How to Do Things with Futurism: Traces of Futurism in Hebrew Culture

From the temporal perspective, although some Hebrew-writing (bilingual or multilingual) writers and artists were active participants in the European modernist cultural sphere, direct references to futurism in Hebrew occurred long after the historical “Futurist Momentâ€� of the 1910s. [...]it may be unsurprising that no official futurist-influenced movement was ever created by Hebrew writers and artists, and that the futurist trajectory in Hebrew was always marginal, ambivalently practiced by scattered individuals, and often nourished by a vague futurist zeitgeist rather than absorbed firsthand. [...]only one Hebrew poet was in direct contact with first-wave European futurists: [...]this influence was not often as direct as it appeared in idiosyncratic examples such as in the poem “Cubofuturismâ€� (1923) by the lesser-known Hebrew poet Jakob Peremen, which aestheticizes the intensity of building in Mandatory Palestine, or in the work of the Hebrew literary group the “Octobrists,â€� which was active in Russia during the days of the 1917 revolution.13 Indirect traces of futurism in Hebrew writing, though—and particularly those of the more politically problematic Italian futurism on which this discussion focuses—are no less revealing.