Israeli Fantasy and Science Fiction:

Fantastical Time/Space and the Modern Promised Land

by Dr. Vered Weiss

Tuesday, April 11th at 1:00-2:30 pm, Natural Sciences Bldg 304

*The event is both in-person and livestreaming on YouTube: Serling Institute for Jewish Studies

The notion of ‘The Promised Land’ is simultaneously known and familiar and inherently incomprehensible. It is conceptually both a real place that one must reach and conquer, and it is also a nebulous idea of promise and prosperity. Focusing on twenty-first century Israeli Science Fiction and Fantasy (SFF), Weiss outlines a division between Judaic Israeli SFF and Universalist Israeli SFF texts. The former uses the Promised Land time/space to engage with Jewish and Israeli culture as the main focal point, and the latter rejects such associations. Weiss also examines SFF that engages with the Promised Land time/space in a sporadic manner, situating local Jewish and Israeli concerns within global issues, and vice versa, which she terms Hybrid Judaic Universalist Israeli SFF. The three kinds of Israeli SFF adhere to transcultural SFF generic ontological conventions, forging a fundamental unifying bridge between Israeli and global readers.

Vered Weiss is the Serling Israeli Visiting Scholar and The Israel Institute Teaching Fellow at The Michael and Elaine Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel. Weiss is a faculty member of the Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities, and teaches courses on Israeli culture, as well as on world literature. Weiss is co-editor of Tracing Topographies: Revisiting the Concentration Camps Seventy Years after the Liberation of Auschwitz (Routledge, 2017), and is co-editing a volume about Israeli culture and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Lexington). Her current research project explores the interplay between the location of marginalized characters and the ways in which narrative empathy is formulated in literature, and she is also collaborating on a co-edited volume about Israeli speculative fiction (Liverpool University Press).