This special English language issue of Yehee has been in the works for some months. The project was born of a desire to bring Israel’s oft unheard voices to an English-language readership, broadening the discourse around Israel, Israeliness—and around the politics of contemporary poetry as a whole. The atrocities of October 7th make this mission all the more urgent. The depraved assault on innocents, the baying of mobs for Jewish blood in the streets of the world’s cities, and the venomous purring of elites in its classrooms and boardrooms for the same, have taken far too many by surprise. It is a perpetual present: this sterile mindset that forgets again and again that there is evil in the world. Technocratic arrogance blinds us to this evil, while the dogma of coddled progressives seeks to excuse and mitigate it. Both contribute to a stupor that hides from us the horror of the world, and also—more unforgivably—the world’s beauty, its richness and fragility, its sparks of holiness.

Poetry, true poetry, is meant to be an antidote to this stupor—this despite the fact that many of poetry’s self-appointed stewards have aligned themselves unthinkingly with fashionable slogans. Since its founding in 2019, the Jerusalem-based journal Yehee has been a counter-voice to the herd, a bracing and defiant instance of the power of poetry to awaken. Each of the journal’s issues—as well as its dynamic website—have assembled radical experiments in language, faith, and politics; new engagements with nation and world. This Hebrew literary vitality is matched by exquisite visual design, a commitment to the whole art, reflected in painting, photography, animation, graphics, and more. The title itself embodies its aspiration. An allusion to the book of Genesis: Yehee—let there be—as in, “Let there be light.”

“Our intention is clear,” states the journal’s founding manifesto:

“We offer a radical (in its etymological sense, meaning ‘of the roots’) artistic front for the passions, dreams, and political desires of new voices, for a discourse that usually rumbles overhead or underneath the surface of Israeli society.”

The literary and artistic establishment in Israel, as in much of the West, is predominantly secular and left-wing—to an extent that has made some parts of the poetry world a stultifying place given to cancel culture. By contrast, Yehee has sought to showcase the full spectrum of Israeli society, especially those usually consigned to the margins. The Israeli periphery—or peripheria, as it is known—includes the residents of the border towns, be they north or south (long under a rain of perpetual fire); the mostly Mizrahi (Jews of Middle Eastern origin) population of poor development towns; with special emphasis on the settlers and the right wing. Also left out of many mainstream publications are the voices of the ultra-Orthodox Haredi minority, as well as religious sentiments in general. What unites these disparate voices is their deep and categorical rootedness—in the land, in Jewish heritage, in tradition. Indeed, this rootedness is perhaps the underlying reason for their marginalization. Yehee seeks to free these voices from their tokenized position in academic discourse, letting them sound as a full-throated and polyphonic Israeli voice.

The first two issues of Yehee highlight this broad range of expression, often juxtaposing the most disparate elements. The two more recent issues of Yehee are theme-based. Issue Three is devoted to the memory and aftereffects of the Disengagement, the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza strip in 2005. Yehee is the first publication to devote a full and comprehensive issue to the pain, confusion, and trauma of the Jewish residents who were forcibly evicted from their homes. This volume feels especially relevant right now, as Israel revisits and rethinks the Disengagement, and how the evacuation of the Gaza strip enabled the rise of Hamas. The fourth issue of Yehee is devoted to Haredi poets and artists—a unique chance to hear the voices of an insular community that rarely speaks outside its own walls. The editors of Yehee feel that sounding this voice is essential for a renewal of Israeli culture.

The poems that follow in this special English-language edition have been selected from all four issues of the journal. They include fantasias and manifestos, nationalisms turned inside-out and landscapes cracked open, sensuous explorations of the body and chronicles of the most intimate life cycle events, savage prayers and tender epiphanies, scriptural verses set awhirl through days of lambent ordinariness and nights of bottomless grief.

In assembling our selection, we have sought, first and foremost, to reflect the journal’s diversity and showcase polyphonic Israel in all her wonderful variety and complexity. Our aspiration is to give space to the many sides of the political and social spectrum that have appeared in the journal: the spiritual search alongside the anger of the dispossessed. Second, we have been mindful of the challenges inherent in translation, in particular translating Hebrew poetry with its frequent biblical intertextualism, as well as the multi-axial midrashic conversation taking place along millennia, inscribed and enacted by so many of Yehee’s poets. These considerations have shaped our selection, and we are very grateful to the dedicated translators who have risen to these challenges. As editors, we have relied on their solutions, and together have employed epigraphs, insertions, editors’ notes, and intentional echoes of the King James Bible translation, in order to offer poems that resonate in English. Rather than lament what is lost in translation, we see these translations as a gain: a restoration in English of voices that have too often fallen by the wayside

Yehee opens vistas on an Israel unfamiliar to most English readers, and some may find it surprising, even shocking. This Israel brims with complex realities. Even more than most societies, Israel is distorted by the lens of simple narratives and imposed binaries. Either/or notions of religious versus secular, eastern versus western, white versus colored, modern versus traditional, are clumsy frameworks in and of themselves. What is worse is that, all too frequently, a mental surgery takes place in which the perceived good part of a binary is kept and the supposedly bad is lopped off and discarded.

Yehee defies such amputations and the binary thinking that enables them. Collapsing easy distinctions between the popular and the literary, the poetic and the political (Yehee calls itself ktav et poeti-politi, “a poetic-political journal,” not a “journal of political poetry”), Hebrew and Arabic (it has printed both, with cross-translation), pious and scandalous, and right and left, the journal seeks to be a place for open dialogue and the search for truth, for what Yehee’s founding manifesto calls “the radical expression of our lives in this land of strife, of sweetness.”

Yehee is published by the Uri Zvi Greenberg Heritage House in downtown Jerusalem, just off the light rail line and down the street from the biblical city of King David. The journal’s mission is inspired by the example of Greenberg (1896-1981), whose own career is a case study of great poetry and its marginalization. Raised in a traditional Jewish household in Poland, Greenberg was a major talent in the Yiddish avant-garde of Warsaw, but in 1923 he emigrated to Palestine and shifted his focus to Hebrew poetry. Increasingly disillusioned with the Zionist left, he found a political and cultural home in the right-wing Zionist Revisionist movement. During the 1930s, his poems excoriated the socialist-oriented Zionist leadership in Palestine for not doing enough to protect Jews, and he presciently warned the Jews of Europe of the coming catastrophe. His parents and sisters, who remained in Poland, were murdered in the Holocaust.

Greenberg is held to be one of the greatest twentieth-century Hebrew poets, the pinnacle of Hebrew modernism. His 1951 collection Streets of the River is Israel’s most elaborate and searing Holocaust lament. Yet alongside the high critical estimation has been something of a cordon sanitaire decreed against the poet by the official institutions of Israeli culture. Long dominated by the left, they have never forgiven Greenberg for his political apostasy. Nor can the guardians of mainstream culture be comfortable with his extremism: the rage and accusation, the violent imagery and agonized love of a poet who saw himself as an unwilling prophet of Jewish fate. In a country that honors its poets—four other twentieth-century modernists grace Israeli banknotes today—Greenberg haunts Israeli culture, a marginalized titan unlikely ever to be allowed on currency, though his visage is imagined on a “stubborn coin” in one of the poems in this volume.

This issue of Yehee concludes with two poems by Greenberg, rare soundings of his demanding, orchestral oeuvre available for the first time in English translation. (We thank Peter Cole for his counsel in translating this nearly-untranslatable poet.) “From the Depths,” chosen before the events of October 7th, is unsettlingly relevant today. Not for nothing did Greenberg see himself as a prophet. His terrible words, written in response to the 1929 Hebron massacre, could have been written yesterday; his pain the cry of every Israeli over the pitiless butchering of their families. Greenberg’s barbed warning about passivity and the desire to be a “lamb” also resonates now. His is an enraged, caustic, and multifarious voice that refuses all comforting dogma. This stark cry is followed by the counterpoint of his tender “Song of the Dream of the Song,” which reflects Yehee’s aspirations for a renewal of poetry “on the far side of the abyss.”

In Greenberg’s spirit, though hardly copies or uniform in outlook, the poets and artists of Yehee give expression to the widest possible bandwidth of Israel. In them, you will encounter anecdotes and prophecies, grace-thirsty voices of religious women and sideways glances at secular Tel Aviv. You will witness the sense of betrayal still felt over the government’s destruction of the Jewish communities of Gaza during the 2005 Disengagement, monuments in words to the homes and businesses, greenhouses and synagogues that were demolished and whose vacuum was filled with hate and terrorism.

Israel itself, the life it fights for, is too often a case of what gets shut out, distorted, unheard. Do not look away from its testimony. Welcome the diverse range of its voices. The Israelis mourn. They fight. They sing, and they will continue to sing.

Special English Issue editors:

Batnadiv HaKarmi, Jerusalem

Michael Weingrad, Portland

Head Editor, Yehee: Elhai Salomon, Jerusalem

Publication Assistant: Yisrael Medad, Shiloh

Note: all rights to use the work of Uri Zvi Greenberg are held by his estate.