New Article: Ozeri, The 2015 Jerusalem Biennale for Contemporary Jewish Art

Ozeri, Ram. “The 2015 Jerusalem Biennale for Contemporary Jewish Art.” Nashim 29 (2015): 142-6.
 
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/nashim.29.142
 
Abstract

The Jerusalem Biennale is a platform for professional artists whose current work relates, in one way or another, to the world of Jewish content within the conceptual framework of contemporary Jewish art. It does not attempt to answer the questions of what contemporary Jewish art is, or whether there is such a thing at all. The Biennale endeavors to create spaces where the discussion can take place and develop.

Many people view the fields of “Jewish art” and “contemporary art” as mutually exclusive. Jewish art is often associated with Judaica –traditional objects used in religious rituals – while contemporary art is characterized by the use of modern media such as video, sound, installation and performance, and by themes relevant to the present. The main challenge of the Jerusalem Biennale is to promote art that is both Jewish and contemporary. This focus offers a promising alternative to the conventional boundaries of Israeli art and opens the event up to the Jewish world at large.

 

 

 

New Book: Lavie, from HaBurganim to In Treatment (in Hebrew)

Lavie, Noa. From HaBurganim to . Tel Aviv: Resling, 2015 (in Hebrew).

 

 

 

Against the flood of a global and local television genre considered “inferior” – “reality” TV – there are growing public, official, and scholarly voices who distinguish between purely commercial television and quality, or even artistic, television. The quality discourse, which originated in the United States, revolves mainly around serialized drama shows, which as a television genre is even a competitor to the cinema in its artistic innovation.

Israeli television is heavily influenced by this global quality discourse. Moreover, during the 1990s Israeli television was revolutionized with the privatization of the television market in Israel and the establishment of commercial TV channels and cable and satellite channels. This revolution enabled, in parallel with the institutionalization of the global quality discourse, the production of original Israeli TV drama series immeasurably higher than during the sole reign of the IBA. Accordingly, this book explores how the serialized television drama became a “quality” television genre which is treated as a work of art in every respect.

This book does not deny the possibility that there is such thing as “high art,” or television productions that bears artistic marks; but Noa Lavie’s sociological spotlight seeks to illumine the struggles and the social and organizational causes that defined, beginning in the 1990s and down to the first decade of the 2000s, drama series such as “The Bourgeois” or “In Treatment”, along with other series, as high-quality and artistic television. This is achieved through an analysis of interviews with prominent creators of television drama in Israel, analysis of TV reviews published in major newspapers, and an account of the institutional-organizational field and the technological, regulatory, and other changes it underwent in the early 1990s.

 

Dr. Noa Lavi is the head of the political communication division and a lecturer in the School of Government and Society at Tel Aviv-Yaffo Academic College.

 

 

 

New Book: Hochberg, Visual Occupations

 

Hochberg, Gil Z. Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, Perverse Modernities. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015.

 

 

In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists’ creation of new ways of seeing—such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists’ exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness —offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel’s militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.

Gil Z. Hochberg is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at UCLA. She is the author of In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the Limits of Separatist Imagination.

 

Table of Contents

 

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction. Visual Politics at a Conflict Zone  1

Part I. Concealment  

1. Visible Invisibility: On Ruins, Erasure, and Haunting  37

2. From Invisible Spectators to the Spectacle of Terror: Chronicles of a Contested Citizenship  57

Part II. Surveillance  

3. The (Soldier’s) Gaze and the (Palestinian) Body: Power, Fantasy, and Desire in the Militarized Contact Zone  79

4. Visual Rights and the Prospect of Exchange: The Photographic Event Placed under Duress  97

Part III. Witnessing

5. “Nothing to Look At”; or, “For Whom Are You Shooting?”: The Imperative to Witness and the Menace of the Global Gaze  115

6. Shooting War: On Witnessing One’s Failure to See (on Time)  139

 

Closing Words  163

Notes  167

Bibliography  187

Index  207

New Article: Lavie, Constructing the Israeli ‘Quality’ Television Series as an Art Form

Lavie, Noa. “Israeli Drama: Constructing the Israeli ‘Quality’ Television Series as an Art Form.” Media, Culture, & Society 37.1 (2015): 19-34.

 

URL: http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/37/1/19.abstract

 

Abstract

The current study focuses on the social construction of definitions of quality in the field of the television drama series in Israel. By doing that, this work challenges Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that since artifacts of ‘popular culture’ industries are not regarded as ‘autonomous’, according to the autonomy-of-art ideology, they cannot be consecrated as works of art. Bourdieu’s thesis was challenged before, but the television field has not yet been extensively studied from this point of view. My study of the broad empirical corpus, including television reviews and interviews with acclaimed Israeli television creators, reveals that artistic quality and commercial appeal show less tension than Bourdieu had suggested. Furthermore, my findings indicate that the autonomy-of-art ideology can be reconfigured to accommodate commercial (e.g. capitalist) considerations. Within this reconfiguration, the ‘quality’ television series can be redefined to include elements of ‘autonomous’ art, such as authenticity, innovation and the input of ‘genius’ creators, alongside such capitalist requirements as profitability.

New Book: Yosef and Hagin, eds. Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema

Yosef, Raz and Boaz Hagin. Deeper than Oblivion. Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

 

URL: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/deeper-than-oblivion-9781441199263/

 

In this collection, leading scholars in both film studies and Israeli studies show that beyond representing familiar historical accounts or striving to offer a more complete and accurate depiction of the past, Israeli cinema has innovatively used trauma and memory to offer insights about Israeli society and to engage with cinematic experimentation and invention. Tracing a long line of films from the 1940s up to the 2000s, the contributors use close readings of these films not only to reconstruct the past, but also to actively engage with it. Addressing both high-profile and lesser known fiction and non-fiction Israeli films, Deeper than Oblivion underlines the unique aesthetic choices many of these films make in their attempt to confront the difficulties, perhaps even impossibility, of representing trauma. By looking at recent and classic examples of Israeli films that turn to memory and trauma, this book addresses the pressing issues and disputes in the field today.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Sweet on the Inside: Trauma, Memory, and Israeli Cinema Boaz Hagin and Raz Yosef

Chapter 2: Postscript to Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation Ella Shohat

Chapter 3: Gender, the Military, Memory, and the Photograph: Tamar Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling and American Films about Abu Ghraib Diane Waldman

Chapter 4: The Event and the Picture: David Perlov’s My Stills and Memories of the Eichmann Trial Anat Zanger

Chapter 5: The Agonies of an Eternal Victim: Zionist Guilt in Avi Mograbi’s Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi Shmulik Duvdevani

Chapter 6: Traces of War: Memory, Trauma, and the Archive in Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort Raz Yosef

Chapter 7: Memory of a Death Foretold: Fathers and Sons in Assi Dayan’s “Trilogy” Yael Munk

Chapter 8: Queering Terror: Trauma, Race, and Nationalism in Palestinian and Israeli Gay Cinema during the Second Intifada Raya Morag

Chapter 9: “Our Traumas”: Terrorism, Tradition, and Mind Games in Frozen Days Boaz Hagin

Chapter 10: History of Violence: From the Trauma of Expulsion to the Holocaust in Israeli Cinema Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni

Chapter 11: Last Train to the Holocaust Judd Ne’eman and Nerit Grossman

Chapter 12: Passages, Wars, and Encounters with Death: The Desert as a Site of Memory in Israeli Film Yael Zerubavel

Chapter 13: “Walking through walls”: Documentary Film and Other Technologies of Navigation, Aspiration, and Memory Janet Walker

Notes on Contributors

Index

 

New Article: Chyutin, Fleshing Out the Haredi Male Body in Avishai Sivan’s The Wanderer

Chyutin, Dan. “Judaic Cinecorporeality: Fleshing Out the Haredi Male Body in Avishai Sivan’s The Wanderer.” Shofar 33.1 (2014): 57-82.

 

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/shofar/v033/33.1.chyutin.html

 

Abstract

This essay discusses the representation of the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) male body in Avishai Sivan’s noted feature The Wanderer (2010) as representative of contemporary Israeli cinema’s attitude towards Judaic corporeality. Using both sociological and theological literature, it highlights the ways by which this film orchestrates the details of ultra-Orthodox reality to mount a damning critique of Judaic regimes of corporeal regulation. According to this critique, Judaic corporeality exists in a condition of continuous repression, whereby it seeks to absent bodily desires, and even its own material presence. Through the adolescent protagonist Yitzhak, The Wanderer charts a trajectory of transgression and release from this repressive framework. The journey, however, does not entail liberation but rather culminates in destructive violence, consequently allowing the film to define pathological bodily behavior as inescapable both inside and outside the Haredi ghetto. While foregrounding the relevance of this assertion, the essay’s conclusion also traces its limits, which derive from the film’s problematic attempt to reduce ultra-Orthodox corporeality to the contours of certain antisemitic stereotypes of Old World Jewry.

Calendar of Events: Taub Center for Israel Studies, NYU, Fall 2014

Please join the Taub Center for Israel Studies for these exciting events in Fall 2014.

Event details can be found at www.taub.as.nyu.edu

October 21 – 5pm

“Is Arab/Jewish Coexistence in Israel Possible?”

Professor Yuli Tamir, former Israeli Education Minister

 

October 28 – 5:30pm

“Shattered Rhymes: The Life and Poetry of Erez Bitton”

Film Screening, Poetry Reading and Panel Discussion

 

November 9 – 4pm

“Invisibles” and “Write Down, I’m Arab”

Film Screenings and Discussion

Part of the Other Israel Film Festival

 

November 17 – 5pm

“The World Jewish Congress during the Holocaust: Between Restraint and Activism”

Professor Zohar Sagev, University of Haifa

 

November 24 – 5pm

“Israel as Western and Non-Western”

Professor Sammy Smooha, University of Haifa / NYU Visiting Professor

 

December 1 – 5pm

Title TBD

Professor Alon Confino, University of Virginia

 

December 4 – 5pm

“Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State”

Professor Shira Robinson, George Washington University

CFP: Israel Affairs special issue, Cultural Sociology of Dancing in Israel

[from: http://www.academia.edu/6251234/]

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Call for Papers

Special issue of Israel Affairs

 A Dancing Nation – Cultural Sociology of Dancing in Israel

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In history, dance has contributed towards creating friendship and understanding. For example, in newly established communities of British settlers in Australia dancing helped newcomers to interact with locals and establish friendly relations (Clendinnen, 2005). Some form of dance exists in social life since early days. For example, ballet as a formalized form of dance exists since 15th century Italy, and from Italy it spread to France and then other countries. At first, ballet was intertwined with opera, but theatrical ballet quickly found its place as an independent form of art. On the other hand, wider population developed traditional folk dances, which today form part of national cultures. In Judaism, dance presents a social tradition since ancient times because Jews have always expressed joy through dancing. This practice continued after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 when Jews even danced on the day modern state of Israel was established, and Israeli state has a rich dancing culture:  both folk and artistic. During 1940s, Jewish community was seeking its right to self-determination, and Jewish communities developed Hebrew culture as a national culture that will foster new national Jewish identity (Rottenberg 2013; Maoz 2000). Dance also had an important position in creating the state, and particularly the artistic dance performed mostly by European settlers. Jewish communities also developed folk and modern dance inspired by their countries of origin and the Zionist movement (Rottenberg, 2013). In 1950s, American dance groups came to Israel and this helped in spreading expressionism in dance techniques (Rottenberg, 2013). Various dance companies were established during the 1960s, and while folk dances were created from all distinctive traditions in the land of Israel and from Jews who came to Israel after the creation of the modern state of Israel (Roginsky 2007; Eshel 2011), modern and artistic dance are flourishing in Israel. However, dance has not been without divisions in Israeli society and; thus, there is a conflict between Eastern and Western Jewish dances and the position of these two dancing tradition is not the same (Yellin, 2011).

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This volume seeks contributions that tackle socio-cultural aspects of dance, the role of dance in contemporary Israeli society and everyday lives of Israelis. Papers are invited for the following topics: Judaism and dance Jewish dance culture in Israel Zionist dances and culture Impact of dance on everyday lives of Israelis and understanding between Jews of various backgrounds Americanization of dance in Israel Globalization of dance in Israel Influence of the immigration (Russian, Ethiopian, etc.) Dancing and its representation in Israeli Media Dancing and the discourse of ‘prestige’ vs. ‘mass’ culture This special volume is supposed to contribute to increasing of the knowledge about Israel and Jewish studies, as well as to contribute to better understanding of cultural studies and the role of dance in creating and preserving cultural identities. All articles will be a subject to editorial screening and independent peer review, and have to be prepared according to Israel Affairs standards:

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=fisa20&page=instructions

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Abstracts are due June1st, 2014, and should be sent to:

martina@socialsciencesandhumanities.com

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Decisions will be sent by July 1st, 2014. Full papers are due December 1st, 2014. Acceptance of abstract does not automatically guarantee the final paper will be accepted since papers will be subjects to two independent peer-reviews.

New Article: Harris, Palestinian, Druze, and Jewish Women in Recent Israeli Cinema on the Conflict

Harris, Rachel S. “Parallel Lives: Palestinian, Druze, and Jewish Women in Recent Israeli Cinema on the Conflict: Free Zone, Syrian Bride, and Lemon Tree.” Shofar 32.1 (2013): 79-102.

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/shofar/v032/32.1.harris.html

Abstract

Free Zone (Amos Gitai, 2005); The Lemon Tree (Eran Riklis, 2008) and Syrian Bride (Eran Riklis, 2004), explore the Arab-Israeli conflict through women’s experience of the political and military stalemate. In presenting Palestinian, Druze, and Israeli women, these filmmakers attempt to contrast and compare women’s shared encounters, including their experience of patriarchy. While the characters may come from diametrically opposed sides, their experiences as women occlude their political differences. In these films, women are foregrounded within the plot, and have agency over their actions if not their situations. Rejecting the masculine frame that has governed representations of the conflict, these filmmakers demonstrate a new kind of approach in Israeli film that considers feminist aesthetics in the construction of character and plot, as well as the treatment of women’s physicality, gaze, territoriality, and agency.

Post-Doctoral Fellowship: 2014-15 Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University

Teach one course per semester in Israel Studies, related to programs in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Israeli arts and culture, politics, sociology, economics, or other relevant disciplines. Participate actively in the intellectual life of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, present at least one public lecture. Annual stipend of $52,500 plus a $3,000 research & travel fund. Benefits-eligible. Applications due January 15, 2014.

Learn more at http://www.brandeis.edu/israelcenter/support/postdoctoral.html

For further info, call 781-736-2154 or email aselve@brandeis.edu.