Jews and Words
Jews and Words
December 4, 2012
Israel Studies, Culture & Jewish Thought
NPR — “Ours is a text line, not a bloodline,” is a line from a new book Jews and Words by renowned Israeli novelist and BGU professor of Hebrew Literature Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger, a historian at the University of Haifa.
The book explores the relationship Jews have to words and the characters and stories of the Hebrew Bible, whether or not they consider themselves religious.
“For thousands of years, we Jews had nothing but books. We had no lands, we had no holy sites, we had no magnificent architecture, we had no heroes,” says Prof. Oz.
“We had books, we had texts, and those texts were always discussed around the family table. They became part of the family life, and they traveled from one generation to the next — not unchanged, not unchallenged, but reinterpreted in each generation and reread by each generation.”
The father-daughter writing team are confident that the Jewish tradition of relating to text will continue into the next generations.
“In many ways our bookishness has come now — looking at it from antiquity until today — full circle, tablet to tablet, scroll to scroll. And back with the tablets and the scrolls with a vengeance,” says Oz-Salzberger.
Listen to the full NPR radio interview >>
Read the interview transcript >>
Stories Like This
