To the Editor:
If your correspondent, Mr. J. L. Teller, had put his last paragraph first, in his article “The Spartan Youth of Israel” (July), his style would have had a less irritating effect. The reader would have understood that the author had set out on a fault-finding tour—knowing the terrain, knowing that certain conditions obtained among the youth of Israel, and, for the sake of a stimulating discussion, probing into its hinterland, not certain what he would find. . . .
Basing my arguments on only such facts as Mr. Teller gives in this particular effort, it is quite possible CO to find Mr. Teller contradicting himself; and (2) to draw different conclusions from his interpretations. . . .
“The typical Israeli youth,” is, for instance, said to be “coaxed into pouring his innermost thoughts into group discussions led by a youth leader”; the word “coaxed,” I take it, is meant to make the reader sympathize with this youth for being denied an opportunity to keep his innermost thoughts to himself. In the same paragraph we are told that the same youth’s “capacities for introspection or the expression of personal feeling have been either arrested or deliberately repressed—entrusted, like a sexual dream, only to his diary.” Now, which am I to choose? Is he coaxed to discuss his thoughts or is his diary the only witness to them? . . .
The analysis that the sabra wanted to set out without memories is penetrating. But Mr. Teller does not go far enough. The memory which the sabra succeeded in cutting away was the memory of the ghetto. What he remembers and rebels against for want of another memory which would have served the purpose, is the memory of his own past, his childhood. The soil is his, very immediate, past; the soul-searching is a natural reaction. . . . The most serious failure of the sabra has been that the leaders of the youth movements have not, to continue in Mr. Teller’s train of thought, sifted their memory before discarding all of it. . . .
Elizabeth Mayer
Cincinnati, Ohio
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To the Editor:
I have enjoyed passing “The Spartan Youth of Israel” around here to our Israeli student, to several students just returned from Israel, to our more enthusiastic Zionist students, and to one or two anti-Zionists. Most of the comments have been dictated by the prejudices of the individuals, with this exception: all of us who have been in Israel, who have known sabras well, agree that Mr. Teller is a remarkable observer. We don’t always agree on the details of the article—I, for example, find too many facile generalizations about Israeli youth, of which, like the elephant, “There ain’t no such animal.” But the soul-searching of which Mr. Teller writes I did find in almost every young Israeli I have known. . . .
I hope you’ll be interested in knowing that COMMENTARY is read by more students here than any single publication we take except The New Yorker. . . . From time to time, it aggravates hell out of a lot of students—and the director, too—but that’s not necessarily bad either.
Rabbi E. J. Lipman
B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington
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