Within a few days in late August, the world learned of the deaths of three giants of global culture: Dolly Parton, P\u00e9ter N\u00e1das, and Yayoi Kusama.<\/p>\n
An American country singer, a Hungarian Jewish novelist, and a Japanese avant-garde artist. There is no obvious reason to place them together. They belonged to different generations, countries, artistic traditions, and cultural worlds. Yet the news of their deaths arriving within days of one another offers a reminder of something increasingly precious: culture can create common ground \u2013 and open a door into unfamiliar worlds \u2013 without requiring us to become alike.<\/p>\n
I saw this quite literally at a Dolly Parton concert in Toronto in 2016. There were unmistakable groups: men in cowboy-style outfits, a visible Evangelical presence, and large numbers of gay and lesbian fans. Whatever else divided them \u2013 politics, religion, sexuality, social background \u2013 they all adored Dolly.<\/p>\n
For a few hours, Parton created a community among people who might otherwise have had very little to say to one another. She did not resolve their disagreements. She did something more modest and perhaps more valuable: she gave them something they could love together. I am Jewish. I do not share Parton\u2019s Christian faith. But I do not need to share it to understand the image at the heart of her music, that human beings need something that gives them wings and something that keeps their feet on the ground; faith and humility.<\/p>\n
P\u00e9ter N\u00e1das represented a radically different cultural universe. By coincidence, I finished The End of a Family Story three days before his death. It is an uneasy book \u2013 difficult, claustrophobic, and unsettling. N\u00e1das was Hungarian and Jewish, and the Jewishness of his writing is integral, not incidental.<\/p>\n
In The End of a Family Story, family, faith, politics, and memory become entangled with the violent history of 20th-century Europe. People inherit worlds they did not choose and histories they cannot simply discard.<\/p>\n
What Europe means for Jews<\/strong><\/p>\n For Jews, and certainly for Israelis, Europe is rarely only a geographical place. It is also memory. Sometimes longing. Sometimes fear. Sometimes culture. Sometimes a family story whose beginning we no longer know and whose ending remains unfinished.<\/p>\n Then there is Yayoi Kusama. I first encountered her work in person on the Japanese island of Naoshima in 2017. I later attended her major retrospective at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.<\/p>\n Again, the crowd was part of the experience. There were secular Israelis, families with children, and a large, visible group of Arab Israelis. Some had come to see the work of one of the most important artists of the past century. Others were drawn to the mirrors, dots, and pumpkins. Children seemed delighted by a universe that required no explanation before entering it. Kusama could speak to all of them for entirely different reasons.<\/p>\n That is what great culture can do. It does not require everyone standing before the same painting, reading the same novel, or listening to the same song to understand it in precisely the same way. It creates common ground without demanding uniformity.<\/p>\n That ability feels particularly valuable now. We are living through a period in which the boundary between culture and politics is becoming increasingly difficult to preserve.<\/p>\n Israelis experience this with particular intensity. They want to know what the singer said about Israel. Whether the writer signed a petition. Whether the artist supports a boycott. Whether the university severed relations with an Israeli institution. Whether the country voted for us or against us. These questions are not imaginary. Sometimes they matter enormously. Since the Hamas-led massacre on October 7, 2023, Israelis have learned that cultural, academic, and artistic institutions that appeared universal can suddenly become places where belonging feels highly conditional.<\/p>\n But allowing politics to become our only language for encountering other societies carries its own danger.<\/p>\n Jewish experience offers another possibility. For centuries, Jews wrote in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Yiddish, Ladino, German, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, and English. They borrowed melodies, literary forms, philosophical ideas, and languages from the societies around them. They participated in surrounding cultures while stubbornly refusing to disappear inside them.<\/p>\n That tension between belonging and particularity became one of the great creative forces of Jewish life. Israel should understand this better than most. The Jewish state was not created so that Jews could stop encountering the world. It gave Jews a sovereign home from which to encounter it. That distinction matters today. Israel sometimes feels extraordinarily alone. Its relationship with parts of the cultural world has become strained. Israelis arrive at international encounters wondering whether they will be welcomed as individuals or judged first by the passport they carry.<\/p>\n The understandable response is to retreat. To stop listening. To divide everything between those who are with us and those who are against us. We should resist that temptation.<\/p>\n The cowboys, Evangelicals, gays, and lesbians in Toronto did not become one another when Parton walked onto the stage. The secular Israelis, Arab Israelis, and families with children in Tel Aviv did not need to experience Kusama in the same way. N\u00e1das did not make the contradictions of Jewish and European history disappear; he turned them into literature.<\/p>\n Perhaps that is what these three artists, whose deaths entered the news so unexpectedly close together, have in common. Great culture does not erase the boundaries between people. Nor does it require agreement. It gives us permission to cross into unfamiliar territory, to become curious about lives unlike our own, and even to discover something of ourselves there.<\/p>\n Three artists. Three distinct worlds. And three reminders that sharing a culture does not require sharing politics, a religion, or a history.<\/p>\n