A Literary Anthology on the Assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
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Sorry We Were Silent, 1995
Courtesy of the Kibbutz Movement, Yad Tabenkin Archive
ABOUT THE BOOK
When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated on the night of November 4, 1995, a generation came of age in grief, awakening to the fragility of democracy and the cost of Jewish division. His death tore through the heart of Israeli society and reverberated across world Jewry, becoming one of the defining ruptures in modern Jewish history.
Class of 95 presents, for the first time in English, Israel’s poetic response to this national trauma. Originally published in Hebrew as Machzor 95, this anthology gathers diverse and powerful Israeli voices, including both renowned poets and a new generation of writers who gave words to a nation’s shock, grief, and search for meaning.
This new edition appears in November 2025, marking the 30th Memorial Day of Rabin’s assassination. It offers English-speaking audiences a powerful entry point into Israeli cultural memory, weaving together poetry, art, and reflection at a moment when Rabin’s legacy of democracy, unity, and peace feels newly urgent.
First published in Hebrew in 2013 and expanded in 2022, Machzor 95 unearthed dozens of poems that had been written in the aftermath of Rabin’s murder but never published. The name “Class of 95” carries a double meaning: the Israeli generation that came of age in the shadow of that night, and the Hebrew machzor, a prayer cycle, signaling the need to return, again and again, to moments of rupture in order to heal.
This English edition brings forty of those poems to new audiences, organized according to the five stages of Jewish mourning. Together, they move readers from the stunned immediacy of November 4, 1995, through grief and reckoning, to the recognition that Rabin’s assassination is not only a personal or national trauma but a lasting chapter in Jewish history.
This collection features contributions from leading Israeli voices, including Dahlia Ravikovitch, Ronny Someck, Agi Mishol, Jimbo J, Nitzan Mintz, Shachar-Mario Mordechai, Yosef Ozer, and many others.
Edited by Barak Sella, former spokesperson for the Rabin national rally and expert on Israel-US relations. Foreword by Yehuda Kurtzer, President of the Shalom Hartman Institute, and afterword by Silvio Joskowicz, Head of the Zionist Enterprises Department in the World Zionist Organization. Translated by Yoni Hammer-Kossoy, Winner of the 2020 Andrea Moriah Prize in Poetry. Cover and design by Elad Medan.
Published and translated with support from the Zionist Enterprises Department at the World Zionist Organization, and part of the Rabin Way:
Dare to Dream initiative.
Band-Aid on Rabin Square, 2015
Created by Dede Bandaid, Photo by Barak Brinker
REVIEWS
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