Dissertation: Poppe, Constructions of the I in the German Poetry of Israeli Writers

Poppe, Judith. “I am writing into deserted times” – Constructions of the I in the German Poetry of the Israeli Writers Netti Boleslav and Jenny Aloni, PhD dissertation. Göttingen: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, 2015 (in German).

 

URL: https://ediss.uni-goettingen.de/handle/11858/00-1735-0000-0028-86AD-7

 

Abstract

This study examines a subject that has been disregarded in literary history, namely Israeli literature written in the German language. Two authors, Jenny Aloni and Netti Boleslav, as well as their poetry, are used as paradigmatic case studies to show the relevance of this literature that crosses political and cultural borders. In the late thirties Boleslav and Aloni emigrated from Nazi-Germany and Prague to Palestine/Israel where they found a new home. They wrote poetry and prose in German until their death in the 1980s and 1990s. Their lives and works are reconstructed on the basis of documents such as diaries, letters and unpublished manuscripts that are contained in their literary estates and made public partly for the first time. From a methodological perspective, the hermeneutical analysis of the poems in their poetic value is here complemented by poststructuralist approaches of the Cultural Studies. Focusing on the construction of the “I” (the “I” in the poetry as well as the “I” of the empirical authors), this study pursues the traces of different times and places, where the literature has left its mark. The oeuvres of Aloni and Boleslav emerges at the intersections of two worlds, the German and the Israeli, and they wander between various regions and political units such as Bohemia, Nazi and post-Nazi Germany, the State of Israel and Czechoslovakia. Their poems draw from “Jewish” and “Israeli” literature, German pop culture, bucolic poetry and Zionist historiography. Until now the unique position of German Literature in Israel has been almost completely neglected. The present study fills this scholarly gap. The research combines concepts by Deleuze/Guattari and Kühne in order to coin the notion of “Kleine Zwischenliteratur”, which describes the main features of this literature. One of the main goals of the present examination is to grant this literature a more prominent place in the history of literary. Based on the results of the present thesis’ analysis it becomes apparent that notions of transdisciplinary and transnationality need to be mobilised in order to challenge the accepted categories of the discipline, enabling us to close the blind spot of the Israeli literature written in German.

 

 

 

New Article: Hakim, Affect and Popular Zionism in the British Jewish Community after 1967

Hakim, Jamie. “Affect and Popular Zionism in the British Jewish Community after 1967.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18.6 (2015): 672-89.

 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367549415572319
 
Abstract

It is widely accepted within Jewish historiography that the ‘Six Day War’ (1967) had a profound effect on the British Jewish community’s relationship with Israel and Zionism. While this scholarship touches on the affective nature of this relationship, it rarely gives this aspect sustained consideration. Instead of seeing Zionism as an ideology or a political movement, this article argues that the hegemonic way that Zionism has existed within British Jewry since 1967 is as an affective disposition primarily lived out on the planes of popular culture and the British Jewish everyday. As such, it can be more accurately labelled Popular Zionism. In order to make this argument, this article uses a theoretical framework developed by Lawrence Grossberg that brings the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to bear on British cultural studies and supports it by drawing on 12 semi-structured interviews with British Jews and original archival material.

 

 

 

New Article: Hagin & Wagner, A Deleuzian Analysis of Videos from the Israeli Occupation

Hagin, Boaz and Roy Wagner. “The Occupation-Image: A Deleuzian Analysis of Videos from the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.” Journal of Film and Video 66.4 (2014): 19-33.

 

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_film_and_video/v066/66.4.hagin.html

 

Excerpt

b’tselem (hebrew for “in the image of” ), the Israeli information center for human rights in the occupied territories, is one of Israel’s most prominent human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Founded in 1989, its goal is to document and educate about human rights violations in the occupied territories, to combat denial among the Israeli public about what goes on in the territories, and to ensure that Israel’s government “protects the human rights of residents there and complies with its obligations under international law” (“About B’Tselem”).

In 2005, B’Tselem established a video department and added moving images to its human rights reports. In this article we look mainly at two groups of videos distributed by B’Tselem. One is the video reports by B’Tselem’s researchers, which document Israeli violations of the human rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories and which B’Tselem has been making since 2005. The second is videos that were made as part of B’Tselem’s camera distribution project. Launched at the beginning of 2007, this project provides Palestinians with video cameras in order to document their lives under the occupation themselves (“B’Tselem’s Camera Project”). B’Tselem’s videos have been posted on its website (“Video”) and YouTube channel (“B’Tselem: Video”), and some of them have garnered considerable public interest, although they have received almost no attention within film studies. Some of the videos have been circulated by the Israeli and international media.

B’Tselem and the media frequently see these moving images as representations of facts that lie behind the images, coded in terms of human rights and national conflict. This is indeed the chief interest of NGOs such as B’Tselem as well as the police, the courts, and the media. In this article, we would like to put these issues in parentheses and argue that what the images show is not reducible to such an account.

The media discourse surrounding these videos has frequently focused on facts and on issues of objectivity and relations between the people involved, such as the ethics of depicting the suffering of others, self-representation, and the degree to which filmmakers can and should intervene in the lives and deaths of those they depict. According to the videos’ supporters, the media attention and public pressure have encouraged Israelis to raise questions about settlers in the occupied territories; impelled the Israeli police and military police to conduct investigations that might not have been opened based only on spoken or written testimony from Palestinians; and sometimes resulted in arrests and convictions. Moreover, according to B’Tselem and its advocates, the presence of cameras can be a powerful deterrent and has reduced settler and army violence while offering an empowering form of nonviolent resistance for Palestinians. Critics have asked whether B’Tselem gives a fair and impartial picture of events in the territories (and whether it is biased against Israel or even “anti-Semitic”); whether the making of the videos puts the Palestinian photographers, especially children, in danger; and whether the project has any long-term impact beyond the initial media interest.

New Article: Oppenheimer, On the Becoming of the Mizrahi Male Body

Oppenheimer, Yochai. “On the Becoming of the Mizrahi Male Body.” Orbis Litterarum 69.1 (2014): 23-56.

 

URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/oli.12018/abstract

 

Abstract

The representation of the Mizrahi male body in Israeli culture differentiates between the Western Ashkenazi body, which served as the standard of fitness and hygiene and of social functionality, and the Oriental Mizrahi body which, in hegemonic perspective, represented the defective, dangerous opposite of these qualities.

 In this context, I find it appropriate to use the concepts defined by Deleuze and Guattari about the body and its variety of emerging forms, which they understand not only as multifaceted forms of resistance to institutional imprint on the body but also as ways of creating flexible and multifaceted alternative possibilities of bodily experience. These concepts may well signify a place where Mizrahim themselves conduct a subversive literary discourse about Mizrahi corporeality, while deconstructing the hegemonic narrative framework related to the Mizrahi body. Dan-Benaya Seri (Misha’el) blurs the boundaries between men and women – as well as between humans and animals. Albert Suissa (Akud) elaborates on a new language of gestures and body positions that repudiates any meaningful interpretation. Mizrahi writing refused to reproduce the national Zionist Israeli body and was instead attentive to the living body and its multiple possibilities of becoming.