Beyond Political Messianism

In recent decades, a group of second generation religious Zionist West Bank settlers have turned away from the collectivist political messianic ideology of the first generation of settlers and have begun to explore poetry as a mode of individual self expression. Based on interviews of eight key figures in this new trend and an analysis of fifty works by these poets, "Beyond Political Messianism: The Poetry of the Second Generation of Religious Zionist Settlers" tells the story of how they revolutionised the religious Zionist settler culture by moving poetry writing into the mainstream of that culture, and how they introduced into the world of secular Israeli literature images and language styles drawn from their lives as religiously observant Jews. Among the themes central to these poets' concerns are: the formation of a religious identity based on faith and ritual observance, the relationship of the contemporary Jew to the Bible and to traditional Jewish texts, appropriate ways to write about erotic experience, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.