There's a great show up at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan with 60 photographs by Russian Jewish photographers, many of them born in the Soviet Union, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Israel. I went because a friend has pictures in it and I'm interested in images of Israel.
It's a 60th celebration, but there were few grand claims in the photographs. Many of the pictures were almost snapshots, of a tourist character–markets, the desert, the samovar, Masada. Others are picturesque. The Arabs swimming in the Dead Sea, the woman bather covered. The Bedouin boy on a donkey. The Ethiopian policewoman. The Baha'i temple in Haifa looking down on the sea. You see an Israel with a varied Asian population.
There was not much piety or religion, I liked that. And very little politics. Just two images that were political: Nataly Levich, a portraitist, did pictures of the Hitnatkut, the people wearing orange to protest the Gaza disengagement in '05, and then did a picture of the Gaza settlers resettling in Israel. The picture of the protesters made them seem ordinary, and the picture of them resettling was very prosaic. You saw boxes outside on the ground and ramshackle housing, like other displaced people the world around. It was a reminder of how little ideology has to do with every day life.
There was surprisingly little ideology in the show. Russian Jews are driven, enjoying American freedom. And they know from ideologies. Heck, much of the Soviet intelligentsia was Jewish. Luba Proger, who curated the show and has some of her pictures in it, writes:
Although
they have integrated almost seamlessly into the fabric of New York, as
they continue to prosper, grow, and form families of their own, they
are often confronted by the question of roots, identity and belonging.
Israel is one of the places they look to for answers….
I like her frankness about Israel as a mental space. It suggests the huge gap between all the projections on Israel of a political and religious character, and its actuality, the people who actually have to live their lives somewhere. If American Jews would treat it more like a tourist destination, a place to get snapshots of Arabs in the Dead Sea, and camels, and religious guys at the western wall, and not as a messianic destination, we might all be better off.
