John Brinckerhoff Jackson theorized the vernacular landscape as one that reflects a way of life guided by tradition and custom, distanced from the larger world of politics and law. This quotidian space is shaped by the everyday culture of its inhabitants. In Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature, Grumberg sets anchor in this and other contemporary theories of space and place, then embarks on subtle close readings of recent Israeli fiction that demonstrate how literature in practice can complicate those discourses. Literature in Israel over the past twenty-five years tends to be set in ordinary spaces rather than in explicitly, ideologically charged locations such as contested borders and debated territories. Rarely taking place in settings of war and political violence, it depicts characters’ encounters with everyday places such as buses and cafés as central to their self-conception. Yet in academic discussions, the imaginative representations of these sites tend to be neglected in favor of spaces more overtly relevant to religious and political debates. To fill this gap, Grumberg proposes a new understanding of how Israeli identity is mapped onto the spaces it inhabits. She demonstrates that in the writing of many Israeli novelists even mundane sites often have significant ideological implications. Exploring a wide range of authors, from Amos Oz to Orly Castel-Bloom, Grumberg argues that literary depictions of vernacular places play a profound and often unidentified role in serving or resisting ideology.

Hebrew Literature and the 1948 War: Essays on Philology and Responsibility is the first book-length study that examines the conspicuous absence of the Palestinian Nakba in modern Hebrew literature.

Demonstrating the pervasive presence of God in modern Hebrew literature, this book explores the qualities that twentieth-century Hebrew writers attributed to the divine, and examines their functions against the simplistic dichotomy between religious and secular literature. The volume follows both chronological and thematic paths, offering a panoramic and multilayered analysis of the various strategies in which modern Hebrew writers, from the turn of the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century pursued in their attempt to represent the divine in the face of metaphysical, theological, and representational challenges. Modern Hebrew literature emerged during the nineteenth century as part of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) movement, which attempted to break from the traditional modes of Jewish intellectual and social life. The Hebrew literature that arose in this period embraced the rebellious nature of the Haskalah and is commonly characterized as secular in nature, defying Orthodoxy and rejecting God. Nevertheless, this volume shows that modern Hebrew literature relied on traditional narratological and poetic norms in its attempt to represent God. Despite its self-declared secularity, it engaged deeply with traditional problems such as the nature of God, divine presence, and theodicy. Examining these radical changes, this volume is a key text for scholars and students of modern Hebrew literature, Jewish studies and the intersection of religion and literature.

Here is the first critique of modern Hebrew literature to examine the vital concept of place through which we learn about some of the pressing concerns and issues of contemporary Israelis. This book focuses on six novels in which characters leave Israel but then return, manifesting the tension between home and abroad in the dialectics of outside and inside. This allows the authors to use place on a thematic as well as a structural level. Thus, Europe often assumes a metaphoric, or, alternatively, a metonymic function. Places may also be presented by contrasting their analogous descriptions or their social and cultural aspects. Finally, place may be used to analyse the soul, for external place images can reveal the inner reaches of the psyche.

Many contemporary Israelis suffer from a strange condition. Despite the obvious successes of the Zionist enterprise and the State of Israel, tension persists, with a collective sense that something is wrong and should be better. This cognitive dissonance arises from the disjunction between ÒplaceÓ (defined as what Israel is really like) and ÒPlaceÓ (defined as the imaginary community comprised of history, myth, and dream). Through the lens of five major works in Hebrew by writers Abraham Mapu (1853), Theodor Herzl (1902), Yosef Luidor (1912), Moshe Shamir (1948), and Amos Oz (1963), Schwartz unearths the core of this paradox as it evolves over one hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s.