Trajtenberg, Graciela. “When was Feminism? Some Critical Reflections after Exploring an Unknown Group of Israeli Women Art Critics.” Women’s Studies 44.5 (2015): 635-56.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2015.1036159
Katz, Emily Alice. Bringing Zion Home. Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948-1967. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015.
Bringing Zion Home examines the role of culture in the establishment of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel in the immediate postwar decades. Many American Jews first encountered Israel through their roles as tastemakers, consumers, and cultural impresarios—that is, by writing and reading about Israel; dancing Israeli folk dances; promoting and purchasing Israeli goods; and presenting Israeli art and music. It was precisely by means of these cultural practices, argues Emily Alice Katz, that American Jews insisted on Israel’s “natural” place in American culture, a phenomenon that continues to shape America’s relationship with Israel today.
Katz shows that American Jews’ promotion and consumption of Israel in the cultural realm was bound up with multiple agendas, including the quest for Jewish authenticity in a postimmigrant milieu and the desire of upwardly mobile Jews to polish their status in American society. And, crucially, as influential cultural and political elites positioned “culture” as both an engine of American dominance and as a purveyor of peace in the Cold War, many of Israel’s American Jewish impresarios proclaimed publicly that cultural patronage of and exchange with Israel advanced America’s interests in the Middle East and helped spread the “American way” in the postwar world. Bringing Zion Home is the first book to shine a light squarely upon the role and importance of Israel in the arts, popular culture, and material culture of postwar America.
Emily Alice Katz teaches history at the University of California, Irvine.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Postwar American Jewry Reconsidered
2. Before Exodus: Writing Israel for an American Audience
3. Hora Hootenannies and Yemenite Hoedowns: Israeli Folk Dance in America
4. A Consuming Passion: Israeli Goods in American Jewish Culture
5. Cultural Emissaries and the Culture Explosion: Introducing Israeli Art and Music
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Reifler, David M. Days of Ticho. Empire, Mandate, Medicine, and Art in the Holy Land. Jerusalem and Springfield, NJ: Gefen, 2014.
URL: http://www.amazon.com/Days-Ticho-Empire-Mandate-Medicine/dp/9652296651
Abstract
Dr. Avraham Albert Ticho was a Viennese-trained ophthalmologist who immigrated to Ottoman-ruled Jerusalem in 1912. There he married his cousin, the artist Anna Ticho, and together they made their mark on the history of the Land of Israel. In Days of Ticho, the Tichos’ story is told in all its fascinating detail. Their personal history is presented against the backdrop of a variety of historical perspectives histories of medicine, art, civilian institutions, governments, and war; the struggles and growth of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine; and the conflicts that arose between Jews and their Arab neighbors. Among the stories in this book are Dr. Ticho’s supervision of the first Hadassah nurses in Palestine and the early years of Hadassah Hospital, as well as the near-fatal stabbing of Dr. Ticho by an Arab would-be assassin in November 1929, during the murderous riots that took place throughout Palestine. Those riots were an important turning point in Jewish-Arab relations, the harbinger of problems that remain the focus of world attention until today. The Ticho House in Jerusalem was dedicated in May 1984 as a downtown annex of the Israel Museum, and it welcomes thousands of visitors every year. This book further contributes to the Tichos’ legacy while advancing an understanding of their times and ours.
Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies
Student-Faculty Seminars
Join us for our first seminar of the year!
Wednesday November 26, 2014
10:30AM-12:30PM
Jerusalem Art History Journal. An Undergraduate eJournal: The Process and Product
– Dr. Loren Lerner, Project Director, Department of Art History
– Pata Macedo, Journal Designer, Department of Design and Computation Arts
– Israeli Archaeology in Jerusalem: National Heritage, Identity, and Partiality – Charlotte Parent
– Symbols and Motifs: Depictions of the Heavenly Realm in Mordecai Ardon’s At the Gates of Jerusalem – Valerie Gauthier
– Expressing Exile as a Shared Experience: The Work of Steve Sabella – Stéphanie Hornstein
– From the Depths of the Matrixial Sea: Reviving Loss and Memory in Contemporary Israeli Art – Braden Scot
– The Artistic Apocalypse: Three Religious Depictions of the End of Days – Amanda Charlebois
– Representations of Jesus in Early Christian Art – Samantha Wexler
The Benefits of International Diversification:The Case of Israel in a Nexus of Market Development, Corporate Governance and Structural Change
– Dr. Lorne Switzer, Department of Finance
Dekel, Tal. “Feminist Art Hitting the Shores of Israel: Three Case Studies in Impossible Times.” Frontiers 33.2 (2012): 111-128.
URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/frontiers/v033/33.2.dekel.html
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the ways in which major themes in early feminist art in the United States were simultaneously explored in Israel. This will be demonstrated by a showcase of three local artists: Yoheved Weinfeld, Miriam Sharon and Pamela Levy. While such artists were few and their work was considered negligible, they nonetheless produced a vast and complex body of feminist art in Israel during the 1970s. The reasons for the degrading attitude of the Israeli mainstream art world toward artists inspired by feminism will be addressed and explained in light of the unique cultural climate in Israel and its position toward feminism in general and toward the second wave feminist movement in particular.
Online Israel Studies Bulletin Board 