“The Two Gaze Directly into One Another’s Face”: Avot Yeshurun between the Nakba and the Shoah—An Israeli Perspective

The paper is written from an Israeli point of view, a point of view of dual responsibility resulting from belonging to the state that both caused the Palestinian Nakba and took in and rehabilitated survivors and refugees of the Shoah. This position is marked by Jacques Derrida as the state of the aporia of taking responsibility. Avot Yeshurun’s poetry about the Nakba and the Shoah struggles with assuming responsibility as an Israeli for the consequences of both. In his poem “Passover on Caves” especially, Yeshurun develops a discourse of heterogeneous identities enabling the Jewish Israeli to assume both responsibilities by developing “multidirectional memory” of both traumas without constituting one identity at the expense of the supposedly opposed other.