Hillel Halkin has a beautifully-written article on Tel Aviv in the current issue of COMMENTARY — part history, part travelogue, and part political essay.
The city, founded in 1909, is approaching its 100th anniversary, and it is a remarkable city:
"There’s more going on in Tel Aviv than in Paris," a visiting French friend once said to me, and there is more going on in it now than there was then. Leaf through The City Mouse, the most widely circulated weekly entertainment guide for this town of 360,000 people. A recent issue picked at random has 154 pages. In a very partial summary of its contents, you would find written up, listed, or advertised in it a week-long festival of Irish music; 18 movie houses showing 58 different films; 35 rock and pop performances; 36 jazz and blues concerts; 27 classical music concerts; 29 evenings of Israeli singing; 46 plays, including Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Antigone, and Death of a Salesman; nine dance concerts; 28 art-gallery exhibits; ten special museum exhibits; hundreds of places to eat and drink, among them nine newly opened pubs, thirteen newly opened restaurants, and six newly opened cafes; a lecture series on Tolstoy, Orhan Pamuk, Agnon, Flaubert, Bialik, and Walt Whitman; 34 stand-up comedy performances; 32 shows and story-telling performances for children; and over 100 workshops and courses in such subjects as wine connoisseurship, the martial arts, art appreciation, cooking and baking, body building, pregnancy, marital relationships, yoga, Judaism and Kabbalah, coaching, fashion, creative writing, music, acting and psychodrama, psychology, modern dance, belly dancing, and photography.
Tel Aviv has existed for much of its history as an "anti-Jerusalem" in the Israeli consciousness:
Even in its early years, the contrast between the two cities was a staple of social commentary. . . Jerusalem was rooted in history, sanctified by tradition, home to a large and in part fiercely anti-Zionist religious population; Tel Aviv was predominantly secular from the start, free of sacred associations. In Jerusalem, the passions and claims of Judaism and Islam clashed continually; in Tel Aviv, Jews and Arabs lived apart. . . .
Jerusalem was the university on Mount Scopus, Tel Aviv the bohemian life of its cafes. Jerusalem was a stronghold of the political Right, Tel Aviv leaned Left. Jerusalem was study and prayer, Tel Aviv commerce and play. Jerusalem was the world of the spirit, Tel Aviv the life of the flesh. And so forth.
The two cities were barely an hour’s drive apart. Yet they had different personalities, atmospheres, styles, even literatures. The writers of Jerusalem, it was said, were refined, restrained, subtle; those of Tel Aviv direct and sensual. In the folklore of Tel Aviv, Jerusalemites were pale-skinned, conservative, inhibited, snobbish. In that of Jerusalem, Tel Avivians were coarse, materialistic, frivolous. . .
Tel Avivians could joke that the sidewalks in Jerusalem were rolled up at 9 p.m. and Jerusalemites could banter back that this was because the city’s sole prostitute had moved to Tel Aviv to be less lonely, but there was an understanding on both sides that the two cities were complementary and that it was a matter of taste which you preferred.
After the 1967 war, when Jerusalem became a united city again, with access to its formerly lost holy and historical sites, Jerusalem overtook Tel Aviv:
Everything was new, exotic, and exciting: the Arab bazaars and alleys of the Old City, the ancient Jewish remains from the First and Second Temple period, the new neighborhoods springing up across the old border to double and triple the city’s size, the easy access to Bethlehem, Jericho, and a Palestinian countryside of biblical pastorality. It was a heady time. Foreign tourists flocked to Jerusalem, spending a week there and a day, if at all, in Tel Aviv. Jerusalem was now "in," Tel Aviv "out."
But a third stage occurred in the late 1980’s, when Jerusalem — “at least for secular, liberal Israelis" — began to lose its charm:
The nationalist Right was gaining strength; nowhere in Israel did Likud, which had come to power for the first time in the 1977 elections, have a more faithful following. Religious immigrants from abroad were buying up property and forcing up prices. And while Jerusalem was growing more expensive, it was also growing poorer, because its tax base was narrowing and the jobs were all in Tel Aviv. The ultra-Orthodox were reproducing at Malthusian rates and invading one neighborhood after another; secular Israelis felt under siege. The city was growing shrill, grim, intolerant. The romance was gone from it.
Such was the litany. And meanwhile, there, an hour away, was Tel Aviv, a beckoning oasis of normality. No zealots stalked its streets. Arabs were rarely seen in them; black-hatted Jews were not common, either. Palestinian-Israeli and secular-religious tensions seemed far away. . . .
But as Halkin shows in reviewing several recent books about Tel Aviv, the city is not as innocent or independent of the alleged "crimes" of Zionism as its liberal inhabitants may think; post-Zionism is an irresponsible intellectual luxury; and ultimately Jerusalem and Tel Aviv will hang together or hang separately:
[T]here is no "good" Tel Aviv as opposed to a "bad" Jerusalem for leftist Israelis to salve their consciences with. The Zionist project must be viewed as a totality, of which Tel Aviv was an integral part. . . . Tel Aviv, as its inhabitants were once well aware, owes its existence to Zionism and to Zionism’s success in creating a Jewish state, just as it owes its future to that state’s continued welfare. To enjoy Tel Aviv’s riches while dissociating oneself from Zionism, like the son who happily spends his father’s inheritance while disapproving of how it was earned, is sanctimonious.
Halkin’s multi-textured ssay is a tribute not only to Tel Aviv, but to the richness of Israeli culture, the diversity of its communities, and the complexities of its remarkable history — all achieved while under relentless existential attack by those who have chosen death rather than life.
