Bulletin: Israeli literature and Israel in Literature

Ofengenden, Ari. “National Identity in Global Times: Therapy and Satire in Contemporary Israeli Film and Literature.” The Comparatist 39 (2015): 294-312.

URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1103877

Extract

To conclude let us step back and look at the effects of all of these transformation narratives together. These and other novels and films engage in a sustained reusing of the past and successfully transform the way people articulate their identity. They do this with an empathic retelling of the national story like Oz, with the German or Arab Israeli other as in the film Walk on Water and Arab Labor, or with a crazed narrator like Kaniuk’s and Castel-Bloom’s. Therapeutic interventions end with a working through of displacement and immigration, a heightened awareness of the effects of the Holocaust, and a new appreciation of the creative potential of Jewish identity and culture. Self-critical satire breaks open a monolithic national identity, exposing its constructed nature and calls for creative transformations. We can now ask why these two narratives are so central to the way literature and film re-imagine national identity in contemporary times. I think that the answer lies most prominently in globalization. International flows of culture, goods, and people help strengthen civil society in its critique and parody of state violence and state agents. Somewhat paradoxically, globalization also leads to a demand for specifically national narratives in the international market. In a recent talk, Salman Rushdie pointed out that contemporary writers are increasingly asked to mediate the story of a nation for an international audience. Indeed that is what his own Midnight’s Children did for India, what J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace did for South Africa, Toni Morrison’s novels for the U.S., and Oz and Grossman for Israel. Thus we get narratives that are called to represent the nation on an international market but heal, critique, or poke fun at it at the same time. The system in which Hebrew literature finds itself has radically changed. Previously this system or field was constructed as a national field; now the field is constituted as semi-global. Some actors achieve international success while others remain domestic. Some mediate and explain the national story on the global stage while others parody the nation in order to change it.

Israeli national-cultural discourse is not a sole expression of some underlying economic forces that determine its content. However, its expression is a result of creative adaptation to economical and political pressures and opportunities that have become more and more global. Mainstream literature and culture has responded by articulating narratives that simultaneously reflect feelings of lack of political agency and an empathic apologetic self-representation for the global other. Minor literature in Israel saw an opportunity in the weakening of the state to articulate a critique in the form of parody that attempts to reconfigure national identity.

New Article: Keren, Public Intellectuals and Power in Israel

Posted on September 17, 2015 by Aryeh

Keren, Michael. “No, Prime Minister: Public Intellectuals and Power in Israel.” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 156 (Aug 2015): 79-88.

URL: http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=464263242285042;res=IELLCC

Abstract

While intellectuals engaged in public advocacy long before the term ‘public intellectual’ was coined, it was largely Emile Zola’s cry ‘J’accuse’ during the Dreyfus Affair in late nineteenth-century France that gave rise to the expectation that intellectuals ‘speak truth to power’. Yet, while many twentieth- and twenty-first-century intellectuals have spoken to power either as critics or as ‘fellow travellers’, their public engagement has always been accompanied by the question of legitimacy: why should their opinions be valued more than those of coachmen, shoemakers or, for that matter, Facebook users? The intention in this article is to partly address this question by investigating the strategies of legitimisation and validation used by public intellectuals in their political argumentation. Focusing on one case study – the long, burdened and erratic relationship between Israel’s writers and scholars, and the country’s prime ministers – I propose three main sources of validation used by public intellectuals: their preoccupation with ideas, their historical knowledge and their reputation. I illustrate these three modes of validation by analysing open letters written by theologian Martin Buber, philosopher Nathan Rotenstreich, historian Jacob Talmon, novelists Amos Oz and David Grossman, and others to Israel’s prime ministers from 1948 to the present, showing how the three modes evolved in response to the respective prime ministers’ attitudes towards the political involvement of intellectuals and how they were combined by public intellectuals in need of effective strategies to legitimise their stand in given political situations. I then try to assess the effectiveness of such strategies and conclude by noting the challenges posed to public intellectuals today by new players in the market of ideas, especially bloggers using new sources of validation, such as their closeness to the grassroots, in their political argumentation.

ToC: Israel Studies Review 30.1 (2015)

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Aryeh

Israel Studies Review, Volume 30, Issue 1, Table of Contents:

Editors’ Note

Editors’ Note
pp. v-vii(3)

Articles

Mapai’s Bolshevist Image: A Critical Analysis
pp. 1-19(19)
Bareli, Avi

Political Indoctrination of Soldiers in the IDF, 1948–1949
pp. 20-41(22)
Hazkani, Shay

Outsmarting the Nation, Together: Subversive Virtual Fraternity in the Israeli Men’s Magazine Blazer
pp. 42-65(24)
Fraiberg, Steven; Kaplan, Danny

Men and Boys: Representations of Israeli Combat Soldiers in the Media
pp. 66-85(20)
Israeli, Zipi; Rosman-Stollman, Elisheva

The Kibbutz between the Past and the Present
pp. 86-100(15)
Gertz, Nurith

Kibbutz Landscape and Architecture as Represented in Film and Television: Kibbutz Yakum as a Case Study
pp. 101-129(29)
Har-Gil, Amir; Gitler, Inbal Ben-Asher

Review Essay

Right of Center: Rearranging the Israeli Political Map
pp. 130-143(14)
Peleg, Samuel

Book Reviews

Book Reviews
pp. 144-163(20)

New Book: Omer-Sherman, Imagining the Kibbutz

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Aryeh

Omer-Sherman, Ranen. Imagining the Kibbutz. Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015.

URL: http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-06557-1.html

Abstract

In Imagining the Kibbutz, Ranen Omer-Sherman explores the literary and cinematic representations of the socialist experiment that became history’s most successfully sustained communal enterprise. Inspired in part by the kibbutz movement’s recent commemoration of its centennial, this study responds to a significant gap in scholarship. Numerous sociological and economic studies have appeared, but no book-length study has ever addressed the tremendous range of critically imaginative portrayals of the kibbutz. This diachronic study addresses novels, short fiction, memoirs, and cinematic portrayals of the kibbutz by both kibbutz “insiders” (including those born and raised there, as well as those who joined the kibbutz as immigrants or migrants from the city) and “outsiders.” For these artists, the kibbutz is a crucial microcosm for understanding Israeli values and identity. The central drama explored in their works is the monumental tension between the individual and the collective, between individual aspiration and ideological rigor, between self-sacrifice and self-fulfillment. Portraying kibbutz life honestly demands retaining at least two oppositional things in mind at once—the absolute necessity of euphoric dreaming and the mellowing inevitability of disillusionment. As such, these artists’ imaginative witnessing of the fraught relation between the collective and the citizen-soldier is the story of Israel itself.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1. Trepidation and Exultation in Early Kibbutz Fiction

2. “With a Zealot’s Fervor”: Individuals Facing the Fissures of Ideology in Oz, Shaham, and Balaban

3. The Kibbutz and Its Others at Midcentury: Palestinian and Mizrahi Interlopers in Utopia

4. Late Disillusionments and Village Crimes: The Kibbutz Mysteries of Batya Gur and Savyon Liebrecht

5. From the 1980s to 2010: Nostalgia and the Revisionist Lens in Kibbutz Film

Afterword: Between Hope and Despair: The Legacy of the Kibbutz Dream in the Twenty-First Century

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Ranen Omer-Sherman is the Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Louisville.

New Article: Gertz, The kibbutz in recent literary works

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Aryeh

Gertz, Nurith. “With the Face to the Future: The Kibbutz in Recent Literary Works.” Journal of Israeli History (early view; online first).

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13531042.2015.1014204

Abstract

The kibbutz, which was considered one of the greatest successes of the socialist dream, failed to survive history, which replaced socialism with both capitalism and globalization. Numerous texts, literary, documentary, and scholarly, have tried to comprehend the social developments that took place in the kibbutz during the period of its demise, especially over the 1980s and the 1990s. This article focuses on two works – Habayta (Home, Assaf Inbari, 2009) and Bein haverim (Between friends, Amos Oz, 2012) – both of which refrain from solely addressing the rift that the kibbutz underwent, but rather attempt to see in the moment of the kibbutz’s disintegration a stage in a historical process that will ultimately enable creation of new values on the ruins of the old ones. Both works triggered powerful response from literary critics and from the general public, and contributed to shaping a new perspective on the history of the kibbutz.

New Book: Kaplan, Beyond Post-Zionism

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Aryeh

Kaplan, Eran. Beyond Post-Zionism. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015.

Post-Zionism emerged as an intellectual and cultural movement in the late 1980s when a growing number of people inside and outside academia felt that Zionism, as a political ideology, had outlived its usefulness. The post-Zionist critique attempted to expose the core tenets of Zionist ideology and the way this ideology was used, to justify a series of violent or unjust actions by the Zionist movement, making the ideology of Zionism obsolete. In Beyond Post-Zionism Eran Kaplan explores how this critique emerged from the important social and economic changes Israel had undergone in previous decades, primarily the transition from collectivism to individualism and from socialism to the free market. Kaplan looks critically at some of the key post-Zionist arguments (the orientalist and colonial nature of Zionism) and analyzes the impact of post-Zionist thought on various aspects (literary, cinematic) of Israeli culture. He also explores what might emerge, after the political and social turmoil of the last decade, as an alternative to post-Zionism and as a definition of Israeli and Zionist political thought in the twenty-first century.

Eran Kaplan is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Israel Studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy and coeditor (with Derek J. Penslar) of The Origins of Israel, 1882–1948: A Documentary History.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Post-Zionism in History

2. Amos Oz and the Zionist Intellectual

3. East and West on the Israeli Screen

4. Herzl and the Zionist Utopia

5. The Legacies of Hebrew Labor

Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Newsletter: Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, Fall 2014

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Aryeh

Click here to see original.

FALL HIGHLIGHTS

TUESDAY, OCT. 21

The Future of the
Peace Process
Abraham Sofaer,

Hoover Institution; Former Legal Advisor, State Dept.

Janine Zacharia,
Stanford University; Former Jerusalem Bureau Chief,
Washington Post
5 pm | Bancroft Hotel

THURSDAY, NOV. 6

ROBBINS LECTURE IN JEWISH LAW
Maimonides on Mourning:
Jewish Law and Emotion
Moshe Halbertal,
Hebrew University/NYU

5 pm | Bancroft Hotel

PUBLIC EVENTS CALENDAR

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 10
Canada and the Holocaust:
The Untold Story

Irving Abella

University of Ottawa

12 noon | Goldberg Room, Berkeley Law

Click here to RSVP

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 10
Gourmet Ghettos:
Modern Food Rituals
Exhibit Opening Event
5 pm | The Magnes

THURSDAY, NOV. 13

Piyyut: Hebrew Poetry
and World Music

Prof. Robert Alter & Yair Harel, Schusterman Visiting Israeli Artist
Co-hosted by The Magnes
7 pm | The Magnes,

For more information see our events page

_____________________

FALL 2014

Berkeley Institute Newsletter

Prof. Ken Bamberger

A Word from the Faculty Director:

The Berkeley Institute is experiencing a growth spurt. Its role as a hub for student and faculty engagement has expanded exponentially, as has the national presence of its Program on Israel Studies and its Program on Jewish Law, Thought, and Identity. Our talented staff has doubled, with the addition of Andrei Dubinsky, Program Administrator, and Leah Wagner-Edelstein, Director of Institutional Advancement. As the fall term begins, I’d like to share a taste of the past year’s accomplishments, as well as some of what’s planned for this year – ten visiting faculty and scholars, seven new courses, programs on the future of the peace process and Israeli music and culture, the Annual Robbins Lecture in Jewish Law, and two speaker series for students. And that’s just the beginning. I look forward to seeing you throughout the year.

Four Professors – Yudof, Davidoff Solomon, Lawton, and Zilberman – Join the Institute’s Faculty

The Institute welcomes four new members to its Faculty Advisory Committee: Mark Yudof, Steven Davidoff Solomon, Leora Lawton, and David Zilberman. Two hail from law: Mark Yudof, former UC President, is a leading scholar of education law, while Davidoff Solomon studies international issues of law and finance. Lawton, a demographer, heads the Berkeley Population Center and has extensive experience in Israel. Zilberman is a leading environmental economist working on water resources in the Middle East. Their addition to our faculty contributes greatly to the Institute’s programmatic scope, its resources for student advising, and its academic breadth.

Welcoming Ten Visiting Faculty and Scholars

In addition to new faculty affiliates, the Institute has brought ten visiting faculty and scholars to spend the 2014-2015 year at Berkeley. Four Israeli visiting faculty will teach courses in History, Sociology, Environmental Policy, and Legal Studies. Six additional scholars –

American and Israeli – will conduct research and contribute to the Institute’s ongoing programs.

Bidding Farewell to our 2013-2014 Visiting Professors:

we welcome our new visiting faculty, we also say goodbye and thank you to our 2013-2014 visitors, Lisa and Douglas Goldman Visiting Israeli Professor Sharon Aronson-Lehavi and The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Visiting Professor Amnon Lehavi. Their courses greatly enriched Jewish and Israel Studies offerings on campus – engaging with topics in contemporary Israeli art and culture and Israeli law and society – and touched the lives of the many students they taught and advised and faculty with whom they collaborated. We are grateful for their many contributions in and outside the classroom during their year at Cal.

Cite: Peleg, Language and Territory in Modern Hebrew Literature

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Aryeh

Peleg, Yaron. “Writing the Land: Language and Territory in Modern Hebrew Literature.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 12.2 (2013): 297-312.

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14725886.2013.796159

Abstract

This essay examines one of the greatest ambitions of the Hebrew cultural revival––the creation of a modern and distinct Hebrew national culture by rewinding history and reconnecting the indeterminate Jewish subject to a determinate Hebrew soil. The essay looks at three writers from three distinct periods in the last century, S. Yizhar, Amos Oz and Orly Castel-Bloom, whose works are deeply concerned with this connection between man and land, and who demonstrate that concern through a particular use of language. The essay shows how each of these writers uses the Hebrew language to comment on these relations in the last 50 or so years and tell us something about the state of Israeli Hebrew culture in the so-called post-national age. The article looks at Yizhar’s careful creation of a language-land bond, at the way Amos Oz warns against the excesses of these bonds, and at Orly Castel-Bloom’s critical attempt to undermine these bonds half a century after they have been created.

Cite: Peled, Sovereignty and Space in the Israeli Novel

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Aryeh

Peled, Shimrit. “‘Mastery regained’—Israeli Jewish Sovereignty and Space in the Israeli Novel, 1967-1973.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 10.2(2011): 263-284.

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14725886.2011.580987

Abstract

This article identifies key characteristics of sovereign Israeli Jewish identity and its relationship with space in Israeli novels and novellas published between 1967 and 1973, in the context of the complicated dialogue between these texts and Israeli public discourse. Interacting with their contemporary public discourse, the canonical novels and novellas of the period—Michael Sheli [My Michael] by Amos Oz (1968), Nemalim [Ants] by Yitzhak Orpaz (1968), and Hapardes [The Orchard] by Benjamin Tammuz (1972), create an Israeli space in which a Jewish sovereign is surrounded and threatened by an Arab enemy, and as a precondition to his survival, must renew his sovereignty and declare a state of emergency to confirm it. As opposed to the besieged space constructed in contemporary discourse and in these canonical novels, David Shahar’s novels of the period construct a fluid space in which contrasting identities can shift and replace each other with no existential threat.

New Publication: Oz, How to Cure a Fanatic

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Aryeh

Amos Oz, How to Cure a Fanatic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

URL: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8128.html

Internationally acclaimed novelist Amos Oz grew up in war-torn Jerusalem, where as a boy he witnessed firsthand the poisonous consequences of fanaticism. In two concise, powerful essays, the award-winning author offers unique insight into the true nature of fanaticism and proposes a reasoned and respectful approach to resolving the Israeli Palestinian conflict. As an added feature, he comments on contemporary issues–the Gaza pullout, Yasser Arafat’s death, and the war in Iraq–in an extended interview at the end of the book.

Oz argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a war of religion or cultures or traditions, but rather a real estate dispute–one that will be resolved not by greater understanding, but by painful compromise. As he writes, "The seeds of fanaticism always lie in uncompromising righteousness, the plague of many centuries."

The brilliant clarity of these essays, coupled with Oz’s ironic sense of humor in illuminating the serious, breathes new life into this centuries-old debate. Oz argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a war of religion or cultures or traditions, but rather a real estate dispute–one that will be resolved not by greater understanding, but by painful compromise. He emphasizes the importance of imagination in learning to define and respect other’s space, and analyzes the twisted historical roots that have led to Middle East violence. In his interview, Oz sends a message to Americans. Why not, he proposes, advocate for a twenty-first-century equivalent of the Marshall Plan aimed at preventing poverty and despair in the region? "What is necessary is to work on the ground, for example, building homes for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who have been rotting in camps for almost sixty years now."

Cite: Jelen, Israeli Children in a European Theater: Amos Oz and S. Yizhar

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Aryeh

Jelen, Sheila E. "Israeli Children in a European Theater: Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness and S. Yizhar’s Preliminaries," Jewish Quarterly Review 100,3 (2010): 504-18.

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jewish_quarterly_review/summary/v100/100.3.jelen.html

"[Oz and Yizhar] document their movement toward authorship and manhood against a backdrop of the birth of the State of Israel, shedding light on a communal history in addition to a uniquely individual one. Indeed, one could argue that just as both Oz and Yizhar engage in a dialogue with their European literary forebears despite their having been designated, each one in his own generation, the quintessential "Israeli" writer, so too does the literary identity of each of these texts acknowledge its own self-conscious debt to a Hebrew model of autobiographical and fictional hybridity born long before the State of Israel, in Eastern Europe. Israeli culture has, in a sense, come full circle as a Jewish culture in these twenty-first-century expressions of the self as primarily European despite Oz’s and Yizhar’s status as twentieth-century embodiments of "native" Israeli authors."

Cite: Mendelson-Maoz, Immigration in Modern Hebrew Literature

Posted on March 20, 2010 by Aryeh

Mendelson-Maoz, Adia. "Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness within the Framework of Immigration Narratives in Modern Hebrew Literature." Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9,1 (2010): 71-87.

Abstract

Jewish immigration to Eretz Israel is one of the constitutive narratives of Israeli nationality. The Zionist enterprise cast immigration and assimilation in a positive light by using the Hebrew word aliyah to describe immigration to Israel, linked to the notion of people returning to their homeland. In reality, however, the immigration process was often diametrically opposed to the optimistic aliyah story. Most immigrants, once in Israel, found themselves to be outsiders, yearning for their lost homes, friends and culture, and unable to view the new land as their home.
Over the last few decades, Israeli scholars have begun to challenge the concepts underlying aliyah. In the wake of the ongoing debate on nationality, many prefer to replace the word aliyah with immigration, which suggests that Israel should accept a diversity of identities and cultures.
This article presents a new model to account for this. Following Homi Bhabha’s distinction between the pedagogical and the performative and the idea of heterotopy in Foucault’s writing, I demonstrate that narratives of immigration express dialectical relationships between a utopian pedagogical narrative of aliyah and a personal performative narrative of immigration. I illustrate these relationships through major narratives of modern Hebrew literature, and suggest that they are at the core of Oz’s novel A Tale of Love and Darkness.

URL: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a920030037

–

Keywords: Israel: Literature, Amos Oz, Aliyah / Immigration to Israel, עמוס עוז, סיפור על אהבה וחושך

Cite: Abramovich, Feminine Images in the Writings of Amos Oz

Posted on February 4, 2010 by Aryeh

———

Abramovich, Dvir. "Feminine Images in the Writings of Amos Oz." Melilah (Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies) 2 (2009): 20 pp.

———

URL: PDF or Word. For ToC see: http://www.mucjs.org/MELILAH/articles.htm#2009

———–

Abstract: This essay explores the portrayal of female protagonists in several novels and short stories by Israel’s most celebrated author Amos Oz. Employing feminist theory, the article argues that often in the Oz canon, the manner by which women characters are depicted can be read as antifeminist and misogynous. By embracing an oppositional reading which goes against the grain of conventional interpretation, the paper seeks to show that the adumbration of the female in an array of Oz texts is closely associated with a pervasive patriarchal praxis that focuses solely on their sexuality. The familiar image of the woman that is uncovered in this analysis demonstrates that in their multiple configurations, Oz’s female principals are driven by libidinal impulses and that such characterization permeates the author’s gender constructs. The article contends that Oz underlines in many of his plots the erotic dimension so much so that it becomes the mainstay for the heroines’ actions and behaviour.

Online Israel Studies Bulletin Board

New Publications, Bibliography, Conferences, Jobs, Scholarships, etc.

Tag Archives: Amos Oz

Bulletin: Israeli literature and Israel in Literature

ToC: Hebrew Studies 56 (2015)

Innovative Designation of Diminution in the Writings of Abraham Shlonsky

Memory and History in Israeli Post-Apocalyptic Theater

Questioning Boundaries of Language and the World: Ambivalence and Disillusionment in the Writings of Shimon Adaf

Hebrew Neologisms in the Writings of Anton Shammas

The Pain of Two Homelands: Immigration to Israel in Twenty-First Century Hebrew Prose Fiction

“Our Virgin Friends and Wives”?: Female Sexual Subjectivity in Yona Wallach’s Poetry

New Testament Jesus in Modern Jewish Literature: A Symposium

Jesus and the Pharisees through the Eyes of Two Modern Hebrew Writers: A Contrarian Perspective

A Question of Truth: Form, Structure, and Character in Der man fun Natseres

Overtones of Isaac and Jesus in Modern Hebrew Narrative

The Jewish Jesus: Conversation, Not Conversion

Reviews

Compassion and Fury: On The Fiction of A. B. Yehoshua by Gilead Morahg (review)

Periodicals

Books Received — 2015

New Article: Ofengenden, Therapy and Satire in Contemporary Israeli Film and Literature

New Article: Keren, Public Intellectuals and Power in Israel

ToC: Israel Studies Review 30.1 (2015)

New Book: Omer-Sherman, Imagining the Kibbutz

New Article: Gertz, The kibbutz in recent literary works

New Book: Kaplan, Beyond Post-Zionism

Newsletter: Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, Fall 2014

Cite: Peleg, Language and Territory in Modern Hebrew Literature

Cite: Peled, Sovereignty and Space in the Israeli Novel

New Publication: Oz, How to Cure a Fanatic

Cite: Jelen, Israeli Children in a European Theater: Amos Oz and S. Yizhar

Cite: Mendelson-Maoz, Immigration in Modern Hebrew Literature

Cite: Abramovich, Feminine Images in the Writings of Amos Oz