Who Let the Mad Dogs Out? Trauma and Colonialism in the Hebrew Canon

This chapter offers a comparative reading of two texts:Only Yesterday, the 1945 novel by Nobel Prize laureate S.Y. Agnon, and the 2008 Oscar-nominated animated documentaryWaltz with Bashirby Ari Folman. In each of these texts, dogs have a dual presence, as both a real and a haunting syllepsis. To contextualize the significance of these representations, we will survey appearances of dogs in other post/colonial representations. We claim that in Israeli culture, the dog has a recurring role as an intersection between Jewish and Zionist histories, the holocaust and colonialism, and private and collective traumas.