Orian Zakai, George Washington University
Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring 2024)

ABSTRACT: This article charts a poetic conversation between three Hebrew women poets, Rachel Bluwstein, Yona Wallach and Sivan Beskin, surrounding the biblical figure of Jonathan, son of Saul. It traces the way in which the women poets reclaim and revise the figure of Jonathan against the grain of an androcentric intertextual tradition, in which the male-bond appears as a metonym of male superiority. The three poets’ shared fascination with Jonathan transposes the biblical intertext from the realm of male-exclusivity into a much more open field of meaning featuring gender-fluidity, pleasure, trauma and queer temporality. The article reads the poetic conversation surrounding the queer figure of Jonathan as a cross-generational collaborative endeavor of queer appropriation and reconstruction. Sustaining this collaboration is an intertextual network that spans beyond the three poets and the biblical text, encompassing a wide range of multilingual classic and modern cultural intertexts, through which various queer cultural contents interact with each other ultimately confounding national and heteronormative time and space.