Autumn 2023 - Tel Aviv Review of Books

Our Foorprints on Water / Joys That Do Not Come / Top-Down

Marzuq Halabi

Three poems by Palestinian poet Marzouk Halabi, translated from Arabic exclusively for the Tel Aviv Review of Books.

Love Song / A Poem

Amiram Cooper

Love Song was composed especially for the 25th anniversary of the founding of Kibbutz Nir Oz, in 1980. The writer, a resident of the kibbutz, was kidnapped to Gaza on October 7th, 2023.

Small and raggedy, his scowl still terrified me. This was when he knocked on my door and announced he had come to stay with me. He looked like he was having a tougher time than most. Shallow unshaven cheeks, angry burning eyes set deep into black circles, shaggy brows. He said his name was Nissim. I gave him some towels and sheets and left him to get on with it.

Against Analogy

Daniel J. Solomon

Masha Gessen's likening of the Gaza Strip to a Nazi ghetto is a master class in Holocaust inversion and distortion. These statements were made in the heat of a polemical debate, but moral outrage should never call the tune. There is a word for when it does: demagoguery.

Cassandra

Orian Zakai

“Tell them all that we love them to the moon and back”— the last message of the tatzpitaniyot (female lookouts) at the Nahal Oz outpost on October 7, 2023. The lookouts reportedly foresaw the events but their warnings were ignored. All but two were either murdered or taken hostage. A poem.

But Not the Fathers

Josh Rolnick

Jewish Ripples

Zev Mishell

A new book revisits a sizable, and now forgotten, anti-Zionist discourse that held sway among large swaths of American Jews in the mid-20th century. It serves as topical reminder of the prevalence of Jewish dissent before a consensus on Israel and Zionism took hold, one that now seems to fray.

The Book That Saw October 7 Coming From a Mile Away

Andrew Pessin

‘Caliphators’ advocating for the global triumph of Islam see Western values as signs of weakness and decadence. A new book argues that too many Western thinkers, championing progressive liberalism, insist on proving them right.

The War Against Cliche

Arie M. Dubnov

As William James noted, nations are not saved by wars but 'by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks.'