A published poet in Hebrew, Shulman is also active as a literary critic and cultural anthropologist. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 books on various subjects ranging from templemyths and temple poems to essays that cover the wide spectrum of the cultural history of South India.[3]
Shulman is a peace activist and a founding member of the joint Israeli-Palestininian movement Ta'ayush. In 2007 he published the book "Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine" which concludes the years of his volunteering activity in the movement. Shulman is a winner of the Israel Prize for 2016. He announced that he would donate his 75,000 shekel prize to Ta'ayush, an Israeli organization that provides support to Palestinian residents in the Hebron area.[4]
Shulman is a founding member of the joint Israeli-Palestinian 'Life-in-Common' or Ta'ayush grass-roots movement for non-violence.[9] He is convinced that unless 'both sides win the war, both sides will lose it.'[5] Shulman's view on the conflict has been described as without illusions, and he expresses an awareness of the moral failings of both sides:
This conflict is not a war of the sons of light with the sons of darkness; both sides are dark, both are given to organized violence and terror, and both resort constantly to self-righteous justification and a litany of victimization, the bread-and-butter of ethnic conflict. My concern is with the darkness on my side.[5]
Though he sees himself as a 'moral witness' to misdeeds of the 'intricate machine',[10] Shulman shies from the limelight, admitting to an aversion to the idea of heroes, and gives interviews only reluctantly.[11][12]
More recently he has been active as a leader of international campaigns to defend the Palestinians under threat of eviction from such villages as Susya in the South Hebron Hills,[13] and especially from Silwan, where they are at risk of losing their homes as a result of the pressure on the area to have it rezoned for Israeli archaeological digs, in particular those promoted by the Elad association.[14][15][16]
Dark Hope
In 2007, he published a book-length account, entitled Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine, of his years working, and often clashing with police and settlers, to deliver food and medical supplies to Palestinian villages, while building peace in the West Bank. The distinguished Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua called it:
One of the most fascinating and moving accounts of Israeli-Palestinian attempts to help, indeed to save, human beings suffering under the burden of occupation and terror. Anyone who is pained and troubled by what is happening in the Holy Land should read this human document, which indeed offers a certain dark hope.[17]
Israel, like any other society, has violent, sociopathic elements. What is unusual about the last four decades in Israel is that many destructive individuals have found a haven, complete with ideological legitimation, within the settlement enterprise. Here, in places like Chavat Maon, Itamar, Tapuach, and Hebron, they have, in effect, unfettered freedom to terrorize the local Palestinian population: to attack, shoot, injure, sometimes kill - all in the name of the alleged sanctity of the land and of the Jews' exclusive right to it.[19][20]
Shulman's book addresses here what he calls a 'moral conundrum': how Israel, 'once a home to utopian idealists and humanists, should have engendered and given free rein to a murderous, also ultimately suicidal, messianism,' and asks if the 'humane heart of the Jewish tradition' always contains the 'seeds of self-righteous terror' he observed among settlers. He finds within himself an intersection of hope, faith and empathy, and 'the same dark forces that are active among the most predatory of the settlers', and it is this which provides him with 'a reason to act'[21] against what he regards as 'pure, rarefied, unadulterated, unreasoning, uncontainable human evil'. He does not excuse Arabs in the book,[22] but focuses on his own side's culpability, writing: 'I feel responsible for the atrocities committed in my name, by the Israeli half of the story. Let the Palestinians take responsibility for those committed in their name'.[23] Writing of efforts by the IDF and members of hard-core settlements at Susya, Ma'on, Carmel and elsewhere who, having settled on Palestinian land in the hills south of Hebron, endeavour to evict the local people in the many khirbehs of a region where several thousand pacific Palestinian herders and farmers dwell in rock caves and live a 'unique life' of biblical colour,[24] Shulman comments, according to Margalit, that:-
Nothing but malice drives this campaign to uproot the few thousand cave dwellers with their babies and lambs. They have hurt nobody. They were never a security threat. They led peaceful, if somewhat impoverished lives until the settlers came. Since then, there has been no peace. They are tormented, terrified, incredulous. As am I.[25]
Bitter Landscapes of Palestine
The "Bitter Landscapes of Palestine" was written by David Shulman in 2024. The author narrates the lives of Palestinians living in the West Bank. He describes the confrontation between Palestinian shepherds and farmers with Jewish settlers and soldiers. He narrates daily challenges such as the destruction of houses and the expulsion of Palestinians from their land. In this book, an attempt has been made to convey to the reader the sense of the endangered Palestinian lifestyle.[26]
In 2016 he received the Israel Prize for his research on the literature and culture of southern India.[29] He donated the prize money ($20,000) to Ta'ayush.[30]
Personal life
Shulman is married to Eileen Shulman (née Eileen Lendman) and has three sons, Eviatar, Mishael, and Edan.
2001 The Wisdom of Poets: Studies in Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
2002 (with Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyan), Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, Paris, Seuil, Permanent Black, Delhi.
2002 (with Velcheru Narayana Rao), Classical Telugu Poetry: An Anthology, University of California Press, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
2002 (with Velcheru Narayana Rao), The Sound of the Kiss, or the Story that Must be Told. Pingali Suranna's Kaḷāpūrṇōdayamu, Columbia University Press.
2002 (with Velcheru Narayana Rao), A Lover's Guide to Warangal. The Kridabhiramamu of Vallabharaya, Permanent Black, New Delhi.
2004 (with Don Handelman), Siva in the Forest of Pines. An Essay on Sorcery and Self-Knowledge, Oxford University Press.
2006 (Translation, with Velcheru Narayana Rao)The Demon's Daughter: A Love Story from South India,(by Piṅgaḷi Sūrana) SUNY Press, Albany.
2005 (with Velcheru Narayana Rao), God on the Hill: temple poems from Tirupati, Oxford University Press, New York.
2007 Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine,University of Chicago Press.
2008 Spring, Heat, Rains: A South Indian Diary, University of Chicago Press.
2011 (with V.K Rajamani) The Mucukunda Murals in the Tyāgarājasvāmi Temple, Prakriti Foundation.
2012 (With Velcheru Narayana Rao) Srinatha: The Poet who Made Gods and Kings, Oxford University Press.
2015 (Translation of Allasani Peddana, with Velcheru Narayana Rao) The Story of Manu. Murti Classical Library of India.
2016 Tamil: A Biography. Harvard University Press.
2018 Freedom and Despair: Notes from the South Hebron Hills, University of Chicago Press.
He has edited and co-edited several books
1984 (with Shmuel Noam Eisenstadt, and Reuven Kahane), Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy and Dissent in India, Mouton, Berlin, New York and Amsterdam.
1987 (with Shaul Shaked and G.Stroumsa), Gilgul: Essays in Transformation, Revolution and Permanence in the History of Religions (FestschriftR. J. Zwi Werblowsky), E.J.Brill, Leiden.
1995 Syllables of Sky: Studies in South Indian Civilization in Honour of Velcheru Narayana Rao, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
1996 (with Galit Hasan-Rokem), Untying the Knot: On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes, Oxford University Press.
1999 (with G.Stroumsa), Dream, Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming, Oxford University Press, New York.
2002 (with G.Stroumsa), Self and Self-Transformation in the History of Religions, Oxford University Press, New York.
2008 (with Shalva Weil), Karmic Passages: Israeli Scholarships On India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
2010 Language, Ritual and Poetics in Ancient India and Iran: Studies in Honor of Shaul Migron, The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem.
2014, (with Yigal Bronner and Gary Tubb) Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kavya Literature, Oxford University Press.
↑ 'a term he uses to describe various Israeli government agencies, including the army, the police, and the civil authorities that administer the West Bank' (Margalit, 2007).
↑ Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008 pp.374f
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