormy seas. Then, I started drawing comic strips and I would show them to my mom and narrate them. As soon as I learned the alphabet I started writing stories and poems. I wrote every day, usually in the afternoons, when my parents were napping. My sister (who is seven years older) and my father recognized my love of storytelling and writing early on, and they fostered and encouraged it…"
"…Obviously Israel will always be home. I feel it most intensely when I'm there for a long enough period. When I first arrive, I'm not so sure about it, but once I stay for a few weeks, it feels like I could easily move back and live there. It's beyond the fact that my entire family lives there: It's a visceral thing, an attachment to the physicality of the place, to how the place smells and tastes. I also have an intense connection to the sea in Israel; I actually have to say goodbye to it whenever I leave and it's always a difficult parting…"
"I often tell students that I understand the need to write something right after it happens, but if you’re trying to craft it into an actual piece of art, a memoir or a creative nonfiction, I always say it’s best to wait...You need some distance to really make sense of it, I think, in writing."
"I think a lot of women who have experienced sexual assault have the same story. It’s like an ulcer in our bodies. There is something positive about the experience of letting it out and telling the story."
"Israel is a very small place, as you know, there’s something that can feel very familial about it, which is both positive and not so positive at different times and different instances."
"(Do you think there’s been increased awareness of Mizrahi Jewish culture in English-language speaking communities?) I sure hope so. I do my part. It’s a small part. But every time I get to speak in front of people, I correct misconceptions, which happens often. People saying things like “Mizrahi Jews didn’t come to Israel until the founding of the country, so that’s maybe why …” And I’m like, “Actually, my great-grandmother came in 1907, and the first Yemeni immigration was at the same time as the Bilu immigration of the European Jews, exactly the same years, it just hasn’t been told.” So yeah, you have to do what you have to do."
"When you write your first book, you get to write it in a bit of a bubble. You don’t know if it will be published, as much as you hope and wish for it, you don’t really know that. It’s kind of a safer place to write. And then when you write the second book, you’re aware of readership, you’re aware of views, of an audience out there, of expectations, and it’s more work to shut that down."
"The sea is the setting for many of my formative memories: I spent many Saturdays there with my family, fell in love, had my first kiss, broke up with my first boyfriend. Later on I worked as a waitress on a Tel Aviv beach and got to work barefoot, watch hundreds of sunsets and sunrises, swim late at night. When I moved to Vancouver, I found myself living by water again. In Toronto where I now live, the lake doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t offer the same promise, the same fantasy as the sea. It doesn’t satisfy my longings."
"Jewelry is an important part of Yemeni Jewish heritage. In Yemen, jewelry making was strictly a Jewish profession; the majority of the Jewish men were silversmiths and they were known for their fine craftsmanship. In fact, after the Jews went to Israel, Yemeni culture suffered a huge loss because they took their craft with them."
"I’ve never believed in “write what you know.” I believe in “write what you must.” So I tried, knowing that I very well might fail. When writing fiction, you need to find that kernel of truth within you and superimpose it onto your character."
"(Describe your female characters, their sexual aggressiveness.) AT: I like to think my women are badasses. The first person to point that out to me was one of my teachers at Guelph who said he appreciated that my female characters were sexually aggressive, that they wanted sex and went for it. It wasn’t something that I did consciously. I just wrote the kind of female characters I like to read. A part of it stems from my interest in gender dynamics in Israel, in particular the mandatory nature of the army service and how it shapes young men and women. I feel that being forced at such a young age to go into the army—still a male dominated environment—contributes to young Israeli women possessing what’s considered stereotypically male characteristics. It probably also has something to do with growing up and living in a warzone, a place where survival is an issue and the need to defend oneself is so instilled in our minds that people—regardless of gender—feel they need to develop a certain toughness, be on the offensive, even in everyday life."
"I was a terrible soldier. That’s the thing with mandatory service—it’s not for everyone, yet everyone has to go."
"For a long time I didn’t write about Israel at all. It’s such a volatile place and people have such strong opinions and everything you write about Israel is perceived as political. It is a double edged sword—some people may find your writing more alluring because of it while others may not want to go anywhere near it. At some point I had to stop worrying. I had to resign myself to the fact that I was going to piss people off, and that people are going to read the book and interpret it any way they like, and there is nothing I can do about it."
"Mizrahi literature has been overlooked in Israel—it’s getting better now, but when I was growing up I never read characters or authors that represented me. It made me feel invisible. There are more Mizrahi authors published nowadays, but Mizrahi literature is still underrepresented in the education system and in the Israeli canon. Unfortunately, Mizrahi authors have been translated a lot less than Ashkenazi authors."
"Perhaps Tsabari’s greatest attraction as a global storyteller is her absolute veracity— no holds barred, she has her reader in thrall with her art of fashioning her tellings with a refreshing turn of phrase. And like the burgeoning tribe of diasporic and postcolonial writers whose mother tongue is not English, she employs the once colonizer’s language to tell her stories in her own voice, that are being read by hundreds of thousands of immigrants who live in English-speaking countries which are their adopted homeland. Thus, the narrative is studded with unexpected gems — visual, audial, culinary and cerebral: “The sky cracked open like an eggshell”; “I would wish that I was the one leaving because that would be better than being left behind”; “I know about death…Our country is haunted by its dead, weighed down by loss and remembrance”...Tsabari’s creativity spins on the unique fulcrum of provoking the reader to think outside the box, and insidiously works to make the global reader understand the urgency to celebrate diversity with the art of acceptance."
"Each author has a unique style, all his own...I believe every author is unique and every work is too, due to its unique style."
"Style is a part and parcel of the expression. I never “think out” devices. The device is a reflection of my psychic structure. It’s like my own voice. Part of it is the sound, the other part—my intonation."
"A writer is a person who at a certain point in his life has found out that he is bothered by something which those around him seem to take in their stride. He finds out that here the usual modes of talk will not do, and he turns to investigate it the lonely way—on paper. It is doubtful if he is to find a solution to those pestering questions, but giving shape to his probings is itself a kind of solace. And then, something strange happens. The paper gets hold of him. It stimulates him, it becomes a meaning to itself. This person has passed a thin line into a new, a different world, to stay there forever. Forever, because not to obey this call now is tantamount to desertion, or still worse, to exile."
"I think I am mostly concerned with two issues: death-in-life versus life, and chaos versus order. These two are clearly intertwined, of course. I am talking about the individual revolt against the established order of things, the attempt to break through the visible. This attempt brings about an epiphany of a wider order of things which underlies our existence."
"Every story is a breakthrough. Every story is catching a glimpse of some vast, infinite pattern which gives meaning to our lives. Every story is an acceptance, a realization that the all-encompassing pattern is there for a purpose. But the unconscious attempt to disguise the pattern is infinite, so every story comes as a surprise."
"My work is an expression of myself, and I happen to be Jewish, I guess my point of view is affected by a hierarchy of values which is bound up with this point in history, and this place in the world. And I guess there is no escape from my own point of view."
"I have two sons in the military service, one in the Air Force and one in the Army. So nobody can be against war more than myself. But to tell the truth, during the day to day routine, doing the normal things, small or great, war hardly enters our thoughts. It becomes a fact of life. Almost like air pollution."
"Every human encounter is the external embodiment of an attraction between two magnetic fields. The encounter comes suddenly, unexpectedly. It is a moment of truth. It is a moment of revelation, as when the right ray of sun penetrates through the right window pane, and falls with the right slant on one picture in the museum. This is the painfully short moment which shows us just what the artist had in mind. It happened to me once. I walked into a bookstore in Jerusalem. I opened one book after another, when suddenly I found myself reading something breathlessly. It was a book of poems by Pinhas Sadeh. There was a flash, I was touched by something powerful. For some reason, I could not purchase the book right away. A while later, back in Tel Aviv, I went to buy the book. When I opened it this time it was—difficult. The angle had changed. The ray of light passed me by. There was no illumination. The same happens with human encounters. We meet someone, and suddenly we are capable of being ourselves, just like we were supposed to be—ourselves without hiding, without pretending, with no pretexts. We are each a magnetic field. And each attraction, limited as it may appear to be, is a cosmic happening—it occurs within the broader pattern of things, within the endlessly complex structure which underlies our lives."
"(What does the title of the story, “There, The Newsroom” mean?) A. K. -C. The essential news, the news which matters, is not in the newsroom but in the opposite direction. The things which shape our lives are not projected on the television screen."
"Living in a world of flux, subjugated to the indecipherable laws of constant vicissitudes, our encounters cannot but be momentary flashes. The glamor cannot last because we change, the others change, circumstances change. So I wouldn’t call the end of a relationship a failure."
"I wrote about the hard way in which one learns the pain of the break between dream and reality. And you know, in the beginning I tended to write, for lack of a better term, in the “romantic” vein. I was trying to search for human nature through the external order of things. I wanted to touch human misery without getting my hands dirty, out of a peculiar fastidiousness. I think I changed tremendously in this sense. I am not as much of an outsider anymore. I am more capable now of observing the pain, and being part of it at the same time. I have learned to come to terms with the “concrete” and naked reality and not flinch from expressing it in a more direct fashion."
"After all, what are we trying to find in a book ? Ourselves. A good book offers you yourself in a more articulate way. Reading is actually plunging into one’s own identity and, one hopes, emerging stronger than before. You see, unconsciously, we are seeking to find an affirmation to our own world -perception and set of values. Since these change as we grow up and develop, our response to books changes as well. I don’t believe there is an objective yardstick by which a book may be evaluated. The “science” of literary criticism is an illusion—it is based on subjective impressions, and no one feels the sting more strongly than I, being a critic myself. The only thing I hope to do in my books, is to open up the reader to a new awareness. There is no logical or speculative message I intend to transmit. The “message” belongs to the realm of intuition, imagination and emotional perception. If I manage to make a reader sensitive to that special awareness which has inspired me to write, I consider myself a lucky writer."
"I write when I cannot hold back any longer. Call it an attack, an irresistible impulse. In a way, my writing has almost been clandestine. There was a constant feeling of guilt, and a continuous tension between my duties at home and my literary aspirations."
"Her stories plunge the reader directly into an unmediated world of subjective feeling. Usually the subjects of her novels and stories are young women facing the problems of growing up and contending with romantic attachments. In a later novel, With Her on Her Way Home (1991), she deals with the problems of growing old. Kahana-Carmon's language is carefully shaped and unadorned, but possessing an idiosyncratic subtlety that makes translation difficult."
"Amalia Kahana-Carmon is often described as the Israeli Virginia Woolf. Though she belongs to the age group of the Palmach generation of the fifties, she is normally classified as one of the “New Wave” writers on a par with A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz."
"All the Rivers touched a raw nerve in Israeli society. The book tries to address the Jewish fear of losing our identity in the Middle East. And yet that very fear condemned it to official rejection. It was banned from the high-school curriculum on the grounds that “intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews threaten to subvert our distinct identity.” The Minister of Education, Naftali Bennett had claimed that I portrayed Israeli soldiers as sadistic criminals — even though he flatly denied reading the book — and now all the Israeli social networks, news sites and current-affairs programs were discussing All The Rivers."
"Despite the incessant efforts to caricature “the other” as demonic and boorish; despite the attempts to persuade us that the Palestinians are nothing but “shrapnel in the ass”; despite the political deadlock and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s steadfast refusal to engage with the other side — despite all this, All the Rivers is an aperture for dialogue. Far away in New York, Liat and Hilmi, an artist and a student, discover their affinities and their shared fate. Theirs is a complicated love story. But it is suffused with our responsibility to see the other, to be able to recognize ourselves in them. Above all, it rests on the hope that whether we want to or not, whether we shut our eyes or plug our ears, whether we drag our feet or stomp our legs, we will sooner or later admit that we — us and them — sail on the same boat."
"Israel's collective consciousness, which was the cornerstone of the foundation of the Zionist state 53 years ago and which bound the immigrants from all parts of the world into a people, into a nation, is no longer our consciousness. This is the archaic, too idealistic outlook on life of our parents that arouses in us a concealed snigger at the Sabbath-eve family dinners. According to it, the individual has to sacrifice his own good, his freedom, his life, for the common good. This outlook has not succeeded in upgrading itself to a modern, sophisticated version."
"Through all those years Marcelle had confused Yoel with the imaginary heroes that her sad eyes cut out of the romances she read... and she realized that all through the past years she had merely travelled over the road map of the land of love, never in the land itself."
"Someone was at the door. I was vacuuming, with Nirvana on the stereo at full volume, and the polite doorbell chirps had failed to break through, rousing me only when they lost their patience and became long and aggressive. It was mid-November, early on a Saturday afternoon. I'd managed to get a few things done in the morning and was now busy cleaning. I vacuumed the couches and the hardwood floor, my ears bursting with the hollow roar of air and the reverberating music, a monotonous screen of white noise that somehow imbued me with calm. I was free of thoughts as I wielded the suction hose to root out dust and cat fur, entirely focused on the reds and blues of the rug. I snapped out of it when the vacuum's sigh subsided just as the song was whispering its last sounds. In the three- or four-second gap before the next track, I heard the sharp, insistent doorbell chime. Like a deaf person who suddenly regains her hearing, I had trouble finding language. (beginning of chapter 1)"
"The hoarseness of my voice echoes in my ears as if from another era: "I have to leave...." (chapter 7)"
"yesterday, in cafés and bars and streets all over town, thousands of other young couples had met, men and women whose paths had crossed and who had spent the weekend together, taking comfort in each other, salving their loneliness in this vast city. That's all, I thought as I sank down and my breathing grew deeper, aligned with his. Just as quickly as it started yesterday, it could be over tomorrow. It could all end with a big hug and a friendly kiss at the door. (chapter 13)"
"Although I was exhausted, it took a long time to fall asleep. Hilmi had dropped off long ago, but my mind hummed with the sounds of our time together, unready to let go of them yet. (chapter 13)"
"Quiet hours and long talks, awash in each other... (ch 14)"
"Those frozen December days, the last days of 2002, come back to me years later slightly blurred, shining through the mist, as though preserved in my memory right from the start with a slightly unreal distortion. Or perhaps it's that over time they have lost some of their sharpness and acquired a dreamy afterglow. 14"
"...my gaze meets the laptop screen and the words I poured out all afternoon. It began yesterday without any particular intent, just a quick reply to my sister. But today when I went back, the email suddenly took on a different form, more feverish, more poetic. I was seized by a storytelling binge, a lucid, cutting clarity, and from page to page the words joined together and frothed and flowed. And it is then that I realize I am not writing to Iris anymore. That the recipient is in fact myself, an as-of-yet unknown self, a me who has long ago gone back to Israel and is living my tomorrow-life in Tel Aviv, a distant me who will one day open up this file and read the words, and perhaps with hindsight have a better understanding of what is occurring inside me now, what I am going through in these mad and beautiful days. She will remember us as we once were, in New York, in Hilmi's Brooklyn studio. She will read the lines and remember how I sat here once on this couch, in December of 2002, like the bird perched on the windowsill all afternoon, and watched myself loving him while I wrote these words. (chapter 14)"
"At last, the luminous match was struck and the day was lit. But Matti had awakened earlier-before her father rose from his dreamless bed and went, sorrowful, to the sea; before her sister Sofia's blue baby awoke and shook the house with his cough; before her sister Lizzie returned from night shift at the hospital, her high heels clacking on the living room floor, revealing under her white nurse's smock a shimmering low-necked dress and colorless bruises. Matti woke up knowing she'd had a bad dream but could not remember what it was. (first lines, chapter title: "Matti Azizyan's Birthday, five-thirty in the Morning")"
"Between them she felt small, even smaller than herself. (p13)"
"From Mama we learned what sort of people we should be, and we loved her as a confidante; but Papa's image was the mold of our dreams. (p52)"
"The silence was very intense, like the hush that used to trouble her mind when she was the first to wake up on Saturday mornings. (p97)"
"That spring evening, which was marked by the harsh sting of chopped red peppers, all over the housing estate, in all the flats around all the supper tables, the residents talked about Matti Azizyan. Her actions dwarfed the fathers and mothers and big brothers, made their voices crack with shock, and reduced their world to the dimensions of the backyard. (p135)"
""If you could just for a moment come out of yourself and see what I see...you wouldn't stop looking at yourself. But unfortunately you need a mirror to do it, my poor beauty.” (p148)"
"Only literature can allow us to see each other as individuals. (2023)"
"Freedom of speech in Israel is so fragile, and this book was attacked as a symbol, for its vulnerability. (2019)"
"Art and literature are about a magical appeal to identity and empathy. How an identity in literature is transferred into your own identity so that you care for a fictional stranger so that you get into his skin and wear his gaze. This is what is so powerful. It is an antidote to the armoury we are requested to put on. This shield of ignorance and indifference and apathy. Because if you really sense everything, if you don’t wear this shield, it is painful. (2017)"
"If you allow only one perspective, you narrow the world. [Then] something is missing for us to interpret our future. Where we are heading. (2017)"
"What literature should suggest to us as readers is beyond debate — it’s our ability to elaborate our perspectives and to have knowledge of the other from within his mind and feelings, allowing us to recognize the humanity of the other...It makes us not only better human beings but better citizens of our worlds. (2017)"
"I’ve always been a little bit suspicious, because sometimes this poetic sensibility in Israeli culture turns the conflict into something romantic. There is nothing romantic about occupation and occupiers and the occupied. (2017)"
"This strange craft of writing stories requires self-belief in these visions that you have (2017)"
"We cannot explore someone else’s identity from within as we do with books and literature… And we cannot do it when you don’t wear someone else’s skin as literary work invites us to do. This empathy that we can taste is so unique to storytelling via the page....I try to encourage myself when it comes to writing prose. Because I do believe in it and love it. This is my home. (2017)"
"By just acknowledging a dual perspective to everything, along with two justifications, you are considered a non-patriot in today’s Israel. (2017)"
"The lighthouse of marriage is only one of a host of glimmering lights."
"I shall always write about immigrants, about mobility; about the gap between what you wish for, and what you get."
"(Do you classify yourself as a Sephardi writer?) I am in the middle, neither here nor there. I have a sense of comradeship with people like me, who were caressed by the same accent when they were babies, who had the same taste on their tongues."
"The work is tiring, drudgery, a labour of years, and when the reader receives the book, he has to feel the trickery, the magic. He must not see the heart that suffers, the grubby hands."
"There is something so wonderful and reassuring about the organism called "The Family', a multi-limbed, multi-headed creature. It's awful to tear oneself from such a large, warm body, but it is essential for growth. I would very much like to use the 'Me' term, but I can't. It's not accidental that I haven't yet written a novel with a first person singular narrator, only stories told by 'We'."
"My traditional society defined womanhood as poverty, but I have turned it into wealth. As a child I was jealous of the preference for boys, then the jealousy became anger and disappointment, but I turned the offence into a source of strength, which produced literature and power. I am a link in a chain of astonishing women in my family."
"We are drugged with romantic novels and Turkish films and sayings like, 'Everything will be better when you're married', and we rush panic-stricken towards the wedding-canopy, out of hunger, almost as though it were a children's disease we cannot recover from until we take the marriage vow. We leave the 'We' of the family and move directly to the 'Us' of the couple, without any 'Me' in the middle. I think that on the way from 'We' to 'Us' there has to be a 'Me', otherwise you have no energy for living."
"Darkness and the fact that the whole world is asleep brings a kind of quietness, and makes time softer, neutralizing the positive vibrations of humanity that abound in daylight. It is easier then to convince myself for several hours that the solitude I must have in order to write is inviolable."
"I don't know anyone, certainly not myself, who would sit and write for eight hours a day, if it were not for some lack, something broken in his life. History of art proves that emotional confusion and a crisis of values are a prerequisite for creation. I create not out of abundance but out of broken worlds. (What is so broken about your world? You grew up in a big, loving family.) There was a kind of weakness, when the home confronted the street. If I had not been the daughter of immigrants, if I were not aware of the gap between Ispahan and Kfar Saba, the tension between what my parents expected to find here and what they found, I would probably not have become a writer. That is the pit out of which I write."
"There is nothing more Arabic than honor and shame."
"Living in Israel means that you have the choice. You can live a totally European lifestyle, or you can live a life that is oriented toward the Arab world. Or the third world, if you like."
"I work with the Palestinians, I try to communicate, try to be a part of the intellectual movement that wants to build a bridge. But walking on that bridge, or being a brick in that bridge-I'm not sure how much value that would have. I believe in the masses, in what happens in the grass roots."
"(about what happened to the Sephardic Jews in Israel.) Well, we prefer to be called Mizrahi, that is, Oriental or Eastern. The term Sephardic isn't used so much anymore, and actually refers to people from Spain. The answer to your question is one of the great failings of the Zionist movement. The movement started in Europe and spread out from there, and as a result, the hegemony in Israel is European, which is foreign to this region. I believe that the conflict in the Middle East is what it is today because the Mizrahi Jews who emigrated here from Muslim countries have been so passive...They were persuaded to come to the new land by the European Jews. Most of them had in fact dreamed of it for years, but they never actively left their countries. So in effect they came here as 'guests' of the Zionist movement, and they groveled and apologized as they came. The pioneers were European, and the greater part of Middle Eastern Jews became second-class citizens, the proletariat."
"The Holocaust effectively spewed the Jews out of Europe. Nothing even close to similar ever happened to the Jews in the Muslim world. Seen cynically, it seems strange that the Jews who were in effect exiled nevertheless continue to look to the European lifestyle with great veneration and try to recreate it in their own homeland. It makes you want to shout: 'Listen, people, you could have created something beautiful here, if you had only turned backs on those who killed six million of you, and instead accepted that the people who live in this region have never done anything like that.' I think that the majority of Jews who used to live with the Arabs were more peaceful, friendlier, more natural and humane than the European Jews. For example, the Sephardic rabbis in Morocco used to preach a pragmatic, sensible Judaism. Orthodoxy did not exist in those communities. Here in Israel, everything has become stricter and more extreme, like an echo of the Ashkenazi rabbis who had their religion influenced by a Catholic environment, where guilt and punishment were key concepts. (“What happened to the Sephardic culture here in Israel? Does it still exist at all?") DR: It was given no recognition. The European hegemony was so strong that it suppressed the very idea that there might be such a thing as Sephardic or Mizrahi culture. ("But has it continued to exist in one form or another?") DR: Behind closed doors, yes. In formal situations, no. But if we look back over the past ten years, there has been a dramatic change. Today, the notion that Israel is a pluralistic and multicultural place is more accepted. The very fact that my books and books by Sami Michael are being published is proof of that. Now you can listen to Middle Eastern music on the radio, watch TV dramas about families in Iraq or Iran, and it is all mainstream. It has received the Israeli stamp of kosher, as we say here. So now we are basically 100 percent Israeli. But that is something very recent."
"(Does she see herself as a Mizrahi writer?) Yes, of course. Some of my female colleagues claim that my writing is not feminist literature. And I completely agree, because it is human literature, written by a woman. The fact that I am a woman colors my writing. I am proud of being a woman, just as I am proud of being an Israeli of Iranian descent. I write from what is essentially me, and being Iranian is absolutely an element of that."
"I really do see some interesting similarities in Hebrew and Palestinian literature, especially the literature written by second generation Mizrahi Jews and post-1948 Palestinians. The two have a lot in common, or rather a lot of parallels, as their paths do not cross and they never refer to each other. But they deal with the same subjects, the same set of issues. So you could say that we are on the same track, just using different languages."
"The differences between me and an author like Etgar Keret, who has parents who survived the Holocaust, are obvious-but so are the similarities. In a way, we are both telling the stories of those who were silenced by Israeli hegemony. There was a conformity that said, 'Let bygones be bygones! We will create a new country! We want the children here to be proud and magnificent!' But this is not a fair game. And there is a great opportunity for literature here, to give voice to those silenced voices."
"If you only have this superstition and no conscience in addition, then you're trapped in spiritual poverty. It's difficult even for me to let go of the superstition, no matter how much I want to. My parents cannot let go, because that is all they have. The alternative is far too frightening." ("And the alternative is to take responsibility for and control of your own life?") Yes, and that's a frightening thought, because there are no role models. So you feel trapped in this poverty, a kind of regression into the past."
"Judaism is not something I practice, but something that I carry inside. Being Israeli gives you the privilege of including Jewishness as part of a package, part of yourself. You don't ask any questions unless you want to. I have grown up in a Jewish country and I appreciate that."
"the literature I value the most is those parts of the Bible that I read through choice and love. I am proud of the Bible and carry it with me. I read it as literature, I don't worship it, but I see it as part of who I am."
"Judaism is a cult religion. There is no evangelizing, newcomers are not welcome. Religious Jews cultivate and practice segregation at all levels. In terms of food, they separate milk and meat. Our weekdays are different. There are various materials that you're not supposed to wear. In fact, there are lots of elements from God's creation that aren't allowed-ranging from certain certain types of fish that you cannot eat to certain types of people you cannot marry. So it's a very isolated position, which means that Jews-wherever they live-often stick together and don't assimilate. I really wish that Judaism could be practiced in the way it deserves, that those who claim to be Jewish could show more respect for the non-Jews around them, for a start. The way I see it, thinking and wisdom are absolutely fundamental to the Jewish attitude. Judaism has been elaborated throughout more than 2,000 years of exile, but now that we've become masters of this country, taken by power, this wisdom has suddenly been forgotten. Look at Jews in Diaspora, in the global society, the fact that they're a minority makes them better Jews...Because they don't see their Jewishness as a passport. For them, Judaism is an obligation to be better people, they don't have a choice. Here in Israel, the Bible is used to suppress other religions, to control other people's lives, to kick people out of their home and subdue an entire nation. Just because you've had this book for so long, and then come back to where the action took place, you feel you can say, 'I'm going to use force, I call on the army!' We're talking here about people who demand land for spiritual reasons, and it's done in such a crude way. That's exploiting the Bible."
"The problem with Palestinian literature in Israel is that so few of us know anything about it. ("Did you ever read any Palestinian literature in the course of your schooling?") No, they thought it would be more useful for us to read James Joyce than the literature of our neighbors. I think it is in fact an Israeli policy not to translate Arabic literature. There is a hostile attitude that is being transferred from one generation to the next. The truth is that we do not have insight into their personal and cultural life. We have nothing that can be used to bridge the gap. Literature could, of course, be such a bridge, because it helps you to see that other people are human just like us."
"The old role for writers was linked to nation building. The country was so young, and we needed someone to speak on behalf of the people, but today, the disparity in opinions is so great that no one can claim to hold the absolute truth anymore. I can't stand and say that I know the truth. I feel confused and at a loss, like most people. That's why I practically never write newspaper articles. Nothing here is black and white, everything is shades of gray. Even my left-wing politics are fluid, because everything in society is fluid. I'm no Amos Oz, who's always ready to take a firm stance. I need someone to talk to me. Personally, I prefer listening to academics rather than authors, because academics analyze reality every day. At a political level, he or she is far better equipped to do this than someone who can write a love story that makes me melt. Authors are best at internalization, having empathy-an author who is good is good at a personal level."
"(In Europe, Amos Oz is often talked about as some kind of modern Israeli prophet.) DR: That's because he can't let go of the old prophetic gestures. It's a nice role and he's comfortable with it, and maybe we need him to open people's eyes. Who knows, maybe it's just me who's cynical. But there's nothing prophetic about the rest of us, particularly the younger writers. Your horoscope can tell you more about the future than we can. I don't see writing as a kind of vocation or destiny, but as the only profession that I've mastered. If someone discovers something greater underlying it all, then I've been lucky. But I don't work an eight-hour day in order to deliver a message. I'm trying to find out something about myself, about my life, trying to control something in all this chaos. For me, writing is the only way to give order to my life. To earn a living by doing something that gives me peace, and that makes me happy"
"The concept post-Zionism stems from the so-called new historians who in the early '90s came up with new facts, new stories, facts that the nation builders had omitted from textbooks in order to foster a generation that was proud and prepared to join the army and die, a generation fueled by patriotic loyalty. Facts such as the Palestinians being driven from their houses and having to flee in 1948. These new historians were deemed to be very radical, they sabotaged the prevailing views of Zionism and Israel. I personally am a radical and post-Zionist, in the sense that I take into account the fact that what we learned at school was not the absolute truth. At the same time, I live here in Israel, and in this sense I enjoy the fruits of the occupation in 1948. But I totally condemn the occupation in 1967. Israel is my only home. I know that it is built on a crime, and I am willing to pay for that crime, but I'm not willing to let Israel become a two-nation state. I want two states for two people, and I want to see the refugees from 1948 receive compensation for the crime that gave me my home, but I will never agree to creating a joint Jewish-Palestinian state between the River Jordan and the sea. I think that would be a catastrophe for the Jews. I want the Palestinian community to thrive, but not at the risk of becoming a refugee myself. And I say that with the greatest love for those who disagree with me, the sons and daughters of the refugees from 1948. They are welcome to come here and live in Jaffa, just as I sometimes go to live in New York, or my sister lives in London. They will have full rights here, but not citizenship. They will have their Palestine, their own homeland. In order to achieve peace, we have to establish two states alongside one another."
"Rabinyan's writing is vivid and sensual, physical and intimate and at times, very direct and crude. Dorit Rabinyan is a very likeable woman. She is intense, reflective, and humorous."
"Dorit Rabinyan is a young author of Iranian background who writes beautifully about Iran and Israel."
"First of all we have to plant the Garden of Eden, because without the Garden of Eden there is no serpent; without the boughs of the apple tree to hide in, the serpent is nothing but an eater of dirt, of no greater significance than a snail or a worm. Therefore, let there be a Garden of Eden! And in fact, why "let there be"? There was a Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden existed. Because why shouldn't I call what I had a "Garden of Eden"? Let's begin with a Sabbath day of unutterable sweetness."
"Anyone who grew up like I did will always see the room from the point of view of the maid who comes to clean it. (p198)"
""...Just because a person realizes how lucky he was doesn't mean that he's prepared to stop being lucky." (p 265)"
"you can never know what will calm the troubled soul: a poem, a philosophical saying, or a silly slogan on the roof of the Jewish Agency. (p272)"
"you can't put a lid on the past so easily (p355)"
"Sometimes you have to stick your finger down your throat and vomit up the disgusting insides of the self... sometimes you have to increase the nausea in order to get rid of the disgust... (p12)"
"Love can be described as compulsive thinking. The thought buzzes and buzzes like an insect stuck to a wet picture...Compulsive thinking latches on to details and dwells on them as if they hold enormous significance which cannot be grasped in a moment. It keeps returning to them again and again as if there is still something left to understand. The more I think about the meaning of these gestures the sicker I get of my thoughts and of myself for thinking them. (p34-5)"
"what does it help me to know that the heart is a muscle, just a blood-pumping muscle, if my heart still goes out to him, and the bloody muscle still yearns and swells? (p38)"
""Only someone with an individual voice of his own can describe what is impossible to describe" (p51)"
"Love had mobilized my entire being, love ruled me like a tyrant, and love would allow for no other master. (p67)"
"Personally, I think it’s very important for a writer to know what kinds of things are beyond his or her knowledge. Even though I spent a lot of time with people who came from Russia, and visited Russia eight times before writing “Confessions,” I knew it wasn’t possible for me to write what’s going on in Alek’s mind."
"Being a mother — especially of twins — taught me how to work efficiently. Family life saves one from the dangers of solipsism, which I think many writers encounter. One has to learn how to live with two parallel worlds, and, in a way, use the actual life as a good and safe base from which one can send expeditions to that parallel world. I think that dealing only with words all the time doesn’t do one any good. It’s good to remember that there are other human beings around you."
"For me there’s no dichotomy between thought on one hand, and feelings or passion on the other. They aren’t different spheres. In a way, I believe that our passions appear to us in the form of thoughts. And that thought can be extremely passionate. Every person, when he experiences some kind of feeling, also relates to that feeling — judges it, evaluates it. I think that what makes people different is not so much what they feel as the different ways they respond to their feelings."
"Hareven, one of Israel's finest writers, has a keen insight into how a toxic relationship can consume a woman."
"The simple thirst for vengeance that drives so many crime thrillers becomes, in Hareven’s hands, the subject of a moral investigation that yields no clear answers. This is what gives Lies, First Person its haunting power and reveals Hareven as a novelist that American readers should embrace."
"I decided I could not be a fig-leaf for this system anymore."
"I want my quitting to be a sort of demonstration and expression of my despair and disgust with the system, and maybe as a proof that something must be done to grant protection to the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Because for the Palestinians, unfortunately, we can't obtain justice."
"Because we Jews know what it is to suffer, we must not oppress others."