The one-way mirror:

The Hardy boys and the Bobsey twins are replaced by local imitations whose adventures are equally improbable.

In America, the spectrum of Orthodox Jews from Modern

through chareidi is much more continuous than in Israel, and the bulk of those who identify themselves as chareidim have much more contact with secular media. Reading the New York Times, or Newsweek, or the Reader's Digest is widely considered acceptable. The classic nineteenth century novelists, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, are taught in the English classes of chareidi schools. Outside of New York, there is usually only one day school to a community, and it serves a wide spectrum of both Orthodox and traditional Jews. The secular studies in such a day school are expected to prepare their students for admission to a good university. It shcould be noted, in addition, that members of the younger generation in America and Israel, if they remain religious, are generally more knowledgeable, more committed, and more observant than people of their parents' generation. There are many women in America who were brought up on secular literature, but who now restrict themselves to books from Orthodox publishers. As a result, the standards of literary and scientific sophistication of the American chareidi community are higher than those of the Israeli chareidim.

This creates a significant difference between the Orthodox publishing environment in America and in Israel. The "captive audience" in America is more skittish, more open, and more sophisticated than its Israeli counterpart. It is more skittish, in that more of the readers of Jewish books also read secular books, and will move in that direction if they cannot find enough to read from Jewish publishers. Accustomed to seeing a wider range of issues treated in print, they find fewer matters objectionable. They are more sophisticated, in that they have a much greater exposure to quality literature in the course of their schooling. As a result, the American adult novels published by the Orthodox publishers are both more "daring" in the topics that can be broached and better written than the Israeli novels.

§3 Critical Mass: Orthodox writers in America and Israel

In English Orthodox publishing, a great deal of the writing and editing, perhaps as much as half, takes place in Israel, a situation has clear implications for the treatment of Israel in Orthodox literature. The publishing houses Mesorah and C.I.S. are based in Brooklyn and Lakewood, New Jersey, but Feldheim and Targum have their main editorial offices in Jerusalem. Most of their books in English are shipped to America; only around 10-15% are sold in Israel, Europe or South Africa.

Among the authors of Feldheim's "all-time best-sellers", several live in Jerusalem, (Schwarzbaum, The Bamboo Cradle and, Shain, All for the Boss) live in Jerusalem, the Pearl Benisch (To Vanquish the Dragon) and Agi Bauer (Black Becomes a Rainbow) live part time in Israel, and the Chaim Shapira (Go, my Son) lives in America. Among the most prolific of Orthodox authors are Miriam Adahan, Rabbi Zelig Plishkin and Rabbi Hanoch Teller, all of whom live in Jerusalem, as do Sarah Shapiro, editor of the Our Lives anthologies of Jewish women's writing, and Miriam Zakon, coeditor of Horizons, an Orthodox quarterly which actively solicits Orthodox fiction. Of the authors of novels in English, Rachel Pomerantz live in Israel, Ruthie Pearlman lives part-time in Jerusalem, Libby Lazewnik lived in Jerusalem until very recently, Ruth Benjamin lives in South Africa, while Sarah Birnhak and Miriam Friedman live in the States.

There is no equivalent literary activity in Hebrew among

Orthodox Jewish yordim living in the Diaspora. The books, magazines and newspapers sold in the Orthodox books stores in Israel are all written and produced locally, fairly evenly balanced between Jerusalem and Bnei Brak. If we look specifically at the novels for adults, those in Hebrew are all written by

Israelis living in Israel.

The current spate of literary activity among the Orthodox

Jews is unusual. To this day there is no corresponding outpouring of Orthodox Jewish novels in French. One might speculate that in order for a community to produce Orthodox writers willing to undertake the investment of time and energy required to produce a significant novel, it must have a group of writers, perhaps writing other types of material, and it must provide perceived opportunities for the publication of novels. In Hebrew this perceived opportunity came with the introduction of serials in magazines for adults, which allowed a preexisting corps of juvenile authors to upgrade to more adult material.

Fifteen years ago the corresponding writers in America and Israel were writing children's books, not adult novels. Of firstpublished novels in English, Sarah Birnhak and Libby Lazewnik had previously published books for teen-age girls, while Ruthie Pearlman and Rachel Pomerantz responded to a solicitation of manuscripts.

§4 Historical origins of the Orthodox novel

In Eastern Europe, the Yiddish novel and the Yiddish theater were products of the Haskala, and as such were opposed by the rabbinical leadership of the day. There was a rudimentary folk theater, concentrated in the "Purim shpiel", the Yiddish skits or plays performed in the homes of wealthy men on Purim to raise money for charity.

The first genuinely Orthodox works of fiction to appear were the serialized novels of Rabbi Marcus Lehmann, which appeared in his German language journal, the Israelit. In Germany the fight to exclude literature was regarded as lost. Young Jews were going to read novels in German. If so, then there must be novels

with a Jewish outlook for them to read, and Rabbi Lehmann set about to write them. Others of his contemporaries in Orthodox circles in Germany also joined the effort, but none were as prolific as Rabbi Lehmann.

After World War I, with the introduction of compulsory education in the vernacular for both girls and boys, the problem of Jewish young adults reading non-Jewish literature swept through Eastern Europe, but the response was not, as it had been in Germany, a competitive effort to produce Jewish literature in the vernacular, but rather an attempt to strengthen the network of after-school Jewish education and extend it to girls through the Beis Yaakov movement. There were Orthodox literary efforts, but they attained neither the acceptance nor the popularity that Rabbi Lehmann's books had achieved in Germany.

The destruction of the Eastern European centers of Orthodox culture left the Orthodox communities in Israel, America and Western Europe with one major priority: Jewish education. The major effort went into constructing a network of schools, but providing textbooks and juvenile literature was considered an important adjunct. The books of Marcus Lehmann were translated into Hebrew and English, and in Hebrew Rabbi Firer wrote novels based on the struggle raging between the religious and secular camps, while in America Gershon Kranzler wrote one story after another in which the hero is tops both at baseball and at learning Gemara.

The rising standards of Jewish education produced a rising demand for Jewish books, both the standard religious texts and the so-called Judaica, including biographies of rabbis, autobiographies of Holocaust survivors, and works of a more philosophical bent. By '81, in an article on Jewish publishing in America, Bnei Brith magazine declared that "the only Jewish publishers that consistently chalk up impressive sales figures are the religious houses." The staples were religious texts in

Hebrew, juvenile fiction, and non-fiction Judaica for adults.

An abortive attempt at an adult Orthodox novel, Brushstrokes by Gary Levine, came out in '81 from Moznaim, but it was not a commercial success and made the publishers wary of any more attempts at adult fiction. In 1986, a new publisher, BASH, in conjunction with Moznaim, put out Search My Heart, which lay on the borderline between adult and juvenile fiction. Not until end of the eighties did anyone make another attempt, and the publisher who did was C.I.S., Creative Institutional Services, which actually began as an organization which did fund-raising mailings for yeshivas. One of the gimmicks was to send out free copies of a series of very well-written historical novels on seventeenth century Poland, the Pulichever novels. They were so popular with both adults and children that C.I.S. started actively soliciting manuscripts.

The editors of C.I.S. took what they felt to be a risk in

publishing Wildflower, which contained such sensitive topics as fertility treatments and a married couple who separate, and C.I.S. did not, in fact, use its own label for this publication. When the book was successful, the field was open for more of the same. Libby Lazewnik, who had been until then the most prolific of the writers for the juvenile market, switched gears and began writing novels for adults. Eventually even Feldheim buckled and started looking around for a good adult novel to publish.

The two centers of Jewish publishing are in the United

States and in Israel. Lately two or three Orthodox publishers have been operating in France, but most of the material published is translated either from English or Hebrew. Feldheim has translated some of its best-sellers, notably The Bamboo Cradle, into Hebrew, French, Russian, and Spanish. Many series of children's books routinely offer versions in Hebrew, English and Yiddish. Nevertheless, a glance at publishers' catalogues will show that the main reading and writing languages of contemporary

Orthodoxy are Hebrew and English.

There is little cross translation between the two major languages. This is rather surprising, given the high degree of congruence between chareidi society in Israel and America, but the explanation seems to be economic. Translators must be paid immediately, by the number of pages translated, whereas royalty payments to authors are routinely deferred for a year or more and are proportional to the number of copies actually sold. The cost of translation is deducted from the author's royalties, and may absorb the entire royalty payment. Thus neither the publisher nor the author have much economic incentive to push for translation.

In addition to the separateness of the two enterprises,

there are considerable differences between the American and Israeli Orthodox publishing houses. The American concerns aim for a larger volume and a production quality which can compete with secular publishers. In America books are published in hard cover and soft cover, with a dust jacket on the hard cover, starting with an initial run of 2000-4000 copies. In Israel a book is typically put out with an initial run of 1500-2000 copies, in a semihard cover with the design directly on the cover. The distribution in America is more expensive, since the books must be sent by postal service all over the United States, whereas in Israel distribution is a matter of taking a long drive around the country in a station wagon and dropping off bundles of books at Orthodox book-stores. Of novels published in English, perhaps ten per cent are marketed in Europe and Israel; there is no corresponding attempt to market Hebrew novels in the Diaspora.

For Israel, the significant event which opened up the

possibility of publishing novels for adults was the advent, in the mid-eighties, of Orthodox periodicals willing to publish serials and of desktop publishing. The periodicals were willing to take chances on material slanted toward an older audience, and

then the authors, from the manuscript already on diskette,

published their books themselves. In Shrikot, Chava Rosenberg justifies this as more profitable. Since the Israeli books are cheap and published in fewer copies, and Israeli publishers sometimes pay less than the standard ten per cent royalty, it is clear that an Israeli chareidi author relying or royalties would clear much less for the same amount of work than his or her American counterpart.

On thing the literary centers have in common is that in both publishing environments the authors are subject to editorial review. In America it is the all-or-nothing decision to accept or reject the book. In Israel, serialized publication depends on the editorial opinions of the magazine in which the book is serialized and the feed-back from the readers. This induces, in both cases, a form of self-censorship on the authors on ideologically sensitive issues, such as the Israel/Diaspora dichotomy. This issue pulls the two sets of authors in different directions. The editors in America are trying to please a readership who live in America and think that living there is a perfectly acceptable thing to do, while the editors in Israel are dealing with readers who tend to feel that the place for a Jew to live is in Israel, and who surely don't want their own children to see the Diaspora as an acceptable alternative place of residence.

§5 The English Orthodox novel: attitudes toward Israel and the Diaspora

As was explained at length in the section on the captive

audience, the Orthodox publishers were traditionally hostile to the idea of novels for adults. This changed in the late '80's with the founding of two or three new publishing houses with a more daring and aggressive outlook. Thus one had in quick

succession: Search my Heart by Sarah Birnhak, Wildflower by Rachel Pomerantz, Working it Out by Ruthie Pearlman, On a Golden Chain by Ruth Benjamin and The Search for Miri by Libby Lazewnik. In the early '90's appeared sequels or quasi-sequels to these books and Thirteenth Avenue by Miriam Friedman.

All the authors in this list are women. Since the targeted readership of the adult Orthodox fiction are Orthodox housewives, it is other Orthodox women who write in their voice. It is not that there are no male authors in the Orthodox publishing world, but they generally concentrate on historical novels, which are irrelevant to the Israel/Diaspora conflict because the books are set in periods before 1948, or on adventure stories, which can be classified with juvenile literature. Classification of various recently published novels into adult and juvenile is difficult, and has been done both on the basis of subject matter and of sophistication.

Let us consider the place of Israel in these works author by author. Each of the following brief descriptions, far from being a plot summary, is merely an indication of the main theme of the book, the locale of the action, and the extent to which living in Israel is or is not mentioned.

Search my Heart is the story of a girl, Leah, infiltrating the religious community in the guise of a ba'alat teshuva in order to play detective in a version of the Yossele Shuchmacher kidnapping case. As she assimilates to the chareidi community, she internalizes the role she has been playing. When she finally locates the kidnapped boy, it is only inadvertently that she betrays him. The story begins and ends in Israel, which Leah comes to view as her spiritual home. The sequel, Family Secrets, is the story of Leah's Orthodox parents-in-law, and takes place mostly in the Diaspora. It documents the rise in religious standards in the religious community, showing why this respectable Orthodox housewife prefers not to tell her daughter-

in-law what she and her husband were like as teenagers. The book culminates when their son Avi, who has become a chareidi rock singer, recharges spiritually in a ba'al teshuva yeshiva in Jerusalem, and someone makes this admittedly improbable match between a boy from an Orthodox home and a ba'alat teshuva. The author seems to be trying to convince her readership that since their own backgrounds are not so spotless, they should be less snobbish about how they marry off their children. Sarah Birnhak lives in America.

Working it Out, Getting it Right, and Making it Last concern a brilliant girl from an English Orthodox home who tries to fulfill her ambitions to be a doctor within the educational framework of the Orthodox community, in spite of having gotten married at eighteen and raising a large family. The first two books take place mainly in Israel. In the last volume she and her husband are driven back to England by the exigencies of her husband's career as a dentist, and only make it to Israel again twenty years later. Daniel, My Son, is an exploration of the problems of foster-parenting and the trauma of having a child taken away by a biological mother who is not competent to rear him. It is set in London and Israel is not mentioned. Ruthie Pearlman lives in London, but maintains a residence in Jerusalem where she and her husband spend part of each year.

Wildflower is the story of a young American college graduate who went to Israel for a summer, stayed on in a seminary for ba'alot teshuva, and married a young man of similar background. Their marriage is at first childless, and they take a foster baby, Ronny, from a secular home. The remainder of the book treats their difficult relationship with the child's natural family, and with the marital difficulties of Barbara's friend Aviva, which center around Aviva's wish to finish her doctorate in America. The sequel, Cactus Blossoms, deals with a court case for custody of Ronny at the time of his bar mitzva. The title

refers to the difficulties of American immigrants in raising their Sabra children. The central theme of the book is the effect on children of estrangement from their parents. With the Gulf War exploding in the background, the book explores, in parallel, the way in which nuclear families are pulled together by the crisis, and the way Jews in the Diaspora identify with Israel during war in the Mid-East. A Time to Rend, A Time to Sew concerns two sisters, a doctor and a lawyer, who study in a seminary in Jerusalem. The elder, Beth, is engaged in an all-out battle to achieve her secular ambitions despite the frequent prejudice she encounters as a woman and as an Orthodox Jew. For career consideration, she returns to America, and marries another academic ba'al teshuva who shares her conflict between secular ambitions and demands of an Orthodox lifestyle. The younger sister, Lynn, surrenders her secular ambitions completely. She settles in Israel and marries a young Israeli widower from a chareidi family, fighting for acceptance from the Orthodox community. The novel has just appeared in Hebrew. Rachel Pomerantz lives in Bnei Brak.

The Search for Miri is about Miri's search for Jewish identity in the DP camps, including the question of going to Israel or America. It is based on the experiences of the author's mother after the war. The sequel, Between the Thorns, deals with the children of the survivors, whose parents have done all they can to protect their offspring from suffering. As the children marry and make their way in life, they must discover for themselves that all roses have thorns. Miri's daughter and her new husband go to spend several childless years in Israel as a kollel couple, and wind up making aliya. Give Me the Moon is about a brother and sister raising their families in New York and Jerusalem respectively, about the effect of their arrogance on the other members of their families, and about the crises that humbled them. Among the various decisions their children face,

one of them is the choice between living in America or in Israel. Libby Lazewnik lived for years in Jerusalem, and has now moved to Baltimore.

On a Golden Chain concerns a Jewish girl adopted into a

Gentile family in England, searching for her natural family in South Africa and Israel. The hero of Yesterday's Child is a boy from a broken home who discovers that his mother had been divorced before marrying his father, and the book explores the South African attitudes toward Jewish divorce, with no particular connection to Israel. A Stranger to her People treats a South African convert who explores the extent to which her family is implicated in the Holocaust. All the Hidden Children is partly adventure story, but the other part is about a ba'al teshuva who feels that his spiritual roots are in Israel and who, at the end of the book, settles there to raise a family. Ruth Benjamin lives in Johannesburg.

Thirteenth Avenue gives the adventures of three religious housewives, friends from high school, who open a business together on Boro Park's main shopping street. It is on a lighter vein than the novels mentioned previously, and Israel is not an issue. Miriam Friedman lives in Brooklyn.

Taken together, these books provide a fairly accurate view of life in the religious strongholds of America and the American immigrant community in Jerusalem. Israel appears in Orthodox novels in English as a place to study or to recharge in Jewish terms, and as a potential home. Political issues are not considered at all. It was acceptable to go from the DP camps to America if that was the first visa to come through, and it is acceptable for someone settled in America to stay there, but to leave Israel for the Diaspora requires some justification in terms of career, making a living, finding a spouse or caring for one's parents.

§6 The Hebrew Orthodox novel: attitudes toward the Diaspora and

Israel

The contemporary novel for Orthodox adults is even harder to define in Hebrew than in English, due to a pious fiction that the novels are written for teenagers. Furthermore, the general level of sophistication in the Hebrew literature is lower than that which prevails in Orthodox novels written in English. However, if we take as an index the extent to which the point-of-view is assigned to married women rather than unmarried girls, we can come to a rough categorization. As before, our list includes only women, because the men are writing historical novels or adventure stories. We will concentrate on the works of Chava Rosenberg, who is surely the most prolific of the Orthodox chareidi novelists, of Leah Fried, and of Yehudit Golan.

Tishim V'tesha is set in the Jewish community of Zurich, but involves an Israeli girl stranded there by a sort of self-induced amnesia. The theme of the book is the extent to which a tooexclusive friendship can end in hard feelings and disaster, and the dangers of wallowing in guilt. By opening herself to new ties and new friendships, Adina learns to deal with the guilt induced by the harm she has done to her best friend However, we see little of Zurich beside the airport and shelter in which the girl is staying. Going abroad had taken her out of a situation which was intolerable and given her time to heal. Kav Hashever is the story of an adopted child in Israel, searching for her natural mother with the compliance of a non-Jewish clerk in America, who actively aids her in her search. After a court battle over custody, she returns to her natural mother, who an American immigrant. Lachtzov Besela deals with two of the current crises in the Jewish community, the difficulties of girls with something non-standard in their background getting accepted to seminary, and the heavy financial burden on chareidi parents

in trying to marry off their children. In the first strand of the plot, it is only an act of negligence toward the candidate that finally forces the seminary administrators to consider her apart from her brother who had gone to live on a kibbutz. In the second strand, as a counter-balance to the descriptions of wearying searches for loans and extra income, the corrupting effects of having too much money are also presented. The Diaspora is not mentioned, except in that an opportunistic foreign businessman occurs as a minor character. In Shrikot, the author treats family feuds, how they grow up, how they are maintained, and what is the cost to all concerned. The younger married heroine has made aliya from Belgium with her husband, and that is the catalyst which eventually reunites the two branches of the family. Chava Rosenberg lives in Jerusalem.

Leah Fried has written two very good novels, Efshar Likro lach Ima, and Abba Chozer, but it is possible to read the first, about the difficulties of blending together two families when a widower marries a widow, without discovering that there is more to the world than Israel and prewar Europe. Abba Chozer, the story of a secular couple who have gotten divorced and split up the children because the father has become religious, actually admits to being a novel for adults. The father, who was demanding and inflexible in the early stages of his teshuva, begins to acquire some of the tact and consideration urged on him by his mentors, while the mother, influenced by the disastrous effects of the divorce on their children, eventually decides that she can do teshuva at her own pace, and without sacrificing her own personal style. At that point the children intervene to patch the family together again. Secular prejudices about the chareidi community are treated in depth. The Diaspora appears as a place for which secular children leave their parents.

Yahalom b'Chol by Yehudit Golan is the story of a girl from Argentina who comes to Israel to visit and stays to learn, and

about her friend from a wealthy family in Brazil who came to Israel to visit her brother the ba'al teshuva and remained to attend seminary herself. Here, as in the books in English, Israel figures as a spiritual center and source of inspiration for Jews from the Diaspora. However, in this novel, South America is presented as such a Jewish wasteland that even to go back for a short visit is viewed as sure spiritual suicide.

§7 International Orthodoxy: Cultural Unity and Cultural Diversity

As the brief plot outlines indicate, the treatment of Israel and the Diaspora in novels published by Orthodox publishing houses is neither similar not symmetrical: the English novels do not treat Israel the way the Hebrew novels treat the Diaspora, but rather much more warmly; the Hebrew novels do not treat the Diaspora the way the English novels do, but rather much more coldly.

It is clear from the author-by-author review that the English authors regard Israel as a desirable place of residence for a Jew, perhaps the most desirable place of residence. The reasons given by the characters in the books have nothing to do either with politics or with strengthening the Jewish State, but with the positive effect of residence in religious communities of Israel on the Jewish identity and religious observance of the individual. However, for people settled already in a religious community in the Diaspora, staying put is regarded as acceptable and even expected. The question of aliya usually arises with regard to Jews who have lived in Israel for a period of a year or more, usually studying in one form or another, and must decide whether or not to return to the Diaspora. In Thirteenth Avenue, written by a Boro Park English teacher about residents of Boro Park, Israel is not mentioned at all.

In the Hebrew novels, the Diaspora is rarely mentioned. A

sojourn abroad by an Israeli chareidi is justified by some sort of mission to benefit others. A child moving abroad is seen as not really caring about his parents, and this is considered to be a problem which strikes secular parents in particular.

To describe this "one-way mirror" phenomenon has been simple enough. To account for it is considerably more difficult. To attempt an explanation without reference to the importance of ideas in shaping Orthodox Jewish culture would be completely impossible.

Adherence to the commandments of the Torah, as interpreted through three thousand years of rabbinical exegesis, is a strong unifying factor in the culture of Orthodox Jews, wherever they may be located. Since the rabbinical literature emphasizes reverence for the rabbinical leadership of the past ages, and places a high value on regarding all Jews as brothers, the Orthodox Jews are provided with a common history and a common set of culture heroes. Since they have, in addition, a common set of holidays, a mutually intelligible liturgy, and a strong tradition of hospitality to fellow Jews, it is a relatively simple matter for an Orthodox traveler to fit into the local community whenever he should find himself in need of a quorum for prayer, kosher food, or a place to spend a Sabbath or holiday. Similarly, an immigrant, arriving in a new country, turns naturally to the local Orthodox community for help in arranging the basic necessities of Orthodox living. This creates a sense that there exists one broad international Orthodox community.

On the other hand, there are many factors combining to

fragment this international Orthodox community into subgroups which barely speak to each other. Each Orthodox community exists in a symbiotic relationship with an ambient secular culture, and outside of Israel, this ambient culture is non-Jewish. Most Orthodox Jews in the Diaspora work and shop in a non-Jewish environment, and their mother tongue is a non-Jewish language.

Despite the homogenizing influences of American films and television on world culture, there remain significant differences in manners, attitudes and opinions from one national culture to the next, and the Orthodox Jews, except when the ambient culture is particularly low-status, usually pick some of these up and are distinguished by them from other Orthodox Jews. In addition, with Yiddish fading as an international language among the younger generation, and neither Hebrew nor English quite taking its place, Orthodox Jews from different countries come up against a language barrier as well.

Among the fragmenting factors there are also internal political factions, stemming from differences of opinion about how Orthodox Jews should meet the particular religious, social and political challenges to the Orthodox community. Of these, one of the important debates is over the question of the extent to which Orthodox Jews should participate in the ambient secular culture. A second fragmenting issue is the attitude toward political Zionism. In Israel these two issues are very closely related, since the ambient secular culture was shaped by political Zionism. In the Diaspora, they are very different.

Having discussed the centripetal and centrifugal forces in

the Orthodox community in general terms, let us now focus on the particular issue which concerns us in this article, the Israel-Diaspora dichotomy. After we have said that Orthodox Jewish attitudes are affected by ambience, it is not surprising that Orthodox books published in the Diaspora reflect a different set of attitudes then Orthodox books published in Israel. The problem is to determine why the difference takes the particular form we have described.

The feeling that a Jew should live in Israel is clearly part of the common heritage of Orthodox Jews in whatever country they live. The yearning of Jews for the Holy Land is embedded in the liturgy, in the laws, and in the history. Many commentators consider it to be one of the commandments of the Torah, and there is considerable discussion in the rabbinical literature about what should be done if a husband and wife disagree about whether or not to live in Israel. Thus is it hardly surprising to find this element in the novels written in English and in Hebrew.

What requires more explanation is the differing attitudes toward the Diaspora. Although we have generally treated the Diaspora first, in this case it seems preferable to begin with the situation in Israel.

A crucial issue for Israeli Orthodox is the distinction

often made between support of political Zionism and living in Israel. The rejection or acceptance of political Zionism is the one most divisive issue in the Orthodox community in Israel; it is the question that divides the Israeli Orthodox into two subcamps which have no communal institutions in common except the cemetery. Nonetheless, both subcamps are agreed in thinking that the proper place for an individual Jew to live is in Israel. In addition, since the ambient secular culture is Jewish, the decision to stay in Israel or to leave it is seen as an affirmation or rejection of Jewishness, even for a secular Israeli.

It is not hard to see why the nationalist Orthodox should

feel this way. Not only is living in Israel an Orthodox value, it also reaffirms their commitment to secular Zionism. It is harder to determine the reasons for the corresponding conviction among the Israeli chareidim that the place for a Jew is in Israel, a conviction that is not shared by chareidim outside of Israel, and to do more than point to some of the factors is probably beyond the scope of the article. The Israelis are supported by the high value placed on living in Israel in the rabbinical literature. They are commending what they themselves do, i.e., live in Israel. They probably gauge the superiority of the Torah study in Israel compared to that in the Diaspora to be

more significant than those in the Diaspora do, particularly since few Israelis study in American or English yeshivas. They are engaged in a cultural struggle with the ambient secular culture, which makes them appreciate reinforcements and deplore deserters. For them, the Israel-Diaspora opposition is nearly assimilated to a Jewish-non-Jewish opposition, and Israelis, secular and non-secular, have a limited and mostly negative experience with non-Jews. Combining all these factors, we arrive at the situation we have documented, that in Israel the prevailing chareidi attitude toward the Diaspora is rejection.

There is a much greater continuum of opinion among American

Jews and a greater sharing of communal institutions. One reason is that the issue of accepting or rejecting political Zionism is relatively less important, and the question of the relationship to the ambient non-Jewish culture comes closer to describing the spectrum of religious opinion. This is a question that allows much finer gradation of opinion than the political question.

Very few Jews in the Diaspora are sitting on their suitcases, waiting for the moment to move to Israel. That being so, most have an emotional stake in believing that living in the Diaspora is an acceptable alternative. Given the bias toward living in Israel in the rabbinical literature, many ideological justifications are offered to support this.

Some opponents of political Zionism do this by blurring the distinction, so important in Israel, between the opposition to secular Zionism and opposition to aliya. Living in Israel involves dealing with a secular Jewish government in various contexts, and those who object to having any dealings at all with the Israeli government can avoid the whole thorny issue by staying abroad. It is hard to know how large this group is, but since they also theoretically prefer Yiddish to Hebrew or English, this group is probably not a significant portion of the prospective market of an Orthodox novel in English.

There is a probably larger group of middle-of-the-road

chareidim who blur the distinction between political Zionism and aliya in a different way. Since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism has masqueraded, in many countries and many circles, as anti-Zionism, and this non-Jewish anti-Zionism makes no particular distinction between political Zionism and the individual's decision to make aliya. For Jews this makes criticism of Zionism seem antiJewish. The usual resolution of this conflict among the non-Zionist Orthodox in America is to keep a low profile on questions of Zionism and support aliya in theory, if not in practice. The English Orthodox novels, as we have described them, follow this line.

Whether the pro-aliya bias in Orthodox literature will have demographically significant effects is a question that remains to be settled. In the last two decades there has neither been a large-scale move toward aliya in the Orthodox community in America, nor a large-scale movement toward leaving Israel in the Orthodox community in Israel. However, the history of the Jewish resettlement of Israel shows both that large-scale aliya can grow quite suddenly, and that ideas and ideals are a central factor in any aliya.

In Israel we have a generation of chareidi girls of marriageable age for whom leaving Israel is not considered an option; for their counterparts in America, most of their cultural heroes, real and imaginary, live in Israel, and they themselves are expected to spend at least one year in seminary in Israel before getting married. At present they and their husbands opt to remain with their families in America, perhaps after spending a few years in Israel as a young kollel couple. What the literature has done is to create a pool of women for whom the idea of aliya is a familiar one, and might become a dominant idea if other factors, family and livelihood, were to change.

In conclusion, the positive attitude toward living in Israel is strongest in those authors who live there themselves, whether they write in English or in Hebrew. However, residents of Israel are over-represented among the English authors, and all the Hebrew authors are Israeli. This reflects the fact that Israel is the cultural center of world Orthodoxy. To consider the Orthodox novels in English alone or in Hebrew alone would give a skewed picture of the entire Orthodox publishing enterprise.

Israel and the Diaspora in contemporary Orthodox literature

BIBLIOGRAPHY