Roy Holler "Multiple Identity Politics: The Passing Narratives of Dahn Ben-Amotz" in conversation with Katya Gibel Mevorach
In 1938, Mussia Thilimzogger’s parents put their thirteen-year-old son on a boat from Poland to Palestine. Three years later they perished in the Holocaust. Alone, rejected, and failing to fit in, the young Jewish-Polish immigrant adopted a new biography, changed his birthplace from Rivne to Tel-Aviv, and Hebraicized his foreign sounding name Mussia into Dahn Ben-Amotz (1924-1989). Ben-Amotz was one of many immigrants forced to change their identities and conform to the Zionist vision of the Hebrew: heroic and rough idealist, with a shared hatred of the Jewish diaspora. With his new persona, Ben-Amotz became a cultural icon for generations. But this author who shaped Israeli culture was haunted by little Mussia to his very last day, and the central trauma in his 1968 autobiographical novel, Lizkor veliskoakh (To Remember, to Forget) was not the Holocaust, but his own act of passing.
Focusing on integrationist demands of the Zionist narrative and the transformations of Jewish identities, this talk will introduce the concept of passing to Ben-Amotz's novel. It will argue that the resettlement of the Jewish diaspora in Palestine did more than move physical bodies in and out of the land: it also called for an erasure and restructuring one’s identity in an effort to create a new Israeli culture and an improved Jewish race. Passing describes the turning away from the Jewish past to claim belongingness to the new Hebrew identity in Israel. Ben-Amotz’s fiction is obsessed with lost identities, showing that when a Jew wished to pass as a Hebrew, all prior ethnicities, memories, languages and cultural heritage had to be erased.
Roy Holler is an assistant professor of Israel Studies in the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University, Bloomington, and his B.A. in English from the City University of New York. His current book project, Passing and the Politics of Identity in Israeli and African American Literatures, explores the phenomenon of passing in a comparative context. A part of a chapter from this project is forthcoming publication in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.
Katya Gibel Mevorach holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. She received her B.A. and M.A. in African Studies from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. Gibel Mevorach is Professor in Anthropology and American Studies at Grinnell College. She is the author of Black, Jewish and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity (1997), and articles, review essays and position papers have appeared in journals which iinclude American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Biography, Developing World Bioethics, Identities, Cultural Studies, Research in African Literatures, נוגה (Noga: Israeli Feminist Journal), עתון אחר (Iton Aher) and The Jerusalem Post (Israel).
This lecture is part of our Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Award Lectures, in partnership with Columbia University’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.
