New Book: Starr and Dubinsky, The Israeli Conflict System

Starr, Harvey, and Stanley Dubinsky, eds. The Israeli Conflict System. Analytic Approaches, Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016.

Table of Contents

Introduction : crossing disciplinary and methodological boundaries in conflict systems analysis / Harvey Starr and Stanley Dubinsky — Event Type, sub-state Actor and Temporal Dimensions of the Dissent-Repression Relationship : Evidence from the Middle East / Philip A. Schrodt and Ömür Yilmaz — Turbulence in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict System : Predicting Change / G. Dale Thomas — Causes and Consequences of Unbalanced Relations in the International Politics of the Middle East, 1946-2010 / Zeev Maoz and Belgin San-Akca — Trade Networks and Conflict Processes in the Israeli Conflict System / Nadia Jilani, Ashley Murph-Schwarzer, Dona Roy, Matthew Shaffer, and Brian Warby — Trade in Conflict Zones : The Israeli Conflict System / Katherine Barbieri and Adrian R. Lewis — The Geography of Conflict : Using GIS to Analyze Israel’s External and Internal Conflict Systems / Harvey Starr, Roger Liu and G. Dale Thomas — Language, Conflict, and Conflicting Languages in Israel/Palestine / Stanley Dubinsky and William D. Davies — The Role of Holocaust Memory in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict / Andreas Musolff — An Experimental Procedure Comparing How Students in Middle Eastern and Western Democracies Cope with International Conflicts / Ranan D. Kuperman — Subjectivity in the Application of the Just War Doctrine to Collateral Damage : An Experimental Test in Israel and the US / Nehemia Geva and Belinda Bragg — Predicting Revolution and Regime Instability in the Middle East : The Uncertain Future of Arab-Israeli Relations / Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith.

New Article: Imhoff et al, Differences in Attributions for the Holocaust in Germany, Israel, and Poland

Imhoff, Roland, Michał Bilewicz, Katja Hanke, Dennis T. Kahn, Naomi Henkel-Guembel, Slieman Halabi, Tal-Shani Sherman, and Gilad Hirschberger. “Explaining the Inexplicable: Differences in Attributions for the Holocaust in Germany, Israel, and Poland.” Political Psychology (early view; online first).

 

URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0959353516647071

 

Abstract

Seventy years have passed since the Holocaust, but this cataclysmic event continues to reverberate in the present. In this research, we examine attributions about the causes of the Holocaust and the influence of such attributions on intergroup relations. Three representative surveys were conducted among Germans, Poles, and Israeli Jews to examine inter- and intragroup variations in attributions for the Holocaust and how these attributions influence intergroup attitudes. Results indicated that Germans made more external than internal attributions and were especially low in attributing an evil essence to their ancestors. Israelis and Poles mainly endorsed the obedient essence attribution and were lowest on attribution to coercion. These attributions, however, were related to attitudes towards contemporary Germany primarily among Israeli Jews. The more they endorsed situationist explanations, and the less they endorsed the evil essence explanation, the more positive their attitude to Germany. Among Germans, attributions were related to a higher motivation for historical closure, except for the obedience attribution that was related to low desire for closure. Israelis exhibited a low desire for historical closure especially when attribution for evil essence was high. These findings suggest that lay perceptions of history are essential to understanding contemporary intergroup processes.

 

 

 

New Article: Azaryahu, Battle Remains and the Formation of a Battlescape, Sha’ar HaGai

Azaryahu, Maoz. “Wrecks to Relics: Battle Remains and the Formation of a Battlescape, Sha’ar HaGai, Israel.” In Memory, Place and Identity: Commemoration and Remembrance of War and Conflict (ed. Danielle Drozdzewski, Sarah De Nardi, and Emma Waterton; Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2016).

 

 

Absract

Beyond prior knowledge about the association of the relics with history, their interpretation and evaluation in terms of memory and legacy is a matter of perspective based on particular ideological premises. Writing about his bus ride from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 1994, the travel writer Paul Theroux mentioned these relics: ‘Old-fashioned armored cars and rusty trucks had been left by the roadside as memorials to the men who had died in what the Israelis call the War of Liberation. The vehicles, so old, so clumsy, roused pity.’ To Theroux the relics ‘roused pity’. In Israeli patriotic culture they have been associated with heroic sacrifice, evoking veneration and respect. Despite their repeated relocations in the local landscape, the authenticity they exude substantially augments their symbolic capacity to conflate the historical battlefield at Bab el Wad and the contemporary battlescape at Sha’ar HaGai.

 

 

Thesis: Melamed, Israeli Homemade Video Memorials and the Politics of Loss

Melamed, Laliv. Sovereign Intimacy: Israeli Homemade Video Memorials and the Politics of Loss, PhD dissertation. New York: New York University, 2015.
 
URL: http://gradworks.umi.com/37/40/3740826.html
 
Abstract

Sovereign Intimacy takes as its subject of investigation video memorialization of dead Israeli soldiers done by their close family and friends. Mixing private loss, home-made video production, military conduct, state politics, and an institutionalized commemoration, it redraws the affinities between affective intimacy and forms of governing. It delineates the reshaping of sovereignty by filial relationships, video practicing and aesthetics, state and military administration of death and mass media. Sovereign Intimacy inquires into the political currencies of mourning and loss.

The videos respond to an event triggered by operations of state violence—figured by military power—with a personal lamenting of the breaking of intimate ties. These videos are made by the family and for the family, through amateur and semi-amateur modes of production. Although they were meant to be privately circulated, this phenomenon emerged in tandem to the videos being broadcast on television during the events of the National Memorial Day.

Home-made video memorials become a standard of Israeli memorialization during the 1990s. Largely the result of waning public support of the Israeli occupation of the south of Lebanon, and of a growing disavowal of state authority, the phenomenon represented a potential challenge to hegemonic narratives and aesthetic forms, through the appropriation of memory and means of production. However, it did not make way to a new political voice to emerge. Instead, these videos emotionalized violence and victimized its deliverers. Furthermore, the broadcasting of the videos on television—allegedly as a tribute to the families, a communal gesture of listening and a call for solidarity—participated in a national economy of death in which the lives of Lebanese, Palestinians and marginalized people within Israeli society had no value. Lastly, the phenomenon of memorial videos normalized the growing militarization of civil society and neutralized any call for political action.

 

 

 

ToC: Jewish Film & New Media 4.1 (2016; special issue on genres)

Jewish Film & New Media

Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2016

Table of Contents

SPECIAL ISSUE: GENRES IN JEWISH AND ISRAELI CINEMA

Guest Editors: Yaron Peleg and Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan

 

Introduction to the Special Issue

Genres in Jewish and Israeli Cinema

pp. 1-2

Yaron Peleg, Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan

Articles

A Body in Every Cellar: The “New Violence” Movement in Israeli Cinema

pp. 4-24

Neta Alexander

Arnon Goldfinger’s The Flat: Holocaust Memory, Film Noir, and the Pain of Others

pp. 25-42

Yael Munk

The “New Psyche”: A Model of Different Femininity in Film: Viviane Amsalem, Heroine of the Trilogy by Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz

pp. 43-67

Macabit Abramson

Frum with Benefits: Israeli Television, Globalization, and Srugim’s American Appeal

pp. 68-89

Shayna Weiss

Adapting Masculinities: Israeli and American Genres Redefining Mizrahi Masculinity in the TV Series Haborer

pp. 90-108

Ronen Gil

DIY: How to (Not So) Safely Dismantle the Bomb of On-Screen Jewish-Israeli Identity: The Synergies with Art and Television in the Representation of Jewish-Israeli Identity and What Can Be Learned from Them

pp. 109-138

Lee Weinberg

Workshop: at Taub Center, on memory, landscape and Moroccan Identities (NYU, April 15, 2016)

4/15/16 – Taub Center Graduate Workshop
10am – 2pm

The Taub Center organizes regular workshops for graduate students and faculty in the field of Israel Studies at NYU and other universities in the tri-state area. The regional workshops are an opportunity for students and faculty to present and discuss their respective areas of research. The workshops also serve as an important forum for networking and strengthening the field of Israel Studies.

• Noga Kadman, Independent Scholar (Israel): Erasing the Past: On the Side of the Road and the Edge of Consciousness
• Aviad Moreno, Tel Aviv University: Ethnicity in Motion: Rethinking Moroccan Identities in Israel

New Article: Rosen, The Poetry of 1.5 and Second-Generation Israelis of Hungarian Origin

Rosen, Ilana. “The Poetry of 1.5 and Second-Generation Israelis of Hungarian Origin.” Hungarian Cultural Studies 8 (2015): 46-62.

ְְ 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2015.218

 

Abstract

This article continues my 2014 article in this journal, in which I presented a beginning of work on contemporary Israeli prose writers of Hungarian origin. My analysis of those works showed that they are governed by recurring concerns, or literary themes, such as: the memory or post-memory of the Holocaust; Hungarian-to-Hebrew language and translation peculiarities; preoccupation with the family’s past, including that of remote relatives; and fascination with home objects, dishes, and recipes representing the family’s Hungarian past. Following my work on those prose works, in this article I focus on the works and worlds of 1.5 and second-generation Hungarian-Israeli poets and explore, first, the presence of the concerns or themes governing this group’s prose works, and, second, issues of identity through the poets’ depictions of experiences such as persecution, displacement, emigration, and re-settlement in Israel. My present discussion of the 1.5 and second-generation Hungarian-Israeli poets is divided into four themes: the Holocaust as an epitome of catastrophe, the Holocaust as memory and post-memory, co-fusion of languages and cultures, and the eternal mental displacement of the poets’ parents.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

New Book: Rosenfeld, Deciphering the New Antisemitism

Rosenfeld, Alvin H., ed. Deciphering the New Antisemitism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.

Deciphering the New Antisemitism addresses the increasing prevalence of antisemitism on a global scale. Antisemitism takes on various forms in all parts of the world, and the essays in this wide-ranging volume deal with many of them: European antisemitism, antisemitism and Islamophobia, antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and efforts to demonize and delegitimize Israel. Contributors are an international group of scholars who clarify the cultural, intellectual, political, and religious conditions that give rise to antisemitic words and deeds. These landmark essays are noteworthy for their timeliness and ability to grapple effectively with the serious issues at hand.

 

Table of Contents

Introduction Alvin H. Rosenfeld

Part I. Defining and Assessing Antisemitism
1. Antisemitism and Islamophobia: The Inversion of the Debt – Pascal Bruckner
2. The Ideology of the New Antisemitism – Kenneth L. Marcus
3. A Framework for Assessing Antisemitism: Three Case Studies (Dieudonné, Erdoğan, and Hamas) – Günther Jikeli
4. Virtuous Antisemitism – Elhanan Yakira

Part II. Intellectual and Ideological Contexts
5. Historicizing the Transhistorical: Apostasy and the Dialectic of Jew-Hatred – Doron Ben-Atar
6. Literary Theory and the Delegitimization of Israel – Jean Axelrad Cahan
7. Good News from France: There Is No New Antisemitism – Bruno Chaouat
8. Anti-Zionism and the Anarchist Tradition – Eirik Eiglad
9. Antisemitism and the Radical Catholic Traditionalist Movement – Mark Weitzman

Part III. Holocaust Denial, Evasion, Minimization
10. The Uniqueness Debate Revisited – Bernard Harrison
11. Denial, Evasion, and Anti-Historical Antisemitism: The Continuing Assault on Memory – David Patterson
12. Generational Changes in the Holocaust Denial Movement in the United States – Aryeh Tuchman

Part IV. Regional Manifestations
13. From Occupation to Occupy: Antisemitism and the Contemporary Left in the United States – Sina Arnold
14. The EU’s Responses to Contemporary Antisemitism: A Shell Game – R. Amy Elman
15. Anti-Israeli Boycotts: European and International Human Rights Law Perspectives – Aleksandra Gliszczynska-Grabias
16. Delegitimizing Israel in Germany and Austria: Past Politics, the Iranian Threat, and Post-national Anti-Zionism – Stephan Grigat
17. Antisemitism and Antiurbanism, Past and Present: Empirical and Theoretical Approaches – Bodo Kahmann
18. Tehran’s Efforts to Mobilize Antisemitism: The Global Impact – Matthias Küntzel

List of Contributors
Index

ALVIN H. ROSENFELD holds the Irving M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies and is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University Bloomington. He is editor of Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives (IUP, 2013) and author of The End of the Holocaust (IUP, 2011), among other books.

 

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

New Article: Segalo et al, Engaging Memory and Imagination Within Decolonizing Frameworks

Segalo, Puleng, Einat Manoff, Michelle Fine. “Working With Embroideries and Counter-Maps: Engaging Memory and Imagination Within Decolonizing Frameworks.” Journal of Social and Political Psychology 3.1 (2015).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v3i1.145

 

Abstract

As people around the world continue to have their voices, desires, and movements restricted, and their pasts and futures told on their behalf, we are interested in the critical project of decolonizing, which involves contesting dominant narratives and hegemonic representations. Ignacio Martín-Baró called these the “collective lies” told about people and politics. This essay reflects within and across two sites of injustice, located in Israel/Palestine and in South Africa, to excavate the circuits of structural violence, internalized colonization and possible reworking of those toward resistance that can be revealed within the stubborn particulars of place, history, and culture. The projects presented here are locally rooted, site-specific inquiries into contexts that bear the brunt of colonialism, dispossession, and occupation. Using visual research methodologies such as embroideries that produce counter-narratives and counter-maps that divulge the complexity of land-struggles, we search for fitting research practices that amplify unheard voices and excavate the social psychological soil that grows critical analysis and resistance. We discuss here the practices and dilemmas of doing decolonial research and highlight the need for research that excavates the specifics of a historical material context and produces evidence of previously silenced narratives.

 

 

New Article: Kraemer, Waltz with Bashir: Trauma and Representation in the Animated Documentary

Kraemer, Joseph A. “Waltz with Bashir (2008): Trauma and Representation in the Animated Documentary.” Journal of Film and Video 67.3-4 (2015): 57-68.

 

URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_film_and_video/v067/67.3-4.kraemer.html

 

Excerpt

Waltz with Bashir, in its final minutes, seems to fall within this trap of showing the modern condition of the world at its worst, the trauma of human suffering, as something that can be contained and distilled down to the most dramatic, visceral document of the massacre possible—the archival video clip—which somehow can satisfactorily sum up the truth of that calamity. In this way, the film betrays the momentum toward a truly authentic representation of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, where the film was headed before its final, non-animated sequence. Folman’s assertion that his remembrance and rediscovered ability to know and take possession of the traumatic event would set him free from the amnesia he suffered, to say nothing of the trauma of those families left behind to mourn their dead, seems inaccurate and misguided.

 

 

New Article: Harris, Through the Lens of Israeli Cinema: A Review

Harris, Rachel. “Through the Lens of Israeli Cinema: A Review.” Jewish Film & New Media 3.2 (2015): 220-31.

 

URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jewish_film_new_media_an_international_journal/v003/3.2.harris.html

 

Abstract
This review essay examines three recently published books on Israeli cinema. Raz Yosef’s The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema; Anat Y. Zanger’s Place, Memory and Myth in Contemporary Israeli Cinema; and Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg’s edited volume, Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion. It considers the ways in which Israeli cinema is inextricably linked to the history of Israeli nationalism and reflects on the treatment of this issue within these three texts. Examining major issues in the field and considering theoretical models relevant to the individual essays, chapters, and books, this essay offers a context from which to explore Israeli cinematic scholarship.

 

 

New Article: Steir-Livny, Holocaust Humor, Satire, and Parody on Israeli Television

Steir-Livny, Liat. “Holocaust Humor, Satire, and Parody on Israeli Television.” Jewish Film & New Media 3.2 (2015): 193-219.

 

URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jewish_film_new_media_an_international_journal/v003/3.2.steir-livny.html

 

Abstract
The politicization of the Holocaust has been reflected in Israeli culture from the late 1940s in cinema, literature, theater, and poetry; in the last several decades, it has also been depicted on Israeli television. Most of the representations of the Holocaust in the first decades of Israel’s existence were dramatic. But from the 1990s onward, Israelis also began to address the subject through satire. The case studies in this article focus on the satirical skits performed on episodes of The Chamber Quintet (Hahamishia Hakamerit; Matar Productions, Channel 2-Tela’ad, Channel 1, 1993–1997) and Wonderful Country (Eretz Nehederet; Keshet Productions, Channel 2-Keshet, 2003–2014). Diverging from arguments that these humorous skits addressing the Holocaust disrespect the Holocaust and its survivors, this article maintains that they instead articulate the powerful position the Holocaust holds as a constituting event in the consciousness and identity of younger generations in Israel.

 

 

New Article: Waters, The Perils of Positing Civil Society in Conflict and Transition

Waters, Timothy William. “Clearing the Path: The Perils of Positing Civil Society in Conflict and Transition.” Israel Law Review 48.2 (2015): 165-87.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021223715000060

 

Abstract
Can there be a general theoretical perspective on civil society’s involvement in transitional justice? This article considers this question in its application to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Within the study of transitional justice and conflict resolution, civil society – a notoriously plastic concept – can be understood narrowly as rights-oriented groups working ‘for’ peace, but the term is equally available to describe a broader array of communities that can either promote or prevent peace and justice.

It is, in fact, quite difficult to sustain a theoretical distinction between them, because transitional justice does not escape the dictates of politics – of differing human desires expressed through power. Efforts to memorialise imply conflict over the particular memories to be privileged; claims for reparations are not only demands for justice, but for material redistribution that in turn may promote conflict. A narrow view of civil society problematically assumes we even know – let alone agree on – what constitutes positive change.

It is, in fact, quite difficult to sustain a theoretical distinction between them, because transitional justice does not escape the dictates of politics – of differing human desires expressed through power. Efforts to memorialise imply conflict over the particular memories to be privileged; claims for reparations are not only demands for justice, but for material redistribution that in turn may promote conflict. A narrow view of civil society problematically assumes we even know – let alone agree on – what constitutes positive change.

The real work performed by civil society in promoting agendas of peace and justice cannot properly be understood without locating it in a defensible theoretical and empirical framework. Imagining a narrow civil society risks skewing our analysis of what civil society can do and actually does in relation to conflict. Civil society can clear the path to peace, or can provide the principal obstacles to it – it can simultaneously do both. In this it very much shares the ambiguous, multivalent profile of its classic counterpart: politics in the public sphere.

 

 

 

New Article: Yair, The Germans: Cultural Trauma and the Israeli Habitus

Yair, Gad. “The Germans: Cultural Trauma and the Israeli Habitus.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 3.2 (2015): 254-79.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/ajcs.2015.2

 

Abstract

This article reports results from a qualitative study of Israelis living in Germany, focusing on their traumatized national habitus. The study is based on 80 in-depth interviews and on replies of more than 100 respondents to an online questionnaire. The present article focuses on one specific aspect of the Israeli traumatized habitus: ‘the wounded eye and the scratched ear’. Specifically, it explores the ways by which the trauma of the Holocaust is inscribed in Israeli senses. It details how respondents’ eyes, ears and thoughts are activated by German mundane episodes, linking day-to-day experiences to the trauma of the Holocaust. Trains, suspect on-boarding Israelis, might end up in Auschwitz; snow brings up associations of the death marches; old people are perceived as Gestapo officers; and contemporary child-rearing practices ‘explain’ to Israelis the obedience and collaboration of ordinary Germans with the Third Reich. Using thick description from the interviews I expose the suspicious Israeli habitus – which always looks for ‘signs’ that might explain what happened in Germany 80 years ago.

 
 
 
 

Reviews: Roberts, Contested Land, Contested Memory

Roberts, Jo. Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel’s Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe. Toronto : Dundurn Press, 2013.

 

Reviews

• Esber, Rosemarie M. “In New Book, Palestinians, Israeli Jews Reflect on History of Ethnic Cleansing.” Electronic Intifada, January 17, 2014.
• Shuman, Ellis. “We Have to Talk about the Nakba.” Times of Israel, May 26, 2014.
• Davis, Brandon. “Violence in Paradise: Jo Roberts Probes Israeli Memory and Myth.” Mondoweiss, June 26, 2014.
• Ronan, Marian. “The Middle East: Where One Catastrophe Begets Another.” National Catholic Reporter, August 13, 2014.
• Christiansen, Drew. “Building An ‘Ethnocracy’.” America – The National Catholic Review, September 29, 2014.
• Adas, Jane. “Review.” Americans for Middle East Understanding.
• Riegle, Rosalie G. “Review.” Oral History Review.

 

 

 

 

New Article: Gueta & Addad, Long-Term Recovery of Former Drug-Dependent Israeli Women

Gueta, Keren, and Moshe Addad. “A House of Cards: The Long-Term Recovery Experience of Former Drug-Dependent Israeli Women.” Women’s Studies International Forum 48 (2015): 18-28.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.10.003

 

Abstract

While previous studies on recovery from drug addiction have tended to focus on recovery initiation and treatment issues among men, the primary purpose of this study is to shed light on the experience of long-term recovery among women. For this purpose, we employed qualitative methods and interviewed nine long-term (two to seven years) recovering women. Additionally, we monitored five women for two years of the recovery process in a dual research track (a total of 24 interviews). The research findings indicate that developing recovery capital, including self-awareness, stress-coping strategies, and various social resources (Granfield & Cloud, 1999), can be part of an effective strategy for overcoming long-term recovery challenges while financial difficulties, intrusive memories, motherhood and inability to find leisure activities may hinder it. These results indicate the need to reconsider gender-sensitive therapies in order to help women to not only initiate, but also maintain recovery.

New Article: Stolovy et al, Experience of Israeli Women Who Practice Channeling

Stolovy, Tali, Rachel Lev-Wiesel, and Zvi Eisikovits. “Dissociation and the Experience of Channeling: Narratives of Israeli Women Who Practice Channeling.” International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 63.3 (2015): 346-64.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2015.1031555

Abstract
“Channeling” is a phenomenon in which people describe themselves as receiving messages from another personality or dimension of reality. Channeling is often regarded as dissociation, which is a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception. This study explored the interface between channeling and dissociation through a phenomenological analysis. Qualitative data were obtained through interviews with 20 Israeli women who practice channeling. The analysis revealed 3 themes: dissociation, absorption, and control. The channelers’ descriptions correspond with what is coined as “dissociative states” and enable an emic view of the etic definition of dissociation.