SOURCE: "The Holocaust and the Bible in Israeli Poetry," in Modern Language Studies, Vol. XXIV, No. 4, Fall, 1994, pp. 63-77.

In the following essay, Jacobson examines biblical allusions in Israeli Holocaust poetry.

Although the destruction of European Jewry in World War II took place outside of the Land of Israel, Israeli culture has been greatly preoccupied by this historical event. Zionism was a movement founded in Europe with the purpose of saving the Jews of the Diaspora from gentile anti-Semitism. For Jews engaged in the Zionist enterprise in the Land of Israel during and immediately after World War II, Hitler's genocidal attack on the Jews of Europe grimly confirmed their conviction that Diaspora Jewry was doomed and that the only viable alternative for Jews was the development of the Land of Israel into a sovereign Jewish state. As Dina Porat observes, the events of the beginning of the War...