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By analyzing its position within the struggles for recognition and reception of different national and ethnic cultural groups, this book offers a bold new picture of Israeli literature. Through comparative discussion of the literatures of Palestinian citizens of Israel, of Mizrahim, of migrants from the former Soviet Union, and of Ethiopian-Israelis, the author demonstrates an unexpected richness and diversity in the Israeli literary scene, a reality very different from the monocultural image that Zionism aspired to create. Drawing on a wide body of social and literary theory, Mendelson-Maoz compares and contrasts the literatures of the four communities she profiles. In her discussion of the literature of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, she presents the question of language and translation, and she provides three case studies of particular authors and their reception. Her study of Mizrahi literature adopts a chronological approach, starting in the 1950s and proceeding toward contemporary Mizrahi writing, while discussing questions of authenticity and self-determination. The discussion of Israeli literature written by immigrants from the former Soviet Union focuses both on authors who write Israeli literature in Russian and of Russian immigrants writing in Hebrew. The final section of the book provides a valuable new discussion of the work of Ethiopian-Israeli writers, a group whose contributions have seldom been previously acknowledged. The picture that emerges from this groundbreaking book replaces the traditional, homogeneous historical narrative of Israeli literature with a diversity of voices, a multiplicity of origins, and a wide range of different perspectives. In doing so, it will provoke researchers in a wide range of cultural fields to look at the rich traditions that underlie it in new and fresh ways.

This article explores the concept of trauma and guilt in Yoram Kaniuk's novels. Kaniuk's works were affected by two major traumas: The Holocaust and the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Although the structure and circumstances of these two major events were different, as was the nature of the trauma in each, Kaniuk creates a web of links between them through the core concept of guilt that haunts all his protagonists. This article examines Sabon (Soap), the old-new novel Kaniuk wrote in the early 1960s but which was only recently discovered and published, as the first manifestation of this theme, and explores Kaniuk's later related texts to reveal the structure and power of inherent guilt. This reading integrates theories of literature and trauma, debates over the concept of guilt and \"survivor guilt\" and the notion of \"the gray zone,\" as well as the Jewish and Israeli context of war and the myth of the living dead. It shows that a blood bond between the living and the dead is anchored in the kernel of Kaniuk's work, preventing his protagonists from ever healing from the trauma of war.

This article discusses the role of analogy within the ethics of reading. It examines how Israeli literature uses analogies when reflecting on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Many literary texts that depict the Israeli–Palestinian conflict draw analogies between the Israeli Jewish people and the Palestinians, between specific individuals on both sides, or between historical traumas. These analogies are designed to bridge gaps and encourage empathetic reading. This article challenges this role of analogy by arguing that analogies may in fact paint an erroneous picture of symmetrical relations, strengthen victimhood that denies responsibility, and can often lead to “empty empathy.” Analogies may also create a willfully deceptive understanding of the other, while actually maintaining a narcissistic superior stance. Based on philosophical notions put forward by Emmanuel Levinas, this article suggests a different path to ethical understanding in which the literary text, while still enabling analogy, uses other rhetorical devices to create relationships that suspend it and reveal its imposture.

Kol tse-adenu (2008), The Sound of Our Steps is Matalon's most personal novel. It is not defined as an autobiography, although it incorporates major experiences and descriptions that hint at the life of the author. The novel describes the problematic coming of age of the protagonist as a Mizrahi woman by implementing a new discursive approach to space and language that works to question the pillars of the Israeli Zionist literary canon.In terms of its political and gendered stance and its innovative writing style, The Sound of Our Steps gains from being read in conjunction with the discourse of African American women's autobiographical writing as exemplified by bell hooks, and as a form of deterritorialization of the autobiographical genre, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari. The novel is structured in a rhizomatic way that undermines causality and linearity and vitiates the notion of a singular life narrative. It describes mother-daughter relations in a way that is not aimed at a fixed normative identity, but rather constitutes a constant search for a \"line of flight\" from her restricting surroundings. Reading the novel in the light of hooks and Deleuze and Guattari helps highlight the unique artistic nature of the book, which constitutes a critique of race and gender-based oppression in the margins of Israeli society, and offers an unconventional clue for reterritorialization.

This article discusses the work of the female Ethiopian-Israeli author Asfu Beru, whose collection of stories, Yare’ah Aher (A Different Moon) was published in 2002. The small corpus of contemporary Hebrew literature by Ethiopian-Jewish immigrants in Israel usually focuses on the narrative of homecoming and the journey to “Yerussalem,” while often viewing the African space retrospectively in utopian terms. By contrast, the stories in Beru’s collection are set in Ethiopia and do not deal with the journey or immigration to Israel. They depict a rigid traditional society that the protagonist, an adolescent female in many of the stories, has to confront. This article analyzes the convoluted relationship between multiculturalism and feminism through Beru’s hyphenated identity as a member of a traditional society, a woman, a Jew, and a Black, but who identifies at times with the hegemonic Israeli-Western perspective and takes a critical stance toward traditional Ethiopian society.

The horrid events of October 7 and ensuing war have profoundly impacted the Israel Studies academic community. Our hearts go out to the victims, survivors, and their family members. We are republishing the statement issued by the AIS executive on October 13.

For over sixty years, the traumatic memories of the 1948 war haunted the Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk. His experiences of the fighting, his injuries, and the friends who were wounded or killed left their mark on Kaniuk’s personality and became a source of inspiration for his writing. This article discusses the phases in Kaniuk’s writings on the war by examining the numerous variants on an identical episode that reappear in his books and his written drafts. It argues that Kaniuk’s process of writing on the traumatic events of 1948 shifts from a distal standpoint in the 1950s and 1960s to a much more intimate vision of personal testimony in his seminal novel 1948 (Tashaḥ) and shows that tracing Kaniuk’s poetics of displacement can shed light on his process of becoming a witness.

We are deeply saddened by the loss of Professor Gad Barzilai (1958–2023), who died on 10 April 2023. Gadi was an influential scholar in the fields of law and political science. He served as the president of the Association for Israel Studies (AIS) from 2011 to 2013. His leadership, exceptional scholarship, and vision helped shape the field of Israel studies and foster important intellectual debates on issues pertinent to Israeli society.