Thesis: Chyutin, Judaism, Contemporary Israeli Film, and the Cinematic Experience

Chyutin, Dan. A Hidden Light: Judaism, Contemporary Israeli Film, and the Cinematic Experience, PhD dissertation. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2015.
 
URL: http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/26366/
 
Abstract

Throughout its brief history, Israeli cinema largely ignored Jewish religious identity, aligning itself with Zionism’s rejection of Judaism as a marker of diasporic existence. Yet over the past two decades, as traditional Zionism slowly declined, and religion’s presence became more pronounced in the public sphere, Israeli filmmakers began to treat Judaism as a legitimate cinematic concern. The result has been a growth in the number of Israeli films dealing with the realities of devoutly religious Jews, amounting to a veritable “Judaic turn” in Israel’s cinematic landscape. As of now, this “turn” has received meager attention within Israeli film scholarship. The following, then, addresses this scholarly lack by offering an extensive investigation of contemporary Judaic-themed Israeli cinema.

This intervention pursues two interconnected lines of inquiry. The first seeks to analyze the corpus in question for what it says on the Judaic dimension of present-day Israeli society. In this context, this study argues that while a dialectic of secular vs. religious serves as the overall framework in which these films operate, it is habitually countermanded by gestures that bring these binary categories together into mutual recognition. Accordingly, what one finds in such filmic representations is a profound sense of ambivalence, which is indicative of a general equivocation within Israeli public discourse surrounding the rise in Israeli Judaism’s stature and its effects on a national ethos once so committed to secularism.

The second inquiry follows the lead of Judaic-themed Israeli cinema’s interest in Jewish mysticism, and extends it to a film-theoretical consideration of how Jewish mystical thought may help illuminate particular constituents of the cinematic experience. Here emphasis is placed on two related mystical elements to which certain Israeli films appeal—an enlightened vision that unravels form and a state of unity that ensues. The dissertation argues that these elements not only appear in the Israeli filmic context, but are also present in broader cinematic engagements, even when those are not necessarily organized through the theosophic coordinates of mysticism. Furthermore, it suggests that this cycle’s evocation of such elements is aimed to help its national audience transcend the ambivalences of Israel’s “Judaic imagination.”

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

Dissertation: Harel, “The eternal nation does not fear a long road”: An Ethnography of Jewish Settlers in Israel/Palestine

Harel, Assaf. “The eternal nation does not fear a long road”: An Ethnography of Jewish Settlers in Israel/Palestine, PhD thesis, Rutgers University, 2015.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3VD71FW

 

Abstract

This is an ethnography of Jewish settlers in Israel/Palestine. Studies of religiously motivated settlers in the occupied territories indicate the intricate ties between settlement practices and a Jewish theology about the advent of redemption. This messianic theology binds future redemption with the maintenance of a physical union between Jews and the “Land of Israel.” However, among settlers themselves, the dominance of this messianic theology has been undermined by postmodernity and most notably by a series of Israeli territorial withdrawals that have contradicted the promise of redemption. These days, the religiously motivated settler population is divided among theological and ideological lines that pertain, among others issues, to the meaning of redemption and its relation to the state of Israel. This dissertation begins with an investigation of the impact of the 2005 Israeli unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip upon settlers and proceeds to compare three groups of religiously motivated settlers in the West Bank: an elite Religious Zionist settlement, settlers who engage in peacemaking activities with Palestinians, and settlers who act violently against Palestinians. Through a comparison of these different groups, this dissertation demonstrates that while messianism remains a central force in the realities of Jewish settlements and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it exists these days in more diversified forms than before. In addition, this ethnography illustrates how religion both underlies and undermines differences between Israelis and Palestinians and argues that local communities and religious leaders should be included in peace processes. Finally, by examining how messianic conceptions of time among different groups of Jewish settlers connect to their settlement practices, this study reveals the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be as much about time as it is about space. Accordingly, this dissertation has broader implications for understanding the contemporary role of religion and time within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the political struggles of the Middle East.

 

 

New Book: Novak, Zionism and Judaism

Novak, David. Zionism and Judaism. A New Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

 

Why should anyone be a Zionist, a supporter of a Jewish state in the land of Israel? Why should there be a Jewish state in the land of Israel? This book seeks to provide a philosophical answer to these questions. Although a Zionist need not be Jewish, nonetheless this book argues that Zionism is only a coherent political stance when it is intelligently rooted in Judaism, especially in the classical Jewish doctrine of God’s election of the people of Israel and the commandment to them to settle the land of Israel. The religious Zionism advocated here is contrasted with secular versions of Zionism that take Zionism to be a replacement of Judaism. It is also contrasted with versions of religious Zionism that ascribe messianic significance to the State of Israel, or which see the main task of religious Zionism to be the establishment of an Israeli theocracy.

 

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Why Zionism?
• 2. Was Spinoza the first Zionist?
• 3. Secular Zionism: political or cultural?
• 4. Should Israel be a theocracy?
• 5. Why the Jews and why the land of Israel?
• 6. Can the state of Israel be both Jewish and democratic?
• 7. What could be the status of non-Jews in a Jewish state?
• 8. What is the connection between the Holocaust and the state of Israel?

 

DAVID NOVAK holds the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair in Jewish Studies as Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the American Academy for Jewish Research. He is President of the Union for Traditional Judaism, and Vice President of the Institute on Religion and Public Life. Novak also serves as a Consulting Scholar for the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, and as a Project Scholar for the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University.

 

New Article: Inbari, Messianic Religious Zionism and the Reintroduction of Sacrifice

Inbari, Motti. “Messianic Religious Zionism and the Reintroduction of Sacrifice: The Case of the Temple Institute.” In Rethinking the Messianic Idea in Judaism (ed. Michael L. Morgan and Steven Weitzman; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014): 256-73.

 

URL: https://www.academia.edu/16376952/Messianic_Religious_Zionism_and_the_Reintroduction_of_Sacrifice_The_Case_of_the_Temple_Institute

 

Extract

The obscuring of the question of the Temple Mount by early Zionist messianists, both Religious and secular, invited challenges to the Zionist establishment. Scholem wanted the Zionist messianic myth to develop without a yearning for a Third Temple as part of the end of days. Yet Scholem’s conscious denial of the historical desire could not quash the desire. The growing trend of Jewish prayers on the Temple Mount and the vigorous activities of the Temple Institute, discussed above, suggest that the vision of the Third Temple has emerged as a widely accepted component of contemporary Israeli Jewish messianism.

 

 

New Article: Artson, Rootedness in Zion and the Earth

Artson, Bradley Shavit. “Everywhere I Go: Affirming Our Rootedness in Zion and the Earth.” Conservative Judaism 66.1 (2014): 3-19.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/coj.2014.0020 

 

Extract

In that transformative enterprise, it is enough for Rabbi Schechter that some of us live in Zion, building an Israeli culture that wrestles with issues of power and democracy, pluralism and inclusion; one that fights for social services to the poor and fights against inequities for all of Israel’s inhabitants. It suffices for Schechter that some of us are in Israel as sh’liḥim (representatives) of an entire people.

But for Schechter and for me, Jewish significance is not restricted only to what happens in Israel. The Jewish people are a living people everywhere we are, and we retain the obligations of a living people to assert ourselves in the fullness of our humanity, everywhere. For those of us who choose to live throughout the Diaspora, we have no less an obligation to re-acculturate Jewish life, to make Judaism a living language and a rhythm and a way of being, to make it a pathway toward justice among all peoples, to be able to feel a sense of harmony and identity with religions and cultures not our own, and to feel a solidarity with our own people—wherever they are.

New Article: Benyamini and Hotam, An Outline for Critical Theology from an Israeli/Jewish Perspective

Benyamini, Itzhak and Yotam Hotam. “An Outline for Critical Theology. From an Israeli/Jewish Perspective.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 14.2 (2015): 333-39.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2014.997485

 

Abstract

In recent years, critical thought and theological discourse have been challenging each other, as they share mutual themes alongside contesting motivations. Against this broad background, this outline presents a possible formula for “critical theology,” which negotiates between the critical and the theological fields of inquiry. Stemming from the contemporary Israeli framework of religion, society and political imagination, the formula points to the difference between the call to critically navigate in the theological field of meanings, and the call to faithfully adopt its message; between the call “to the call” of theology, and the call “by means of” theology. By doing so, the outline aims to present theology as the original realm of non-religious, perhaps even un-religious, critique, and not as its adversary, while nonetheless maintaining “the religious” as such. Critical theology, we suggest, from our Israeli/Jewish perspective, is a social and political challenge of our time in which religion and religiosity have returned to the forefront of the social, political and cultural world.

 

New Article: Benbassat, Yeshayahu Leibowitz: Jewish Existentialism

Benbassat, Roi. “Yeshayahu Leibowitz: Jewish Existentialism.” Religious Studies 51.2 (2015): 141-63.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0034412514000213

 

Abstract

This article presents Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s conception of Judaism and characterizes his position as typically religious-existentialist. It confronts Leibowitz’s conception with Kantian ethics, refutes the analogy made between these two conceptions, and shows that Leibowitz’s response to Kant is analogous to that of Kierkegaard, the Christian existentialist thinker. It considers Leibowitz’s religious position a Jewish variation of Kierkegaard’s notion of faith in the absurd. Such an analogy enables us not only to elucidate Leibowitz’s religious conception but also to evaluate the implications of Kierkegaard’s religious thought in a broader context.

 

New Article: Afterman and Afterman, Kahane and Contemporary Jewish Theology of Revenge

Afterman, Adam and Gedaliah Afterman. “Meir Kahane and Contemporary Jewish Theology of Revenge.” Soundings 98.2 (2015): 192-217.

 

URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/soundings/v098/98.2.afterman.html

 

Abstract

The article analyzes a relatively unknown, yet influential, contemporary fundamentalist theology of revenge as put forward in the religious writings of Meir Kahane (1932–1990), the notorious militant nationalist. We seek to provide a theological context for this militancy, so as to display the motivational logic behind this troubling trend in Jewish thought and practice. While the doctrine itself has emerged only quite recently, it draws on theological ideas that reach back to the medieval period. In the article we outline the early sources and discussions (Biblical, Rabbinic, medieval, etc.) that constitute the background of Kahane’s radical theology of revenge.

New Article: Engelberg, Modern Orthodoxy in Post-Secular Times

Engelberg, Ari. “Modern Orthodoxy in Post-Secular Times: Jewish Identities on the Boundaries of Religious Zionism.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 14.1 (2015): 126-39.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14725886.2015.1005876

 

Abstract

Post-secularism in Israel is expressed, among other ways, by the growing public acceptance of identities that are neither religious nor secular. This paper is predicated on research of individuals located on the boundaries of Orthodox Religious Zionism. It explores their attitudes on a range of issues and argues that they reflect their post-secularist identities. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with young men and women who chose to abandon the strictures of a Religious Zionist lifestyle as well as those who still remain within its bounds. Various late-modern and post-secular modes of thought and expression were identified in interviewees’ narratives. These included pluralism, relativism, egalitarianism, the personalization of relationships with God, and a disregard for theological arguments based upon scientific findings. It is argued that these attitudes are related to two late-modern social processes: (1) the rise of individual expressivism and (2) the belief in the liberal human-rights ethic. These tendencies cut across the social divide between interviewees who left Religious Zionism and those who chose to remain within the fold, traversing the previously dominant religious–secular social divide and thus serving as yet another indication for the blossoming of new post-secular spaces in Israeli Jewish society.

New Article: Greenberg, R. Areleh Roth’s Pristine Faith

Greenberg, Gershon. “R. Areleh Roth’s Pristine Faith: Through Holocaust to Redemption.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 14.1 (2015): 72-88.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14725886.2015.1007601

 

Abstract

Areleh Roth responded to the Holocaust by labouring to have Jews actualize pristine faith. As the slaughter in Europe mended the sinful universe prior to the advent of the Messiah, the living were enjoined to bring to bear the faith which was experienced by Abraham and which the people of Israel inherited over the ages. This meant struggling against the forces of Amalek who clouded the perception of God’s presence amid the tragedy. Under divine aegis, Amalek brought suffering to induce repentance, he tested the people in order to activate free will, and clouded the perception of God’s presence amid catastrophe. The struggle centred on annulling one’s personality entirely, enabling God to enter the heart so completely as to totally replace the ego. This was the experience of pristine faith, and with it one related to God, through Abraham, and gained the strength to endure the tragedy. Even more, one’s soul could join the ascent of those sparks which were dispersed upon the cosmic catastrophe (described by Isaac Luria) and thereby contribute to, and participate in, the rise of Israel to the spiritual redemption of the Sabbath before Adam’s sin. Roth’s response to the catastrophe was not of theological exposition (for example, why the pious suffered) but of practical means to survive and thrive on the level of spirit.

 

New Article: Freud-Kandel, The Holocaust in the Theology of Louis Jacobs

Freud-Kandel, Miri. “Many Questions, Few Answers: The Holocaust in the Theology of Louis Jacobs.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 14.1 (2015): 40-57.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14725886.2015.1005879

 

Abstract

Louis Jacobs identified the Holocaust—and the creation of Israel—as the two most significant events influencing contemporary Jewish consciousness. Yet his engagement with the theological implications of the Holocaust is notably limited. Since many of his writings are focused on issues facing those he termed “the Jew in the pew,” this absence of detailed consideration of the theological questions posed by the Holocaust seems particularly perplexing. This paper will consider if there is an explanation for this lacuna.

ToC: Israel Studies 19.1 (2014)

1. Special Section—Arabs as Israeli Citizens
   1. Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon and the Arab Draft That Never Was (pp. 1-23)

      Randall S. Geller

      DOI: 10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.1

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.1
   2. The Contemporary Historiographical Debate in Israel on Government Policies on Arabs in Israel During the Military Administration Period (1948–1966) (pp. 24-47)

      Arik Rudnitzky

      DOI: 10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.24

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.24
   3. The Politization of History and the Negev Bedouin Land Claims: A Review Essay on Indigenous (In)justice (pp. 48-74)

      Seth J. Frantzman

      DOI: 10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.48

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.48
   4. Increased Constructive Engagement Among Israeli Arabs: The Impact of Government Economic Initiatives (pp. 75-97)

      Robert Cherry

      DOI: 10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.75

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.75
   5. Democracy, Clan Politics and Weak Governance: The Case of the Arab Municipalities in Israel (pp. 98-125)

      Yakub Halabi

      DOI: 10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.98

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.98
   6. The Quest for Identity in Sayed Kashua’s Let It Be Morning (pp. 126-144)

      Michael Keren

      DOI: 10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.126

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.126
2. Articles
   1. From Peace in the South to War in the North: Menachem Begin as Prime Minister, 1977–1983 (pp. 145-165)

      Yechiam Weitz

      DOI: 10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.145

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.145
   2. Societal Values: Impact on Israel Security—The Kibbutz Movement as a Mobilized Elite (pp. 166-188)

      Zeev Drory

      DOI: 10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.166

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.166
   3. Postsecular Jewish Theology: Reading Gordon And Buber (pp. 189-213)

      Hagar Lahav

      DOI: 10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.189

      Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.189
3. Notes on Contributors (pp. 214-215)

   DOI: 10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.214

   Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.214
4. Guidelines for Contributors (pp. 216-218)

   DOI: 10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.216

   Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/israelstudies.19.1.216