When people find out I write exclusively in English, the reaction is usually one of two things. Israeli readers — the ones who know me or have heard of the newsletter — tend to find it slightly strange, slightly pretentious, occasionally amusing. They file it with the other affectations of a certain kind of Israeli intellectual. Non-Israeli readers, when they find out, tend to find it interesting in the way that biographical details about people they have read are interesting. Neither reaction is quite right.
The decision was not affectation and it was not interesting. It was practical. Around 2010, I was trying to write about urban infrastructure — about cities between 200,000 and 800,000 people, about the gap between how cities are discussed and how they actually function. And I noticed that the conversation I wanted to join was happening in English. The journals, the conferences, the newsletters, the blogs — the places where ideas about city governance were being developed and tested — were almost entirely English-language. If I wanted to participate, I needed to write in the language the conversation was happening in.
The conversations worth having about cities are happening in English, in rooms Israelis rarely enter. — Daniel Fadlon
The room problem
What I mean by "rooms" is not literal rooms, though sometimes it is. The conferences where urban planning ideas are presented and debated — the academic conferences, the practitioner conferences, the increasingly blurry space in between — are conducted almost entirely in English, even when most of the participants are not native speakers. The publications that set the agenda for those conversations are English-language. The think tanks, the research institutes, the NGOs that work across multiple cities and countries — English.
Israeli researchers and practitioners are present in all of these spaces, but rarely as the people defining the terms of the conversation. We appear as case studies, occasionally as provocations, sometimes as curiosities. The Israeli city as object of study is more familiar than the Israeli urban thinker as intellectual interlocutor. I found this mildly irritating in 2010 and I find it mildly irritating now. Writing in English was, in part, an attempt to shift which side of that relationship I was on.
What gets lost
I am aware of what I am giving up. Writing in English means writing for an audience that does not share most of my assumed references. I cannot write about south Tel Aviv — about the specific texture of a neighbourhood that is too close to the center to be suburban, too removed from the center to be prestigious — without a great deal of scaffolding. A Hebrew-language reader would not need that scaffolding. They would have grown up with versions of it.
But the scaffolding is, in some ways, useful. Explaining a place to someone who does not know it is a discipline. It forces precision. It prevents the lazy shorthand that fluency permits. When I write about Plovdiv for an English-language audience, I am writing for people who may never have heard of Plovdiv. When I write about south Tel Aviv for the same audience, the same constraint applies. The unfamiliarity is productive.
The political question I am not answering
People sometimes ask whether writing in English is a political statement. Whether it is a way of addressing the international conversation about Israel by bypassing the domestic one. Whether it is a form of distance-taking from Hebrew-language public discourse, which has its own intensities and its own grievances.
The honest answer is: not really, and also somewhat. Not really, because I am not primarily interested in political discourse. I am interested in infrastructure, in governance, in the specific and unglamorous questions of how cities function. Somewhat, because there is no neutral position when you choose a language to write in, and I am not naive enough to pretend otherwise.
What I can say is that the decision has been productive in the ways I hoped it would be. The newsletter has ~1,400 subscribers, most of them not Israeli, many of them involved in urban planning and governance in places I would never have reached in Hebrew. The arguments I am making about smart city skepticism and quiet infrastructure are entering conversations in languages I cannot write in, carried by readers who are translating them — informally, for colleagues and students — into contexts I do not have direct access to. That is the network effect of writing in the lingua franca, and it is worth the cost.
The book
The book will be in English. This is not a surprise. The Quiet Infrastructure is, in some sense, the project that the language decision made possible — a book about cities between 200,000 and 800,000 people, written by an Israeli, for an English-language readership that has not thought much about those cities, in a conversation that is happening in English and that has room for this kind of voice.
Whether it will be translated into Hebrew afterward is a question I find genuinely interesting and have not resolved. The Israeli readership that might be interested in it is real. The question is whether they want to read it in translation, with all the distance that implies, or whether they would prefer that it had been written for them in the first place.
I do not know the answer. But I know which decision produced the book. And I know which language the conversation was happening in when I decided to join it.