Examining a network of correspondences and encounters that cross between German and Hebrew, Zionism in Translation argues that the space between the languages enabled ambivalent conversations about the foundation of the State of Israel.

Zionism in Translation concerns exchanges—primarily of letters but also drafts, reviews, and other ephemera—sent to or from Jerusalem in the decades after 1948. All were written in German and Hebrew by a fascinating range of literary figures, including Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Yehuda Amichai, Ludwig Strauss, Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Leah Goldberg, Peter Szondi, Paul Celan, and Tuvia Ruebner. Na’ama Rokem illuminates the complexities that emerge as the two languages mix in this extraordinary epistolary network.

The writers that Rokem studies here contend with the genocidal violence that brought the rich historical relation between German and Hebrew to a seeming end. They also grapple, in different ways, with the new reality in Israel/Palestine in the wake of the founding of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba. The bilingual conversation that crosses over between German and Hebrew in these letters thus centers around the question of Jewish fate in the twentieth century and is immersed in negotiations about Jewish nationalism, the Zionist movement, and the possibilities of Jewish poetry. In the space between German and Hebrew, Rokem argues, the protagonists of her story voice ambivalences and hesitancies not found elsewhere.

Zionism in Translation joins a growing body of scholarship that uncovers the complex modes of belonging and resistance that unfold around the Zionist movement in the twentieth century. It will interest all readers concerned with modern Jewish intellectual, cultural, and literary history, the history of Zionism, and writers such as Arendt or Celan.