The "postcolonial" in translation: Reading Said in Hebrew

The essay focuses on the "travel" of various debates-orientalism, postcolonialism, postzionism-between the U.S. and Israel, between one institutional zone and political semantics and another. Through a comparative history of these critical intellectual debates, the author considers some key moments and issues in the "translation" of Said's ideas into Hebrew. The reception of Said's work is engaged in its contradictory dimensions, especially in liberal-leftist circles, where the desire to go-beyond-Said offers some ironic twists. The issues examined include: the nature of the "post" in the concepts of the "post-colonial" and "post-Zionism"; the problem of "hybridity" and "resistance" in the land of partitions and walls; and the mediation in Israel, via the Anglo-American academy, of the "subaltern" intellectual.