In the nascent Hebrew press of the Zionist settlers in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century, questions of literary production were discussed as urgently as political strategies or economic policies. That Hebrew literary production was an accurate measure of the condition of the Hebrew nation was an unquestioned axiom. While the press featured literary reviews of both Hebrew and European literatures regularly, the series of essays reviewing the current state of Arabic literature, which appeared in the journal Hapoel Hatzair (The Young Worker) in 1911, were still unusual. The writer of the reviews was Yitzhak Shami, a Palestinian Jewish Hebrew writer from Hebron, and among his rather disparaging critiques he championed the author Jurji Zaydan as a model of a successful contemporary writer of Arabic literature. Yitzhak Shami was a native Arabic speaker, well-versed in the debates of the Arabic nahda. A Zionist and enthusiastic follower of the emergent Hebrew literary scene, he took it upon himself to provide the East European Zionist settlers with knowledge and understanding of the native Arab population through his essays, his short stories, and his roles as political consultant. In this paper, I focus on Shami’s self-positioning as a bridge, introducing Arabic literary developments to the small settler colonial Zionist community. In particular, I examine the manner in which Shami recruits Zaydan in order to articulate the current problems, prospects, and possibilities of modern Arabic literature, and by extension, of modern Hebrew literature as well. Comparing this review to other works of literary criticism appearing in the Hebrew press in the same period, primarily by the influential editor and writer Y. H. Brenner, reveals how Arabic and Hebrew literatures both faced similar demands of modernization, articulated in almost identical terms. Zaydan appears in this account as an author who has found a solution to the problem plaguing both Arab and Hebrew authors at the time – the problem of narrating a present of national revival, or a “revival modernity.” Studying his reception in the Hebrew press of the early 20th century is the basis for articulating a new understanding of the experience of revival modernities and the genres of writing they produce.