Summer 2017

Series Editor: Yigal Schwartz
Guest Editors: Batya Shimony and Ilana Rosen
Editorial B​oard: Eitan Bar-Yosef, Hanna Soker-Schwager, Anat Weisman
Editorial Assistant: Yaara Keren
 
The present volume of BGU Review offers some innovative analyses of contemporary Israeli works of fiction about war, soldierhood and battlefields. As shown in all of the six articles in this volume, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has exacted a heavy moral and cultural toll on Israeli society. The collection of articles, works analyzed and methods of exploring them in this volume is far from covering the scope of the topic of Israel's wars and their depiction in Hebrew literature; Nevertheless, these six articles shed significant light on the decades-long Zionist effort to dominate the Land.

Four of the six articles (written by Ayala Amir, Yael Shenker and Omri Herzog, Yael Levi-Hazan and Yael Dekel) examine fiction works dealing with the 1948 War and the moral dilemmas it presented to Israeli combatants. Gidi Nevo addresses the portrayal of everyday army life in three Israeli novels, showing the army to be a microcosm of Israeli society and its various subgroups and ideologies, and Yigal Schwartz confronts the trauma of the 1973 Yom Kippur War as remembered in Israeli literature and culture to this very day.

Full articles

Yael Shenker and Omri Herzog - "The World Is Filled With Remembering and Forgetting": Poetic Commemoration of the Battle in Huleikat

About the authors:
Dr. Yael Shenker is a Senior Lecturer at the Film and Television School of Sapir College. Her research addresses the literature and film of religious communities in Israel. Her recent publications include "Choosing One's Life: Identity-swapping Plots in Popular Fiction by Israeli Haredi Women," Israel Studies 22.1 (2017); “Disengagement: Representations of Territory and Space,” Theory and Criticism 47 (2016); and “Reading 'The Time of Trimming' under the Desk of Religious Zionism: Haim Be’er and National-Religious Identity,” Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture, 2014.
Omri Herzog is an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Chair of the Department of Culture — Creation and Production at Sapir College. His research interests include corporeal politics, cultural critique, and the political dynamics of Israeli culture. He co-edited the books Canonical and Popular (2007) and Inter-Cultural Interfaces (2009). His recent articles deal with Israeli beauty, the horror genre in Israeli culture, and representations of bad motherhood. He publishes regularly literary critiques in Haaretz newspaper, for which he won the Bernstein Prize in 2012.

Yael Dekel - Imprisoned Within the Poetics of Silence in S. Yizhar's "Hashavuy"

Yael Dekel received her PhD from New York University in 2014. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Crown Center for Jewish and Israel Studies at Northwestern University. She has published articles, essays and book reviews, translated poetry and edited books (Most recently: Utopia from Casablanca, Ra'av 2016). She is interested in Israeli literature and specifically the ways in which it takes part in the relationship among discourse, social norms, power dynamics, ideology and the state. She is a translator and an editor in the independent "Raav" press, Beer-Sheva.

Yigal Schwartz - Our Shadows and Ourselves: The "Yom Kippur Generation" in Israeli Fiction

A Full Professor in the Department of Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), the director of Heksherim: The Research Center for Jewish and Israeli Culture. He has published twelve books of research, a research autobiographical novel, and dozens of articles that have been translated into ten languages. He has also edited more than two hundred and fifty books—research works, prose, poetry, and drama—mainly in the framework of his position as senior editor at Keter Publishing House and at the Kinneret Zmora Bitan publishing house. He is the Senior Editor of Masa Critit (Critical Mass), a series of research books published by Heksherim Institute and Kinneret Zmora Bitan publishing house, and co-adds two series of prose books: Ruach Tzad (Side Wind), in which unique and new voices of Hebrew writers are being heard, and Retro, which intends for Hebrew manuscripts that had not been published and for Hebrew books that had gone out of production.
His latest publications include The RebirA Lamenter in Leopard-Print Pants: The Narrative Art of Zeruya Shalev of Hebrew Literature, Peter Lang GmbH, Frankfurt, 2016, and Lamenter in Leopard-Print Pants: The Narrative Art of Zeruya Shalev with Shai Zur and Nufar Rashkes, Ben-Gurion University and Miskal, 2017 (Hebrew).

Yael Levi-Hazan - Rewriting the War? Rewrites, Editing and Versions in Women’s Fiction About the 1948 War

Dr. Yael Levi-Hazan is a Post-Doctoral fellow at the Program of Philosophy and Literature at Haifa University. She specializes in Hebrew literature, gender studies, and feminist methodologies. Her Ph.D., written at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, dealt with Israeli Women's War Literature. Her forthcoming article is: “There was a War – People Ate It: Food, War and Consumer Culture in Two Stories by Orly Castel-Bloom", Capitalism and Gender: Feminist Issues in the Market Culture, eds. Dana Olmert et al. Jerusalem: Van-Leer Institute.

Gideon Nevo - "The Sound of Cannons Has Subsided" – On Three Israeli Army Novels

Dr. Gideon Nevo is a Senior Lecturer at the department of Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research focuses on the interface between Modern Hebrew literature and its historical, social and ideological contexts. His publications include Seven Days in the Negev: On S. Yizhar's 'Days of Ziklag' (2005) and The Seat of the Scornful: The Rhetoric of Modern Hebrew Satire (2010).

Ayala Amir - "Tracing Back My Own Footsteps": Space, Walking and Memory in "Shiv’a Mehem" by Nathan Shaham

Dr. Ayala Amir teaches at the Department of Comparative Literature at Bar Ilan University and in the Open University of Israel. Her book, The Visual Poetic of Raymond Carver (Rowman & Littlefield) was published in 2010. She has also published articles on modern and postmodern fiction, and the interconnections between literature and the visual arts, as well as chapters on literary criticism and narratology for the Open University courses. Her article on the Israeli writer Yeshahyu Koren was recently published in Mikan, Ben-Gurion University's journal of Israeli and Jewish literature and culture.