“Vengeance Like This”: Expressing and Instigating Rage in Hebrew Poetry

Join the Program in Judaic Studies for a seminar with Vered Karti Shemtov on Monday, September 28.

This talk explores the aesthetics, evolution, and political co-optation of rage in modern Hebrew poetry, focusing on Hayim Nahman Bialik’s 1906 trilogy From the Poetry of Rage (Mi-shirei ha-Za’am). By examining the sequence of “On the Slaughter” (1903), “In the City of Slaughter” (1903), and “I Knew in a Night of Fog” (1905), the presentation demonstrates how Bialik’s poetic rage evolves from an immediate visceral outcry and internal moral critique following the Kishinev pogrom into a transformative cosmic reflection. Ultimately, the talk argues that Bialik consciously reframed explosive outrage into long-term emotional containment and collective mourning, resisting the reduction of poetic rage to political agendas. This is part of a project that focuses on different modes of writing poetic rage.

Open to the public. Kosher refreshments will be available.

More about Vered Karti Shemtov

Vered Karti Shemtov teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She is the faculty director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford and the founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Dibur. Her publications focus on modern Hebrew poetry, Jewish and Israeli perspectives of time, and her new project on literary rage.