If there is one pair of words that is worn down to the fine in the corona years, it is "female empowerment."
It seems that the more women weakened financially, occupationally and personally, the more they experienced loss of livelihood, violence or just divorce (there were many of these in Corona), the more everyone liked to talk about women empowerment, and powerful women.
"Powerful Woman" - This seems to be the ultimate compliment these days.
And who is a powerful woman?
As our teachers and gentlemen have taught us - from Rotem Sela to Etty Kreif and Tzipi Refaeli - this is a woman who "makes her home", and this house is worth a lot of money, judging by the estates that peek behind the backs of the latter in television interviews.
Such sums cannot be obtained through the writing of books, nor through work in the theater or cinema.
What is clear is that in Israel in 2022 money is talking, the spirit is long dead and art is dying in its wake.
Reports of a drastic drop in book sales sound news every morning.
Israeli films, they say, have also become a matter of interest to festivals only.
The theater stopped mourning in the first closures.
It is said that art flourished even in the darkest periods in history, but sometimes it seems that what is happening now is the emptiness after dark, the clinical death time of art.
Still, even from clinical death one can sometimes wake up.
Humans need art.
They need it to feel human.
People need books, theater, cinema, music, dance and plastic arts to make them believe - even for a moment - that there is something else in this life besides the daily struggle for survival.
That there is something else that can connect them to others besides the immediate interest of livelihood, security and even love and sex.
I meet wonderful artists who work in the country.
To the magazine I co-edit, they send me stories, poems, cover illustrations.
On social media I come across their artwork, and sometimes I go to exhibitions that make me elated.
I see in independent theaters - and once in a few years also in institutions - plays that make me think.
I see great movies and series that they write and direct.
When I try to think of another low, the world can deteriorate if their voice is silent - I am filled with terror.
I wonder how one can continue to make art in the Corona Age, and it seems to me that the surest way to do so is to give up this beautifying lie of the powerful woman.
Because if there is one thing that art can do - it is to tell the story of underprivileged women.
In fact, when you think of the most influential and formative works of art ever created by women, these have almost always dealt with women that someone, or someone, did everything to weaken: women who suffered violence, women who were silenced, oppressed or pushed out, sometimes they simply Did not conform to the accepted female model of male marriage, the ultimate source of female power.
From Sappho's songs to Tony Morrison's 'Hemdat', through Marina Abramovich's first performance works (who once said she was lucky no one killed or raped her in the middle of a performance in which she instructed the audience to do as he pleased for several hours), the dead women walk in " Pina Bausch's Coffee Miller or Tina Turner's Proud Mary, one of whose most moving performances was served by her just hours after she was nearly beaten to death by her ex-husband.
All of these artists were tired of being weak, so they decided to expose the economic and social power mechanisms that weakened them - and screamed about their existence out loud.
Maybe this is also what we need today - to scream our stories of weakness and weakness out loud, instead of smiling a million dollar smile.
Sorry - NIS 850,000.
The author is a writer, editor and creative writing teacher
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