New Article: Ozeri, The 2015 Jerusalem Biennale for Contemporary Jewish Art

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Aryeh

Ozeri, Ram. “The 2015 Jerusalem Biennale for Contemporary Jewish Art.” Nashim 29 (2015): 142-6.

URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/nashim.29.142

Abstract

The Jerusalem Biennale is a platform for professional artists whose current work relates, in one way or another, to the world of Jewish content within the conceptual framework of contemporary Jewish art. It does not attempt to answer the questions of what contemporary Jewish art is, or whether there is such a thing at all. The Biennale endeavors to create spaces where the discussion can take place and develop.

Many people view the fields of “Jewish art” and “contemporary art” as mutually exclusive. Jewish art is often associated with Judaica –traditional objects used in religious rituals – while contemporary art is characterized by the use of modern media such as video, sound, installation and performance, and by themes relevant to the present. The main challenge of the Jerusalem Biennale is to promote art that is both Jewish and contemporary. This focus offers a promising alternative to the conventional boundaries of Israeli art and opens the event up to the Jewish world at large.

New Article: Amishai-Maisels, Ayana Friedman. Layers of Feminist Struggle

Posted on February 8, 2016 by Aryeh

Amishai-Maisels, Ziva. “Ayana Friedman. Layers of Feminist Struggle.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 15.1 (2016): 131-57.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2015.1114822

Abstract

Ayana Friedman is an Israeli multi-media artist who deals with politics, the Holocaust and society’s treatment of the Other. This article concentrates on her feminist works and how Judaism and being the child of a Holocaust survivor affected her approach to this subject. Three main feminist interests are highlighted. First, the turn to “feminine” materials. Second, the struggle against the restrictions and abuse imposed on women and their specific Jewish examples. Friedman demands equality for women in Judaism, opposing customs that demean them and creating new ritual objects for them. Third, the conflicts women have between a career and motherhood, and the inter-generational problems they involve.

New Article: Trajtenberg, Female Israeli Artists Make Uncommissioned Street Art

Posted on February 8, 2016 by Aryeh

Trajtenberg, Graciela. “Multiple Trespasses. Female Israeli Artists Make Uncommissioned Street Art.” Ethnologie française 161 (2016): 83-92.

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URL: http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=ETHN_161_0083

Abstract

This article analyzes the strategies used by Israeli women to make illegal street art. The findings demonstrate that female street artists do not only trespass the taken‑for‑granted capitalist concept of who controls the public space, but also the normative boundaries of what activities are permitted or forbidden for women in this domain. In comparison to women artists that work in other societies, the transgressive actions of Israeli street artists involve both strategies historically defined as feminine, as well as critical strategies of the malestream order.

ToC: Israel Studies 21.1 (2016; Narratives of the 1948 war)

Posted on December 14, 2015 by Aryeh

Volume 21, Number 1, Spring 2016

Representations of Israeli-Jewish — Israeli-Palestinian Memory and Historical Narratives of the 1948 War

Edited by Avraham Sela and Alon Kadish

Preface and Acknowledgements

pp. V-VI

Israeli and Palestinian Memories and Historical Narratives of the 1948 War—An Overview

pp. 1-25
Avraham Sela, Avraham Kadish

The 1948 Palestine War on the Small Screen: A Comparative Analysis of its Representation in Two Israeli Television Series

pp. 27-53
Bosmat Garami

Israel’s Publications Agency and the 1948 Palestinian Refugees

pp. 54-81
Rafi Nets-Zehngut

The War of Independence Exhibited: A Study of Three Israeli Museums

pp. 82-108
Offer Boord

Contested Urban Memoryscape Strategies and Tactics in Post-1948 Haifa

pp. 109-131
Ziva Kolodney

The Making of a Myth: The Story of Kfar Etzion in Religious Zionism 1948–1967

pp. 132-156
Dror Greenblum

Descending the Khazooq: “Working Through” the Trauma of the Nakba in Emile Habibi’s Oeuvre

pp. 157-182
Assaf Peled

Wa-ma Nasayna (We Have Not Forgotten): Palestinian Collective Memory and the Print Work of Abed Abdi

pp. 183-208
Tal Ben-Zvi

Conference: Reinventing Israel. Transformations of Israeli Society in the 21st Century (American U, Washington, Oct 28-29, 2015)

Posted on October 26, 2015 by Aryeh

For full program [PDF], click here.

Please Join The Center for Israel Studies and Jewish Studies Program next week for our Reinventing Israel conference!
FREE WITH RSVP (by session).

Featured presentations include:
“From BG to Bibi: The End of an Era in Israel-Diaspora Relations?” by David Ellenson
Wednesday, October 28, 7:30 PM
Keynote address to kick off “Reinventing Israel: Transformations of Israeli Society in the 21st Century” conference. Ellenson is director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Brandeis University and Chancellor Emeritus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
Location: SIS Building Abramson Family Founders Room. (Free parking in SIS Building garage)

“Reinventing Israel: Transformations of Israeli Society in the 21^st Century” conference featuring international scholars and AU faculty
Thursday, October 29, all-day
Sessions featuring History and Memory, Economy and Hi-Tech, Politics and Law, Religion and Ethnicity.
Location: Butler Board Room (Floor 6 of Butler Pavilion).
Pre-paid parking by kiosk (on level P-1 by elevator – note parking space number) in Katzen Arts Center or SIS Building Garage (free after 5:00 PM).

Imagining Israel in 2035 – Different Visions
Thursday, October 29 7:30 PM
With Fania Oz-Salzberger (University of Haifa) Mohammed Wattad (Zefat College, UC Irvine) James Loeffler (University of Virginia) Moderator: Michael Brenner (AU).
Location: Butler Board Room. Free parking after 5:00 PM in all university parking garages.

New Book: Shoham, Prison Tattoos. A Study of Russian Inmates

Posted on September 8, 2015 by Aryeh

Shoham, Efrat. Prison Tattoos. A Study of Russian Inmates in Israel. New York: Springer, 2015.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1
The Inmates Community 5
Tattoos 41
Anthropological Study 59
Typology of Tattoos Among Russian Inmates in Israeli Prisons 63
Tattoos and Gender 83
Criminals’ Tattoos Versus Normative Tattoos 87
Rehabilitation Programs for Russian Inmates in the Israeli Prisons 91
Summary 95

Bibliography 101

Index 107

Prof. Efrat Shoham is a senior criminologist in Ashkelon Academic College, Israel. She is the Chairperson of the Israeli Society of Criminology, and the research committee of the Israeli Prisoners Rehabilitation Authority.

New Article: Trajtenberg, When was Feminism? Israeli Women Art Critics

Posted on July 17, 2015 by Aryeh

Trajtenberg, Graciela. “When was Feminism? Some Critical Reflections after Exploring an Unknown Group of Israeli Women Art Critics.” Women’s Studies 44.5 (2015): 635-56.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2015.1036159

New Article: Louise Bethlehem, Scratching the Surface

Posted on July 14, 2015 by Aryeh

Bethlehem, Louise. “Scratching the Surface: The Home and the Haptic in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo city and Elsewhere.” Scrutiny2 20.1 (2015): 3-23.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/18125441.2015.1035745

Abstract

This paper deploys the haptic, and more broadly speaking, notions of multisensory reading and spectatorship to reconfigure perceptions of home. It explores configurations of home in the practice of the late French-Israeli visual artist, Absalon, to draw tropes of “complicity” and “contagion” into an intersection with discourses of moral hygiene arising from the modernist preoccupation with denuded surface in the history of architecture. It then goes on to read a postapartheid South African text, Lauren Beukes’s Zoo city (2010), through the lens of these concerns. Beukes’s text, it claims, can be made to precipitate the historicity of the white suburban home under apartheid. The novel offers alternative iterations of domesticity, however, as metonymies of contagion shift into metonymies of conviviality. The final section of the paper investigates the vulnerability of the home against the background of the 2014 Israeli war on Gaza and its assault on the built environment. It explores an art exhibition, Postcards for Gaza, staged by the dissident Israeli organization, Zochrot, in the context of a previous military assault on Gaza in 2008. Here the reworking of photographic surface is made to gesture towards the possibility of political reparation in an alternate modality of complicity that Mark Sanders parses as “human-foldedness” (Sanders 2002).

New Book: Katz, Bringing Zion Home. Israel in American Jewish Culture

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Aryeh

Katz, Emily Alice. Bringing Zion Home. Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948-1967. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015.

Bringing Zion Home examines the role of culture in the establishment of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel in the immediate postwar decades. Many American Jews first encountered Israel through their roles as tastemakers, consumers, and cultural impresarios—that is, by writing and reading about Israel; dancing Israeli folk dances; promoting and purchasing Israeli goods; and presenting Israeli art and music. It was precisely by means of these cultural practices, argues Emily Alice Katz, that American Jews insisted on Israel’s “natural” place in American culture, a phenomenon that continues to shape America’s relationship with Israel today.

Katz shows that American Jews’ promotion and consumption of Israel in the cultural realm was bound up with multiple agendas, including the quest for Jewish authenticity in a postimmigrant milieu and the desire of upwardly mobile Jews to polish their status in American society. And, crucially, as influential cultural and political elites positioned “culture” as both an engine of American dominance and as a purveyor of peace in the Cold War, many of Israel’s American Jewish impresarios proclaimed publicly that cultural patronage of and exchange with Israel advanced America’s interests in the Middle East and helped spread the “American way” in the postwar world. Bringing Zion Home is the first book to shine a light squarely upon the role and importance of Israel in the arts, popular culture, and material culture of postwar America.

Emily Alice Katz teaches history at the University of California, Irvine.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Postwar American Jewry Reconsidered

2. Before Exodus: Writing Israel for an American Audience

3. Hora Hootenannies and Yemenite Hoedowns: Israeli Folk Dance in America

4. A Consuming Passion: Israeli Goods in American Jewish Culture

5. Cultural Emissaries and the Culture Explosion: Introducing Israeli Art and Music

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

New Book: Reifler, Days of Ticho

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Aryeh

Reifler, David M. Days of Ticho. Empire, Mandate, Medicine, and Art in the Holy Land. Jerusalem and Springfield, NJ: Gefen, 2014.

URL: http://www.amazon.com/Days-Ticho-Empire-Mandate-Medicine/dp/9652296651

Abstract

Dr. Avraham Albert Ticho was a Viennese-trained ophthalmologist who immigrated to Ottoman-ruled Jerusalem in 1912. There he married his cousin, the artist Anna Ticho, and together they made their mark on the history of the Land of Israel. In Days of Ticho, the Tichos’ story is told in all its fascinating detail. Their personal history is presented against the backdrop of a variety of historical perspectives histories of medicine, art, civilian institutions, governments, and war; the struggles and growth of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine; and the conflicts that arose between Jews and their Arab neighbors. Among the stories in this book are Dr. Ticho’s supervision of the first Hadassah nurses in Palestine and the early years of Hadassah Hospital, as well as the near-fatal stabbing of Dr. Ticho by an Arab would-be assassin in November 1929, during the murderous riots that took place throughout Palestine. Those riots were an important turning point in Jewish-Arab relations, the harbinger of problems that remain the focus of world attention until today. The Ticho House in Jerusalem was dedicated in May 1984 as a downtown annex of the Israel Museum, and it welcomes thousands of visitors every year. This book further contributes to the Tichos’ legacy while advancing an understanding of their times and ours.

Dissertation: Strohm, Contemporary Art, Politics and the Palestinians in Israel

Posted on November 27, 2014 by Aryeh

Strohm, Kiven. Impossible Identification. Contemporary Art, Politics and the Palestinians in Israel. University of Montreal, 2013.

URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/1504845797

Abstract

This thesis explores what it means for the Palestinian indigenous minority in Israel to produce art in a setting that has simultaneously controlled their movements and excluded them from full citizenship. It takes on the question of how Palestinian artists face discrimination within a monolithic state structure that defines itself primarily along religious and ethno-national lines. Most writing about art in colonial and postcolonial contexts tends to see art as a resource for asserting repressed ethnic, racial and indigenous identities in the face of ongoing control and domination. Art, in other words, is considered a political act of recognition through the assertion of a counter identity. The central question of this thesis concerns what happens when artists contest the colonial conditions within which they live without having recourse to identity-based claims about equality and rights. Based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork in the region, this research demonstrates that for Palestinian artists the political aspect of art is not related to claims about identity and that the relationship between art and identity is not homologous. Specifically, it explores artistic processes within a context in which spatiotemporal regimes of identification are being disrupted by an indigenous national minority. It establishes that politics in the case of Palestinian artists in Israel is a form of disidentification that is articulated through the figure of the present absentee. The central tropes found within the works of these artists can be seen as disruptive aesthetic acts, a “taking place” of politics that is between art and non-art, and outside of given identities; that is, a scene for the rupture of the “sensible order” of Israeli society through the affirmation and verification of an already existing equality.

Subject: Cultural anthropology

Classification: 0326: Cultural anthropology

Identifier / keyword: Social sciences, Visual art, Aesthetics, Palestine, Israel, Colonialism, Haifa,

Number of pages: 278

Publication year: 2013

Degree date: 2013

School code: 0992

Source: DAI-A 75/06(E), Dec 2014

Place of publication: Ann Arbor

Country of publication: United States

ISBN: 9780499277718

Advisor: White, Bob

University/institution: Université de Montréal (Canada)

Department: Faculté des arts et des sciences

University location: Canada

Degree: Ph.D.

Source type: Dissertations & Theses

Language: English

Document type: Dissertation/Thesis

Dissertation/thesis number: NS27771

ProQuest document ID: 1504845797

Seminar: Azrieli Institute Student-Faculty Seminar (Nov 26, 2014)

Posted on November 24, 2014 by Aryeh

Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies

Student-Faculty Seminars

Join us for our first seminar of the year!

Wednesday November 26, 2014

10:30AM-12:30PM

Jerusalem Art History Journal. An Undergraduate eJournal: The Process and Product

– Dr. Loren Lerner, Project Director, Department of Art History

– Pata Macedo, Journal Designer, Department of Design and Computation Arts

– Israeli Archaeology in Jerusalem: National Heritage, Identity, and Partiality – Charlotte Parent

– Symbols and Motifs: Depictions of the Heavenly Realm in Mordecai Ardon’s At the Gates of Jerusalem – Valerie Gauthier

– Expressing Exile as a Shared Experience: The Work of Steve Sabella – Stéphanie Hornstein

– From the Depths of the Matrixial Sea: Reviving Loss and Memory in Contemporary Israeli Art – Braden Scot

– The Artistic Apocalypse: Three Religious Depictions of the End of Days – Amanda Charlebois

– Representations of Jesus in Early Christian Art – Samantha Wexler

The Benefits of International Diversification:The Case of Israel in a Nexus of Market Development, Corporate Governance and Structural Change

– Dr. Lorne Switzer, Department of Finance

New Publication: Matar and Harb, Narrating Conflict in the Middle East

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Aryeh

Dina Matar (author), Zahera Harb (author), eds. Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communications Practices in Lebanon and Palestine. London: Tauris, 2013.

The term conflict has often been used broadly and uncritically to talk
about diverse situations ranging from street protests to war, though the
many factors that give rise to any conflict and its continuation over a
period of time vary greatly. The starting point of this innovative book
is that it is unsatisfactory either to consider conflict within a
singular concept or alternatively to consider each conflict as entirely
distinct and unique; Narrating Conflict in the Middle East explores
another path to addressing long-term conflict. The contributors set out
to examine the ways in which such conflicts in Palestine and Lebanon
have been and are narrated, imagined and remembered in diverse spaces,
including that of the media. They examine discourses and representations
of the conflicts as well as practices of memory and performance in
narratives of suffering and conflict, all of which suggest an embodied
investment in narrating or communicating conflict. In so doing, they
engage with local, global, and regional realities in Lebanon and in
Palestine and they respond dynamically to these realities.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Approaches to Narrating Conflict in Palestine and Lebanon: Practices, Discourses and Memories Dina Matar and Zahera Harb

Practices

Just a Few Small Changes: The Limits of Televisual Palestinian Representation of Conflicts within the Transnational ‘Censorscape’ Matt Sienkiewicz

Mediating Internal Conflict in Lebanon and its Ethical Boundaries Zahera Harb

Negotiating Representation, Re-making War: Transnationalism, Counter-hegemony and Contemporary Art from Post-Taif Beirut Hanan Toukan

Narratives in Conflict: Emile Habibi’s al-Waqa’i al-Ghariba and Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention Refqa Abu-Remaileh

Discourses

Islam in the Narrative of Fatah and Hamas Atef Alshaer

Al Manar: Cultural Discourse and Representation of Resistance Rounwah Adly Riyadh Bseiso

The Battle over Victimhood: Roles and Implications of Narratives of Suffering in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Kirkland Newman Smulders

The ‘I Love…’ Phenomenon in Lebanon: The Transmutations of Discourse, its Impact on Civil Society, the Media and Democratization Carole Helou

Memories and Narration

Making Sense of War News among Adolescents in Lebanon: The Politics of Solidarity and Partisanship Helena Nassif

Narrating the Nakba: Palestinian Filmmakers Revisit 1948 Nadia Yaqub

Bearing Witness to Al Nakba in a Time of Denial Teodora Todorova

USE discount code for special offer on paperback: BOUNDARIES

Cite: Dekel, Feminist Art Hitting the Shores of Israel

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Aryeh

Dekel, Tal. “Feminist Art Hitting the Shores of Israel: Three Case Studies in Impossible Times.” Frontiers 33.2 (2012): 111-128.

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/frontiers/v033/33.2.dekel.html

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the ways in which major themes in early feminist art in the United States were simultaneously explored in Israel. This will be demonstrated by a showcase of three local artists: Yoheved Weinfeld, Miriam Sharon and Pamela Levy. While such artists were few and their work was considered negligible, they nonetheless produced a vast and complex body of feminist art in Israel during the 1970s. The reasons for the degrading attitude of the Israeli mainstream art world toward artists inspired by feminism will be addressed and explained in light of the unique cultural climate in Israel and its position toward feminism in general and toward the second wave feminist movement in particular.

Exhibition: Orthodox in Israel (photography)

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Aryeh

7 PM

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Hillel at UCLA

Michael Cohen

(Photographer)

Orthodox in Israel

An Exhibit Opening

A secular kibbutznik, Mr. Cohen has embarked on a photographic journey to explore the way of life of Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel. The images, printed on canvas, depict the holiday celebrations, weddings, prayer and play of a world which usually remains hidden from those who are not part of it.

Sponsored by the

Dortort Center for Creativity in the Arts at UCLA Hillel
Cosponsored by the
UCLA Center for Jewish Studies

To RSVP, visit: www.uclahillel.org/ArtOpeningOctober_2011

For questions, call: (310) 208-3081 ext. 108