Third Issue, 2013
Publish Date: November 2013
Editors: Batya Shimony and Yigal Schwartz
Editorial Board: Eitan Bar-Yosef, Hanna Soker-Schwager, Anat Weisman
Translation Editor: Hannah A. Komy Ofir
The new volume of the electronic journal BGU Review is dedicated to the works of authors and poets of the second generation of the 1950s immigration to Israel. All of these writers are the children of immigrants from Arab countries, with the exception of Leah Aini, whose father is a native of Salonika and whose mother is Nashdidani, and are known in Israeli society as “Mizrahim”. They grew up in the social and cultural periphery of Israel. In the past several decades, their works, which began to be published in the 1980s and 1990s, have come to fruition and have arrived at a position of honor in the Israeli literary space. This literature offers novel poetic and thematic directions that challenged accepted social and national ideologies and offered a new language with which to understand Israeli society and culture. In this volume, we present a poetical-personal essay by each one of the writers, accompanied by an academic article that addresses his or her works, as well as a panoramic article that discusses the Holocaust connection in the works of this generation of writers.
This issue is based on the conference "Between East and West: Oriental Writers and Orientalism in Israeli Literature and Culture”, which was held in Heidelberg, Germany in April 2013. The conference was initiated and organized by Prof. Anat Feinberg, Hochschule für Jüdische Studien, Heidelberg and Prof. Yigal Schwartz, Director of Heksherim: The Research Institute for Jewish and Israeli Literature and Culture, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
All of the articles were translated to English by Hannah Komy Ofir.
We thank her for her excellent and helpful work.
