David Grossman the great Israeli writer who just seven months ago won one of literature’s most prestigious awards, the Man Booker Prize, last week learned that he would, on Israel’s 70th Independence Day, receive his homelands most prestigious award, the Israel Prize. But an essay this weekend in Haaretz by Israel’s leading civil rights lawyer Avigdor Feldman argued is that, in these days, to take the prize is an act of collaboration with a government with which people of principle ought no longer collaborate. Should Grossman, for decades one of the clearest voices of conscience on the Left, turn down the Israel Prize as a powerful and percussive expression of that conscience?
This is a segment from The “Eyes on the Prize” Edition.
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Photo: David Grossman with South African author Nadine Gordimer.
