SOURCE: "Anti-War Poetry in Israel," in Partisan Review, Vol. 54, No. 4, Fall, 1987, pp. 594-602.

In the following essay, Young analyzes the place of the Holocaust in modern Israeli anti-war poetry.

Of the centuries of historical archetypes for suffering accumulated in Hebrew, those generated during the period of the Holocaust have begun to overwhelm all others. Even the names for this era in Hebrew and Yiddish, Sho'ah and Churbn, which previously designated other catastrophes, are in themselves now reinformed by the last and greatest disaster. Due partly to the sheer enormity of events, partly to the great proportion of Holocaust survivors in Israel (nearly half the population in 1948), and partly to the central place of the Holocaust in Zionist ideology, images and figures from the Sho'ah have all but displaced their historical precedents. Not only has the Sho'ah begun to represent retroactively all pre-Holocaust catastrophes—lending them a significance they...