The following is a transcript of Episode 182 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Sara: Hello and welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Sara Labaton, your guest host this week, and director of teaching and learning at the Shalom Hartman Institute. We’re recording on Wednesday, April 3rd. 

This is the time when some Jews are bringing up boxes filled with Passover goods, or if you’re like me, thinking uneasily that they should probably start. Alongside the Seder plates, kosher for Passover cutlery, and afikomen bags, are stacks of Haggadot, sometimes with wine stains and crumbs going back decades. And indeed, the Haggadot are part and parcel of the Seder table tableau. It is wholly appropriate that the people of the book sit down with a book when celebrating and commemorating their national foundation story, the Exodus from Egypt. While the Haggadah is part of the Jewish canon, alongside the Torah, Talmud, and Siddur, it is also uniquely elastic, responsive, and dynamic. 

Simultaneously, the Seder and the obligation to retell the story of the Exodus highlight the limits of the book. The Haggadah is a means, not an end, and slavish devotion to the script of the Haggadah can inhibit our ability to reenact and truly experience liberation, to translate the Exodus into our own contemporary milieus and idioms, to fully internalize the ideas, ideals, and values at the heart of the Exodus story. The Seder can be a container for familial, communal, and individual memories, and an opportunity to express our identities and cultures. When my family asks each other in Arabic, min wajeyya, where are you coming from, and the answer is miMitzrayim, from Egypt, it is a reminder that our ancestors in Aleppo partook of the same Seder ritual. 

When we see the ashtrays that, as a teenage immigrant, my great great grandfather bought from Woolworth’s to serve as his Seder plate, we remember that America provided a safe harbor for him and opportunities to succeed. Jews are obsessed with memory and storytelling. It’s not just that we as a people annually remember what happened to our people in the far distant past. We also remember, as it were, the remembering. We remember how our families and our communities have remembered over many Seders spread across many centuries. We have memories of doing this national remembering. 

And if Passover is a time when the people of the book explore their relationship with script, scripture, and stories, the place where this relationship is on full display is the National Library of Israel. The library functions as a repository of written and now digital products connected to the state of Israel, the land of Israel, the Hebrew language, Judaism, and the Jewish people. These include maps, manuscripts, photos, posters, archives, ethnographic music, internet sites, and of course books. 

But as I learned as a graduate student living in Jerusalem, researching and writing my dissertation, the library’s functions are manifold, and it is far more than the sum of its parts. The reading room at the National Library was austere and serious. On a given day, I could request a book on medieval Hebrew astrology and sit down between someone comparing Talmudic manuscript variants and someone else studying Palestine under the British Mandate. The seats were occupied by luminaries whose scholarship I used and who I regarded with some degree of star-struck fangirldom. 

But at the same time, it was a place where scholars from all over the world would come to converse, argue, collaborate, and catch up. Just like the Seder, the library captured a rich symposium of voices, coming from different fields and with different takes, writing the story of the past, using contemporary tools, and ultimately bringing it into the future. It felt like I was privy to a type of kibbutz galuyot, an ingathering of the Jews to Israel, as prophesied in books like Deuteronomy and Isaiah. But here, instead of God returning the Israelites or Jewish people, it is Jewish books and artifacts spending hundreds of years written in dozens of languages from all over the world, traveling back to a homeland and reality most of their authors could only have dreamed of. 

Indeed, the vision for the library and its origins are intertwined with the Zionist story itself, with Polish Zionist Joseph Chazanovich writing in 1899. “In Jerusalem, a great house shall be built, high and lofty, in which shall be treasured the fruits of the Jewish people’s endeavor from the moment it became a nation. And to this great house shall stream our masters, sages, and all the scholars of our nation, and everyone with a heart which understands our literature, and whose spirit yearns and strives for Torah and for wisdom, and to know of the history of our people and the lives of our ancestors.”

Chazanovich issued the charge to collect or gather everything. At the Third Zionist Congress in 1899, in fact, he refused to shake the hands of the young scholar Joseph Klausner, who did not send his written works promptly enough. For Chazanovich, the library was a symbol of a national movement, nothing less than the renewal of a people, culture, and language in their home. 

The National Library has been in the news recently. Partly because of the major renovation it just underwent, the library was scheduled to reopen on October 17th. What was supposed to be a celebration of another milestone in the 130-year history of this institution had to be postponed. There is another reason, however, why the library is making news. The library has set out to collect documents and archive any and all materials related to October 7th and the subsequent war in Gaza. 

In this sense, the Library holds both the miracle and trauma of modern Israel. The treasure, side by side with the tragedy. At a point when history is being written, this is a massive assumption of responsibility on the part of the Library to document this moment and ultimately shape how it is remembered for generations to come. Like the Seder, the National Library has books at the center, but also embodies the national memory of the State of Israel and of the Jewish people, with all the complexity and tension that entails. 

With me today to unpack some of this is Dr. Raquel Ukeles, the head of collections of the National Library of Israel, before which Dr. Ukeles served as the curator of the library’s Islam and Middle East collection. Thank you so much for being here with us today.

Raquel: Thank you, Sara. What a phenomenal introduction to the library. I feel like you went right to the heart, both of what the library set out to do 130 years ago, and als the depths of the pathos of the work we’re doing now. 

Sara: Great. So let’s actually start with that. How did it come to be that the library took on this incredibly ambitious project of documenting both October 7th and the war. What is the library hoping to accomplish with this project? And what are some of the challenges that the library is facing as it tries to gather these materials and sensitively and ethically share them?

Raquel: So as you said, the library is the institution for the collective memory of the state of Israel and the Jewish people. It’s our mission to document and collect, preserve, and make available our history, our culture, our society, in the high points, and in the depths of the worst moments. 

October 7th is one of the greatest catastrophes to befall the Jewish people, and in the history of the State of Israel. And it is also one of the most monumental chapters that we are watching unfold in front of our eyes. And so it speaks to our core mission that we need to collect and preserve this material. Now, the library started collecting material not on October 7th, that was Simchat Torah, not on October 8th. That’s a day I can barely remember, but on October 9th, we started to work. 

And the truth is that we were not the first to start documenting. One of the most interesting and challenging aspects of this project is that overnight and until today they have developed what we’ve now counted to about 200 grassroots collection efforts. And it’s part of the same remarkable solidarity move that I think a lot of us have read about, of people immediately getting to work at the civic level, that people overnight understood what I said before, that this was a critical historical moment, I think we all watched in horror how immediately people began to deny what happened. And so people in the south and all over Israel got to work documenting, for many different reasons, many different kinds of material, different approaches, from the most stark, collecting the facts, to how do you tell this story in different contexts.

And so our work has been to collect directly and also to almost put our hands around all of this extraordinary voluntary work and to offer a home, a long-term, home to all of these different collecting efforts. 

We’re actually hosting a conference this Sunday, April 7th, which is exactly six months from October 7th. And we are gathering this community, this community of hundreds of people who are documenting October 7th. And bringing them together, in a lot of cases, to see each other for the first time, because it’s a community that developed virtually and digitally on WhatsApp and email exchanges. And so they’re all coming together to Jerusalem. We’ve given space for collection efforts to highlight their work. And we’re going to get into some of these ethical dilemmas that you, that you referenced. 

This work is challenging not only because of all the different partners involved, but also because it has excruciating aspects to it, that go way beyond the legal issues of intellectual property. We’re talking about the most intimate and painful episodes of human beings lives. And some people want to share their stories, some people don’t want to share their stories and some people are ambivalent.

So we have created a consortium of the major institutions and collection efforts, and we’re hashing through writing an ethical code for this work. How do you enable people to tell their stories, but give them space to regret, to change their minds? How do you hold on to the trace of that, as material moves from a local collection effort of a particular kibbutz to the National Library, so that the person who gives that testimony or shared that WhatsApp or offered that poem, that 5, 10, 20 years from now, can still hold on to their connection to that material and to get to say, I don’t want this in the world, or I’ve changed my mind?

How do we make sure to give the space to come back around to these people because how they think about October 7th and this period, which is still ongoing, that our thinking about it is evolving and to allow for that evolution? 

And so just in these first few moments, we’re touching on many different challenges of this work because on the one hand it’s, it’s about collecting as much as possible that moment to moment set of facts of what happened and, you know, to try to create a trusted repository and authentic record, but also recognizing that as this critical moment in Israeli history, we’re going to be chewing on this for a very long time. And so it’s both that moment, but also the span that’s at this point, open-ended.

Sara: I wanted to pick up the thread of the library service as the national memory of the state of Israel and of the Jewish people. And I, I know that the library went through a name change recently from the Jewish National and University Library to the National Library of Israel. And I think that the recent this recent name change reflects the diversity of people who can claim this library as their own, and it begs the question of who the library belongs to and who belongs to the library. 

So I wanted to ask you about two specific sites where tension or dilemmas might manifest. First, the library, like you said, is a repository of national memory for a Jewish state with non-Jewish citizens. And second, the library is also the repository of national memory for the entire Jewish people, more than half of whom live outside of Israel. 

So let’s start with how the library wrestles with the responsibility of serving minority populations, specifically the non-Jewish citizens of Israel. A deep challenge that gets played out more broadly, of course, on the Israeli political, legal, and social scene in all sorts of ways. And I’m especially interested if you could unpack a little bit how the library manages absentee property, namely books and manuscripts that were found in Palestinian homes in 1948 when their owners fled West Jerusalem.

Raquel: I always think of the library as a microcosm of Israel, both today and historically. And so the library was founded in, as you mentioned, in the late 19th century as part of this revitalization of Jewish culture. And it was the project of cultural Zionists. It was their first project. The second project was the university, but the first project was to build a library because the library is a way to do this ingathering of the exiles, this kibbutz galuyot. And in that case, it was the ingathering of Jewish culture.

And so the first mission of the library was this collecting of the national memory at the ethnic understanding. And that is the library of the Jewish people. In 1925, with the founding of the Hebrew University, the university adopted the original library and changed the name from its original, it had a few names, but then it was the National Library, in the Jewish national sense, and then they changed it to the Jewish National and University library. 

When I first moved to Israel and started working at the library in the end of 2010, I naively thought it was the Jewish comma, national comma, and university library, meaning it has three roles, right? The ethnic, the state’s, and the academic. 

And in funny ways, I was foreshadowing our current situation, but historically, it was Jewish, dash, national. Meaning it held onto this historical, national understanding in the ethnic sense, and actually didn’t shift after 1948. There was a kind of archaic understanding of nationalism, but it was primarily a university library with a universalist trajectory.

In 2007, the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, passed the National Library Law and changed its name. And the shift was understood in a number of ways, starting with the idea that the country needed a national library that would serve in an active way as the collective memory of all the people in the country, but still holding on to its historical ethnic national role.

And so, again, the library serves as a microcosm of some of the most existential challenges of Israeli society. And that is, what does it mean to be a Jewish and democratic state? What does it mean to be a national library of the Jewish people worldwide, and the national library of all the residents and citizens of this country?

And as you put your finger on it, the litmus test for the way in which we serve both roles is how do we serve the role of being the national library for the non-Jewish residents and citizens of this country? The other litmus test is how are we the Jewish library for Jews outside of Israel? Those are the two case studies, right? 

So if we start with the first one, the library has been collecting Arabic material for a hundred years. This year we’re celebrating a hundred years of the Arabic and Islam Collection. And I always like going back to the founding of that collection because it speaks to the mission of the library and the potential role that the library can play in Israeli society. And that is, there were descriptions of the founding of this library, of the Arabic and Islamic library, in all the different newspapers at the time. 

In October, what’s Chol Hamoed Sukkot, the middle of the Sukkot holiday, in 1924, there was a modest celebration of science in Jerusalem, that’s how they described it. And there was a who’s-who of elite Jerusalem society that came, and the reports mentioned Muslims, Jews, local Christians, foreign European dignitaries, the British mandate officials, and the heads of the Zionist movement. And they all came to celebrate science. 

And the two speakers that day were Judah Magnes, who becomes the following year, the first president of Hebrew University and Chaim Weizmann, who becomes the first president of Israel. And they both spoke about the cultural humanistic aspects, I’m translating from the Hebrew, the cultural humanistic aspects of this library as a meeting place for scholars to come together and study together in this land. And that was in 1924. 

So the library has this extraordinary potential to be a space that belongs to everyone. And in fact, the slogan today of the library is “hasipur shel kulanu,” that is, the story of all of us. 

Now, Israel is a place where cultural identity and national identity is complicated, and so an institution like the National Library that has these clear Zionist roots, clear roots of being historically a Jewish National Library, is not the most obvious candidate to be a library that belongs to everyone. That, I have always felt is a responsibility that we need to actualize. And so I spoke about the potential of what the library can be, but it doesn’t necessarily function that way. 

In order for it to function that way, we have to make sure that we A) create a space that is welcoming and inclusive to everyone, and that we have materials and collections that meet different community needs, and programming that is interesting and attractive and engaging to different community groups, and it’s true about the Arab Palestinian community in Israel, but it’s true about many other communities as well. 

So in the case of the Arab community, so within the building, when you walk around the new National Library, you’ll see every sign in three languages. And that was actually a lengthy process that we went through, a transformational process of, when the library speaks, who does the library speak to? And so today the library speaks in three languages. And that’s very significant. We’re a public institution. We’re not required by law to speak in three languages. But it’s part of our core mission. 

We have invested a significant set of resources in making historical Palestinian cultural material available and Islamic material available, as part of our, how do we engage different populations? We have a phenomenal array of educational programs, for teachers and students, and somewhere between 30-40% of our teacher training programs are run in Arabic.

So the library has made great strides in how do you actualize this potential. Now, I won’t say that everything is perfect, because it’s an ongoing process and, on the one hand, there’s always a question, you know, in terms of when you start to tell stories, stories are you going to tell? And to what degree are you going to focus on the mainstream population? And to what degree are you going to try to expand the horizons of people who walk in? 

And so in certain areas, the library focuses on, you know, mainstream Hebrew Zionist culture and in other places, we work very hard to expand people’s horizons. For example, in our permanent exhibition, there you’ll be able to walk through many different narratives and stories. You can walk through the whole place and focus on, you know, one culture or one religion, or one tradition, but it’s designed to pique your curiosity to look beyond yourself, to see others, many different kinds of others.

Certain areas, we still have a lot of work to do. You mentioned the collection that’s called the AP Collection. And that is part of our history that the library in 1948, during the first phase of what became the Independence War, when there was fighting in neighborhoods all over West Jerusalem, so Hebrew University librarians, were actively involved in collecting books, manuscripts, and periodicals from the homes of primarily wealthy, but, you know, mostly, intelligentsia families, Palestinian families in Western Jerusalem neighborhoods, neighborhoods that today are very prestigious, primarily Jewish neighborhoods like Talbiya, Katamon, Baka. 

And the librarians, in their own writing, spoke about the moral dilemma they faced. There was widespread looting in these neighborhoods. And they were aware in a lot of cases of these libraries, because they were famous Palestinian intellectuals, some of which had gone and used the library in the 20s and 30s and 40s, and they were very concerned that this material would be lost, but they were also aware that if they were to collect this material, they would be looting. And they did the moral calculation and they came to the conclusion that it was better to collect this material than not, because neighborhoods they didn’t make it to, that material disappeared.

And so they collected about 30,000 volumes. They sorted it out. It is at a time when, in 1948, the library was in Mount Scopus and had become unavailable to Israeli scholars and they were missing key research materials, and these materials, some of which were divided up by subject and provided access to these materials for local scholars.

And the material at the beginning was recorded under the names of the families. You know, they didn’t know what was going to happen then, and they saw their work originally as temporary, a temporary collecting and looting effort, and then, over time, these materials were cataloged. And they were cataloged in a kind of compromised position.

On the one hand, they were cataloged not according to the family names, but under a unified label called AP, which followed a shift in thinking about Palestinian property in the Israeli government in the 50s. And so they were labeled separate, but the names of the families were not, in a lot of cases, were not preserved.

And this kind of like gray status has continued until today. And so the AP collection is officially owned by the person who’s called the custodian for absentee property, which is a position in the finance ministry. And the library is, has the mandate to preserve the material and make it available for scholarship. And so that’s what we do. We do not have the authority to give the material away or to return the material to the families, the descendants of the libraries from which this material was taken. 

And the work that we’ve done in the last decade has been, as much as possible, to make the history of the collection accessible to scholars and to catalog all the materials, in a way that they can be used and preserved. So, for example, we decided several years ago to scan the historical newspapers that were in this collection. And recently we decided to scan about 600 manuscripts that were in this collection. 

Sara: All of them in Arabic, I’m assuming?

Raquel: The collection is primarily in Arabic, also Persian and Turkish. The collection is a really interesting snapshot of intellectual history in the first half of the 20th century. And scholars use this material constantly, now that it’s online, scholars all over the world use this material, and so it’s a little bit of a tikkun, a little bit of, you know, a way of repairing this historical saga, and you know, I personally hope, for many reasons, I hope that there will one day in our lifetimes be permanent status negotiations between Israel and Palestine and the material will find a home in a Palestinian cultural institution or back in the families. But that’s Raquel, personally. The library, again, doesn’t have that mandate to make final decisions about the collection.

Sara: So let’s move to the second side of tension, the library’s mission to serve as the national memory for the Jewish people worldwide. And I think that brings up interesting questions around what repatriation could mean in this context, who owns Jewish books, or put another way, what is the appropriate home for these treasures? Is it the place where it originated, whether there are Jews there today or not? Is it among the descendants of the community that produced it or used it? Or is it Israel? Is Israel the rightful home for these works, the homeland and the gathering place of the Jewish people? 

And I guess this question percolated for me as I was reading the gorgeous, incredible new book you edited, 101 National Treasures from the National Library of Israel, and I was especially struck by the handwritten community ledger of Frankfurt am Main, which dates back to the 16th century, and among other things, tells the story of this community’s role at the imperial court of the Holy Roman Empire.

And I had spent a year teaching Jewish students in Frankfurt, and I could imagine it being meaningful for the community to have this snapshot of a period in the community’s history, and as Frankfurt Jews today invest in education, community, and Jewish identity, having an object that demonstrates their roots in this city carries deep significance. 

So I’m wondering how the library approaches the question of where artifacts belong, how these decisions get made, and how the library interacts with the communities who are implicated in these objects.

Raquel: So you’re touching on the subject of provenance, and this is a question that is occupying the attention of all cultural heritage institutions around the world today. It’s a subject that colleagues of mine here at the library and in partner institutions have been thinking about extensively, towards the publication of a white paper, on producing best practices and guidelines for Judaica provenance research. 

And you laid out beautifully the challenges and that is, what’s the significance of local culture, of the relationship between Jewish culture in local contexts, and this grand sweep of history that is part of the Zionist movement with this trajectory of Jews moving through the world, with a clear arrow towards coming back to the promised land, to Jerusalem.

And how do you weigh between the values of these two, these two ways of thinking about place, of home, of property? In provenance research today in general, more and more, there’s a waiting towards returning an artifact to its earlier or original geographic location. And I have to admit that as someone who has done a lot of research in Jewish history and culture and texts, but also extensively in Islamic culture and textual traditions, I wasn’t really mindful of something that’s very stark when you say it out loud, and that is Jews, and you can say this about others, but really, most Jews in the world are not in the same place as their ancestors were 150 years ago.

Now, many people around the world have moved, right? It’s not only the Jews who have migrated or were refugees, especially in our lifetime, unfortunately. But as a group, Jews are outliers. In this movement towards returning material and artifacts to the authentic original location. It doesn’t work. That model doesn’t work for Jews because Jews aren’t there. And so if there’s an item that is, you know, from Frankfurt or from Poland or, you know, from Tunisia, and the Jews aren’t there anymore, does it make sense to return that item to those places? It raises very interesting thorny questions. 

And so in this white paper, my colleague laid out a really thoughtful method of how do you think about and make these decisions. 

So for example, if there is a Jewish community, and this is particularly true for community documents, like you mentioned, the Pinkas, this community register. It’s less true for an item that belonged to an individual that got sold or transferred to another individual. But in case of Jewish community material, let’s say from Hungary, that comes up on auction, does the Hungarian government have a stronger claim? Or, do you look at, well, where is the Jewish community of Hungary today? 

And what the white paper lays out is that if you can identify the current community of the majority of a community within the Hungarian Jewish spectrum, if they all moved to Montreal or they all moved to Brooklyn, then that place has weight. It’s not black and white in any case, but that place has weight. 

In addition, Jerusalem has weight. And the role of the National Library as a public cultural institution that’s committed to preserving the Jewish memory, that that has weight. Now, sometimes, you’re not going to come up with a clear answer. And so one of the methods that we’ve developed, which I really see as a win-win is, is to move towards stewardship as opposed to ownership. 

And that is, whoever gets the material is the stakeholder or the institution who can best preserve the material and can make it publicly available. And in that case, and we’ve had several examples of this, of contested community material, where we’ve reached out to the local community, whether it’s in that original place, and in a lot of cases in Europe, or in another place, and we said, let’s buy together. Let’s share it. 

How do you share it? Today, you have a digital solution that allows you to co-own something. And so what we’ve done is, there been a few cases like this, we’ve purchased an item and we’ve kept the original. We’ve scanned it and given a digital copy to the other part of the partner institution. And in some cases the other way around. I frankly love the digital solution, because it allows us to get it out from under, you know, contested cultural assets and cultural appropriation.

We use it often, going back to our previous conversation, of how how to honor and preserve Arab cultural material in this country without taking items, given how contested that is. And so 

 

what’s true about the Arab context is also true about the Hungarian context. 

Now it’s not perfect. You know, there are those who will say, if there’s an item, it should sit with me. But digital preservation goes a long way in enabling stewardship as opposed to ownership and contested claims. 

Sara: I think this is a question which is relevant to both the library serving as the National Library of Israel and the National Library of the Jewish People. I’m curious about national memory, and any attempt to remember inevitably means forgetting other things or selecting what to remember and what to exclude or forget. And what’s the library’s criteria for that, for remembering, for choosing what gets remembered versus what gets forgotten or pushed to the sidelines? 

Raquel: that’s an excellent question. And inevitably, we forget. Human beings forget. And I would even go as far as to say that, thank God we forget, because it allows us to get out from under trauma and to create space for new thinking, new ideas. 

If we go back to the work we’re doing on October 7th, our goal right now is to try not to forget, to try to collect as much as possible without a lot of discernment and selection. So any collection efforts who is willing to share digital copies of their material, we want to take. And we’re working very hard to try to make sure we cover many different perspectives, many different kinds of people. 

We’re not going to get everybody. And so some things are going to fall by the wayside. That’s what I would call passive forgetting, because the intention is to collect everything, but inevitably, things will drop, anytime a library gets involved in selection, so that means that I choose X and not Y, and that’s part and parcel of what it means to be a curator. I lead a team of five curators. We are all academics in our background. And our job is to select. And we wrestle with these questions all the time. 

How do you determine what’s important? How do you decide what we shouldn’t forget? So libraries have strategies for balancing this out. For example, in certain kinds of material, we choose blindly. We take, you know, in our case, we take every book we can get our hands on that’s written about Jewish material, Jewish culture, Jewish history, or about Israel. We have one of the world’s largest collections of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist material in the world, right? And in certain kinds of material that it’s really very expensive to process like an archive, so there we select. 

Now for much of the library’s history, they had very clear understandings of what was culturally valuable. But as society shifts, so valuation shifts. So for example, in the first, let’s say, 90 years of the library’s history, there was a very strong focus on, let’s say, Jewish men from certain places around the world who were considered to be the most important, the most active, most significant contributors to culture. 

Today we have a much broader understanding of who are cultural icons and heroes and important thinkers. 

Sara: So can you give some examples of that? I mean, I think I know Naomi Shemer’s

Raquel: So, Naomi Shemer’s archive is from a long time ago, right? Naomi Shemer is one of Israel’s iconic songwriter-poets. We have Else Lasker-Schüler’s archive. We have part of Lea Goldberg’s archive. Lea Goldberg is a beloved writer of poetry and stories, both for children and for adults.More recently, we have received the archive of Nechama Leibowitz, which is a new, I think is a new understanding of who is an important cultural figure. She was a mythic teacher and biblical commentator of the late 20th century, Hannah Senesh, who was a great Zionist pioneer and hero during World War II and was an extraordinary poet and writer. Her archive came to the library in the end of 2020, thanks to a wonderful gift by Uri and Nurit Eisen, great friends of the library. 

So over time, we’ve been expanding and broadening the circle of what is valuable. You know, that’s the other side of what do you not want to forget.

Sara: So let’s close with your vision for the National Library and where do you see the meaning and significance of the library as a cultural institution and as holding the national memory of Israel and the Jewish people? 

Raquel: So as you mentioned, the library was supposed to open our new building on October 17th. And on October 8th, we shut down several years of preparations forlaunching our new building and canceled about 20 different events. And we pivoted to getting the building open for the public. And we opened three weeks later.

Since we’ve opened, the building has been packed. And people come from all over the country to see the gorgeous architectural features of this building, but also to find a space to think, to write, to dream, to breathe. 

And it’s been it’s been unbelievable to witness what a space like a library can be today, because there’s so many people who say you don’t need libraries anymore. It’s all on your phone. But the National Library that we’re witnessing right now can be the space that belongs to everyone.

And my dream and vision for the library is to be that public square, to be the big tent for Israeli society. There are very few spaces in Israel that really belong to everyone, beyond the mall or the zoo, which are, you know, important cultural mixing places. 

But to be a place where culture in general is valued, curiosity is encouraged, and everyone’s culture is considered, is not forgotten. And so, my vision of the library is to keep building outward this space to be a space of learning, to be a space of conversation, and a kind of cultural watering hole, and a place that everyone can come find themselves, expand their horizons, discover new aspects of themselves and others, and to develop a much greater appreciation for the multiplicity of cultures and traditions in Israel.

We’re in this terrible time, and it’s a time where it’s very easy to forget what’s valuable about living among others, and among people who disagree with you, and among people who see the world differently. The library can play a healing role, an educational role, in helping us remember who that that’s the basis of a thriving society, of a thriving democracy. So that’s my hope.

Sara: Thank you so much, Raquel. And I do hope that everybody listening will have an opportunity to both visit the library in the near future. 

Raquel: Thank you.

Tessa: Thanks for listening to our show and special thanks to our guest this week, David Matlow. Identity/Crisis is brought produced by me, Tessa Zitter and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Sarina Shohet and edited by Gareth Hobbes at Silver Sound NYC, with music provided by so called. 

Transcripts of our show are now available on our website, typically about a week after an episode airs. We’re always looking for ideas for what we should cover in future episodes, so if you have a topic you’d like to hear about, or if you have comments about this episode, please write to us at [email protected]. 

For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what’s unfolding right now, sign up for our newsletter in the show notes, and subscribe to this podcast everywhere podcasts are available. See you next week, and thanks for listening.