They disagree about many things. But post-October 7, 2023, William Kolbrener, an Orthodox professor of English literature at Bar-Ilan University, and secular novelist Ronit Eitan, a Ph.D. student at Bar-Ilan, agree on one thing: Jewish poets, writers and artists needed an outlet to express the raw complexity and nuance of their new reality.

They launched Writing on the Wall, a nonprofit publishing project, just as the global publishing world began sidelining Israeli authors.

“We took on the responsibility of cultivating voices from around the world, coming from that middle between the extremes,” Kolbrener said. “All those like Ronit and me who agree, despite all our differences, in a Jewish and democratic Israel.”

The initiative’s workshops, lectures, community-building events and Israeli Bytes podcast were joined in January 2025 by a free quarterly English-language literary magazine available as a digital download. Named after the Hebrew word for chaos or mess, Balagan: A Magazine of Art, Poetry, and Perspective features contributors spanning the secular-religious, Ashkenazi-Mizrahi, immigrant-sabra, Israeli-Diaspora divides.

In Balagan’s first issue, which carries the theme “Scarred,” Eitan writes about her haunting memories of the day of the Hamas attacks: “On Oct. 7, I counted the knives in my kitchen drawers. I had three butcher knives, ten butter knives, and a bread knife that I could use as a chainsaw….The newest addition, a small tourné knife, used to cut little strings of cucumber to adorn my favorite Vietnamese salad once upon a time, before the war, might be useful to take out a terrorist’s eye if another invasion occurs.”

Non-Jewish voices also are represented. The March 2026 “Underground” issue features first-person pieces by Muslim and Christian Arabs written inside Israeli bomb shelters during the war with Iran. Nigerian poet Solape Adetutu Adeyemi explores the Japanese concept of nagori, which translates to “aftertaste of a season,” in Balagan’s June 2026 “Hope/Exhale” issue.

The November issue’s theme is “The Love Issue: All You Need Is Love?”

“We’re trying to show what we’re feeling and how we’re filtering and processing our reality,” Eitan said. “We’re providing a language for the experience we’re living. We’re fearful, we’re hopeful and we’re writing.”

Abigail Klein Leichman lives in Israel and writes regularly for The Jerusalem Post’s Friday Magazine, the Jewish Standard, Hadassah Magazine and other publications.