The 47th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies will take place in Boston, December 13-15, 2015.
The full program is now available on the AJS website: http://www.ajsnet.org/conference-menu.htm
You may also download the program here: PDF
Alush-Levron, Merav. “The Politics of Ethnic Melancholy in Israeli Cinema.” Social Identities 21.2 (2015): 169-83.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2015.1041015
Abstract
This paper deals with the way migrants’ children process the trans-generational trauma of immigration and examines its impact on the formation of their self-identity. It explores the manifestation of this trauma as present in two highly-notable works by Mizrahi cinematographers. The memory unfolding in these films is a penetrating audio-visual testimony to the immigration trauma with the mark it has left on the psyches and identities of migrants’ children. It argues that the split identity that is a product of both Israeli assimilationist and Mizrahi resistance inhabits the continuum between mourning and melancholy, grief and grievance. Along this continuum, immigrant subjects engage in intergenerational negotiations between mourning and melancholy, while their ethnic melancholy emerges as an alternative mental state to the Eurocentric hegemony.
Shemer, Yaron. Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2013.
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