Literatureמרדכי גלדמן

Mordechai Geldman

Mordechai Geldman was an Israeli poet, psychologist, art critic and artist who received the Bialik Prize in 2010.

1946 to 2021Hebrew poetryEarly openly gay Israeli poetryPsychoanalytic writing on literatureArt criticism for Haaretz

Born: 16 April 1946, Munich
Died: 8 October 2021, Tel Aviv
Occupation: photographer, psychologist, writer, poet
Education: Bar-Ilan University

Mordechai Geldman was born in 1946 in Munich

Geldman was born in 1946 in a displaced persons camp in Munich. His parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland. The family moved to Israel in 1949 and settled in Tel Aviv, where he lived from then on.

He studied literature and clinical psychology at Bar-Ilan University. He worked as a psychotherapist and later ran a private practice using psychoanalytic methods. He also served as a psychologist at the IDF assessment center for senior officers.

His first poetry book appeared in 1970. He published 18 poetry books, a book of short stories and 6 non-fiction books on psychoanalysis, art and religion. In the 1970s he was one of the first Israeli poets to write openly about love between men, and his later poems drew on Zen Buddhism and haiku.

He was also an art critic for Haaretz, a curator and a visual artist whose photographs were shown at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His poems were translated into many languages, and an English collection was published in 2018. He died of cancer in 2021.