Why is There No Jewish Surrealism?

In this seminal article, translated for the first time into English, Gideon Ofrat poses and answers the question, why is there a lack of true Surrealism in Palestinian-Israeli art and literature while all the other major trends of twentieth-century literature and art found echoes in Palestinian-Israeli culture. Ofrat contrasts Israeli views on bodies and letters, light and darkness, dream and reality, memory and frozen consciousness, redemptive history and the prison of memory, meaning and paradox, and hope and abject despair—all considered in the perspectives of biblical-rabbinic Judaism, surrealist writing and art, and the Holocaust. He concludes by contrasting Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion and Salvador Dali’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross and Corpus Hypercubus.