Israeli literature “waited” until the 1961 public indictment of a Nazi war-criminal to hesitantly begin to face the Holocaust. The Zionist wish to forge a “New Jew” was in part responsible for this suppression. Aharon Appelfeld’s understated short stories were the first to enter the modernist literary scene in the 1960s, followed in 1970 by the cryptic verse of Dan Pagis, a fellow child survivor. Only in 1988 two Israeli-born pop singers -- haunted children of survivors -- broke the continuous practice of concealing the past and its emotional aftermath in the watershed documentary Because of That War. The process of breaking the silence intensified in the last two decades; the “Second Generation” burst forth artistically with writers like Etgar Keret, Amir Gutfreund and Savyon Liebrect who told what their parents were unable to utter. This course will analyze the transformation of Israeli literature and cinema from instruments of suppression into means for dealing with the national trauma. The class is conducted in Hebrew and the texts are read in the original. The content of this course changes from year to year; therefore students may take it for credit more than once. Seminar. Fulfills Literatures of the World, Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) and Cross Cultural Analysis – Class of ‘10 and after.