“Who are the people living in Israel now? And what do they want?” Such are the questions that Isabel Kershner’s editor asked her. The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel’s Battle for Its Inner Soul is her attempt at an answer. Reminiscent of Amos Oz’s In the Land of Israel, the book presents a series of encounters with Israelis from across all possible divides — political, religious, ethnic, and more. Kershner’s work as a correspondent for the The New York Times in Jerusalem, and her passion for people and their stories, is evident as she seeks to understand who people are, why they believe and act the way they do, and how those actions and beliefs come together to create and fuel modern Israel’s societal complexities.
Kershner’s reports are deep and expansive. Offering beautiful depictions of neighborhoods and villages, she draws the reader into the lives of the everyday Israelis who comprise the nation’s diverse landscape. She also educates us about recent events — including the conflict surrounding the Temple Mount in May 2021, and the horrific Lag B’Omer crowd rush just a month prior, which left forty-five 45 Hasidim dead — and how they affected the people she met.
In general, Kershner paints sympathetic pictures of the people and communities she profiles. Most communities in Israel first arrived after having escaped some form of trauma — exile, antisemitism, discrimination, genocide — and, for many of those communities, the trauma has become intergenerational. Just as many Holocaust survivors were initially reluctant to share their stories, so too did Palestinians who survived the Nakba hide theirs, only decades later telling younger generations so that their former lives, families, and homes would not be forgotten. Kershner describes the pain experienced by 1990s Russian immigrants, particularly immigrant children, who often met hostility and ridicule from their Israeli-born peers. They later found themselves Jewish enough for the State but not enough for the Orthodox rabbinate that questioned their lineage — just as the 2018 Nation-State Bill “dealt a blow to the Arab Israeli psyche” — affirming that they would never be fully welcome in Israel, the “unique home to the Jewish People.” The primary exception to Kershner’s generally sympathetic portrayals concerns the Haredim. Although she avoids any overt condemnation, her descriptions suggest frustration with their lack of army conscription, their reliance on government support, and their response, or lack thereof, to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Land of Hope and Fear reads as a series of mostly parallel journalistic portraits. The subjects’ lives rarely intersect, and, for the most part, Kershner doesn’t draw comparisons or offer inter-portrait analysis. Each person, each community, stands alone: the Ethiopian refugees facing racism and discrimination, the high-tech businessmen from Tel Aviv carefully exploring possibilities with new partners in Dubai, and the descendants of Labor Zionist kibbutzniks reimagining the possibilities of the desert in a changing economy and growing coral in the Arava to be used for bone grafts. It is a glimpse behind the analysis so often provided by others. Additionally, with minimal notes, the reader is left to rely solely on Kershner’s accounts of the people she met and the stories, historical and contemporary, she describes. In that way, it is an engaging and descriptive narrative of a nation and a people, but not necessarily a resource for future research.
“Yisra-el” means “one who wrestles with God.” Kershner depicts a nation made up of peoples each wrestling with their own stories alongside each other’s experiences, traumas, and dreams. As Israel celebrates its seventy-fifth birthday, having witnessed five elections in three years, Kershner concludes that “as the drama plays out, the actors are staying put.” The people Kershner met either have nowhere else to go or can’t imagine themselves anywhere else. They are in Israel to stay; they are “intrinsic elements of the landscape.” The future of Israel, then, will depend on a better understanding of the diversity of its people and how their desires intersect and diverge. Perhaps these portraits can serve as a guide to that end, so that — as Kershner hopes — Israel will continue to adapt, and ultimately, endure.
Joy Getnick, PhD, is the Executive Director of Hillel at the University of Rochester. She is the author of the Melton School of Adult Jewish Learning Beyond Borders: The History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, has taught history at area colleges, and previously worked in the JCC world and as the director of a teen Israel travel summer program.
