Bulletin: Water in Israel

Articles

• Gabriel Antonius, Israel’s Water Story: Success or Crisis?
• Hannah Boast, “A River without Water”: Hydropolitics and the River Jordan in Palestinian Literature
• Anat Gesser-Edelsburg & Yaffa Shir-Raz, Communicating Risk for Issues That Involve ‘Uncertainty Bias’: What Can the Israeli Case of Water Fluoridation Teach Us?
• Patrick Huntjens, Mediation in the Israeli-Palestinian Water Conflict
• David Katz, Undermining Demand Management with Supply Management: Moral Hazard in Israeli Water Policies
• Yifan Li and Fusheng Liu, Implications of Israeli Agricultural Water Price Sharing System to China

Thesis

• Eyad Yacoub Yaqob, Prospects for a Shared Management of Transboundary Wastewater: Israel-Palestine Case (PhD; U Cincinnati)

New Article: Goldstein, The Beginnings of Ḥibbat Ẓion

Goldstein, Yossi. “The Beginnings of Ḥibbat Ẓion: A Different Perspective.” AJS Review 40.1 (2016): 33-55.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0364009416000039

 

Abstract

In the spring of 1881, Jewish communities within the Pale of Settlement in Russia and Romania witnessed the creation of the Jewish nationalist groups, regional associations, and other core organizations that would subsequently evolve into the movement that came to be known as Ḥovevei Ẓion (lovers of Zion), or Ḥibbat Ẓion.

Although antisemitism played an important role in stimulating the emergence of Ḥibbat Ẓion, the movement’s establishment must be understood as having been shaped by two concurrent processes. One was the conclusion of Jewish emancipation in central and western Europe, which brought central figures in the national movement, such as Leon Pinsker, to the decisive conclusion that the Jews could only be truly emancipated in an independent Jewish state. The second stemmed from the poor socioeconomic conditions faced by Jews of the time, particularly in eastern Europe. The demographic growth experienced by the Jews of eastern Europe, which reached a high point during the last few decades of the nineteenth century, required a dramatic socioeconomic solution that was nowhere to be found. Proponents of the Jewish nationalist movement argued that the establishment of a Jewish state would also help relieve the Jews’ social and economic plight.

 

 

 

Lecture: Morris, A New Look at the 1948 War (Georgetown, April 20, 2016)

The Department of Government  invites you to

The 201​6 Goldman ​Lecture

“A New Look at the 1948 War”

Benny Morris, Professor of History
Middle East Studies Department, Ben-Gurion University

Wednesday, April 20
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
Copley Formal Lounge

Please RSVP by ​Monday, April 18
at the Eventbrite page

Benny Morris is Professor of History in the Middle East Studies Department at Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba, Israel, where he has taught since 1997. He was born in Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh and was brought up in Jerusalem and New York. He earned his BA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Ph.D. in Modern European History from Cambridge University. Between 1978 and 1991 he was a journalist and diplomatic correspondent at The Jerusalem Post. 

He has been a fellow at the Hebrew University’s Truman Institute and a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution, St Antony’s College in Oxford and at Oxford’s Centre for Hebraic and Jewish Studies, Yarnton Manor. In addition, he has taught at the University of Florida, Dartmouth College, the University of Maryland, Munich University and Harvard University.

Professor Morris has published ten books, including The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (1988); The Roots of Appeasement, the British Weekly Press and Nazi Germany during the 1930s (1991); Israel’s Border Wars 1949- 1956 (1993); Righteous Victims (1999); and 1948, A History of the First Arab Israeli War (2008) – winner of the Jewish National Book Award. He is currently completing a book on Turkey’s relations with its Christian minorities, 1876-1924. His articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The National Interest, The Guardian, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, and other newspapers and journals in Europe.

New Article: Heian-Engdal, Efforts to Release Blocked Palestinian Bank Accounts of 1948

Heian-Engdal, Marte. “‘A Source of Considerable Annoyance’: An Israeli–Palestinian Backchannel in the Efforts to Release the Blocked Palestinian Bank Accounts.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2016.1170590

 

Abstract

In addition to the great emotional toll that the Nakba inflicted on the Palestinian people, the 1948 exodus occasioned substantial material losses for the refugees as well. As the 1948 War ground to a halt, the international community had to decide how to deal with all of this, and in the early 1950s the matter of the so-called ‘blocked’—or frozen—Palestinian bank accounts became one of the main issues on the UN Palestine Conciliation Commission’s agenda. Initially, its effort included the government of Israel and the British-owned Barclays Bank. As things progressed, however, Israeli diplomats also engaged a group of Palestinian refugees in an informal backchannel. This article sheds light on this largely overlooked episode and shows how the channel was established, and how the Palestinian group faced nothing but strong international opposition, most notably from the British Foreign Office. Protecting the interests of its regional ally Jordan, as well as those of Barclays Bank, the Foreign Office did what it could in order to make sure that this particular Israeli–Palestinian backchannel was promptly closed.

 

 

 

Thesis: Jadhav, GIS based application tool — Israel Palestine Conflict

Jadhav, Priyanka Sharad S. GIS based application tool — Israel Palestine Conflict, MS Thesis. San Diego: San Diego State University, 2015.
 
URL: http://gradworks.umi.com/16/06/1606015.html
 
Abstract

The objective of the thesis is to develop a GIS based application tool that gives insight into the ongoing controversial Palestine-Israel Conflict. The tool showcases the complete history of the conflict right from World War II through today. It also showcases the other conflicts in the Middle East, which involved Israel and Palestine.

Information about the rulers is provided and how the initial boundaries were chosen. The user can click on the important points on the Israel map. As the user clicks on the map points, Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) pages will be displayed which will have information about the key events during the conflict along with some more information about the ruler and their ruling period. Information about their contribution will also be described. The programming language used to develop this tool is JAVA. Different features to this tool are added using MOJO (Map Objects Java Objects), which is developed by ESRI (Environmental Science Research Institute). The map is also developed using MOJO.

The tool will also include a few customized features for the user to understand the Palestine-Israel conflict in an easy way. Customized features like pictures, videos will be added to the tool to make the tool more interesting and informing. This tool will help people to know more about the ongoing highly controversial Palestine-Israel conflict.

 

 

 

Postdoc: Research Associate in Religion and Violence in the MidEast (Princeton, 2016-7)

The Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia invites applications for a postdoctoral or more senior researcher related to the theme of Religion and Violence in the Middle East. Applicants can be from the disciplines of history, law, politics, literature, as well as Islamic studies. The appointment will be for the year, September 1, 2016 through August 31, 2017, with the possibility of renewal, subject to satisfactory performance and continued funding. Assuming approval by the Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Dean of the Faculty, the researcher will be expected to teach a one-semester undergraduate course, which may be open to graduate students. Candidates must hold the Ph.D. degree and are expected to pursue independent research at Princeton and to participate in Institute-related activities on campus. Travel assistance of up to $1000 for round-trip, economy-class airfare will be available to the appointee and her or his immediate family. The salary, to be approved by the Department and the Dean of the Faculty, will be based on the successful candidate’s qualifications. This position is subject to the University’s background check policy.Interested applicants must apply online at https://jobs.princeton.edu and submit a current curriculum vitae, a research statement (maximum length 2 pages), a cover letter, and contact information for three references. The deadline for application is March 31, 2016, 11:59 p.m. EST.

Essential Qualifications: Candidates must hold the Ph.D. degree and are expected to pursue independent research at Princeton and to participate in Institute-related activities on campus.

Click here to apply.

New Book: Douglas, The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial

Douglas, Lawrence. The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.

 

 

In 2009, Harper’s Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk’s legal odyssey began in 1975, when American investigators received evidence alleging that the Cleveland autoworker and naturalized US citizen had collaborated in Nazi genocide. In the years that followed, Demjanjuk was twice stripped of his American citizenship and sentenced to death by a Jerusalem court as “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka—only to be cleared in one of the most notorious cases of mistaken identity in legal history. Finally, in 2011, after eighteen months of trial, a court in Munich convicted the native Ukrainian of assisting Hitler’s SS in the murder of 28,060 Jews at Sobibor, a death camp in eastern Poland.

An award-winning novelist as well as legal scholar, Douglas offers a compulsively readable history of Demjanjuk’s bizarre case. The Right Wrong Man is both a gripping eyewitness account of the last major Holocaust trial to galvanize world attention and a vital meditation on the law’s effort to bring legal closure to the most horrific chapter in modern history.

 

Table of Contents

• Introduction 1
• 1 The Beginning of the End of Something 17
• 2 John in America 26
• 3 Ivan in Israel 68
• 4 Demjanjuk Redux 109
• 5 Demjanjuk in Munich 137
• 6 Was damals Recht war . . . 161
• 7 Memory into History 194
• 8 The Trial by History 216
• 9 The Right Wrong Man 247
• Postscript 258
• Acknowledgments 261
• Notes 263
• References 299
• Index 321

 

LAWRENCE DOUGLAS is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. His books include The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust and The Vices. His work has appeared in leading publications such as the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, and Harper’s. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts.

 

 

 

Report: National Library of Israel, 2015 activities

Click here for Hebrew version:

• David Grossman entrusts personal archive to National Library
• Prof. Jonathan Sarna, Scholar-in-Residence
• Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: The Battle of the Book
• Piyut and Prayer Series (watch on YouTube)
• Documentary Film Festival
• Professional Training Courses for European Librarians and Archivists
• Summer Program for Children from East Jerusalem
• Launch of Young Curators Program Pilot
• Digitization of 670 pages from 56 Israeli journals (see database here)
• Archives of Jewish journalism online (click here for the archives)
• Collection of Israeli archives (see AZ website)
• Historic maps of Jerusalem on Wikipedia (see here)

ToC: Hebrew Studies 56 (2015)

Below are the relevant articles for Israel Studies from the latest issue of Hebrew Studies. For a full Table of Contents,click here.

 

Innovative Designation of Diminution in the Writings of Abraham Shlonsky

pp. 231-243

Bat-Zion Yemini

Memory and History in Israeli Post-Apocalyptic Theater

pp. 245-263

Zahava Caspi

Questioning Boundaries of Language and the World: Ambivalence and Disillusionment in the Writings of Shimon Adaf

pp. 265-294

Dorit Lemberger

Hebrew Neologisms in the Writings of Anton Shammas

pp. 295-314

Adel Shakour, Abdallah Tarabeih

The Pain of Two Homelands: Immigration to Israel in Twenty-First Century Hebrew Prose Fiction

pp. 315-331

Smadar Shiffman

“Our Virgin Friends and Wives”?: Female Sexual Subjectivity in Yona Wallach’s Poetry

pp. 333-356

Amalia Ziv

New Testament Jesus in Modern Jewish Literature: A Symposium

pp. 357-358

Zev Garber

Jesus and the Pharisees through the Eyes of Two Modern Hebrew Writers: A Contrarian Perspective

pp. 359-365

Neta Stahl

A Question of Truth: Form, Structure, and Character in Der man fun Natseres

pp. 367-376

Melissa Weininger

Overtones of Isaac and Jesus in Modern Hebrew Narrative

pp. 377-384

Aryeh Wineman

The Jewish Jesus: Conversation, Not Conversion

pp. 385-392

Zev Garber

Reviews

 

Compassion and Fury: On The Fiction of A. B. Yehoshua by Gilead Morahg (review)

pp. 433-436

Yael Halevi-Wise

---

Periodicals

pp. 437-456

Books Received — 2015

pp. 457-460

ToC: Jewish Social Studies 21,1 (2015)

Jewish Social Studies 21.1 (2015)

Table of Contents

 Front Matter

•  A Modern (Jewish) Woman in a Café: Leah Goldberg and the Poetic Space of the Coffeehouse (pp. 1-48)

  Shachar Pinsker
• The Missing Beat Generation: Coming of Age and Nostalgism in Arik Einstein’s Music (pp. 49-88)

  Arie M. Dubnov
• Shame as an Existential Emotion in Modern Kabbalah (pp. 89-122)

  Jonathan Garb
• Yad Vashem and the State of Holocaust Education in Israeli Schools in the 1960s (pp. 123-150)

  Jeffrey C. Blutinger
• Jewish Liberal, Russian Conservative: Daniel Pasmanik between Zionism and the Anti-Bolshevik White Movement (pp. 151-180)

  Taro Tsurumi

Newsletter: From the Azrieli Institute (+CFP on Balfour Declaration Centennial)

The Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies is a hub of opportunities on Israel Studies at Concordia University.

Below is information regarding:

 

1. 1. Course offered this coming January
2. 2. The Institute Library
3. 3. Call for articles: 100 Years since the 1917 Balfour Declaration: A Retrospective
4. 4. Other related event

 

 ——————————————————————————–

1. Course offered this coming January

Dr. Aidan Beatty, Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies Post-Doctoral Fellow, will be teaching Irish and Jewish Identities: National and International Dimensions at the School of Canadian Irish Studies.

 

 

2. The Institute Library

Did you know that the Institute has a mini-library of Israel related books and articles?

Should you wish to do some research in our offices, all you have to do is reply to this email and make an appointment.

We will be happy to help you with your research.

 

3. Call for articles: 100 Years since the 1917 Balfour Declaration: A Retrospective

The Israel Studies journal invites original articles specifically related to the Balfour Declaration’s architects, protagonists, antagonists, historical, and legal interpretations. Articles are peer-reviewed and should be no longer than 10,000 words including abstract, notes and illustrations. Proposals should be sent to istudies@bgu.ac.il no later than April 1, 2016. Information on Israel Studies & Guidelines for Contributors:

http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/em/email_images/Jrnls/ISR_Guidelines.pdf

Israel Studies is published three times a year by Indiana University Press for the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Sede-Boker) and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Brandeis University (Waltham, MA)

 

4. Other related event

Israeli Movie Night in Montreal: Mussa

Tuesday, December 1, 2015 at 7:00 PM

Segal Centre Cinema Space, 5170 Chemin de la Côte-Ste-Catherine

Refugees from Darfur, Mussa and his parents have been living in Tel Aviv’s worst neighborhood for six years. At twelve years old, Mussa doesn’t speak. In a strange stroke of policy, he is bussed to an elite private school every day. Leaving behind addicts and prostitutes each morning, he silently navigates an upscale world, and forges a bond with a teacher who is also a refugee. When a series of unexpected crises hit, Mussa’s precarious place between two disparate worlds is heartbreakingly revealed.

Event is free. Register at https://www.nifcan.org/our-events/upcoming

 

Csaba Nikolenyi

Professor, Department of Political Science

Director, Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies

Concordia University

1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. Ouest, Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8

Phone: 514 848 2424 extension 8722 or 2120

Visit us at: http://www.azrieli-institute.concordia.ca/

 

New Article: Papastamkou, Greece between Europe and the Mediterranean, 1981-1986

Papastamkou, Sofia. “Greece between Europe and the Mediterranean, 1981-1986: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Greek-Libyan Relations as Case Studies.” Journal of European Integration History 21.1 (2015): 49-69.

 

URL: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01214944/

 

Abstract

This article examines aspects of the foreign policy of Greece’s socialist Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou regarding the Mediterranean from 1981 to 1986. The Mediterranean was one of the three circles of Papandreou’s “multidimensional” approach in foreign policy, a conceptualized one that encompassed Greece’s Arab policy, mainly from a third road point of view. Two case studies are considered, the Greek-Palestinian and the Greek-Libyan connections, principally from a European perspective. Opting for a global rather than a bilateral perspective allows to fully appreciate the evolution of Greek foreign attitudes at the time mainly from the perspective of their Europeanisation.

 

 

New Article: Alon-Mozes, National Parks for a Multicultural Society

Alon-Mozes, Tal. “National Parks for a Multicultural Society: Planning Israel’s Past and Present National Parks.” In Landscape Culture – Culturing Landscapes: The Differentiated Construction of Landscapes (ed. Diedrich Burns et al; Wiesbaden: Springer, 2015): 173-83.

 

 

Extract

Both case studies demonstrate the power of the landscape as an agent fostering first national and later communal identity. Early planning of Gan HaShlosha and Zippori national parks emphasized the role of the biblical/Hellenistic pastoral landscape in reinforcing a common national identity among the Jewish settlers of Israel. Consequently, the Palestinians’ past was erased from Zippori grounds, as in other places in Israel, and their narrative was silenced.

Due to the failure of the melting pot policy and the emergence of Israel as a multicultural society, contemporary Israeli national parks are designed and managed in order to address the needs of various communities of visitors, and not solely the hegemonic ones. The new clientele includes veteran Jews and new immigrants, various Jewish ethnic groups, ultra-orthodox Jews, Christian pilgrims, and the Palestinians Currently, panning strives to increase the profitability of the parks by recruiting new communities, by enabling mass gatherings and communal cultural events, and by mitigating conflicts among participants. Various stakeholders promote parallel narratives within and surrounding the parks, advancing the parcelization of the area based on time or space zones. Within this relatively enabling system, even the Palestinian narrative of Zippori is marked on the land, in spite of objections based on nationalistic considerations.

 

 

New Book: Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1929

Cohen, Hillel. Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1929, Schusterman Series in Israel Studies. Translated by Haim Watzman. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2015.

A new and provocative reassessment of the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In late summer 1929, a countrywide outbreak of Arab-Jewish-British violence transformed the political landscape of Palestine forever. In contrast with those who point to the wars of 1948 and 1967, historian Hillel Cohen marks these bloody events as year zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict that persists today.

The murderous violence inflicted on Jews caused a fractious—and now traumatized—community of Zionists, non-Zionists, Ashkenazim, and Mizrachim to coalesce around a unified national consciousness arrayed against an implacable Arab enemy. While the Jews unified, Arabs came to grasp the national essence of the conflict, realizing that Jews of all stripes viewed the land as belonging to the Jewish people.

 

Through memory and historiography, in a manner both associative and highly calculated, Cohen traces the horrific events of August 23 to September 1 in painstaking detail. He extends his geographic and chronological reach and uses a non-linear reconstruction of events to call for a thorough reconsideration of cause and effect. Sifting through Arab and Hebrew sources—many rarely, if ever, examined before—Cohen reflects on the attitudes and perceptions of Jews and Arabs who experienced the events and, most significantly, on the memories they bequeathed to later generations. The result is a multifaceted and revealing examination of a formative series of episodes that will intrigue historians, political scientists, and others interested in understanding the essence—and the very beginning—of what has been an intractable conflict.

 

HILLEL COHEN is a senior lecturer in the Department of Islam and Middle East Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

 

Table of Contents

 
Introduction
Chronological Overview of the Events
Casualties in the 1929 Riots

• 1 Jaffa and Tel Aviv
  Sunday, August 25, 1929
• 2 Jerusalem
  Friday, August 23, 1929
• 3 Hebron
  Saturday, August 24, 1929
• 4 Motza
  Saturday, August 24, 1929
• 5 Safed
  Thursday, August 29, 1929
• 6 After the Storm
  A Postmortem

Afterword
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index

 

 

 

New Book: Gartman, Return to Zion

Gartman, Eric. Return to Zion. The History of Modern Israel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

 

 

The history of modern Israel is a story of ambition, violence, and survival. Return to Zion traces how a scattered and stateless¬ people reconstituted themselves in their traditional homeland, only to face threats by those who, during the many years of the dispersion, had come to regard the land as their home. This is a story of the “ingathering of the exiles” from Europe to an outpost on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire, of courage and perseverance, and of reinvention and tragedy.

Eric Gartman focuses on two main themes of modern Israel: reconstitution and survival. Even as new settlers built their state they faced constant challenges from hostile neighbors and divided support from foreign governments, as well as being attacked by larger armies no fewer than three times during the first twenty-five years of Israel’s history. Focusing on a land torn by turmoil, Return to Zion is the story of Israel—the fight for independence through the Israeli Independence War in 1948, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the near-collapse of the Israeli Army during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Gartman examines the roles of the leading figures of modern Israel—Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Yitzchak Rabin, and Ariel Sharon—alongside popular perceptions of events as they unfolded in the post–World War II decades. He presents declassified CIA, White House, and U.S. State Department documents that detail America’s involvement in the 1967 and 1973 wars, as well as proof that the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty was a case of mistaken identity. Return to Zion pulls together the myriad threads of this history from inside and out to create a seamless look into modern Israel’s truest self.

Eric Gartman is an intelligence analyst for the United States Department of Defense who has lived and studied in Israel and traveled extensively throughout the Middle East.

New Book: Monterescu, Jaffa Shared and Shattered

Monterescu, Daniel. Jaffa Shared and Shattered. Contrived Coexistence in Israel/Palestine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.

 

Binational cities play a pivotal role in situations of long-term conflict, and few places have been more marked by the tension between intimate proximity and visceral hostility than Jaffa, one of the “mixed towns” of Israel/Palestine. In this nuanced ethnographic and historical study, Daniel Monterescu argues that such places challenge our assumptions about cities and nationalism, calling into question the Israeli state’s policy of maintaining homogeneous, segregated, and ethnically stable spaces. Analyzing everyday interactions, life stories, and histories of violence, he reveals the politics of gentrification and the circumstantial coalitions that define the city. Drawing on key theorists in anthropology, sociology, urban studies, and political science, he outlines a new relational theory of sociality and spatiality.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Contrived Coexistence: Relational Histories of Urban Mix in Israel/PalestinePart I. Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Communal Formations and Ambivalent Belonging
   1. Spatial Relationality: Theorizing Space and Sociality in Jewish-Arab “Mixed Towns”
   2. The Bridled “Bride of Palestine”: Urban Orientalism and the Zionist Quest for Place
   3. The “Mother of the Stranger”: Palestinian Presence and the Ambivalence of SumudPart II. Sharing Place or Consuming Space: The Neoliberal City
   4. Inner Space and High Ceilings: Agents and Ideologies of Ethnogentrification
   5. To Buy or Not to Be: Trespassing the Gated CommunityPart III. Being and Belonging in the Binational City: A Phenomenology of the Urban
   6. Escaping the Mythscape: Tales of Intimacy and Violence
   7. Situational Radicalism and Creative Marginality: The “Arab Spring” and Jaffa’s Counterculture

   Conclusion: The City of the Forking Paths: Imagining the Futures of Binational Urbanism

   Notes
   References
   Index

Daniel Monterescu is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. He is author (with Haim Hazan) of A Town at Sundown: Aging Nationalism in Jaffa and editor (with Dan Rabinowitz) of Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities: Historical Narratives, Spatial Dynamics, Gender Relations and Cultural Encounters in Palestinian-Israeli Towns.

New Article: Rosenberg, Is Israel Good for the Diaspora?

Rosenberg, Göran. “Is Israel Good for the Diaspora? Jewish Quarterly 62.2 (2015): 28-34.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0449010X.2015.1051705

 

Excerpt

So, where does the Jewish Diaspora go from here? On the one hand, I believe we might expect a further widening of the gap between Zion in its present-day nationalistic manifestation, and the Jewish Diaspora as a manifestation of religious pluralism and spiritual universalism. The Jewish Diaspora will then increasingly evolve into exilic community like most others, held together by a common ancestry and history, nourished by a common fear of antisemitism and a common affinity with a not-so-common nation-state.

On the other hand, we might expect—or in my case at least hope for—a revival of that strand of Judaism that Marcus Ehrenpreis was dreaming of in March of 1945, reconnecting in new ways and under wholly new circumstances, to the spiritual heritage of the Jewish Diaspora, to make the texts and tenets of Judaism known and relevant to new generations of Jews and non-Jews alike, to make the Jewish Diaspora into something more than a passive affiliate to Zion. This is to say, to find a new path for Judaism between Zion and Diaspora. A modest attempt is actually being made in Sweden, of all places, where in 2000, The European Institute for Jewish Studies, Paideia, was founded with support from the Swedish government. At Paideia, some twenty students from all over Europe—Jews and non-Jews alike—spend a year of study in close and critical contact with Jewish texts and text traditions (full disclosure, I am a proud board member). This is how Paideia has formulated its mission:

Dedicated to the revival of Jewish culture in Europe, Paideia educates leaders for Europe—academicians, artists and community activists—towards fluency in the Jewish textual sources that have served as the wellsprings of Jewish civilization. In renewing interpretation of Jewish text, Paideia is reviving a European Jewish voice long silenced by Communism and post-Holocaust trauma—a voice that can contribute to a culturally rich and pluralistic Europe

It is perhaps no coincidence that in 2011, a link was established between Paideia and the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien in Heidelberg, creating a joint Master’s program in Jewish Civilizations, contributing “towards a European Jewish culture that is a dynamic, open and inclusive learning community, in conversation both with the Jewish textual sources and with society.”

 

CFP: The Past in the Present of the Middle East (CBRL Conference, April 15-16, 2016, London)

 

CBRL Conference: The Past in the Present of the Middle East

15 & 16 April 2016 at the London Middle East Institute in SOAS

The Council for British Research in the Levant is pleased to open a call for papers and posters for a two-day conference to be held in London with the LMEI to showcase the work of CBRL and its partners in the region. The conference will present sessions on a number of themes linking the past to the present day in the Middle East.

• Cultural heritage in conflict

• Cultural heritage, society and economics

• Britain and the Levant: Culture and (Mis)Communication

• The past in the political present: the legacy of colonialism and intervention

• The Politics of Dissent: challenges to Orientalism and Zionism

• The impact of research – working with humanitarian agencies/practitioners

Closing session: The future of the past in the Middle East

Participants in the conference will include both invited speakers and participants who respond to this call, including early career scholars sponsored by CBRL to undertake new research, as well as established scholars presenting their own research, and research partners from the region. The conference is intended as an opportunity to speak to a wide audience, not only the academic community but also policy makers, practitioners and members of the public. We believe that this event will make an important contribution to the profile of research in the region.

Please send proposed paper or poster titles and abstracts of no more than 250 words to CBRL@britac.ac.uk by September 7th 2015. We will notify participants whether their paper or poster has been accepted by the end of October.

The conference fee is £50 (with an early bird rate of £40 until 15 January 2016), with a discounted rate of £20 for student participants. The fee will cover attendance at the conference, including lunches during the conference and the conference reception.

The CBRL is the British Academy-sponsored organization that promotes, sponsors and carries out high-quality research in the humanities and social sciences throughout the countries of the Levant.

Please circulate to all interested colleagues.

Council for British Research in the Levant

10 Carlton House Terrace

London SW1Y 5AH.  UK

www.cbrl.org.uk

New Article: Sela, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Israel’s National Photography Archives

Sela, Rona. “Rethinking National Archives in Colonial Countries and Zones of Conflict: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Israel’s National Photography Archives as a Case Study.” In Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Competing Narratives in the Middle East (ed. Anthony Downey; London: Tauris, 2015), 79-91.

 

Excerpt

My research over the years has dealt with the question of tyranny that characterizes the activities of Israel’s national institutional photography archives. I discussed the power relations that shaped them and the significant role they played in determining the perception and writing of history. Derrida points to violence as one of the main features inherent in the archive, embodying governmental information/power relations. These aggressive relationships are intensified in a country where two peoples—occupiers and occupied—live in a national conflict and are present, for example, in the way institutional archives control both the national treasures of the vanquished and the knowledge of their history and culture. Pointing out the overt and covert mechanisms in these national institutional archives by stripping away and exposing their inherent national bias, lays the foundation for building an alternative, layered database, different from the one-sided worldview that characterizes them. This enables the original purpose of the archives to be undermined and, in the words of McEvan, put through a process of democratization. However, while in South Africa civil organizations and government are aware of the importance of establishing post-colonial (post-apartheid) archives, in Israel the situation is different. Although in recent years additional studies have started to breach this national cover, exposing excluded areas of knowledge and research, in Israel they still exist on the margins and there is ample room to read archives in a way that penetrates their façade of physical violence.

It is also necessary to deconstruct the archive’s structure, and to propose alternative mechanisms of reading, interpretation and criticism in addition to those discussed in this essay.

The voice of the subjugated is not entirely absent from national, insti-tutional archives in Israel, but exists in an emasculated and misleading form. In this essay, I wanted to raise the possibility of hearing these voices that are seemingly missing from the archives. Freeing the national archives from their chains, and the construction of an independent memory and history—by challenging the national database and providing a platform for Palestinian voices and the return of their looted and seized materials—are the first steps in establishing alternative national archives in Israel. However, stripping away their outer-wrapping does not replace the importance of hearing the voices of the oppressed, learning their history and restoring their ownership and rights.

New Article: Bourdon, Historical Analogies in the Coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Bourdon, Jerome. “Outrageous, Inescapable? Debating Historical Analogies in the Coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict.” Discourse & Communication (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1750481315576835

 

Abstract

This article explores the debate that has surrounded the use of analogies in coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, analyzing in depth two ‘analogy affairs’ on the basis of a LexisNexis corpus: the 2002 Auschwitz-Saramago affair (64 items) and the 2006–2007 Apartheid-Carter affair (154 items). Using the classic Aristotelian tripartition of logos, ethos, and pathos, the article unfolds the argumentative structure of the controversies. Carter and Saramago used the combination of their own personal status and the controversial nature of their analogies to trigger a debate. Commentators focused very much on the ethos (arguments around the authority and the character of the authors) and the pathos, and tended to ignore the logos (the factual relevance of the analogy). Opponents, who made up the majority of commentators, considered analogies as a way of passing judgment on and mobilizing against one of the actors in the conflict (Israel in our cases). This analysis suggests that despite the call for a more cautious use of (or even a prohibition of) the analogies discussed, participants in the debate on the Israeli–Palestinian conflicts are bound to resort to them – even if only to condemn them.