Lunch Seminar: The Diasporic Motif of the Non-Jewish Other in Contemporary Hebrew Literature

Where is the ‘Goy’? The Diasporic Motif of the Non-Jewish Other in Contemporary Hebrew Literature

In my talk I analyze how the diasporic motif of the non-Jewish Other has been utilized in
Hebrew literature in Israel over the last three decades, despite an apparent decline in use of
the term, ‘goy’. Notwithstanding a change in Jewish identity from a minoritarian to a
majoritarian perspective, this motif continues to shape the contemporary Hebrew literary
imagination. By pointing, among others, to the figure of the most important non-Jewish Other
in Israeli reality–the Palestinian–I will argue that this category, though obviously mediated by
current Israeli circumstances, is indeed built on the foundation of the diasporic category of
the ‘goy’. What does the ongoing vitality of this motif, despite the transformations of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, tell us about the relationship between continuity and
breakage in contemporary Hebrew literature and Israeli Jewish identity? By pointing to
specific images present both in the pre-State Hebrew literary canon (e.g. texts by Hayim
Nahman Bialik, Josef Hayim Brenner and Shmuel Yosef Agnon) and in the Israeli literary
mainstream of the last three decades (e.g. texts by Yehoshua Knaz, Dorit Rabinyan and Sami
Berdugo), I will analyze the role of the non-Jewish Other for the projection of a Jewish Israeli
national identity and its consequences.

Jagoda Budzik is an assistant professor at the University of Wrocław in the Taube Department
of Jewish Studies. She also teaches Hebrew literature at Middlebury College in the Middlebury
School of Hebrew summer program. She’s the author of the award-winning book, “Eretz Sham:
Poland in the Writings of the Third Post-Holocaust Generation in Israel” (Warsaw, 2023). Her
work is highly interdisciplinary and draws from literary, cultural and memory studies.