War, Writing, Remembrance: Agnon House & Jewish Review of Books
Online discussion with Prof. Neta Stahl and R. Jeffrey Saks
Join AGNON HOUSE and the JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS for an online discussion evening marking the arrival of the most recent issue of the Review and its special content “Before & After October 7.”
Watch a recording of this event.
Sunday, March 17 at Noon (Eastern time) = 6:00 pm (Israel) on Zoom in English (register below).
Prof. Neta Stahl and R. Jeffrey Saks will speak with each other and our audience about their contributions to issue. How did each use the frame of Jewish literature in general and S.Y. Agnon’s writing in specific to craft a response to the traumas facing Israel these past number of months?
Neta Stahl’s essay “A Kibbutz and Its Fullness” details her coming to terms with the catastrophic events that befell Kibbutz Kfar Azza, where she was raised and where her family suffered at the hands of Hamas. Re-reading Agnon’s “A City and Its Fullness” (Ir uMeloah), his epic story collection attempting to come to terms with the destruction of his own hometown during the Shoah, opens a window for Neta to begin to do the same with hers. Jeffrey Saks’ “The Secret of Our Army’s Endurance” surfaces a long-forgotten interview Agnon gave in the 1960s about the meaning and challenge of the return to Jewish sovereignty and the need to maintain a military motivated and guided by Jewish values. The event will be introduced by JRB’s contributing editor, Prof. Shai Secunda.
Read the essays — and subscribe to JRB — here.
Neta Stahl is associate professor of modern Hebrew literature and the director of the Stulman Program in Jewish Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author, most recently, of The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature (Routledge).
Jeffrey Saks is Director of Research at Agnon House in Jerusalem.