Art & War: Poetry, Pulp and Politics in Israeli Fiction

Shimon Adaf and Lavie Tidhar are two of Israel’s most subversive and politically outspoken writers.  Growing up on opposite sides of the Israeli  spectrum – Tidhar in the north of Israel in the Zion-ist, socialist Kibbutz; Adaf from a family of religious Mizrahi Jews living in Sderot – the two nevertheless shared a love of books, and were especially drawn to the strange visions and outrageous sensibilities of the science fiction that was available in Hebrew.

In Art and War, they engage in a dialogue that covers their approach to writing the fantastic, as they question how to write about Israel and Palestine, about Judaism, about the Holocaust, about childhoods and their end.

Extending the conversation even into their fiction, the book contains two brand new short stories – Tutim by Tidhar, and Third Attribute by Adaf – in which each appears as a character in the other’s tale; simultaneously political and fantastical, they burn with an angry, despairing intensity.