ToC: Israel Studies 21.1 (2016; Narratives of the 1948 war)

Volume 21, Number 1, Spring 2016

Table of Contents

Representations of Israeli-Jewish — Israeli-Palestinian Memory and Historical Narratives of the 1948 War

Edited by Avraham Sela and Alon Kadish

Preface and Acknowledgements

pp. V-VI

Israeli and Palestinian Memories and Historical Narratives of the 1948 War—An Overview

pp. 1-25
Avraham Sela, Avraham Kadish

 

The 1948 Palestine War on the Small Screen: A Comparative Analysis of its Representation in Two Israeli Television Series

pp. 27-53
Bosmat Garami

 

Israel’s Publications Agency and the 1948 Palestinian Refugees

pp. 54-81
Rafi Nets-Zehngut

 

The War of Independence Exhibited: A Study of Three Israeli Museums

pp. 82-108
Offer Boord

 

Contested Urban Memoryscape Strategies and Tactics in Post-1948 Haifa

pp. 109-131
Ziva Kolodney

 

The Making of a Myth: The Story of Kfar Etzion in Religious Zionism 1948–1967

pp. 132-156
Dror Greenblum

 

Descending the Khazooq: “Working Through” the Trauma of the Nakba in Emile Habibi’s Oeuvre

pp. 157-182
Assaf Peled

 

Wa-ma Nasayna (We Have Not Forgotten): Palestinian Collective Memory and the Print Work of Abed Abdi

pp. 183-208
Tal Ben-Zvi

 

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: Neuman, Al Mansfeld and the Interpretation of the Israel Museum

Neuman, Eran. “Al Mansfeld and the Interpretation of the Israel Museum.” Journal of Architecture 20.5 (2015): 803-30.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2015.1092166

 

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem has been the subject of post-colonial interpretations which likened the organisation of the pavilions that make up the museum to the form of an Arab village. Focusing on the organisational and formal similarities between the museum and the typology of the Arab village, these interpretations propose that Israel, even before the 1967 War and the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, had already begun to appropriate Palestinian symbols. These interpretations often refer to drawings made by Al Mansfeld, the museum’s architect. This essay argues that while the post-colonial interpretations may be correct, they neglect to address yet another big influence on Mansfeld’s thinking when he conceptualised the Israel Museum in the late 1950s. During the early 1930s in Berlin, Mansfeld was a student of two German Expressionist architects, Hans Poelzig and Heinrich Tessenow. During these years, Mansfeld was exposed to expressionist ideas about architecture that later permeated his designs and artwork, including the design of the Israel Museum.

 

 

 

Reviews: Reiter, Contesting Symbolic Landscape in Jerusalem

Reiter, Yitzhak. Contesting Symbolic Landscape in Jerusalem: Jewish/Islamic Conflict over the Museum of Tolerance at Mamilla Cemetery. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2014.

 

 

[See abstract of earlier Hebrew version here]

 
Reviews

• Shamir, Shimon. “The Controversy of the Museum of Tolerance” Haaretz, December 25, 2011.
• Campos, Michelle U. “Review.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47.3 (2015): 629-32.

New Article: Noga-Banai, The Contested Ownership of Yosef Trumpeldor’s Arm-Reliquary

Noga-Banai, Galit. “The Contested Ownership of Yosef Trumpeldor’s Arm-Reliquary: A View from a Christian Perspective.” Jewish Quarterly Review 105.3 (2015): 399-414.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jqr.2015.0014

 

Abstract
The article discusses an object that once belonged to a singular individual, which has been enshrined in a glass vitrine to be seen and admired: the prosthetic arm of Jewish war hero and pioneer Yosef Trumpeldor (1880–1920). A debate over its possession has long endured between the Tel-Hai Courtyard Museum and Trumpeldor’s House in Kibbutz Tel Yosef. The prosthetic arm is evaluated here from the perspective of medieval arm reliquaries. The zeal surrounding the object in Tel Yosef and the longing for it in Tel-Hai are analyzed using terminology and ideology borrowed from the realm of the Christian cult of relics.

 

 

New Book: Katz, Bringing Zion Home. Israel in American Jewish Culture

Katz, Emily Alice. Bringing Zion Home. Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948-1967. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015.

 

 

Bringing Zion Home examines the role of culture in the establishment of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel in the immediate postwar decades. Many American Jews first encountered Israel through their roles as tastemakers, consumers, and cultural impresarios—that is, by writing and reading about Israel; dancing Israeli folk dances; promoting and purchasing Israeli goods; and presenting Israeli art and music. It was precisely by means of these cultural practices, argues Emily Alice Katz, that American Jews insisted on Israel’s “natural” place in American culture, a phenomenon that continues to shape America’s relationship with Israel today.

Katz shows that American Jews’ promotion and consumption of Israel in the cultural realm was bound up with multiple agendas, including the quest for Jewish authenticity in a postimmigrant milieu and the desire of upwardly mobile Jews to polish their status in American society. And, crucially, as influential cultural and political elites positioned “culture” as both an engine of American dominance and as a purveyor of peace in the Cold War, many of Israel’s American Jewish impresarios proclaimed publicly that cultural patronage of and exchange with Israel advanced America’s interests in the Middle East and helped spread the “American way” in the postwar world. Bringing Zion Home is the first book to shine a light squarely upon the role and importance of Israel in the arts, popular culture, and material culture of postwar America.

Emily Alice Katz teaches history at the University of California, Irvine.

 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Postwar American Jewry Reconsidered

2. Before Exodus: Writing Israel for an American Audience

3. Hora Hootenannies and Yemenite Hoedowns: Israeli Folk Dance in America

4. A Consuming Passion: Israeli Goods in American Jewish Culture

5. Cultural Emissaries and the Culture Explosion: Introducing Israeli Art and Music

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

 

New Book: Reifler, Days of Ticho

Reifler, David M. Days of Ticho. Empire, Mandate, Medicine, and Art in the Holy Land. Jerusalem and Springfield, NJ: Gefen, 2014.

 

 

URL: http://www.amazon.com/Days-Ticho-Empire-Mandate-Medicine/dp/9652296651

 

Abstract

Dr. Avraham Albert Ticho was a Viennese-trained ophthalmologist who immigrated to Ottoman-ruled Jerusalem in 1912. There he married his cousin, the artist Anna Ticho, and together they made their mark on the history of the Land of Israel. In Days of Ticho, the Tichos’ story is told in all its fascinating detail. Their personal history is presented against the backdrop of a variety of historical perspectives histories of medicine, art, civilian institutions, governments, and war; the struggles and growth of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine; and the conflicts that arose between Jews and their Arab neighbors. Among the stories in this book are Dr. Ticho’s supervision of the first Hadassah nurses in Palestine and the early years of Hadassah Hospital, as well as the near-fatal stabbing of Dr. Ticho by an Arab would-be assassin in November 1929, during the murderous riots that took place throughout Palestine. Those riots were an important turning point in Jewish-Arab relations, the harbinger of problems that remain the focus of world attention until today. The Ticho House in Jerusalem was dedicated in May 1984 as a downtown annex of the Israel Museum, and it welcomes thousands of visitors every year. This book further contributes to the Tichos’ legacy while advancing an understanding of their times and ours.

New Book: Hansen-Glucklich, Holocaust Memory Reframed

Hansen-Glucklich, Jennifer. Holocaust Memory Reframed. Museums and the Challenges of Representation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014.

URL: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/product/Holocaust-Memory-Reframed,5168.aspx

Holocaust memorials and museums face a difficult task as their staffs strive to commemorate and document horror. On the one hand, the events museums represent are beyond most people’s experiences.  At the same time they are often portrayed by theologians, artists, and philosophers in ways that are already known by the public. Museum administrators and curators have the challenging role of finding a creative way to present Holocaust exhibits to avoid clichéd or dehumanizing portrayals of victims and their suffering.

In Holocaust Memory Reframed, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich examines representations in three museums: Israel’s Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Germany’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She describes a variety of visually striking media, including architecture, photography exhibits, artifact displays, and video installations in order to explain the aesthetic techniques that the museums employ. As she interprets the exhibits, Hansen-Glucklich clarifies how museums communicate Holocaust narratives within the historical and cultural contexts specific to Germany, Israel, and the United States. In Yad Vashem, architect Moshe Safdie developed a narrative suited for Israel, rooted in a redemptive, Zionist story of homecoming to a place of mythic geography and renewal, in contrast to death and suffering in exile. In the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Daniel Libeskind’s architecture, broken lines, and voids emphasize absence. Here exhibits communicate a conflicted ideology, torn between the loss of a Jewish past and the country’s current multicultural ethos. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum presents yet another lens, conveying through its exhibits a sense of sacrifice that is part of the civil values of American democracy, and trying to overcome geographic and temporal distance. One well-know example, the pile of thousands of shoes plundered from concentration camp victims encourages the visitor to bridge the gap between viewer and victim.

Hansen-Glucklich explores how each museum’s concept of the sacred shapes the design and choreography of visitors’ experiences within museum spaces. These spaces are sites of pilgrimage that can in turn lead to rites of passage.

Cite: Helphand, Halprin in Israel

Helphand, Kenneth I. “Halprin in Israel.”  Landscape Journal 31.2 (2012): 199-217.

 

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/landscape_journal/v031/31.1-2.helphand.html

 

Abstract

Lawrence Halprin’s contributions to the Israeli landscape—though little known—were significant in the areas of planning and design. Halprin’s relationship to Israel spans his lifetime. Born into a Zionist family, he spent two years on a kibbutz in the 1930s which profoundly influenced his ethics and philosophy. He returned to Israel throughout his life. His contributions were both as advisor and designer. He advised on national landscape planning, national parks, and was an influential member of Mayor Teddy Kollek’s Jerusalem Committee. His design projects, all in Jerusalem, include: the Hadassah Medical Center, the Israel Museum, and the Ben Yehuda Mall. His most significant work is the Haas Promenade (with Shlomo Aronson) and the Rhoda Goldman Promenade (with Bruce Levin). His Israeli work exemplifies aspects of his most significant contributions as a designer. The work is derived from intense personal experience. It is passionate and idealistic, and it exemplifies continued attention to choreography and performance. The work draws from lessons learned from the thoughtful examination of other places, yet is based on a careful sensitivity to the cultural and physical conditions of the place. The work demonstrates his attention and consummate skill at all phases and scales of design, planning, and construction.

Cite: Hansen-Glucklich, Visual Holocaust Narratives in National Museums

Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich. "EVOKING THE SACRED: VISUAL HOLOCAUST NARRATIVES IN NATIONAL MUSEUMS." Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9.2 (2010): 209-32.

URL: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a924849295

 

Abstract

This essay examines how Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem and The Jewish Museum in Berlin move beyond the usual informative and communicative functions of museum exhibits to visually evoke sacred feelings in regard to Holocaust memory. Ideas and images of the sacred vary in the two museums, reflecting two very different memorial cultures and commemorative goals, and these contrasting contexts frame the analysis. Theoretically informed by religious and ritual studies, both sacred time and space are considered through close readings of museum architecture, visual exhibits and the movement of the visitor through the museums.

Tour: 8-day Study Tour Israeli and Jewish Art

Galilee International Management Institute (GIMI) and the Ein Harod Art Museum have designed a 8-day Study Tour ISRAELI AND JEWISH ART for academia, students of Art history or related subjects and museum employees.

 

The Tour takes place from 2-10 of August, 2010. For more information visit the website at http://www.galilcol.ac.il/index.asp