Imagining Palestine and Israel:  Poems by British and American Jews, 1830-1998   

    Israel's “state” has particularly concerned Jewish poets in the English-speaking diaspora: they envisage a “nation,” a theology, and a cast of characters from whom they  “came” in a distant past.  This topic explores their attitudes towards exile and return, the pressures on their conceptions exerted by the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the Shoah, and Statehood, and the values of making pilgrimage or aliyah.  We study  the imagery of triangulated loyalties---to the Holy Land, to  the natal country of immediate ancestry, to the New World---that has characterized much post-Enlightenment Jewish experience.  

    19th and 20th century writings by Marion Moss, Grace Aguilar, Philip Abraham, Israel Zangwill, David Plotkin, Isaac Rosenberg, Nina Salaman, Jessie Sampter, Louis Untermeyer, Abraham Moses Klein, Babette Deutsch,  Karen Gershon, Arthur Jacobs, and Adrienne Rich and 19th century photographs and paintings.