Few modern Hebrew writers have more consistently and zealously defended the traditional dichotomy of Zionism/Diaspora than A.B. Yehoshua, whose stridently negative evaluations of Jewish Diaspora identity have frequently outraged his Jewish interlocutors in North America and Europe. His well-known hermeneutics of Diaspora as a debilitating condition of neurosis has never wavered throughout his nearly five decades as one of Israel’s most important public intellectuals. Nowhere is the palpable tension between the values that Yehoshua ascribe respectively to Zionism and the Diaspora more evident than in his most epic labyrinth of a novel to date, The Liberated Bride (Ha-Kala Ha-Meshachreret). In the current discourse between Zionist and diasporic identities, the prevailing perspective of writers who lean toward the latter may be said to affirm the values of Diaspora: elusiveness, fluidity, straddling contradictions. Such writers contend that Jews have not merely existed for centuries with such contradictory identities; they’ve genuinely thrived on them. In this regard, The Liberated Bride is a richly conflicted narrative about the problem of “being at home,” the encounter between cultural homogeneity and alterity. In this novel’s warm portrayals of the prospects of cultural hybridity and the breakdown of stable identities that result from the encounters between Jews, Israeli Arabs, and Palestinians, Yehoshua the artist seems to thwart the intentions of the forceful public statements made by Yehoshua the polemicist.