ToC: Israel Affairs, 23.2 (2017)

Israel Affairs 23.2 (2017)

Table of Contents

Articles

• The rise and decline of ‘optional control’ in the IDF / Eitan Shamir (205-230)
•  ‘Spokesman-ship is a weapon’: Israeli army news management during the October 1973 war / Giora Goodman (231-252)
• The erosion of US‒Israeli relations during Obama’s second term / Robert O. Freedman (253-272)
• A ruling party in the making: Mapai in the 1948 war / Avi Bareli (273-302)
• Politics vs. trade: a Realist view on Turkish‒Israeli economic relations / Cenap Çakmak & Murat Ustaoğlu (303-323)
• Israel is too expensive for us? Political consumerism, public policy and entrepreneurship: the case of the cottage cheese boycott / Omri Shamir (324-341)
• Banking and philanthropy in pre-state Jewish Palestine: particularist Sephardic philanthropy disguised as support for the general Zionist cause / Riki Galia (342-360)
• ‘Digital soap opera’ online radio listening patterns and the digital divide / Mira Moshe, Tal Laor & Shimon Friedkin (361-384)
• The Palestinian Authority: the dangerous transition from failing entity to failing state / Kobi Michael (385-410)
• The Holocaust paradox: Holocaust denial and its use in the Arab world / Nitza Davidovitch & Nissim Dana (411-426)
• Cultural change in a kibbutz factory as an outcome of the privatization process: an Israeli case study / Yaffa Moskovich & Yuval Achouch (427-446)

Book Reviews

• Divine service? Judaism and Israel’s armed forces (447-448)
• Crossing: Suez, 1973 (448-449)
• Eye to eye (450-451)
• Defensive Shield: An Israeli Special Forces Commander on the Front Line of Counterterrorism (451-452)

ToC: Israel Studies 22.2 (2017)

Israel Studies 22.2 (2017)

Table of Contents

    Special Section: Religion And Ethnicity

•         Like a Phoenix: The Renaissance of Sephardic/Mizrahi Identity in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s / Avi Picard (pp. 1-25)
•         Philoumenos of Jacob’s Well: The Birth of a Contemporary Ritual Murder Narrative / David Gurevich and Yisca Harani (pp. 26-54)
•         William James in the Holy Land: Religious Experience and Secular-Believer Jewish Women in Israel / Hagar Lahav (pp. 55-77)
•         “Belfast Is Not Here”: The Israeli Press and the Good Friday Agreement / Aidan Beatty (pp. 78-95)

Articles

•         The Kibbutz and the Development Town: The Economic Dimension of Their Reciprocal Relations—The Case of the Hula Valley / Amir Goldstein (pp. 96-120)
•         Kibbutz Under Fire: Back to the Days of Sickle and Bayonet / Zeev Drory, Eyal Lewin and Eyal Ben-Ari (pp. 121-144)
•         The Fiscal Path to the State of Israel: Social Policy and State Building in the Yishuv during the Mandate / Michal Koreh and Daniel Béland (pp. 145-168)
•         What is Israeli in Israeli Art? A Psychoanalytic Solution / Efrat Biberman (pp. 169-187)

CFP: Jewish horticultural schools in Germany and their impact on Palestine / Israel

Call for Papers: Jewish horticultural and agricultural schools / training centers in Germany and their impact on horticulture, agriculture and landscape architecture in Palestine / Israel 

Place: Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem

Date: September 26, 2016

Deadline: April 30, 2016

In the course of the late 19th and early 20th century, more than 30 Jewish horticultural and agricultural training centers and schools (Hachshara) were established in Germany to train Jews from Germany and other European countries, particularly Eastern Europe. While these institutions aimed to prepare their graduates to emigrate from Germany, they also reflected the lure of the students toward the local land and landscape, a topic which was relative neglected in the emerging research field of ‘everyday history’(Alltagsgeschichte) of Jewish life in Germany. Upon arriving in Palestine, graduates of these centers were involved in establishing new settlements, led agricultural and horticultural activities, pioneered agricultural education, and practiced landscape architecture. Nevertheless, in contrast to the rich documentation of the role of the “Yekkes” in the country’s development, there is surprisingly little research on this group’s contribution to the emergence of the local landscape.

Our research explores the scopes, goals, and contribution of these German educational institutions. It documents the history of the schools and training centers, their curricula, and the actual work and life of their students. In parallel we investigate the impact of these graduates, after their arrival in Palestine, on the local landscape. We explore their landscape perceptions, their settlement projects (mainly in the Kibbutzim but not exclusively), and their contributions to the fields of agriculture, horticulture, and landscape architecture.
On September 26, 2016 we will hold a workshop in Jerusalem, organized together with the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem, in order to bring together German and Israeli researchers to discuss these issues and exchange knowledge and ideas. We invite scholars of all disciplines, including but not limited to architecture, horticulture, agriculture, the humanities, and the social sciences, to send proposals for papers addressing the research topics and related issues.

Interested scholars are invited to send an abstract of 300 words and a short bio of 100 words to Sharon Gordon sharon.n.gordon@gmail.com.

We encourage scholars to send full papers or work in progress prior to the workshop, though such exchange will not be obligatory.

Due date is 30/4/2016.

New Article: Edom et al, Privatization Processes of the Industrial Activity of Israeli Kibbutzim

Edom, Sara, Ram Edur, and Yoram Kroll. “Motives, Expectations and Results of the 2000–2009 M&A Privatization Processes of the Industrial Activity of Israeli Kibbutzim.” Journal of Co-operative Organization and Management (early view; online first).

 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcom.2015.11.006
 
Abstract

In the 20th century, almost all of the 350 kibbutzim’s industrial plants were solely owned by the kibbutzim, which were managed like family communal cooperatives. In 2011, almost all of these cooperative-like firms were privatized and started to employ a public type of management. More than 50% of them went public by IPOs or underwent an M&A process. Questioning those who were involved in the above process as well as the details of financial reports before and after the IPO and M&A events, reveal that in contrast to the expectations and incentives, the IPOs and the M&As harmed the profitability of the acquired industrial firms compared with the industrial firms that remained fully owned by the communal cooperatives of the kibbutzim.

 

 

 

ToC: Israel Affairs 22.1 (2016)

Israel Affairs, Volume 22, Issue 1, January 2016 is now available online on Taylor & Francis Online. This new issue contains the following articles: Articles Sixty-two years of national insurance in Israel Abraham Doron Pages: 1-19 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2015.1111632 Rethinking reverence for Stalinism in the kibbutz movement Reuven Shapira Pages: 20-44 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2015.1111640 Making war, thinking history: David Ben-Gurion, analogical reasoning and the Suez Crisis Ilai Z. Saltzman Pages: 45-68 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2015.1111638   Military power and foreign policy inaction: Israel, 1967‒1973 Moshe Gat Pages: 69-95 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2015.1111636 Arab army vs. a Jewish kibbutz: the battle for Mishmar Ha’emek, April 1948 Amiram Ezov Pages: 96-125 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2015.1111633 Lip-service to service: the Knesset debates over civic national service in Israel, 1977–2007 Etta Bick Pages: 126-149 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2015.1111630 State‒diaspora relations and bureaucratic politics: the Lavon and Pollard affairs Yitzhak Mualem Pages: 150-171 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2015.1111637 Developing Jaffa’s port, 1920‒1936 Tamir Goren Pages: 172-188 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2015.1111634 University, community, identity: Ben-Gurion University and the city of Beersheba – a political cultural analysis Yitzhak Dahan Pages: 189-210 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2015.1111631 The Palestinian/Arab Strategy to Take Over Campuses in the West – Preliminary Findings Ron Schleifer Pages: 211-235 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2015.1111639 Identity of immigrants – between majority perceptions and self-definition Sibylle Heilbrunn, Anastasia Gorodzeisky & Anya Glikman Pages: 236-247 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2015.1111635 Book Reviews Jabotinsky: a life David Rodman Pages: 248-249 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2016.112095 Ethos clash in Israeli society David Rodman Pages: 250-251 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2016.1120967 Nazis, Islamists and the making of the modern Middle East David Rodman Pages: 252-254 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2016.1120968 The new American Zionism David Rodman Pages: 255-257 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2016.1120969 Rise and decline of civilizations: lessons for the Jewish people David Rodman Pages: 258-259 | DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2016.1120970

New Article: Ben-Shaul, Israeli and Palestinian Site-Specific Re-enactments

Ben-Shaul, Daphna. “The Performative Return: Israeli and Palestinian Site-Specific Re-enactments.” New Theatre Quarterly 32.1 (2016): 31-48.

ְְ 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X15000846

 

Abstract

In this article Daphna Ben-Shaul explores politically engaged Israeli and Palestinian site-specific re-enactments that pursue what she terms a ‘performative return’. This includes performed aesthetic and political re-enactments of real-life events, which bring about a re-conceptualization of reality. Three contemporary cases of return are discussed with regard to the historical precedent of Evreinov’s 1920 The Storming of the Winter Palace. The first is an activist, unauthorized return to the village of Iqrit in northern Israel by a group of young Palestinians, whose families were required to leave their homes temporarily in the 1948 war, and have since not been allowed to return. The second is Kibbutz, a project by the Empty House Group, which involved an unauthorized temporary settlement on an abandoned site in Jerusalem. The third is Civil Fast, a twenty-four-hour action by Public Movement, which was hosted mainly on a central public square in Jerusalem, integrated into the urban flow. The article draws attention to the fine line these actions straddle between political activism and aesthetic order, and explores their critical and performative effectiveness. Daphna Ben-Shaul is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University. Her current research on site-specific performance in Israel is funded by a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation. She is the editor of a book on the Israeli art and performance group Zik (Keter, 2005), and has published articles in major journals.

 

 

 

ToC: Journal of Israeli History 34.2 (2015)

Journal of Israeli History, 34.2 (2015)

No Trinity: The tripartite relations between Agudat Yisrael, the Mizrahi movement, and the Zionist Organization
Daniel Mahla
pages 117-140

Judaism and communism: Hanukkah, Passover, and the Jewish Communists in Mandate Palestine and Israel, 1919–1965
Amir Locker-Biletzki
pages 141-158

Olei Hagardom: Between official and popular memory
Amir Goldstein
pages 159-180

Practices of photography on kibbutz: The case of Eliezer Sklarz
Edna Barromi Perlman
pages 181-203

The Shishakli assault on the Syrian Druze and the Israeli response, January–February 1954
Randall S. Geller
pages 205-220

Book Reviews

Becoming Israeli: National Ideals and Everyday Life in the 1950s

Deborah Bernstein
pages 221-224

The “Magic Carpet” Exodus of Yemenite Jewry: An Israeli Formative Myth

Ari Ariel
pages 224-227

The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War

Itamar Radai
pages 227-230

Editorial Board

Editorial Board

.

New Article: Waterman, Ideology and Events in Israeli Human Landscape Revisited

Waterman, Stanley. “Ideology and Events in Israeli Human Landscape Revisited.” Jewish Journal of Sociology 57.1-2 (2015).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5750/jjsoc.v57i1/2.107

 

Abstract

This paper casts a retrospective gaze at an article written as a beginning academic who had immigrated to Israel just two years prior, some 40 years ago. Not wanting to alter anything I had written, it was subsequently published nearly five years later. In that paper, I observed a deep abyss between the Israel I “understood”—mainly through reading—before I immigrated and which I thought I “knew”, and the Israel I was experiencing following my arrival. This chasm led me to identify Israeli myths contra an Israeli reality and caused me to pose what were for me, at the time of writing, some disturbing questions about Israeli landscape and society. I did this by choosing three iconic landscapes — new towns, kibbutzim and the desert — and picking away at misunderstandings about them and the way in which we perceived Israel. Four decades on, I ask whether I had been impulsive in writing that paper then with so little experience and if a similar paper in a similar vein were to be written, set in 2015 rather than 1974, what questions might be asked about Israel now and what would they say about Israeli society and culture?

 

 

Reviews: Helman, Becoming Israeli

Helman, Anat. Becoming Israeli. National Ideals and Everyday Life in the 1950s, Schusterman Series in Israel Studies. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2014.

Reviews

• Burghardt, Linda F.”Review.” Jewish Book Council, n.d.
• Bernstein, Deborah. “Review.” Journal of Israeli History (early view; online first).
• Hirsch, Dafna. “Review.” Israel Studies Review 30.2 (2015).

 

 

New Article: Perlman, Practices of Photography on Kibbutz

Perlman, Edna Barromi. “Practices of Photography on Kibbutz: The Case of Eliezer Sklarz.” Journal of Israeli History (early view; online first).

 

URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2015.1068976

 

Abstract
This article explores how socialist egalitarian ideology affected forms of documentation on the kibbutz in Israel, by examining its practices of photography. The study analyzes the work of one photographer, Eliezer Sklarz, and his role and function in the community, focusing on the visual content and style of his work. The article also describes the role of the kibbutz archive in promoting his work and in constructing kibbutz identity through its photographic archive, as a mechanism for creating Zionist kibbutz historiography. The study addresses the conflicted approach of kibbutz society towards photography: promoting documentation through the function of the archive on the one hand, while maintaining a dismissive role towards photography as a highbrow, middle-class practice, on the other.

 

 

New Article: Shor, The Westermarck Hypothesis and the Israeli Kibbutzim

Shor, Eran. “The Westermarck Hypothesis and the Israeli Kibbutzim: Reconciling Contrasting Evidence.” Archives of Sexual Behavior (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10508-015-0558-5

 

Abstract

The case of the communal education system in the Israeli kibbutzim is often considered to provide conclusive support for Westermarck’s (1891) assertion regarding the existence of evolutionary inbreeding avoidance mechanisms in humans. However, recent studies that have gone back to the kibbutzim seem to provide contrasting evidence and reopen the discussion regarding the case of the kibbutzim and inbreeding avoidance more generally (Lieberman & Lobel 2012; Shor & Simchai, 2009). In this article, I reassess the case of the kibbutzim, reevaluating the findings and conclusions of these recent research endeavors. I argue that the differences between recent research reports largely result from conceptual and methodological differences and that, in fact, these studies provide insights that are more similar than first meets the eye. I also suggest that we must reexamine the common assumption that the kibbutzim serve as an ideal natural experiment for examining the sources of incest avoidance and the incest taboo. Finally, I discuss the implications of these studies to the longstanding debate over the Westermarck hypothesis and call for a synthetic theoretical framework that produces more precise predictions and more rigorous empirical research designs.

New Article: Hananel, Rethinking Israel’s National Land Policy

Hananel, Ravit. “The Land Narrative: Rethinking Israel’s National Land Policy.” Land Use Policy 45 (2015): 128-40.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2015.01.015

 

Abstract

The land narrative tells the unique story of Israel’s national land policy. Its historical and ideological roots are in the early 1900s, when the Zionist movement and the Jewish National Fund were founded, but it continues to influence spatial policy and land allocation in Israel today. The land narrative is based on the distinction between the urban sector and the rural-agricultural sector and on the clear preference—at least at the ideological level—for the rural-agricultural sector. However, despite the decision-makers’ clear preference for the members of the cooperative and communal rural sector, over time the urban residents’ have received more land rights de facto. This study provides an explanation of this dissonance by exploring the land narrative, examines its broad implications for Israeli society, and discusses its future implications.

New Article: Moskovich and Achouch, Metamorphosis of a Kibbutz Industry

Moskovich, Yaffa, and Yuval Achouch. “Metamorphosis of a Kibbutz Industry: An Israeli Case Study.” EuroMed Journal of Business 10.2 (2015): 181-97.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/EMJB-08-2014-0023

 

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to focus on a current trend in kibbutz industries, and to examine the numerous changes at Millennium Industries.

Design/methodology/approach

A case study was carried out documenting the organizational biography of Millennium Industries. Ethnographic interviews were held with kibbutz members employed by the organization, former CEO’s and with other workers.

Findings

The research describes the life cycle of the plant from its beginnings, through its maturity, its growth until its decline. It also explains the organizational failure of the plant, in terms of its background and the difficulties of managing a kibbutz industry in an era of global economy. The causes of its decline stem mainly from a kibbutz-style management based on non-professional involvement of the community in business, and incompatible with the rough competition of capitalistic markets. The plant was finally sold to a private investor, thereby losing its identity as a kibbutz plant.

Research limitations/implications

As a single case-study this research cannot pretend to statistical generalization of the findings but linked to the kibbutz and the organizational literature, findings seem to allow generalization of theoretical propositions concerning evolution of the kibbutz industry (an analytic generalization according to Yin, 2013).

Originality/value

While the kibbutz society and its industry are involved in deep changes for the two last decades, very little research was made on kibbutz industry. This paper should contribute to actualize the social knowledge about these specific and interesting phenomena.

New Article: Ebenstein, Changing the Cost of Children and Fertility: Evidence from the Israeli Kibbutz

Ebenstein, Avraham, Moshe Hazan, and Avi Simhon. “Changing the Cost of Children and Fertility: Evidence from the Israeli Kibbutz.” The Economic Journal (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12240

 

Abstract

Prior to 1996, Israelis in collective communities (kibbutzim) shared the costs of raising children equally. This paper examines the impact of privatizing costs of children on the fertility behaviour of young couples. Exploiting variation in parental cost sharing across kibbutzim, we estimate that lifetime fertility declined by 0.65 children. We also examine the exit decisions of members, and find that couples were most likely to leave the kibbutz if they were either higher income or lower fertility. This pattern is also observed among Israeli emigrants, in which higher educated and lower fertility couples are more likely to leave Israel.

 

New Article: Gledhill, The British Hashomer Hatzair Movement

Gledhill, Jim. “Forces of Tomorrow. Youth Culture and Identity in the British Hashomer Hatzair Movement.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 14.2 (2015): 280-98.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2015.1009730

 

Abstract

This article examines the social experience of belonging to the British section of the international Socialist Zionist youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair. The study is based on interviews conducted with 10 former activists across four generations and focuses primarily on the movement in London. It will be argued that Hashomer Hatzair represented a unique alternative youth culture based on a model developed by the movement’s founders in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This model synthesized Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting, the Jugendkultur of the German youth movements, Socialist Zionism and Marxism. Imported to Britain by young German and Austrian refugees from Nazism, this youth culture was reproduced initially in the English countryside, and after the war plugged into the pre-existing politics of Jewish radicalism in London and the general Zionist fervour that anticipated the establishment of Israel. Hashomer Hatzair emphasized autonomy from adult society. By creating autonomous youth spaces, the movement opened a portal for young Jews to shape their own identities. Through a process of politicization and education, the movement’s adherents would identify life on Israeli kibbutzim as an ideal future in adulthood. In tandem with the projection of heroic Jewish role models, this process encouraged Hashomer Hatzair’s followers to define their Jewishness in secular and existential terms, in opposition both to contemporary consumerist and urbanized capitalism, and to the traditional communal associations of the past.

 

ToC: Israel Studies Review 30.1 (2015)

 

 

Israel Studies Review, Volume 30, Issue 1, Table of Contents:

Editors’ Note

Editors’ Note
pp. v-vii(3)

Articles

Mapai’s Bolshevist Image: A Critical Analysis
pp. 1-19(19)
Bareli, Avi

Political Indoctrination of Soldiers in the IDF, 1948–1949
pp. 20-41(22)
Hazkani, Shay

 

Outsmarting the Nation, Together: Subversive Virtual Fraternity in the Israeli Men’s Magazine Blazer
pp. 42-65(24)
Fraiberg, Steven; Kaplan, Danny

 

Men and Boys: Representations of Israeli Combat Soldiers in the Media
pp. 66-85(20)
Israeli, Zipi; Rosman-Stollman, Elisheva

 

The Kibbutz between the Past and the Present
pp. 86-100(15)
Gertz, Nurith

 

Kibbutz Landscape and Architecture as Represented in Film and Television: Kibbutz Yakum as a Case Study
pp. 101-129(29)
Har-Gil, Amir; Gitler, Inbal Ben-Asher

Review Essay

Right of Center: Rearranging the Israeli Political Map
pp. 130-143(14)
Peleg, Samuel

Book Reviews

Book Reviews
pp. 144-163(20)

 

Lecture: Redlich, A New Life in Israel: Kibbutz Merhavia (Manchester, April 28, 2015)

A New Life in Israel: Kibbutz Merhavia

Prof Shimon Redlich (Emeritus, Ben Gurion University)

3pm Tue 28 April, in B2.4 Ellen Wilkinson Building.

ABSTRACT: A discussion of my life in kibbutz Merhavia, within the social and psychological context of the kibbutz in the early 1950s.

SPEAKER: Shimon Redlich was born in 1935 in Lwów and grew up in Brzezany. He was saved during WWII and the Holocaust by a Polish and Ukranian family. Between 1945 and 1950 he stayed in postwar Lodz and then emigrated to Israel in early 1950. There he lived in kibbutz Merhavia 1950-57. He studied for a BA at Hebrew University, an MA at Harvard, and PhD at New York University. During his career, he wrote books and articles on the history of Jews in Eastern Europe. Since retirement from Ben Gurion University in 2003, he has published two volumes of his autobiography in historical context, one on his childhood in Brzezany and the other on his adolescence in Lodz. This presentation will be part of the third and last volume: ‘A New Life in Israel, 1950-54.’

Further information about the CJS research seminar programme and other Jewish Studies events at the University.

New Book: Omer-Sherman, Imagining the Kibbutz

Omer-Sherman, Ranen. Imagining the Kibbutz. Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015.

 

URL: http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-06557-1.html

 

Abstract

In Imagining the Kibbutz, Ranen Omer-Sherman explores the literary and cinematic representations of the socialist experiment that became history’s most successfully sustained communal enterprise. Inspired in part by the kibbutz movement’s recent commemoration of its centennial, this study responds to a significant gap in scholarship. Numerous sociological and economic studies have appeared, but no book-length study has ever addressed the tremendous range of critically imaginative portrayals of the kibbutz. This diachronic study addresses novels, short fiction, memoirs, and cinematic portrayals of the kibbutz by both kibbutz “insiders” (including those born and raised there, as well as those who joined the kibbutz as immigrants or migrants from the city) and “outsiders.” For these artists, the kibbutz is a crucial microcosm for understanding Israeli values and identity. The central drama explored in their works is the monumental tension between the individual and the collective, between individual aspiration and ideological rigor, between self-sacrifice and self-fulfillment. Portraying kibbutz life honestly demands retaining at least two oppositional things in mind at once—the absolute necessity of euphoric dreaming and the mellowing inevitability of disillusionment. As such, these artists’ imaginative witnessing of the fraught relation between the collective and the citizen-soldier is the story of Israel itself.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1. Trepidation and Exultation in Early Kibbutz Fiction

2. “With a Zealot’s Fervor”: Individuals Facing the Fissures of Ideology in Oz, Shaham, and Balaban

3. The Kibbutz and Its Others at Midcentury: Palestinian and Mizrahi Interlopers in Utopia

4. Late Disillusionments and Village Crimes: The Kibbutz Mysteries of Batya Gur and Savyon Liebrecht

5. From the 1980s to 2010: Nostalgia and the Revisionist Lens in Kibbutz Film

Afterword: Between Hope and Despair: The Legacy of the Kibbutz Dream in the Twenty-First Century

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

 

Ranen Omer-Sherman is the Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Louisville.

New Article: Confino, History and Memory in Israel after 1948

Confino, Alon. “The Warm Sand of the Coast of Tantura: History and Memory in Israel after 1948.” History and Memory 27.1 (2015): 43-82.

 

URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/histmemo.27.1.43

 

 

Abstract

On May 23, 1948, Jewish forces occupied the Palestinian village of Tantura, expelled all its residents, and on June 13 a group of young Zionists settled in the village to build a new kibbutz in the nascent State of Israel, Nahsholim. What happened in the following weeks, years and decades to the several hundred houses of Tantura and their narrow alleys, to the village school, and to the makeshift cafés on the beach, where Tanturians used to sit on hot summer evenings caressed by the cool breeze from the Mediterranean? How did the Israeli Jews engage with and transform the coast they now inhabited, and how did they remember its past and construct its new present? I tell this story via five aerial photos of the coast from 1946, 1952, 1957, 1966, and 1976.

 

New Article: Gertz, The kibbutz in recent literary works

Gertz, Nurith. “With the Face to the Future: The Kibbutz in Recent Literary Works.” Journal of Israeli History (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13531042.2015.1014204

 

Abstract

The kibbutz, which was considered one of the greatest successes of the socialist dream, failed to survive history, which replaced socialism with both capitalism and globalization. Numerous texts, literary, documentary, and scholarly, have tried to comprehend the social developments that took place in the kibbutz during the period of its demise, especially over the 1980s and the 1990s. This article focuses on two works – Habayta (Home, Assaf Inbari, 2009) and Bein haverim (Between friends, Amos Oz, 2012) – both of which refrain from solely addressing the rift that the kibbutz underwent, but rather attempt to see in the moment of the kibbutz’s disintegration a stage in a historical process that will ultimately enable creation of new values on the ruins of the old ones. Both works triggered powerful response from literary critics and from the general public, and contributed to shaping a new perspective on the history of the kibbutz.