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

.

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: Brown | Lia van Leer: Founder of Jerusalem Film Festival and Israel’s Cinematheques

Brown, Hannah. “Lia van Leer: Founder of Jerusalem Film Festival and Israel’s Cinematheques.” Jewish Quarterly 62.2 (2015): 88-90.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0449010X.2015.1051735

 

Excerpt

Lia van Leer founded the cinematheques in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, art-house cinemas based on the model of the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris. Van Leer also created the Israel Film Archive, which houses more than 30,000 prints of movies from around the world, as well as more than 20,000 videos and DVDs—among them virtually all movies made in Israel.

In addition, she founded the Jerusalem Film Festival, in 1984, which presents hundreds of movies from around the world, as well as showcasing the newest Israeli films.

 

New Book: Halperin, Babel in Zion

Halperin, Liora R. Babel in Zion. Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

 

 

The promotion and vernacularization of Hebrew, traditionally a language of Jewish liturgy and study, was a central accomplishment of the Zionist movement in Palestine in the years following World War I. Viewing twentieth-century history through the lens of language, author Liora Halperin questions the accepted scholarly narrative of a Zionist move away from multilingualism, demonstrating how Jews in Palestine remained connected linguistically by both preference and necessity to a world outside the boundaries of the pro-Hebrew community even as it promoted Hebrew and achieved that language’s dominance. The story of language encounters in Jewish Palestine is a fascinating tale of shifting power relationships, both locally and globally. Halperin’s absorbing study explores how a young national community was compelled to modify the dictates of Hebrew exclusivity as it negotiated its relationships with its Jewish population, Palestinian Arabs, the British, and others outside the margins of the national project and ultimately came to terms with the limitations of its hegemony in an interconnected world.

Table of Contents

Note on transliteration and translation

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Babel in Zion

Languages of Leisure in the Home, the Coffeehouse, and the Cinema

Peddlers, Traders, and the Languages of Commerce

Clerks, Translators, and the Languages of Bureaucracy

Zion in Babel: The Yishuv in Its Arabic-Speaking Context

Hebrew Education between East and West: Foreign-Language Instruction in Zionist Schools

Conclusion: The Persistence of Babel

Notes

Bibliography

Index

 

New Book: Helman, Becoming Israeli: National Ideals and Everyday Life in the 1950s

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

 

 

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introducing Israel in White
• The Language of the Melting Pot
• The Humorous Side of Rationing
• “A People in Uniform”
• Taking the Bus
• Going to the Movies
• The Communal Dining Hall
• Informality, Straightforwardness, and Rudeness
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

With a light touch and many wonderful illustrations, historian Anat Helman investigates “life on the ground” in Israel during the first years of statehood. She looks at how citizens–natives of the land, longtime immigrants, and newcomers–coped with the state’s efforts to turn an incredibly diverse group of people into a homogenous whole. She investigates the efforts to make Hebrew the lingua franca of Israel, the uses of humor, and the effects of a constant military presence, along with such familiar aspects of daily life as communal dining on the kibbutz, the nightmare of trying to board a bus, and moviegoing as a form of escapism. In the process Helman shows how ordinary people adapted to the standards and rules of the political and cultural elites and negotiated the chaos of early statehood.

 ANAT HELMAN is a senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her most recent book is A Coat of Many Colors: Dress Culture in the Young State of Israel.