Given the centrality of the question of the national subject, it is not surprising that myriad approaches have emerged that rethink the celebratory inflections of 1948. Hebrew literary texts have challenged earlier representations of the Zionist War Hero and reconfigured collective/national memory in a variety of different genres. Scholars are also seeking to revisit the quintessential question of Israeli-Jewish national subjecthood within the realm of decolonial thought, comparative settler colonial imaginaries, and global economic history. However, to date, these diverse approaches to the foundational theme of Modern Hebrew literature have yet to be brought into dialogue with one another; it is this much overdue conversation that the proposed panel seeks to enable. The session will consist of four presentations of 14-15 minutes each, followed by 15-18 minutes of discussion.
Dr. Tamar Hess’s presentation, “Christianity and Mediterranean Locality in Israeli Fiction of 1948 Heroism,” considers a strand of Israeli literature that reconceptualizes 1948 through the perspective of the local Mediterranean clime, in which Jews constitute one of many ethnicities, and the land of Israel/Palestine one of many stops along a continuous Mediterranean shore. In this vein, she considers work by Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua and others that employ Mediterranean and/or Christian motifs in order to “question . . . the inevitability and necessity of Jewish statehood” and to express “concern with institutionalization (of church or state).” Considering texts written between 1948 and 2014, Dr. Hess’s paper constitutes an important illumination of an alternate and little studied strand of 1948 writings in Israeli Hebrew literature.
Dr. Shira Stav’s presentation, “Poetic Memoirs and the New Subjects of Israeli Poetry,” considers how Israeli poetry since the early 1990s has self-reflexively effected a turn away from earlier fusions of self-and-nation into the “non-specific ‘I’ ubiquitous in Hebrew poetry”, crafting instead a new poetic subject expressing “specific memories, images, and events, firmly situated within their cultural, historical, and linguistic norms.” In so doing, Dr. Stav elucidates a new wave of Israeli poetry in which “the poetic subject no longer represents the national mind,” resulting in “fragmented narratives [pursuing] non-symbolic concreteness [and] penetrable, fluid, and/or fragmented subjects shaped by changing locations.” Implicit in her work is a radical decentering not only of the towering figure of the 1948 fighter, but also of the question of national belonging itself.
Dr. Rachel Green’s presentation, “The Arab Businessman-Entrepreneur in Israel Literature and the Limits of Neoliberal Imagination” considers the question of national belonging in light of recent thematizations of entrepreneurship and neoliberal economic policy in Israeli Hebrew literature. Focusing on two novels by Assaf Gavron, her paper considers the figure of the entrepreneur as a new iteration of national belonging that fuses the frontier-oriented pioneer of the early Zionist imaginary with exigencies of the accelerating incorporation of Israel into global capitalism. Nevertheless, the presentation invites readers to consider the blindspots of Gavron’s neoliberal template for belonging as embodied in the contradictory and problematic figure of the Arab entrepreneur in his works.
Lastly, Stephanie Kraver’s presentation, “Mapping a Decolonial Hebrew Poetics: From Palestine/Israel to Australia,” revisits the work of celebrated Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch to excavate traces of prompts for readerly reflection upon comparative settler-colonialisms. As Kraver notes, she argues that Ravikovitch “uses allegorical motifs to transport her Hebrew readers to an alternative historical and geographic locale for political censure in the present, and to ruminate upon how nationalist accounts might be amended and reconfigured.” In this vein, Kraver’s work is an important reconsideration of the fundamental question animating Hebrew literature of 1948, brought into conversation with current debates on the settler colonial imaginary.
Bringing together these presentations, the panel endeavors to foster a novel conversation crossing genres, eras, and theoretical approaches in order to revisit and reconceptualize the fundamental question of the national subject in Hebrew literature.