New Article: Walfish & Brody, How Religious Teachers View Problems in Bible Teaching

Walfish, Ruth A., and David L. Brody. “‘Students get bogged down’: How Religious Israeli Elementary Teachers View Problems and Solutions in Bible Teaching.” British Journal of Religious Education (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01416200.2015.1134442

 
Abstract

Bible teachers in contemporary society confront serious problems related to the nature of the biblical text and the socio-cultural context of their teaching. This study, based on semi-structured interviews, examines the problems that five expert religious Israeli elementary school teachers encounter in their teaching and the solutions they employ. Our findings show two major domains of pedagogic issues: unfamiliar biblical linguistics and problematic content. Teachers reported student difficulties in understanding biblical Hebrew. Problematic content includes irrelevant topics, emotionally laden material, and age inappropriate issues. Linguistic solutions relied on reading comprehension techniques and use of features specific to Bible reading such as diacritical marks. Regarding content issues, teachers were motivated by faith in the sanctity of the text to find effective solutions. These include selectivity, reinterpretation using homiletic tools, a holistic understanding and contextualising the narrative. Though teachers felt ill-prepared by their pre-service training in dealing with these challenges, they demonstrated resilience in their solution-oriented pedagogy. These findings suggest attention to mentoring and professional development, and to the creation of a community of practice to support teachers’ dealing with the ongoing challenges in their teaching.

 

 

New Article: Sherrard, American Biblical Archeologists’ Responses to the Six-Day War

Sherrard, Brooke. “Mystical Unification or Ethnic Domination? American Biblical Archeologists’ Responses to the Six-Day War.” Journal of the Bible and its Reception 3.1 (2016): 109-33.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jbr-2016-1002

 

Abstract

After the Six-Day War, members of the American Schools of Oriental Research experienced conflict over how and whether to maintain the organization’s policy on political neutrality. This article argues that ASOR members who supported Israel framed their views as theological, lauding the war for achieving a mystical unification of Jerusalem, while members who opposed the war’s outcome responded that appeals to theology and neutrality were being deployed to justify one ethnic group’s domination over another. I present two main examples, George Ernest Wright and Paul Lapp, and connect their scholarly views on objectivity versus relativism to their political views on the conflict. Wright, a biblical theologian, argued the Old Testament was an objective record of a religion revealed by God to the Israelites and defended the slaughter of Canaanites in terms that echoed justifications for Palestinian displacement. Conversely Lapp, who read the Old Testament as a polemical text, overtly connected his perspectivalism to his pro-Palestinian politics. In 1968 Wright clashed with ASOR residents, including Lapp, who protested Israeli plans to reroute a parade through recently captured areas of East Jerusalem. A reading of the correspondence record created after the protest analyzes the political implications of these differing scholarly positions.

 

 

 

New Article: Brueggemann, Reading the Bible amid the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Brueggemann, Walter. “Reading the Bible amid the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict.” Theology Today 73.1 (2016): 36-45.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0040573616630025

 

Abstract

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is a difficult, complex interface in which new postures, new possibilities, and new dangers are constantly emerging, so that reiterations of old formulae are at best unhelpful. A biblical interpreter can make only a very modest contribution to that ongoing urgent conversation. In what follows I will seek to sort out some of the extrapolations that are made from the Bible. It is clear that the Bible, as the rabbis have always understood, is filled with playful ambiguity and supple plural possibilities. Where that ambiguity and suppleness of the Bible is flattened into an ideological certitude that yields specific benefit, we likely have a misreading of the Bible.

 

 

 

New Article: Pappe, The Bible in the Service of Zionism

Pappe, Ilan. “The Bible in the Service of Zionism: ‘We Do Not Believe in God, But He Nonetheless Promised Us Palestine.” In History, Archaeology, and the Bible Forty Years After ‘Historicity’, Changing Perspectives 6 (ed. Ingrid Hjelm and Thomas L. Thompson; Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016).

 

 

Extract

The secular early Zionists quoted intensively from the Bible to show that there was a divine imperative to colonize Palestine, or in their discourse, to redeem Eretz Israel. But in fact the Bible is not a very useful text for reinventing a Jewish nation: the father of the nation, Abraham, was not from Palestine, the Hebrews became a nation in Egypt and the Ten Commandments were given to them in Egypt (the Sinai). This text was reinterpreted by the early and secular Zionists. The nation was one of the tribes, living under occupation in Canaan, exiled to Egypt and came back to redeem the homeland, as did the modern Zionists. As new occupiers of Canaan was how the secular Zionists saw themselves. Namely, the successors of Joshua and the Judges, and, then, they too founded a Jewish kingdom.

 

 

 

New Article: Sherrard, American Biblical Archaeologists and Zionism

Sherrard, Brooke. “American Biblical Archaeologists and Zionism: How Differing Worldviews on the Interaction of Cultures Affected Scholarly Constructions of the Ancient Past.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84.1 (2016): 234-59.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfv063

 

Abstract

A major critique of American biblical archaeologists has focused on biblical presuppositions they brought to their work, whereas Israeli archaeologists have been critiqued for promoting Jewish ethno-nationalism through their work. I maintain, however, that American archaeologists also participated in the debate over Zionism, implicitly (and not necessarily consciously) through writings about the ancient past, and explicitly through political activism. This article focuses on contemporaries William Foxwell Albright and Millar Burrows, who disagreed about Zionism. Burrows, who opposed Zionism, characterized the ancient world in terms of cultural interaction and fluidity, while Albright, who favored Zionism, characterized the ancient world in terms of rigid ethnic boundaries. Burrows published a book about Palestinian refugees; thus, his political involvement was no secret. Albright’s political involvement in favor of a Jewish state, which he later denied, is reconstructed here from archival materials. The terms of this debate still resonate, as demonstrated by the current controversy over archaeological theory at the City of David site in Jerusalem.

 

 

 

New Book: Levy, Israeli Theatre (in Hebrew)

Levy, Shimon. Israeli Theatre. Time, Space, Plot. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2016 (in Hebrew).

 

 

In the absence of a well-established tradition of drama, the new Hebrew theatre in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century, is caught in a fruitful and fascinating bind. Processes of secularization and liberalization among world Jewry and pre-State Israel fostered openness towards the theatre. This relatively new art in Jewish tradition was also seen as entertainment, but in its early years it was primarily employed as an educational and ideological tool in the service of Zionist national needs in the struggle for the creation of a Hebrew culture. The dramatic nature of this change in the status of Jews and Israel not only summoned a revived reading of Jewish history, but also its staging, pun intended, on the Hebrew stage, in the Land of Israel, and of course – the Hebrew language.

This book addresses issues and topics of Israeli drama and theatre from a social-artistic perspective. The prologue treats the development of a Jewish-Hebrew-Israeli theatre against the backdrop of secularization of the Jewish community from the early 19th century to its flourish in contemporary Israel. The basic conditions for theatre in general and Israeli theatre in particular are discussed in a chapter on space in Israeli drama. Theatrical props are discussed in a chapter which examines the idiosyncrasy of local drama through one of the elements of its space design. The Hebrew Bible and Judaism are addressed in a chapter on secular sanctity, characteristic to our stage. Another component of Israeli identity, its attitude toward Arabs, wars and the protracted conflict, is discussed in a chapter entitled “captive in fiction.” A discussion of three giants in Israeli drama – Nissim Aloni, Joshua Sobol and Hanoch Levin – is structured by the meta-theatrical intentionalism of each of them. the Acco Festival, an annual event since 1980, is discussed as a key component in the Israeli theatrical scene. The book concludes with a eulogy for the Hebrew radio drama, a celebrated genre in its heyday until it was marginalized by television, but its significant contribution to Israeli drama nevertheless remains.

 

SHIMON LEVY is a Professor Emeritus of Theatre at Tel Aviv University, where he taught for many years, and was chair of the Department of Theatre Arts. His main areas of research are Hebrew-Israeli theatre and drama, the works of Samuel Beckett, and theories of chaos in relation to theatre. He has published dozens of articles, and hundreds of essays on theatre in Hebrew, English, and German, as well as about ten books. He has translated over 100 plays for the stage, and continues to be active as a director in Israel and abroad.

 

 

 

New Book: Kronfeld, The Full Severity of Compassion. The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

Kronfeld, Chana. The Full Severity of Compassion. The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.

 

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) was the foremost Israeli poet of the twentieth century and an internationally influential literary figure whose poetry has been translated into some 40 languages. Hitherto, no comprehensive literary study of Amichai’s poetry has appeared in English. This long-awaited book seeks to fill the gap.

Widely considered one of the greatest poets of our time and the most important Jewish poet since Paul Celan, Amichai is beloved by readers the world over. Beneath the carefully crafted and accessible surface of Amichai’s poetry lies a profound, complex, and often revolutionary poetic vision that deliberately disrupts traditional literary boundaries and distinctions. Chana Kronfeld focuses on the stylistic implications of Amichai’s poetic philosophy and on what she describes as his “acerbic critique of ideology.” She rescues Amichai’s poetry from complacent appropriations, showing in the process how his work obliges us to rethink major issues in literary studies, including metaphor, intertextuality, translation, and the politics of poetic form. In spotlighting his deeply egalitarian outlook, this book makes the experimental, iconoclastic Amichai newly compelling.

 

Table of Contents

• Introduction: “Be an Other’s, Be an Other”: A Personal Perspective
• 1 Beyond Appropriation: Reclaiming the Revolutionary Amichai
• 2 “In the Narrow Between”: Amichai’s Poetic System
• 3 “I Want to Mix Up the Bible”: Intertextuality, Agency, and the Poetics of Radical Allusion
• 4 Celebrating Mediation: The Poet as Translator
• 5 Living on the Hyphen: The Necessary Metaphor
• 6 Double Agency: Amichai and the Problematics of Generational Literary Historiography

 

CHANA KRONFELD is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (winner of the MLA Scaglione Prize for Best Book in Comparative Literary Studies) and the co-translator (with Chana Bloch) of Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open: Poems (winner of the PEN Translation Prize). Kronfeld is the recipient of the Akavyahu Lifetime Achievement Award for her studies of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry.

 

 

 

Event: Ilana Pardes discusses her new book at Stanford, Sep 30, 2014

Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture

Lecture and conversation with Ilana Pardes,

Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Tuesday, September 30, 4:00pm  

Building 260, Room 252 

Stanford University

In adopting the Song of Songs, Zionist interpreters sought to return to the erotic, pastoral landscapes of biblical times. Their quest for a new, uplifting, secular literalism, however, could not efface the haunting impact of allegorical configurations of love. 

 

“This new study confirms Ilana Pardes as one of the most deeply interesting scholars in the field of comparative literature.”
-Robert Alter, University of California, Berkeley

Presented by the Taube Center for Jewish Studies in collaboration with Hebrew@Stanford and the Department of Comparative Literature.

 

New Book: Pardes, Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers

Pardes, Ilana. Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers. The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture, Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014.

 

 

Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers explores the response of Israel’s Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon to the privileged position of the Song of Songs in Israeli culture. Standing at a unique crossroads between religion and secularism, Agnon probes the paradoxes and ambiguities of the Zionist hermeneutic project. In adopting the Song, Zionist interpreters sought to return to the erotic, pastoral landscapes of biblical times. Their quest for a new, uplifting, secular literalism, however, could not efface the haunting impact of allegorical configurations of love. With superb irony, Agnon’s tales recast Israeli biblicism as a peculiar chapter within the ever-surprising history of biblical exegesis.

Ilana Pardes is professor of comparative literature at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Upon the Handles of the Lock

2. The Song of Songs as Cultural Text: From the European Enlightenment to Israeli Biblicism

3. Rechnitz’s Botany of Love: The Song of Seaweed

4. The Biblical Ethnographies of “Edo and Enam” and the Quest for the Ultimate Song

Epilogue
Forevermore

Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index

 

CfP: Graduate conference at Cambridge, Patterns of Protest in Hebrew Culture

Call for Papers

Patterns of Protest in Hebrew Culture: Memory, Agents and Representation

2014 Cambridge Graduate Conference in Modern Hebrew

We would like to invite graduate students from within or without Hebrew Studies, as well as academics, artists and other interested parties to submit proposals for the Cambridge Hebrew Graduate Conference 2014, “Patterns of Protest in Hebrew Culture: Memory, Agents and Representation,” to be held on Tuesday 6 May 2014 at Cambridge. The conference aims to facilitate and promote discussion in the field of Modern Hebrew Studies, stimulating scholarship in the UK academy and bringing it into conversation with academics from around the world.

Recent waves of political protest in the Middle East have drawn critical focus to tensions regarding the future of societies and communities in the region and to the clash of worldviews and visions. Protest and the changes it brings are difficult phenomena to measure, and we tend to understand them mainly through examining political systems and the actions of leaders. In this conference we wish to promote a different debate by taking focus away from speeches in Parliament and statements to the media and aiming it toward the dynamics of culture.

2011’s wave of social protest in Israel caught many by surprise, as hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to demand social justice, a lower cost of living and a government response to the concerns of the middle class. Although the social justice movement challenged 21st century Israeli neo-liberalism, it often did so by employing the rhetoric of a diverse tradition of Hebrew texts, from Amir Gilboa’s poetry to the words of the Hebrew Bible.

The link between Hebrew texts and political and social protest is as ancient as the books of the prophets. Throughout history, Hebrew writers have articulated the prohibited and the revolutionary, in advance – and in advancement – of wider public acceptance. What part, then, has protest played in shaping Hebrew culture, throughout its history and in the present?

The purpose of this conference is to bring together young scholars from different disciplines to investigate the historical and cultural significance of Hebrew as a language of protest, and the forms of expression of protest and protest movements – topics surprisingly unexplored by academia. We welcome contributions that consider this theme from diverse theoretical perspectives and academic disciplines. We particularly welcome papers that examine the complimentarity and tensions between political dissent and Hebrew literary production – how is protest rendered intelligible in ways that serve to contain or depoliticize struggles? How has Hebrew, the language of tradition, served these modes of dissent as a means of reclaiming agency in the face of existing power structures? And how, in contemporary Israel, is Hebrew protested against as the language of power?

Participants will be invited to present their work as part of themed panels, followed by questions and discussion with Cambridge students, academics and fellow conference attendees.

Abstracts of 300-500 words are requested by 1 February 2014, with accepted papers to follow in full by March. Please submit abstracts, along with a brief academic C.V, to chgc2014@gmail.com. Any further queries may be sent to the same address.

ToC: Journal of Israeli History, 32.2 (2013)

Ben-Gurion’s view of the place of Judaism in Israel

Nir Kedar
pages 157-174

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.822728

 

Yom Kippur and Jewish public culture in Israel

Hizky Shoham
pages 175-196

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.822732

 

Returning to religious observance on Israel’s non-religious kibbutzim

Lee Cahaner & Nissim Leon
pages 197-218

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.822727

 

Holocaust memory in ultra-Orthodox Society in Israel: Is it a “counter-memory”?

Michal Shaul
pages 219-239

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.822731

 

In search of Ahad Ha’am’s Bible

Alan T. Levenson
pages 241-256

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.822729

 

Israeli Intelligence and the leakage of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech”

Matitiahu Mayzel
pages 257-283

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.822730

 

Book Reviews

 

The Political Philosophy of Zionism: Trading Jewish Words for a Hebraic Land

Noam Pianko
pages 285-286

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.829663

 

Law and the Culture of Israel

Nir Kedar
pages 286-290

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.824730

 

The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel

Jonathan Rynhold
pages 290-293

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.824731

 

Israel and the European Left: Between Solidarity and Delegitimization

Eli Tzur
pages 293-297

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.824732

 

Editorial Board

Editorial Board

DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.849091

 

Cite: Tadmor-Shimony, Yearning for Zion in Israeli Education

Tadmor-Shimony, Tali. “Yearning for Zion in Israeli Education: Creating a Common National Identity.” Journal of Jewish Identities 6.1 (2013): 1-21.

 

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_jewish_identities/v006/6.1.tadmor-shimony.html

 

Abstract

A study of the educational materials that Israeli elementary school students used in the 1950s and 1960s during their eight years of free, mandatory education enriches our understanding of the techniques used to transmit one of the basic elements of Zionist ideology. During their first year of school, six- and seven-year-olds in Hebrew lessons heard the legendary version of the weekly biblical portions, such as Lekh Lekhah (Go forth! Gen. 12:1) and the Bible story of the disagreement between Abraham’s shepherds and those of Lot. Through these stories, the students heard the divine promise that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish People. Hearing these stories at such a young age, from an unquestionable authority figure, creates a lasting impression on these future citizens.

Upon beginning seventh grade, Israeli students read the well-known line in their Hebrew literature class from the poetry of Rabbi Judah Halevi, which has become one of the most famous expressions in Zionist discourse: “My heart is in the East and I am at the end of the West.” The lesson’s official aim—to analyze works by the Jewish poets of Spain—was perhaps partially achieved, but certainly the Zionist message was transmitted (perhaps with even greater success than the academic goal.) When these teenagers reached their last year of elementary school, they were given the famous verse from Psalms (137:5) and were asked to answer the following leading question: “‘If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill.’ How did the Nation keep this oath throughout the generations?”⁸⁴ The correct answer to this question proved that the claim of the constant connection between the Jewish People and Zion, functioning as one of the central pillars of the Zionist ideology, had indeed been successfully transmitted to the next generation.

Space and Place in Jewish Studies—Conference on March 10 at JTS

 

"The Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies"

March 10, 2013
9:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

The Jewish Theological Seminary
Mendelson Convocation Center
3080 Broadway (at 122nd Street)
New York City

Space and place have become increasingly important terms for understanding Jewish cultures. Join us for an interdisciplinary gathering of scholars, who will discuss their work in relation to recent intellectual and scholarly trends. Topics will include a range of areas, including architecture in the Talmud, the Bible in Israeli cultural memory, Agnon’s Buczacz, language wars in the Yishuv, and post-Holocaust Jewish architecture. A reception will follow the day’s panel discussions.

No RSVP is necessary. Contact Dr. Barbara Mann, associate professor of Jewish Literature and Simon H. Fabian Chair in Hebrew Literature at JTS, at bamann@jtsa.edu or (212) 678-8816 for more information.

The program is cosponsored by The Jewish Theological Seminary, the Zvia Ginor Fund, the Columbia University Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, and Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.

Full Conference Program

9:30 a.m.

Coffee

10:00 a.m.

Opening Remarks

Welcome
Alan Cooper, provost, The Jewish Theological Seminary

"Space Matters"
Barbara Mann, The Jewish Theological Seminary

10:30 a.m.

Text/Culture/Memory

Chair: Stefanie Siegmund, The Jewish Theological Seminary

"Torah and Topography: Late Antique Rabbinic Culture Between Real and Symbolic Space"
Gil Klein, Loyola Marymount University

"Space, Memory, and th*e ‘Return to the Bible’ in Israeli Culture"
Yael Zerubavel, Rutgers University

"A Baedeker to Buczacz: Agnon as Tour Guide"
Alan Mintz, The Jewish Theological Seminary

12:30 p.m.

Break

2:00 p.m.

Geography/Landscape/Architecture

Chair: TBA

"Mapping Language Diversity in a Hebrew Society: A Spatial Approach to the Cultural History of the Yishuv"
Liora Halperin, Princeton University

"Space and Place in Diaspora Tourism"
Shaul Kelner, Vanderbilt University

"Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust"
Gavriel Rosenfeld, Fairfield University

4:30 p.m.

Closing Reception

ToC: Israel Affairs 18,4 (2012)

Israel Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 4, 01 Oct 2012 is now available on Taylor & Francis Online. — This new issue contains the following articles: — Original Articles — Existential threats to Israel: learning from the ancient past Steven R. David Pages: 503-525 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.717386 — Leadership, preventive war and territorial expansion: David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol Shlomo Aronson Pages: 526-545 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.717387 — ‘Two & three air raids daily. What a bother’: an American diplomat in Israel during the War of Independence Henry D. Fetter Pages: 546-562 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.717388 — The failed Palestinian–Israeli peace process 1993–2011: an Israeli perspective Raphael Cohen-Almagor Pages: 563-576 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.717389 — The birth of the core issues: the West Bank and East Jerusalem under Israeli administration 1967–76 (part 1) Moshe Elad Pages: 577-595 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.717390 — The social representation of incapacity: a psycho-cultural analysis of Israel’s political arena Mira Moshe Pages: 596-614 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.717391 — The advent of Israel’s commercial lobby Hila Tal Pages: 615-628 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.717392 — The games must go on? The influence of terror attacks on hosting sporting events in Israel Yair Galily, Ilan Tamir & Moshe Levy Pages: 629-644 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.717393 — Combat stress reactions during the 1948 war: a conspiracy of silence? Eldad Rom & Dan Bar-On Pages: 645-651 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.717394 — The US, Hezbollah and the idea of sub-state terrorism Hussain Sirriyeh Pages: 652-662 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.717395 — Book Reviews — India’s Israel policy David Rodman Pages: 663-665 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.718493 — The West and the Middle East David Rodman Pages: 665-666 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.718494 — Nation and history: Israeli historiography between Zionism and post-Zionism David Rodman Pages: 666-667 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.718495 — Israeli statecraft: national security challenges and responses David Rodman Pages: 667-668 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.718496 — Confidential: the life of secret agent turned Hollywood tycoon Arnon Milchan David Rodman Pages: 669-669 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.718497 — The anatomy of Israel’s survival David Rodman Pages: 669-670 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.718498 — Perspectives of psychological operations (PSYOP) in contemporary conflicts: essays in winning hearts and minds David Rodman Pages: 670-671 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.718499 — Holy wars: 3000 years of battles in the holy land David Rodman Pages: 671-671 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.718500 — Crossroads: the future of the U.S.–Israel strategic partnership David Rodman Pages: 671-673 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.718501 — Israel’s national security law: political dynamics and historical development David Rodman Pages: 673-674 DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2012.718502