New Book: Feldman, A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land

Feldman, Jackie. A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land. How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.

 

 

For many Evangelical Christians, a trip to the Holy Land is an integral part of practicing their faith. Arriving in groups, most of these pilgrims are guided by Jewish Israeli tour guides. For more than three decades, Jackie Feldman—born into an Orthodox Jewish family in New York, now an Israeli citizen, scholar, and licensed guide—has been leading tours, interpreting Biblical landscapes, and fielding questions about religion and current politics. In this book, he draws on pilgrimage and tourism studies, his own experiences, and interviews with other guides, Palestinian drivers and travel agents, and Christian pastors to examine the complex interactions through which guides and tourists “co-produce” the Bible Land. He uncovers the implicit politics of travel brochures and religious souvenirs. Feldman asks what it means when Jewish-Israeli guides get caught up in their own performances or participate in Christian rituals, and reflects on how his interactions with Christian tourists have changed his understanding of himself and his views of religion.

 

Table of Contents

• 1. How Guiding Christians Made Me Israeli
• 2. Guided Holy Land Pilgrimage—Sharing the Road
• 3. Opening Their Eyes: Performance of a Shared Protestant-Israeli Bible Land
• 4. Christianizing the Conflict: Bethlehem and the Separation Wall
• 5. The Goods of Pilgrimage: Tips, Souvenirs, and the Moralities of Exchange
• 6. The Seductions of Guiding Christians
• 7. Conclusions: Pilgrimage, Performance, and the Suspension of Disbelief

 

JACKIE FELDMAN a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is author of Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity. He has been a licensed tour guide in Jerusalem for over three decades.

 

 

 

New Book: Eshet, The Interest in UFOs and Extraterrestrials in Israeli Society (in Hebrew)

Eshet, Techia. For Their Eyes Only. The Interest in UFOs and Extraterrestrials in Israeli Society. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2015 (in Hebrew).

 

 

 

In the last decade of the 20th century, more than fifty years since the first report of a “flying saucer” in the United States, there has been a growing interest in UFOs and extraterrestrials in Western culture in general and in Israel in particular. At times it seems that spacecrafts have landed in Israel en masse and thousands of extraterrestrials have conquered every part of its culture: the TV screens, daily newspapers, websites and billboards. The interest in UFOs and extraterrestrials, which flourished in Israel in various arenas during the 1990s, is discussed in this book in the context of addressing issues of identity and otherness.

This offers a different and fascinating perspective in a an extraordinary and innovative field of study; a “different” world, which is ostensibly distant, but in fact is close in many ways. “Glimpsing” into the world of those dealing with UFOs and extraterrestrials reveals not only this unique and intriguing subculture, but also very sheds light on the local and global culture of which we are all apart. The employment of extraterrestrial otherness reflects in this book the culture at large, including the changes and transformations that have taken place in Israeli society, alongside an observation of existential issues and concepts related to time, space, body and human existence. This gripping journey into the intricacies of the other and the marginal demonstrates that the preoccupation with the other, the cosmic, and the alien enables the strengthening of the relationship to the present and the local. In addition, the book discusses major cultural issues such as religion, politics, internal and external divides and conflicts, and pseudo-science.

To Their Eyes Only is based on anthropological research conducted within the framework of a doctoral thesis written by Techia Eshet. The study, which lasted several years, included Participant observations in conferences of “the Israeli Center for UFO Research” and in clinics offering treatment through extraterrestrials, along with interviews with practitioners in the field, and analysis of reports on evidence about seeing a UFO sightings or extraterrestrial encounters.

Techia (Thea) Eshet is a doctor of anthropology; Lecturer at the University of Haifa.
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New Article: Ziv et al, Holocaust Studies in Israeli Kindergartens

Ziv, Yair, Deborah Golden, and Tsafrir Goldberg. “Teaching Traumatic History to Young Children: The Case of Holocaust Studies in Israeli Kindergartens.” Early Education and Development 26.4 (2015): 520-33.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2015.1000719

 

Abstract

Recently, the Israeli Ministry of Education initiated a mandatory nationwide curriculum for Jewish kindergarten children focusing on the study of the Holocaust. This initiative raises general questions regarding the inclusion of sensitive historical issues in curricula for young children. In this article, we use the new Holocaust curriculum as an instructive case through which to address the broader questions about what might constitute an appropriate and acceptable curriculum in early childhood. We discuss the initiative from three disciplinary perspectives: a developmental sciences perspective, an anthropological/cultural perspective, and a learning sciences perspective. As we demonstrate, these three perspectives not only represent different disciplines but also highlight different aspects of this issue, thus exposing the complexities of this discussion. We show that understanding these perspectives separately and then trying to combine them may enable a richer and more complex look on the broader questions that this specific curriculum raises. We conclude with an endeavor to integrate the three perspectives, all of which should be taken into account when constructing a curriculum for young children.

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

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