Jewish-Israeli Poetry, Dahlia Ravikovitch, and the Gender of Representation

This article attempts to explain the particular position of Dahlia Ravikovitch among her fellow poets of the Statehood Generation (1950s–1960s) and in Israeli literature in general—namely, the triangular connection between poetics, gender, and canon in the young Israeli-Hebrew culture. I argue that the founding of the nation-state instigated far-reaching changes in the life, structure, and symbolic identity of the nation, and it is in light of these changes that Israeli culture should be analyzed. The main change was the death of constitutive Zionist desire, by which the nation underwent several shifts, one of which was from a masculine to a feminine symbolic identity. Reading Ravikovitch's poem “Dyokan yehudi” and connecting it to other poems, I argue that, in this “feminine” stage of the nation, she fills the previously masculine function of the national poet (and the poet-prophet).