Intelligent » en Israël

Intelligent » in Israel : The Russian intellengentsia today, between closure and openess Danielle STORPER PEREZ This article is based on open interviews that I conducted with my assistants among close to fifty new Israeli immigrants originally from the ex-Soviet Union who coopted one another as members of the intelligentsia. This intelligentsia sought its strength, its vitality, its breath and its prestige from its way of life, from the ethical and esthetical apprehension of its cultural universe and from its specific manner of thinking itself in the semi-secrecy, in the protective warmth of the kitchens. I propose to show here that in the context of the Israeli society to which, at this stage of their collective existence, they do not feel they can or should belong, the « intellygentis », the intelligents, as they call themselves, have no other option than folding back on modalities of the Russian culture which, in Russia today, have lost their value of absoluteness. A closure that is still too premature to know if it will lead towards a ghettoisation, perhaps even a Kulturkampf, or, on the contrary, will contribute to instaure a true cultural pluralism in a country experiencing profund upheavals

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