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

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: Dekel, Immigrant Women Artists from the FSU in Contemporary Israel

Dekel, Tal. “In Search of Transnational Jewish Art: Immigrant Women Artists from The Former Soviet Union in Contemporary Israel.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 15.1 (2016): 109-30.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2015.1120432

 

Abstract

The article explores the subject of contemporary Jewish identity through the case of young immigrant women artists from the former Soviet Union in Israel, with particular emphasis on an analysis of the gendered aspects of their religious identity. Drawing on an interdisciplinary method, the research is based on in-depth interviews with artists, artwork analysis, and various theories from the social sciences and humanities. The article’s main argument is that an analysis of the artistic practices of this and similar understudied social groups, particularly those practices undertaken in moments of conflict or times of deep social change, produces a more subtle understanding of the shifting modes of Jewish identity in the age of globalization and transnationalism, whose phenomenon of mass migration has led to the construction of new multi-hyphenated, hybrid identities.

 

 

 

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

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)

Volume 21, Number 1, Spring 2016

Table of Contents

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: AJS Program Book now online (Boston, Dec 13-15, 2015)

The 47th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies will take place in Boston, December 13-15, 2015.

The full program is now available on the AJS website: http://www.ajsnet.org/conference-menu.htm

You may also download the program here: PDF

 

 

New Article: Louise Bethlehem, Scratching the Surface

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).