One Poet Brother Immigrated to Israel, the Other Stayed in the U.S.

Until last year, the American poet James Reiss was unable to read the mature work of his brother, the late Israeli poet Reuven Ben-Yosef (né Robert Eliot Reiss), who made the Jewish state his home in 1959. Thanks to a recently published volume of English translations by Michael Weingrad, he has familiarized himself with both the poetry and the poet:

Now that I can finally read his poems, I see how, even though we weren’t personally close, our work developed in parallel—or what Saul Bellow called axial—lines over the decades. [Ben-Yosef’s] long poem about New York, “The City,” complements my own Big Apple poems; his portrait of the poet as an “aging lion” echoes my portrait of the king of beasts in “Three Leos”; his description of our father’s funeral service aboard a rented boat pairs well with my elegy for our dad in my first book; his frequent preference for stanzas with the same number of lines equals my own; his experiments with visual poems match “concrete” verse I continue to tweak; his love of imagery and sound shows (at least in translation) in seven stark words I wish I had written: “A shack in a stand of pines.”

Unlike such colloquial late-20th-century Israeli poetry as Yehuda Amichai’s, and unlike much of my own work, which has been called “plainspoken,” Ben-Yosef’s verse apparently deploys biblical and demotic Hebrew in dense, allusive ways. . . .

Fifteen years after he died, a major reassessment of Ben-Yosef’s work may win him readers—an audience—on this shore. As far as I’m concerned, the book is a triumph for our family.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Arts & Culture, Hebrew poetry, Israel, Israeli literature, Poetry

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF