This book is the first to systematically examine the representation of women by mainstream Hebrew authors from the Palmah Generation to the New Wave. Fuchs’ unique analytical method exposes the male-centered bias which often inspires the works of such prominent and widely translated authors as S. Yizhar, Moshe Shamir, A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz. She exposes both the continuities and the transformations in the literary representations of women and explains them in innovative ways, grounded in aesthetic, social, political, and cultural conditions and ideologies. The bold and unexpected discoveries offered by this book illuminate the complex ways in which Israel’s political predicaments, for example, affect the representation of women, as well as the various ways in which Israeli literature uses female images to express the anxiety and frustration arising from these predicaments. This pioneering study will be invaluable to feminist literary critics, scholars, and teachers and students of modern Hebrew literature.

Partition--the idea of separating Jews and Arabs along ethnic or national lines--is a legacy at least as old as the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. Challenging the widespread "separatist imagination" behind partition, Gil Hochberg demonstrates the ways in which works of contemporary Jewish and Arab literature reject simple notions of separatism and instead display complex configurations of identity that emphasize the presence of alterity within the self--the Jew within the Arab, and the Arab within the Jew. In Spite of Partition examines Hebrew, Arabic, and French works that are largely unknown to English readers to reveal how, far from being independent, the signifiers "Jew" and "Arab" are inseparable.In a series of original close readings, Hochberg analyzes fascinating examples of such inseparability. In the Palestinian writer Anton Shammas's Hebrew novel Arabesques, the Israeli and Palestinian protagonists are a "schizophrenic pair" who "have not yet decided who is the ventriloquist of whom." And in the Moroccan Jewish writer Albert Swissa's Hebrew novel Aqud, the Moroccan-Israeli main character's identity is uneasily located between the "Moroccan Muslim boy he could have been" and the "Jewish Israeli boy he has become." Other examples draw attention to the intricate linguistic proximity of Hebrew and Arabic, the historical link between the traumatic memories of the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakbah, and the libidinal ties that bind Jews and Arabs despite, or even because of, their current animosity.

Unlike the literary traditions of the United States, England, and France, the first century of Hebrew literature was lacking in women novelists; women tended to write poetry, while prose fiction was mainly the domain of male writers. Since the 1980s, however, there has been a virtual explosion of commercially successful Hebrew fiction by women that includes many traditionally male genres, such as the historical novel, fictional autobiography, and the mystery novel. No Room of Their Own is a comparative analysis of recent Israeli fiction by women and some of its Western models, from Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir to Marilyn French and Marie Cardinal. Feldman shows the richness and subtleties of Israeli women's fiction as she explores the themes of gender and nation, as well as the (non)representation of the "New Hebrew Woman" in five authors -- the "foremothers" of the contemporary boom in Israeli Women's fiction: Amalia Kahana-Carmon ( Up on Montifer, With Her on Her Way Home), Shulamith Hareven ( City of Many Days, Thirst, The Vocabulary of Peace), Netiva BenYehuda ( The Palmach Trilogy), Ruth Almog ( Women, The Story of a [Writer's] Block, Roots of Air), and Shulamit Lapid ( Gei Oni).

Despite the tragic reality of the continuing Israeli-Arab conflict, this book affirms the bonds between the two communities, showing that the literatures of both ethnic groups defy obstructive ideologies. Rachel Brenner argues that literary critics have ignored the variety and dissent in the novels of both Arab and Jewish writers in Israel, giving them interpretations that conform with Zionist ideology. She offers insightful new readings that compare fiction by Jewish writers Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, and others with fiction written in Hebrew by such Arab-Israeli writers as Atallah Mansour, Emile Habiby, and Anton Shammas. She highlights the moral and psychological dilemmas faced by both Jews and Arabs and suggests that the hope for release from the historical trauma lies in reaching an understanding with and of the adversary.