Rights sold to : Germany (Suhrkamp / Jüdischer Verlag), and USA (Harvard UP)
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Israel has changed. It’s no longer the country everyone still wants to believe in, produced from the melting pot of Europe. The Israel of its beginnings, of its pioneers, of the Shoah, is a thing of the past. It has rebuilt itself with different points of reference and different influences. Not only is it no longer haunted by its European past, but it no longer has the same ties as before: Obama’s America is cause for concern. Israel now exists in a cyberspace at the heart of a globalisation process that has an increasingly Asian flavour. Here postmodernism blends with an ancient, even archaic past that is emphatically religious.
While the rest of the world continued with its mantras of “peace process” and “roadmap”, Israel was changing its references. Its businessmen now invest in Romanian farmland, build shopping centres in Poland (a country also frequented by Israel’s most devoted pilgrims who travel there to visit the tombs of Hassidic rabbis), triumph in Asia and Latin America with their military and information technology knowhow, and in Africa with their bio-agricultural developments. The great biblical and Talmudic past is never forgotten, far from it. But it is combined with the technological progress of a resolutely modern society.
Diana Pinto is Italian, American and French. She is an independent research specialist into questions of democratic pluralism, and is now focusing particularly on the implications of the Jewish presence in Europe and the Middle East since 1989. She has worked as an advisor to the political directorate of the Council of Europe. She is a regular contributor in colloquiums and at universities in Europe, the United States and Israel, and is a founder member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a visiting fellow at Harvard. In 1991, Odile Jacob published her Entre deux mondes.
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