SOURCE: Bernstein, Michael André. “Usurpations: A Poetics of Catastrophe and the Language of Jewish History.” Triquarterly, no. 79 (fall 1990): 207-19.

In the following essay, Bernstein analyzes similarities between the rhetoric of contemporary Israeli society and the themes of Fortunate Exile, highlighting the pessimistic relationship between post-1967 Jewish poetry and Judaic history.

I've yoked together my large silence and my small outcry. 

—Yehuda Amichai, And That Is Your Glory

I

Give all your nights to the study of Talmud 

By day practice shooting from the hip 

—Irving Layton (“Recipe for a Long and Happy Life”)

Initially, one of the most arresting features of many Orthodox settlements erected in the occupied West Bank since 1967 is their large percentage of North American and British-born members. Still more striking, though, is the fact that these late-coming pioneers, often fundamentalist in their religion and far-right in their politics, characteristically arrived in Israel only after...