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In 1967, Ghassan Kanafani published On Zionist Literature, which has recently been translated into English (2022). While Kanafani refers to many of the most celebrated and canonized Zionist literary texts of his time, texts authored by Leon Uris, Samuel Agnon, or Benjamin Disraeli, for example, my talk will focus more narrowly on Altneuland (1902) by Theodor Herzl; and New Face in the Mirror (1959), Envy the Frightened (1960), and Dust (1963) by Yael Dayan. Herzl’s Vienna at the turn of the century, the background and starting point for his utopia in Altneuland, differs in almost every respect from Yael Dayan’s Israel in the middle of the 20th century. A common point of departure for Dayan and Kanafani, however, is the period 1948-1967: Israel in the case of Yael Dayan, Palestine in Kanafani’s work.
Viktoria Pötzl is an Assistant Professor of German-Jewish Studies at Grinnell College. Pötzl’s current and second book project, Literally Imagined: Representations of Palestine and Israel in Jewish-Austrian Literature, explores the influence of gendered national narratives in Jewish-Austrian literary production from the former Galicia to Vienna during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.