By Rabbi Rachel Esserman

Joan Leegant will speak about “Israel’s multi-culture: it’s not just the Ashkenazim and Sephardim anymore – and never was” at the Jewish Federation of Greater Binghamton’s Campaign 2025 Super Sunday Brunch on Sunday, September 8. For more information about the event, see above on this page of The Reporter.

When Joan Leegant visited Israel in 1978, she thought her visit would only last for six months. Instead, she stayed for three years. “I fell in love with the country,” Leegant said in an e-mail interview. “It was young and exciting, still in formation. People were vigorous – hiking the land north to south, seemingly thrilled about each new archeological find – and the culture was social and cohesive; people were passionately interested in engaging with one another. The consumerism that later reached Israel wasn’t there yet; there were fewer cars; my first rental flat didn’t have a phone. I liked this passionate, noisy society that also still retained anti-materialistic remnants of the old socialism. I hadn’t liked the careerism and materialism of the American world I’d known and grown up in. I knew my view of Israel was romanticized – there was economic hardship and all the usual stresses of any westernized society – but I still loved what I saw.” 

Leegant left Israel after becoming ill and returned to her parents’ home in Long Island to recover. Once well, she moved to Boston and resumed her career as a lawyer. However, one aspect of her stay in Israel permanently affected her life: Leegant had begun writing music, which she noted was “my first taste of living a life where I devoted a significant amount of time to creative expression.”

Later, at age 40, when she was no longer working as a full-time lawyer, she returned to the arts, this time as a writer. “Ten years later, I began to write fiction,” Leegant said. “My experiences in Jerusalem soon made their way into the stories. These formed the basis of my first book, ‘An Hour in Paradise: Stories,’ which went on to win the PEN/New England Book Award, the Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction, and be named a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. My second book, a novel, ‘Wherever You Go,’ is also set in Israel and is in part about American Jewish settlers on the West Bank. Half of the stories in my new book, “Displaced Persons: Stories,” are likewise set in Israel. Though I’ve written a few stories set in Boston and have an in-progress novel set farther afield in western Massachusetts, I find myself returning again and again to Israel, and to Jewish life more broadly, as the fount and source of my fiction. I feel as though I have one foot in each country; this is also why I was so grateful to be offered the opportunity to teach at Bar-Ilan some 25 years after leaving Israel the first time. Writing about it in some ways enables me to be back there again.” (For The Reporter’s review of “Displaced Persons,” click here.) 

Leegant noted the different ways Judaism is practiced in Israel and the United States. “I think the biggest difference – and this is well-documented – is that Jewish life in Israel is baked into the culture, so that even for people who are wholly secular, the Jewish framework is ever-present,” she said. “Storekeepers say ‘Shabbat shalom’ on Friday as a sort of equivalent to ‘have a nice weekend.’ Almost all Jewish Israelis sit shiva. More than 95 percent of Israelis host or attend a seder. The Hebrew Bible is taught in public, i.e, secular, schools for its cultural and historical and literary value, as is Jewish history. I’ve heard American Jews say that Israelis they meet in the States lack Jewish literacy because the Israelis may not know how to say Kiddush or make a Motzei over challah, for example, or are unfamiliar with synagogue liturgy, the sorts of things American Jews learn in Hebrew school. But what Americans don’t see if they haven’t been to Israel is how Jewish life pervades Israeli society.”

She added that if people want to live a Jewish life in America, they need to affiliate with Jewish organizations and make an effort to include Judaism in their lives since they are not surrounded by Jewish culture, something that is part of everyday life in Israel. She also noted that it can be very expensive to be Jewish in the U.S. “Obviously, a good deal of nuance is missing from the broad-brush picture I’ve just painted,” she added. “One can have a thoroughly rich and fulfilling Jewish life in the States, and a Jewish Israeli can have an almost entirely non-Jewish existence in Israel, especially in recent decades as non-kosher food has become more ubiquitous – it took me awhile to realize that ‘white meat’ in Hebrew means pork.”

At first, Leegant worried about the reception of her latest work in the post October 7 world where authors are being review bombed (give one star or less in reviews on Goodreads or bookstore websites) because the reviewer considers them a Zionist author. She says that, fortunately, that has not been a problem. “I haven’t encountered the negative reactions documented elsewhere by others,” she said. “And while I’ve concentrated on arranging author talks primarily at Jewish venues, a thoughtful editor of a literary journal where one of my stories appeared, and is not herself Jewish, suggested that I might be limiting myself unnecessarily, and that perhaps I oughtn’t rule out spaces such as libraries and other civic venues. I’ve since taken her advice and found the non-Jewish spaces I’ve reached out to extremely receptive. I’ve also found that podcasters outside the Jewish world who’ve interviewed me about my book have been across-the-board positive and enthusiastic about the stories and the subject matter. So, while review-bombing and cancellations are definitely real and disturbing, they may not be as wholesale or widespread as it might seem. I certainly hope so.”