Description:

During the late 1930's and 1940's, Zionism was not the only ideological-national movement active among Jews in Palestine. The Canaanite movement, essentially ideological and artistic, in fact rejected Jewish nationalism and called for a large nation including those who are native to the Fertile Crescent. Who were the Canaanites? What was their political position vis-à-vis Zionism? What were their artistic demands, and specifically their demands from literature? And how does prose, written by members of the movement, complicates their manifestos?
Yael Dekel (Ph.D, New York University, 2014) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies. She is interested in Israeli literature and specifically the way in which it takes part in the relationship among discourse, social norms, power dynamics, ideology and the State. Her teaching interests include: trauma studies, silence in literature, protest poetry, Palestinian and Israeli war literature.