1. This panel will read Modern Hebrew literature -- from its development within the context of European Enlightenment philology, to its present day status as the national literature of a highly militarized, highly segregated, sovereign nationstate imbricated in lucrative global networks of racial capitalism -- in terms of race. Reading the revival of Hebrew as an endeavor of Ashkenazi Jewish self- deracialization, considering the affects of racialization of Israel's Arab minority, and investigating new ways of looking back upon Israel's origins within the racializing constructs of European settler colonialism, this panel will bring a new, critical and timely approach to perennial questions of Israeli identity as expressed in Hebrew literary works.

2. Race is a timely subject globally, but especially in Israel where Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem has recently declared the existence of a regime of apartheid from the River to the Sea, including both sides of the Green Line. This session aims to bring together two disparate strands of Hebrew literary scholarship to address race in Hebrew literature in a new way -- specifically, it seeks to bring postcolonialist scholars, frequently housed in English departments, and Hebraists, typically housed in departments of Jewish or Middle Eastern Studies. These two groups virtually never enter into conversation with one another, severely limiting the ability of the the field to consider race in a way that is both theoretically informed and empirically innovative.

3. In extant literary and critical scholarship, Zionism has been theorized as a form of settler colonialism, yet the emergence of race as a category in Israeli society and culture remains underexplored vis-à-vis the more prevalent framework of ethnicity.When it is explored, it is often done so by postcolonialist scholars whose familiarity with the Hebrew literary tradition is limited by a lack of training in the Hebrew language itself. Furthermore, when employed by Hebraists and Jewish Studies scholars as an analytical category, race is often limited to diasporic histories of Jewish victimhood, thus precluding a racial analysis of Israeli space and time as such, as they have come to exist on both sides of the Green Line. This panel thus asks what would it mean to read Modern Hebrew literature in terms of the emergence, articulation, and/or perpetuation of categories of race in light of global histories of colonialism, racial capitalism and climate change, drawing upon the wide ranges of expertise within the field of Hebrew literary studies.

4. Each of the three panelists will present for 15-18 minutes, leaving ample time for discussion.

Roni Henig's presentation will consider how 19th century discourses of Orientalist philology informed the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language within the context of European nationalisms, as well as the early flowering of the language as a means for literary expression and intellectual debate. Hannah Boast will investigate how Israeli-Palestinian author Sayed Kashua constructs a comedy of awkwardness, and in so doing brings to the surface the violent racialization of Arab citizens of Israel. Lastly, Hella Cohen's presentation employs the frameworks of animality and Afro-pessimism to consider how the troubled category of the human in contemporary Israeli literature in turn informs understanding of Zionism's European Enlightenment core.