The Betrayal of Criticism

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, Hebrew poetry has enjoyed a certain renaissance, which may have reached its peak in the middle of the 2010s. New poets have gained status among wider audiences and publics than in previous decades, while older poets — such as Nurit Zarchi, who won the Israel Prize for Literature and Poetry in 2021, Shulamit Apfel, Hedva Harekhavi, Rivka Miriam and others — have earned renewed attention and gained a new audience.

This phenomenon includes a trend of poetry that to a certain extent, or ostensibly, has no need for the traditional mechanisms of reception through institutional criticism. This poetry has found ways to reach its audience with almost no help at all from the institutions of ­criticism — ­neither from interpretation, nor, at least not much, from institutions such as the major publishing houses. This poetry is distributed on internet social networks; it is often accompanied by live poetry performances; and it is frequently produced with the help of crowdfunding platforms, which ensure not only its funding, but also initial circulation. Perhaps more crucially, the new poetry is also characterized by poetic accessibility,[1] colloquial language and pop-culture-inspired performativity, eschewing programmatic metanarratives and much of it has a distinct sociopolitical context.

The poetic accessibility and the clear statements express a fundamental shift in Hebrew poetry. In the preceding decades, and especially toward the end of the twentieth century, Hebrew poetry was said by some to have a problematic penchant for idiosyncrasy and opaqueness, for undecipherability. In summer 1989, Ariel Hirschfeld, a literary scholar and a critic of literature and art, published a three-piece series in the “Culture and Literature” supplement of the daily newspaper Haaretz, entitled “The Betrayal of Poetry.” In it, he described an ongoing tendency toward weakness and reduction in Hebrew poetry starting in the mid-1970s.[2] Hirschfeld emphasized that it was not a matter of “not enough” poetry or bad poetry, but rather of (too) subtle, good and original poetry that was nonetheless treacherous, because “it abandoned the subjects that are at the heart of the reality of life in this place.”[3] In the latter pieces he listed poetry’s sins in relation to its audience: it has withdrawn further and further into itself, and what started as a process of liberation, with the poetry of the 1950s, after the establishment of the state, has continued and intensified to create poetry that was engaged with trivialities, self-centered, and becoming elitist and idiosyncratic, thus distancing itself from the readers:

This withdrawal, and in ever growing doses, has turned dangerous . … [Some works have] presented verbal moves verging on the enigmatic. Poetry has become more and more elitist. The reader is required, with hidden violence, to perform a heroic act of interpretation. … For many readers, the poetry that emerged here in the 1970s crossed the boundary of challenge. Nor has it slowly flowed into the center of their consciousness ten or twelve years later; it has gone beyond its scope altogether. Many readers have abandoned poetry — it has been caught, for them, in the abyss of meaninglessness.

Another sin described by Hirschfeld is creating schematic, “leftist” poetry concerned with demarcating the good and the bad, leaving poetry itself in a “righteous” position that smacked of purism. This series of pieces, which caused quite a stir and earned reactions and responses from poets, critics and editors such as Helit Yeshurun, Yitzhak Laor, Nissim Calderon and others, affords a good glimpse, if not at “the state of poetry,” then certainly at the state of the discourse about poetry thirty-five years ago.[4]

What happened in the three decades since, that led to a shift in the major poetic idioms — from coded writing needing decryption on the level of sense, to accessible writing? The common, and for the main part correct, answer is that these decades saw processes of neoliberalization that included a dwindling of the press and the media along with the rise of social networks, which in turn weakened the institution of literary criticism. But we still need to explain the connection between the weakening of criticism and the shift in the poetic idiom.

To understand the shift in the main contemporary poetic idioms, it is not enough to ponder the weakened institution of criticism, but we must also consider the change in poetry’s relationship with this institution: The new poetics rejects the very relations of power and authority between itself and institutional criticism. This can be seen as its response to what I will call the betrayal of criticism. Simultaneously, I will show how criticism translates this growing threat to its exclusivity as a producer of the canon, and as an intermediary and interpreter of poetic quality and literary developments, into negation, condemnation and “intraliterary” anxiety.

Image

The low ebb that Hirschfeld identified in the poetry of the late twentieth century remained a frequent topic of discussion in the following years. In his article “Musings in an Age of Prose”[5] Dan Miron describes poetry’s diminished status after the 1970s as “a general devaluation of poetry as an identity-shaping genre.”[6] Miron, a scholar of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, a literary critic and an editor, does not assume that this decrease in poetry’s status is linked to its quality, contents, standard, and so on, but rather detects a loss of interest in poetry, since it seems to be created without the audience in mind. He thus echoes Hirschfeld’s claim regarding the disconnected elitism of poetry in those years.

Miron portrays the history of Hebrew literature as successive waves of prose and poetry. He explains the decrease in poetry’s status in terms of the internal relations between prose and poetry, and in terms of the relations with society, the audience and circumstances. While rejecting the formalistic thesis that sees literary shifts as stemming from the passing of time, which creates estrangement and novelty, he claims that poetry should be thought of as a whole, comprising both content and form, and concerned with events in the world and in the literary field and the connections between them. Miron points to a central norm in Hebrew literature — the position of “a watchman unto the house of Israel,” which includes a prophetic element — as the norm in relation to which the movement between poetry and prose ultimately takes place. This movement is connected to Roman Jakobson’s distinction between two writing traditions, one metaphoric and the other metonymic.[7] The former is more related to poetry and the latter to prose, although there is no complete overlap and the two genres draw on both traditions, and each genre may also move toward and away from “its” axis. According to Miron, when each genre moves away from its axis, it usually also moves away from the prophetic element, and in time, this usually also decreases its status as the central genre of the period.[8]

What is missing in Miron’s discussion is an account of the role of criticism — an additional factor influencing the field. In Miron’s explanation of the successive waves of prose and poetry in the history of Israeli literature, criticism is sidelined and has no part to play. While Miron connects the reduced status of poetry also to the devaluation of poetic criticism, he does not describe criticism as an institution that influences and shapes, but only as one that is subject to influence, and whose rise and fall are the outcome of poetic trends. Miron claims that criticism has blossomed when poetry has blossomed, because there was a need for interpretation, deciphering, and mediation. This strengthened the academic engagement with literature and the structuralist tendencies, since they are typified by efforts to decipher texts, which poetry seems to demand more than prose (Miron does not suggest that this is actually the case, only that it is the conventional thinking, since readers consider prose easier to understand).

The interpretative criticism of poetry, however, is not only engaged with deciphering texts; it also creates, with varying degrees of awareness, a historiography of literature, and therefore also a hierarchy of it, which distinguishes between poets and locates them in the field’s center or periphery. Hence, not only did poetry justify criticism and strengthen its status, as Miron suggests, but we can also assume that poetry “relied” on criticism to serve as its interpreter, to mediate, to be there and create an audience, in several ways: first and foremost, criticism is expected to wish to discover and hear what there is, what is new, what is going on, to flag who and what is happening in the field and inform the audience.[9]

We can therefore describe the poetry of the last decades of the twentieth century, which Hirschfeld and Miron were referring to, not only in terms of the “betrayal of poetry” vis-à-vis its audience, as Hirschfeld put it, but also as a period in which poetry’s “elitism” was made possible precisely because of its reliance on the institution of criticism to interpret and mediate it and make it accessible. With enough institutions doing so, poetry could afford to be more and more idiosyncratic.

Criticism, for its part, did not fulfil its role in this relationship: the poetry of the period posed it challenges, and in response met with readings using outdated tools, reductive interpretive norms and assumptions, and a tendency to ignore some of the poets. Thus, for example, the poetry of a poet like Sharron Hass — which is indeed enigmatic and infused with mythical ­qualities — was met with bewilderment from the critics. This bewilderment was often verbalized as a position lying somewhere between apology, apologetics, frustration, and a demand that the poet be more understandable:

This book’s main problem is a lack of clarity. Hass is a poet whose power stems from her fertile imagination … The poems brim with metaphors within other metaphors, making them accessible only to well-versed readers. The multiplicity of metaphors obliges the poet to be clear and careful in their selection, so that the difficult poem is at least coherent within its own world, like in the poetry of Avot Yeshurun, for example.[10]

It’s a shame that the poet, who makes use of uncommon terms such as “yellow muse” or Inanna or the Three Magi, does not see fit to enlighten the readers about the origin of those terms.[11]

The early poetry of poet and writer Shimon Adaf from the same period was praised as “authentic and warm,” but in the same sentence criticized for the disconnection between this quality and his being “an acquirer” of European “culture.”[12] The poetry of Mois Benarroch — a poet and writer born in Tétouan, Morocco, in 1959, who immigrated to Israel as a young teenager — gained little attention at first. As the poet and critic Nathan Zach later acknowledged: “He suffers … from a lack of feedback and proper recognition from the journalistic poetry critics in Israel in 2000, and from the established culture, the one that gives awards and prizes.”[13] Meanwhile, Avner Holtzman defined Benarroch’s novel as having only “sociological value.”[14]

Was this attitude only reserved for these particular poets? In my view, the historical turning point that saw the weakening of the poetic canon in the last decades of the twentieth century allows us to expose the modes of operation of critical institutions over many years, and explain the ways in which they acted and how the canon came to be shaped the way it is. A central point of departure for examining the existing canon, which I will not engage with directly, is its sociological character — that is, the fact that it is comprised of a fairly homogenous social group, predominantly male and Ashkenazi, and belonging to the middle and upper middle class. The extraliterary forces that create historical and structural socioeconomic gaps in Israel do not only shape, sort, and demarcate literature directly, from the outside — for example, by reducing the chances for the literary meteoric rise of a young woman poet from a disadvantaged, working-class suburb, whom the socioeconomic force of gravity will probably pull into different orbits — but are also revealed within the literary arena itself, seemingly in isolation from their social origin, this time appearing as gaps in the poetic norms and sensibilities themselves. These gaps in norms are not only the product of generational gaps and institutional changes created over time, as is sometimes claimed, but also reflect a narrow poetic range that over the years and the generations has not allowed many critics to be attentive to different poetics, instead furnishing them with a reductive, unopen, suspicious and skeptical attitude.

Image

“Our roadmap for the field found expression, equally, in what we refused to publish,”[15] said Menakhem Perry in his Ramat Gan Prize for Literature acceptance speech in 2010. In this speech, Perry — a literary scholar, acclaimed professor of poetics and comparative literature, and editor — describes his life’s work as he sees it, portraying it as an enterprise that has been destroyed and has become a wasteland. Beyond the pained words, his text helps us understand Perry’s aspirations and guiding principles — how he sees an effective literary sphere, and what means he has used to try and realize it. The text also enables us to characterize, at least in part, the poetic range adopted by many critics.

Perry’s words begin with the construction and end with the destruction. In the construction stage he emphasizes — perhaps naturally, since he is talking about his life’s work — the role of the scholar and the critic (who in this case is also an editor) as a major creator of the literary sphere (for example, Perry likens the concepts in the theories he developed to “folk songs”). However, it is the critics’ relationship with the audience that deserves attention: On the one hand, Perry testifies that “we were the first to center our theory on the reader’s processes of comprehension,” referring to the academic school to which he belongs, the Tel Aviv School. On the other hand, he describes the role of the critic/editor as being in charge of the field in its entirety: “We knew that a radical transformation in prose and poetry entails not only nurturing new writers, and identifying the writers we feel an affinity with in the previous generations, but also creating new readers, with different ears.” That is, while Perry describes the theoretical revolution that centers on the reader as contrasting with models such as New Criticism (which supposedly centers on the poem), in practice these two kinds of models afford an especially central place to the critic. Such a configuration made it possible for the critic to actively stand in the center of the literary scene. Further to Miron’s suggestion cited above, we may even wonder whether the role of the “watchman unto the house of Israel” was left mainly to literature, or whether with time, criticism also became a lot more interested in the role for itself.

Perry mourns the contemporary situation which, among other things, lacks “all the processes that in the history of literature are responsible for new, self-conscious writing,” processes which for him are: rebellion against a previous generation, and a search for remote uncles against strong fathers. In other words, Perry adopts Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence theory not as a depiction of the way the literary world changes, but as an aspiration and a precondition for an effective literary sphere. In his view, it is not the existing model, but the correct model, and it is the only model that can create good literature. In many ways, not unlike the “watchman unto the house of Israel” model, this is an example of criticism that tries to find what it is looking for — and becomes disappointed. Criticism portrays poetry as treacherous, disappointing or dead, to a large extent, while poetry itself changes and diversifies. The question therefore arises what these models identify and what they do not.

These critical norms and their failures were retroactively interpreted by those who had been the objects of criticism at the time. Thus, in a Yediot Acharonot interview from 2020, poet Shulamit Apfel said: “But today there are plenty of women poets, you know why? Because there are no more professors. That generation of professors has become extinct. They retired, their brains dried up.”[16] This is not to say, of course, that there were no women poets at the time — after all, Apfel herself was there — but that their voice was not heard as much as today. Apfel actually makes a connection between a certain kind of criticism and the exclusion of her and other women’s voices, pointing to a silencing that was seemingly committed by criticism and the models it postulated. We may wonder whether this represents a complaint by poets against the tools of criticism that follow a model of generational struggle, and at the same time describe reality in that way. Apfel herself locates the critics (“the professors”) in the same generational model that they themselves sketched, pointing to the model’s results and to the critics’ all too human place within it: as members of a generation themselves. Apfel, whose poetic career included a twenty-five-year hiatus and a kind of poetic silence, points to the outcomes of such a model, which by its very nature pushed a large part of poetry and literature into the shadows.

A few years ago, in the wake of his book Ha-kol Ha-orphe’i (The Orphean voice),[17] Dan Miron admitted to criticism’s failure to recognize women’s poetry, and to its dismissive and disparaging attitude towards it.[18] But in his own readings Miron has frequently replicated the same problems he seemingly identifies, and his history of reading women poets has included resistance to accepting feminist criticism as a broad and useful approach, and a tendency to engage with the personal and the biographical. Furthermore, he hasn’t explained the impact of this years-long failure, the influence of the ongoing inattentiveness that continued to determine the canon by using outdated models, and thus also create and depict it as such: as successions of fathers and sons — sons who rebel against their fathers but are of course made in their image.

Image

Criticism has a power that stems from the authority to tell the story of the literary field, but since this story is quite contemporary, poetry can also respond to it. And we can list a few optional ways to respond: one possibility is acquiescence. This is one way to describe the poetry of the 1990s, for example by poets who seemed to comply with the request not to engage with “leftist” politics, as Hirschfeld put it. Another possible response is rebellion or defiance: for example, one can write about criticism in one’s poetry, as some poets have done. But the poetry written in the last couple of decades offers something different, and reading it frequently reveals two combined responses. One repeatedly highlights the narrow and constraining expectations imposed on the poet — either implicitly or explicitly, either through the poetry itself or through the paratext (for instance by adopting pennames).

The buds of a second type of response started to appear as early as the 1990s, and have multiplied in the first decades of the twenty-first century: poetry reacts to criticism by rejecting the need to be deciphered, refusing to pose an interpretive “challenge,” as Hirschfeld called it. A look at contemporary poetry shows that poetry has responded to criticism and to its norms with actions, and these actions relate not only to who the poets are, but also to the poetic norms: directness and colloquiality, as in the poetry of poets like Noam Partom, Adi Keissar and Mois Benarroch, for example, still attract hostile criticism, but they also respond to it and deliberately challenge the (supposedly subtle, lean, frugal) norms of beauty, and what this beauty conceals. For instance, Benarroch refers to the implication of the word “zeh” (it), so common in the poetry of Nathan Zach, among others. Benarroch insists on lifting the curtain and dispersing the elusiveness, deriding the very attempt not to be explicit:

This is not the first time

They talk to me about

It

Like they used to talk to a child

About poo or pee

Or said flower

They ask me Why do you keep writing about

It

Or Are you still writing about

It

And it is always said with a very firm It

It

I always pretend to be

A total idiot

And ask

What is

It? …

But he is smarter and already knows me

And knows that we both know what this it is …

And what it is

Is that I was born in Morocco

Or that I talk about Morocco … 

But

It

Is the most Beatniky thing that I’ve ever done

Talking about Morocco

In a country where this memory

Is forbidden.[19]

In Miron’s (and in fact Jakobson’s) terms, we can say that today, poetry is moving away from the metaphoric axis towards the metonymic axis, being less implicit in its poetic devices, less demanding of interpretation and explanation, more explicit. The issue is not a “lowering of the standards” in the absence of gatekeepers, but rather a merging of two aspects concerning the weakened institution of criticism: new conditions of existence for a poetry that has realized that it cannot rely on a critical institution to interpret it and make it accessible; and simultaneously, a “loosening of the reins” in the face of institutional criticism that has a limited, and in effect, limiting range of poetic sensibilities.

Image

Letter to a Literary Editor 2 / Yudit Shahar[20]

Dear Literary Editor,

You have no idea,

You have no idea, your words, what they did to me,

Six months, six whole months

And not one word

Not one letter I put down on paper

I didn’t see your lips voiced on the receiver

I definitely did — red full-bodied rolled-back:

“Feminist trash, weak slogans

What else would you like me to break down”

Dear cold editor, how much you cost me,

What did it cost me,

So much it lost me

Six months not a comma, not a word

And now the murky stutter

Hesitant sterile awkward.

Hope you forgive me

Sorry — don’t forgive me

Sorry that this trash crowded itself

Out crowded out of myself

Hurried bitter and forward

This essay was first published in Hebrew in 2021 in Hazman Hazeh (These times), a journal of political thought, culture, and science founded by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute: https://hazmanhazeh.org.il/literary-criticism/. The author wishes to thank Michal Sapir, Yudit Shahar, Lisa H. Katz, Orian Zakai, Liron Alon, Asaf Shtull-Trauring, Chen Bar-Itzhak and Laura Wenus.

I return to this essay, which itself grew out of the epilogue of my dissertation on Hebrew poetry in the 1990s, with different eyes and renewed thoughts toda, in 2025–26. I think again of the second “sin” that Hirschfeld listed back in 1989: the tendency of 1980s Hebrew poetry to produce straightforward protest poetry that stood against killing, described as “leftist” and “righteous.” And I think of the past few years: the flood of poetic responses to October 7 — collected almost instantly in online anthologies, published in dedicated volumes, and featured prominently in literary supplements — contrasts sharply with, and underscores, the absence of protest poetry in Hebrew regarding the mass killing, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in Gaza. These days, I am preoccupied with the other side of the relationship between critical expectations and the poetry at hand. I return to the question of critical disappointment, now in the face of silence, and of what to do with it.

Yet I do not wish to point fingers at poetry itself. Rather, I call for self-reflection among scholars and critics, since poetry never exists in isolation. These shifts are never isolated; they reflect, respond to, and sometimes challenge long-standing expectations.

In this essay, I emphasized how expectations might function as constraints, blocking certain forms of poetry while also eliciting poetry’s own replies — but this is only one side of the story. I am reminded of Avot Yeshurun’s expectation, and disappointment: “Hebrew literature brought us to Zion and it had to say the truth about who lived in the land.” † At a moment when Hebrew poetry seems to have renounced its responsibility to confront its readership, the critic finds herself untethered. This rupture is real, not symbolic. Perhaps it is not meant to be mended. Yet it clarifies a necessity: critics must engage with their surroundings to offer perspective and participation.

Turning the lens inward, I ask what responsibilities, expectations, and disappointments shape us as critics and as participants in the literary scene. I once again ask: How do our own perspectives, biases, and investments in the field shape what is written, published, and read — or left unheard? In the end, returning to the lesson of my earlier analyses, the challenge is not merely to lament what is missing, but to examine how the literary field, its critics, and its audiences are entangled in shaping both what is written and what is heard. The rupture between expectation, silence, and critique is not a failure to be smoothed over; it is a space for attentive engagement, self-reflection, and ethical responsibility.

(† Michael Gluzman, The Politics of Canonicity: Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew Poetry [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003], 141; Haim Nagid, “Reayon im Yeshurun: ha-sifrut ha-ivrit ba-aretz lo mil’a et tafqida ha-merkazi: le-qarev otano el ha-be’aya ha-aravit” [Interview with Yeshurun: Hebrew literature in Israel did not fulfil its central role: bringing us closer to the Arab question], Yedioth Ahronoth, October 11, 1974; Sh. Shifra, “Reayon im Avot Yeshurun: el ha-yahdut al gesher shel milim ivriot” [Interview with Avot Yeshurun: Toward Judaism over a bridge of Hebrew words] Davar, April 1, 1975.)

endnotes

1. Thus, for example, in Yehuda Vizan’s criticism of the Maayan periodical, he characterizes its poetics as tending toward “immediacy,” and some contemporary poetry as tending to be “on the surface.” Yehuda Vizan, “Memusadim (Roy Chicky Arad, Dory Manor) Part 1,” [Established] Dehak 2 (April 2012), 491–506; Yehuda Vizan, “Libi eino ba-mizrach va-anochi lo kashur la-sifrut” [My heart is not in the East, and I have nothing to do with literature], Dehak 5 (March 2015), 623–36. ↩

2. Ariel Hirschfeld, “Bgidat ha-shira” [The betrayal of poetry] Haaretz, Tarbut Ve-sifrut , July 14, 21, and 28, 1989. ↩

3. Ibid. ↩

4. I would like to examine these pieces and the debate around them as a starting point that reveals some contemporaneous positions, exposing matters that were of concern at that moment. The positions and views themselves have occasionally come up in one wording or another in debates about poetry. We may think also of the famous debate between Leah Goldberg, Nathan Alterman, and Avraham Shlonsky, on whether poetry is supposed to refer to the war (i.e., Second World War) or not. See Leah Goldberg, “Al oto ha-nose atzmo” [On the same subject] Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza‘ir, year 8, nos. 34–35 (September 8, 1939): 9–10; Nathan Alterman, “Mikhtav al oto nose” [A Letter on the Same Subject], Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza‘ir, Dapim le-sifrut, no. 36 (22 September 1939): 9–10; Avraham Shlonsky, “Piku’aḥ nefesh,” [Saving a life] Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza‘ir nos. 41–42 (October 27, 1939): 11–12. Goldberg’s text is available online: https://www.kibutz-poalim.co.il/%D7%A2%D7%9C_%D7%90%D7%95%D7%AA%D7%95_%D7%94%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%A9%D7%90?).

   In his pieces, Hirschfeld suggested that the poetic modes of engagement of the 1980s were self-righteous and sloganeering, objecting to the “bad” and favoring the “good”; he criticized and even ridiculed this poetry alongside what he identified, as already mentioned, as disconnected, idiosyncratic and withdrawn poetry. Against these two tendencies, Hirschfeld demands that poetry address subjects of everyday vitality, citing Hezi Leskly as a positive example of engaged and engaging poetry. Hirschfeld’s pieces earned criticism from both sides: Yitzhak Laor protested against the presentation of political aspects as a betrayal of poetry, while Helit Yeshurun claimed that poetry “doesn’t owe anyone anything.” I do not intend to discuss the actual opinions expressed here, but rather to mark this debate with all its sides as a point of departure in light of which we can think of these questions, and wonder, among other things, how the questions themselves have changed (See Helit Yeshurun, “Ha-behala la-te’oryot koveret anashim beodam bahayim” [The rush to theory buries people alive], Haaretz, Tarbut Vesfirut, July 28, 1989; Yitzhak Laor, “Atzlut ha-academayim” [The academic aristocracy], Haaretz, Tarbut Vesifrut, July 28, 1989. ↩

1. Dan Miron, “Hirhurim be-idan shel proza” [Reflections in an Age of Prose], ed. Zisy Stavi, in Shloshim Shana, Shloshim Sipurim, (Tel Aviv: Yediot Acharonot, 1993), 397–427. ↩

2. Ibid., 397–8. ↩

3. Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” In Language in Literature, ed., Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 95–114. ↩

4. Miron, “Hirhurim be-idan shel proza,” 402–16. ↩

5. The “discovering” stance of a literary apparatus that mixes scholarship with publishing and editorial activity attracted further criticism in the 1990s, in the context of the spotlighting of Eytan Glass at the start of his career. Thus, for example, David Avidan’s satirical journalistic column “Look what I’ve discovered” derides Glass’s poetry, and as implied in the title and the introduction, also the editor Menakhem Perry. Of course, this mixture existed in many of the older periodicals (like Achshav and Siman Kri’a, which toward the end of its life was edited by the prominent scholars Perry and Miron), as well as in the newer ones (Rechov and Mikarov, which were edited by Nissim Calderon, and the short-lived Efes Shtayim, which was edited by Yigal Schwartz and Zeruya Shalev). ↩

6. Yuval Gilad, “Dimyon holech le-ibud” [Imagination is getting lost], Moznayim 80, 2 (April 2006): 25. ↩

7. Yoram Selbst, “Mimehozot ha-sheina el ha-erut” [From the realms of sleep to wakefulness], Iton 77, no. 220 (June 1998): 8–9. ↩

8. This formulation draws on a common stereotype imposed on Mizrahim, and the writing of Shimon Adaf was frequently received through such assumptions in early critical discourse. “I find it hard to assess the closeness between the poet Adaf, who writes about the death of a neighbor, who writes about love . . . in the beautiful cycle ‘Day Poems’ in authentic and warm and painfully simple lines … and the cultural acquirer, with ‘Poem for Charles,’ who is of course not the well-known Charles de Gaulle, but Charles Baudelaire.” In addition, the first question addressed to Adaf in what was most likely his first interview in the national press was: “We’re talking about Sderot, where you live if I’m not mistaken, which is not necessarily steeped in an atmosphere of poetry in particular and literature in general, what do you say?” Yaakov Besser, “Im Shimon Adaf: gam sderot omeret shira” [With Shimon Adaf: Sderot too speaks poetry], Al Hamishmar, June 11, 1993. ↩

9. Nathan Zach, “’Ani me’od ko’es aleichem’: Nathan Zach al shirim shel moshe benarroch” [“I Am Very Angry with You”: Nathan Zach on Poems by Moshe Benarroch], Hed Hachinuch 74, 10–11 (2000): 37. ↩

10. Avner Holtzman claimed that the novel Keys to Tetouan had no value as a literary creation, but only “sociological value,” because it was a testimony of the failure of the Melting Pot policy. Holtzman explains that Benarroch’s quiet desperation left him with a disconcerting impression, thus maybe achieving its aim. Avner Holtzman, “Ha-galut hi tmidit” [Exile is forever], Yediot Acharonot, Hamusaf Leshabat, May 5, 2000, 27–8. ↩

11. Menakhem Perry, “Dvarim be-tekes pras mifal hayim: hirhurim mefukahim” [Remarks at a lifetime achievement award ceremony: disillusioned reflections], Hasifria Hadasha website, June 15, 2010. https://www.newlibrary.co.il/page_713. ↩

12. Elad Bar-Noy, “‘Ha-olam ohev meshorerot metot’: Reayon im Shulamit Apfel” [“The world loves dead women poets:” Interview with Shulamit Apfel], Yediot Acharonot, 7 Leilot, March 2, 2020. ↩

13. Dan Miron, Ha-kol Ha-orphe’i [The Orphean voice], (Tel Aviv: Afik, 2017). ↩

14. See for example an interview with Dan Miron following the publication of his book: Neta Halperin, “Le-hevra kal yoter leqabel nashim feministiyot ma’asher nashim meshorerot” [It is easier for society to accept feminist women than women poets], Israel Hayom, September 19, 2017. ↩

15. Mois Benarroch, “Ze” [It/This], Ktovet 2 (December 2009): 102–104. English translation by Michal Sapir. ↩

16. Yudit Shahar, “Mikhtav le-oreh sifruti 2” [Letter to a literary editor 2], Maayan 8 (2012): 120. English translation by Michal Sapir. ↩