The Winning Stories - "The Degeneration of the Nation" Short Story Competition

Judges' Statement: The stories submitted this year are an inverted mirror image of the conservatism, fossilization, and degeneration of the original competition. The short story emerges in them as the central literary genre of the Facebook era and short attention span, but contrary to the cliché, this does not stem from superficiality and narrow-mindedness, but rather from ideological density, bold and incisive form, rapid drilling to the heart of the matter and the reader's heart - and also quite a bit of audacity. It turns out that outside the doors of the gatekeepers in Israel's narrow literary republic, a wild, original literature is growing here, deeply rooted in the soil of reality and time, compared to which our "official" literature seems stuck deep in the past. In the eyes of the panel of judges, the future of Hebrew literature looks promising, exciting, and more relevant than ever. Who would have believed - the generation is rising and ascending

Literary Discovery  (Source)

The Unawarded Short Story Competition of "The Degeneration of the Nation"

A prestigious competition where no valuable story has won for ten years

Third Place in The Degeneration of the Nation Short Story Competition: "The Kiss with the Secular Woman"

Judges' Reasoning: "The Kiss with the Secular Woman" is a story that combines the experimental with the emotional to create a principled exploration of the connection between the two - and the price of experimentalism, its power and weaknesses. The story disguises itself as an ars poetica manifesto, reaching the point of theoretical conceptualization, but ultimately reveals itself as a deeply personal story of one whose life is his creation, and has no existence outside of it, and therefore his soul-searching - including the accounting of his romantic life - is a creative accounting. Above all, this is a story of connection between cultures - secular culture and religious culture - where the twists and failures of this connection represent the Jewish condition. And also the circular condition.

Second Place in The Degeneration of the Nation Short Story Competition: "Vayikra" [And He Called]

Judges' Reasoning: "Vayikra" is the closest text to a new biblical book seen in our parts for a long time, but equally it can be seen as the closest thing to Jewish science fiction. This is a biblical-futuristic story in five chapters, demonstrating how one can write completely contemporary fiction in central biblical genres - law, prose, poetry, lamentation, historiography - accumulating into a chilling technological prophecy. This is the most ambitious story submitted to the competition, and its engagement with paradigmatic themes of culture well suits its choice of the greatest and most classical form our culture has produced. In doing so, it recreates in miniature an achievement of the kind of the New Testament: the creation of a new myth from the grave of the old myth.

First Place in The Degeneration of the Nation Short Story Competition: "Geography is a Matter of Pornography"

Judges' Reasoning: "Geography is a Matter of Pornography" is a live report from the contemporary battlefield of gender relations - dating sites, seemingly written in real-time during the competition's publication on Passover eve. The broader Israeli reality, outside the state of "Haaretz" [The Land], is reflected in it as an intense mix of traditionalism with permissiveness and secularism with righteousness - which in turn produces a new and bold ideology, both sexual and religious. As Passover turns into a porn festival, and personal sexual history collides with the frustrating technological present, and ants remind of the Israelites in Egypt, and breasts remind of the yeshiva [religious school], and the stream of consciousness swirls and revolves around itself at increasing speed - the story reaches a new male festival of freedom at the center of the hurricane, in the eye of the storm.