Today, Israel again occupies southern Lebanon. Israeli forces have killed over 4,000 Lebanese civilians and driven more than a million people from their homes. But while the earlier Lebanon wars commanded the collective attention of Israeli society and, prominently, its authors, today's conflict in Lebanon has become, to an extent, an “overlooked” war. That makes this a critical moment to re-excavate Israel’s cultural imaginary with respect to Lebanon. Our panel will revisit public discourses that are (or once were) hegemonic and debate whether the literature of dissent represents inert or latent visions of roads not taken.
Dr. Melissa Weininger’s paper focuses on a controversial April 2026 issue of the prominent Israeli literary journal Ho!, in which writers addressed the imbrication of the Hebrew language with war, state violence, and genocide. Weininger’s paper will ask how a focus on Lebanon specifically might further shape what Ho!’s editors called Hebrew’s “mark of Cain.”
Dr. Elazar Elhanan’s paper will explore evolving iterations of a longstanding discourse in Israel called “shooting and crying,” which relates to soldiers’ moral injury. Elhanan will discuss the 2008 film Waltz with Bashir, which focuses on the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut. Elhanan will stage a comparative analysis with a 2025 viral monologue by Israel actor Udi Kagan, which, like the film, deals with soldiers’ PTSD. He will dissect the ways in which these works reveal, efface, or encrypt the material conditions that produce wars.
My own paper concerns the literary figure of the qorban, a Hebrew term that means both “victim” and “sacrifice.” I will explore distinct poetics that have arisen around the qorban of/in Lebanon. I will examine whether the identification of a victim figure can (or cannot) place Israeli Jewish subject positions into relation with those of Lebanese and Palestinians.
Dr. Oren Yirmiyahu will respond to these papers, comparing the 1980s to the 2000’s to the present day, through the prisms of wars in Lebanon. Yirmiyahu will address the aggregate effect of thinking through questions of victimhood, victimizers, trauma, and from there into broader discussion of the place of Lebanon in informing the relationships between the Hebrew language, Hebrew literary traditions, and Israeli national identity formation.
Each paper will be no more than 15 minutes, leaving 10 minutes for the respondent’s reflections and inquiries. This will allow a few minutes for introductions/bios and at least 15 minutes for unstructured discussion amongst panelists, respondent, and audience.
Lebanon -- as site of war, invasion, occupation; protest; political upheaval; and also Palestinian resistance -- poses provocative questions around the moral status of the Hebrew speaker and writer insofar as that subject participates in war, anti-war, and postwar positions. Altogether we will challenge literary scholarship to find language that addresses the ways that the precedents (or “pre-texts”) of Israeli invasions of Lebanon must be read anew against the inferno that now burns from Gaza to the Gulf.
The four of us hail from public universities in Canada and the American Pacific and Atlantic coasts. We teach some of the nation’s most diverse student bodies: the Wall St Journal ranked Dr. Weininger’s CSUN #3 nationwide for diversity; Dr. Elhanan’s CCNY is in the US News & World Report’s top ten for “social mobility.” We range from contingent faculty (myself) to early- and mid-career tenure-track/tenured scholars. Two of us are American and two of us are Israeli by birth. Two of us have appointments in the multidisciplinary field of Jewish Studies, and two of us teach in literature (and myself also in film) departments. We all work in Israel/Palestine Studies and teach on the conflict.