Miri Regev’s Culture War
The Israeli minister of culture and
sports wants
nothing less than an overthrow of the nation’s elite.
nothing less than an overthrow of the nation’s elite.
By RUTH MARGALITOCT. 20, 2016
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The Tel Aviv Museum of art is a
somber slab of concrete built in the no-fuss brutalist style of the late ’60s.
The architect who planned the museum also designed Israel’s nuclear reactor;
such is the overlap between culture and political exigency in the country. One
Sunday in March, a throng of artists, actors and writers clustered in the
museum’s main auditorium. They were awaiting the arrival of Miri Regev,
Israel’s culture and sports minister, of the ruling Likud Party. A year
earlier, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister and the chairman of Likud,
secured a fourth term in office and swore in his ministers, a coalition widely
regarded as the most right-wing in Israeli history.
In that time, Regev has done just
about everything she can to alienate and enrage those she considers the elites,
or the “cultural junta,” of Israel. Leftists. Secularists. Tel Avivians.
Ashkenazim — Jews of European origin. People who, as she told me recently,
think that “classical music is better than the Andalusian music” of Morocco, or
that “Chekhov is more important than Maimonides.”
Regev, who is 51, grew up in Kiryat
Gat, a development town in Israel’s south, which — like many other towns in
Israel’s peripheria, or periphery, the areas outside the country’s urban
center — was set up in the 1950s to house the influx of Jewish immigrants from
Muslim countries. In person she is warm; after two minutes of conversation she
will call you kapara (“sweetheart” in Jewish Moroccan dialect) or neshama
(“soul” in Hebrew). Yet in public life she comes across as crass and hotheaded.
That afternoon in the museum, she was venturing into hostile territory. She had
agreed to speak at an arts-and-culture conference organized by the liberal
newspaper Haaretz to address the interplay of state funding and cultural
production. Many of those in attendance wondered if Regev had come to make
amends: Shortly after her appointment, at a meeting with stage actors and guild
representatives, Regev all but acknowledged being driven by a sense of
political vendetta. “We got 30 seats” — in the Knesset — “you got only 20,” she
told those present. She later gave an interview in which she called the Israeli
creative class “tight-assed” and “ungrateful.”
When at last Regev materialized,
wearing an all-black ensemble and crimson lipstick, a murmur swept through the
auditorium. She is a striking, fiery presence with wide-set eyes, prominent
lips and dark hair streaked with reddish highlights. Standing in front of the
audience, her expression set between a smirk and a scowl, she clutched the
lectern with one hand. “I was always told to start a speech with a quote; it
makes for a cultured impression,” she began. “So here goes. As the famed
Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu once put it” — she switched to accented English —
“Cut the bullshit! Cut the bullshit!”
Recent
Comments
She
is a dog with fleas ...and while he is a above the curve learner...and has
picked the perfect V.P. she is a criminal...and that is that fact Justice
Department
15 hours ago
Culture and sports.....elite and
resorts last I saw was a false report of blood n sand over the land of abraham
/Peace in the Middle East is...
Billy
from Brooklyn
15 hours ago
Opposes freedom of speech if the
opinion is contrary to current public policy? Using her office to further her
political career? No...
Voyageur
15 hours ago
Over and above the portrait of M.
Regev, this article provides an excellent insight on Israelis current social
and political cultures.
- See All Comments
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Stunned silence fell over the crowd.
Then people began to jeer. Someone cried out, “The minister of occupation!”
“We will expose the hypocrisy and
the greed,” Regev continued, her voice rising. “We will guarantee loyalty to
the laws of the country!”
People rose from their seats and
booed. “Shame on you!” a voice rang out.
Since joining Likud in 2008, Regev
has become known for her provocations no less than for her nationalist fervor.
The columnist Nahum Barnea called her “a walking graffiti wall.” There was the
time she described migrant workers from Africa as “cancer in our body.” And the
time she lashed out at an Arab member of the Knesset: “Go to Gaza, you
traitor!” She sometimes unfurls an Israeli flag during speeches and has on
occasion taken reporters to pray at the Western Wall before an interview. In
2013, she introduced a bill to annex the Jordan Valley, a move that would all
but foreclose the prospect of a two-state solution.
Now she continued on a familiar
course, stating that the ministry would stop serving “as an A.T.M.” and calling
to divert money away from “powerful institutions.” At one point she paused.
“Let’s admit it,” she said. “Your culture demands exclusive funding, while
another culture has been silenced for years.”
That other culture is Mizrahi, or
“Eastern.” It’s a catchall term that includes Jewish communities from Muslim
countries in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as the Sephardic Jews,
whose origins can be traced to Spain and Portugal, who settled there. These
communities immigrated to Israel in mass waves after its founding in 1948 and
into the early 1950s, upending its demographic makeup: The Jewish population,
almost exclusively Ashkenazi, became more than 40 percent Mizrahi. But it
wasn’t just the country’s ethnic composition that changed. The Jewish population
that predated the founding of the state was primarily young, secular and
idealistic; it was also heavily male. By contrast, the new Mizrahi arrivals
tended to be large families from traditional societies. In their ethnic garb,
often with no knowledge of Hebrew, they struck the native-born Israeli sabras
and the European Ashkenazim as provincial and uneducated. Zalman Shazar, a
future president of Israel, warned that these new immigrants “never knew the
taste of high school.” This sense of superiority was heightened by the economic
plight of the Mizrahim: Having no real accommodation or employment for them,
the government of David Ben-Gurion placed them in overcrowded transit camps,
where squalor and hunger became the norm.
The socioeconomic gap between
Ashkenazim and Mizrahim has since narrowed, spurred by a rise in interethnic
marriage (about a third of Jewish Israeli children born today are ethnically
mixed). But it hasn’t disappeared altogether. Mizrahim earn roughly 25 percent
less per capita than Ashkenazim, according to Momi Dahan, a professor of public
policy at Hebrew University. Social and cultural tensions still percolate. In a
2007 poll, more than half of respondents characterized relations between
Ashkenazim and Mizrahim in the country as “not good.”
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