On the Outs

Eli Amir takes Mishy Harman back to the early 1950s, and straight into the closed world of socialist kibbutzim. Amir and his family had just come to the nascent state of Israel from Iraq, and were placed in a ma’abara, a refugee absorption or transition camp. Life there was hard, and before long, twelve-and-a-half-year-old Eli was sent off to lead a better life on a HaShomer Ha’Tzair kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley. An endless string of culture shocks followed, and the kibbutz old-timers made sure Eli never forgot he was only a yeled chutz, an ‘outside child.’ But still, Amir – who is now one of Israel’s most beloved novelists – had but one wish: to “become one of them.”

Shlomo Maital delves into the world of intellectual peripheries, and asks what it’s like when your ideas are considered so far out that you lose all credibility. The unusual story of Eliyahu Rips begins in Riga, Latvia, with a radical act of political defiance. And it ends, almost half-a-century later, with a tired, if persistent, math professor fighting for academic legitimacy.

Long before Banksy became a mysterious international star, Eliezer Sonnenschein from Haifa was being called an “artist/terrorist.” Zev Levi enters the heart of staid art institutions, and brings us the tale of one man who decided he would go as far as he possibly could to leave his mark.