Thesis: Hemelberg, CNN and Al-Jazeera Coverage of the Israeli-Arabic Conflict

Hemelberg, Stephany. Between the Headlines of the Israeli-Arabic Conflict: The Coverage of CNN and Al Jazeera, BA Thesis. Bogotá: Del Rosario University, 2015.

 

URL: http://repository.urosario.edu.co/handle/10336/11629

 

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze the coverage made by CNN and Al Jazeera (in Arabic) to operation Caste Lead and the Goldstone Report during 2008 and 2009. This investigation is based in the theory of Qualitative Analysis of Content, by Wildemuth and Zhang. The methodology follows up with the one proposed by the authors in the main theory, complementing it with the Gamson and Modigliani´s Framing theory. The methodology mention above display the different in the coverage development, determined by the geopolitical influences; being CNN more influenced by a Western pro-USA and pro Israeli speech, while Al Jazeera is more prone to support the Palestinian cause, this is the thesis of this article. During the development of the investigation, the thesis was demonstrated to be only partially accurate as CNN was not completely supportive to the Israeli arguments during the coverage, but Al Jazeera did have preferential speech for the Palestinian cause.

 

 

 

New Article: Dekel, Immigrant Women Artists from the FSU in Contemporary Israel

Dekel, Tal. “In Search of Transnational Jewish Art: Immigrant Women Artists from The Former Soviet Union in Contemporary Israel.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 15.1 (2016): 109-30.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2015.1120432

 

Abstract

The article explores the subject of contemporary Jewish identity through the case of young immigrant women artists from the former Soviet Union in Israel, with particular emphasis on an analysis of the gendered aspects of their religious identity. Drawing on an interdisciplinary method, the research is based on in-depth interviews with artists, artwork analysis, and various theories from the social sciences and humanities. The article’s main argument is that an analysis of the artistic practices of this and similar understudied social groups, particularly those practices undertaken in moments of conflict or times of deep social change, produces a more subtle understanding of the shifting modes of Jewish identity in the age of globalization and transnationalism, whose phenomenon of mass migration has led to the construction of new multi-hyphenated, hybrid identities.

 

 

 

ToC: Journal of Palestine Studies 44.4 (2015)

Table of Contents Alert University of California Press is happy to notify you that the new issue of Journal of Palestine Studies is now available. The online issues of this journal are hosted on JSTOR on behalf of University of California Press. Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. 44, No. 4, Summer 2015 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Institute for Palestine Studies Cover Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4 Front Matter Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4 Table of Contents Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4 FROM THE EDITOR Rashid I. Khalidi Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 5-6. ARTICLE The Two-State Model and Israeli Constitutionalism: Impact on the Palestinian Citizens of Israel Mazen Masri Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 7-20. INTERVIEW Elia Suleiman: The Power of Ridicule Nehad Khader Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 21-31. ESSAYS Dream-Work of Dispossession: The Instance of Elia Suleiman Stathis Gourgouris Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 32-47. The Way Forward: Full Citizenship for Israel’s Palestinian Minority Avraham Burg Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 48-56. REMEMBRANCE Eric Rouleau: Journalist Extraordinaire, Champion of the Palestinian Cause Linda Butler Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 57-67. SPECIAL DOCUMENT FILE The Iran Nuclear Negotiations: Israel and the U.S. Congress Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 68-92. RECENT BOOKS Review: From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 by Ariella Azoulay Review by: Issam Nassar Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 93-95. Review: Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948–2012 Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948–2012 by Thomas Philip Abowd Review by: Michael Dumper Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 95-97. Review: Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel’s Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel’s Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe by Jo Roberts Review by: Awad Halabi Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 97-98. Review: Conscientious Objectors in Israel: Citizenship, Sacrifice, Trials of Fealty Conscientious Objectors in Israel: Citizenship, Sacrifice, Trials of Fealty by Erica Weiss Review by: Mark Levine Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 99-101. Review: Producing Spoilers: Peacemaking and the Production of Enmity in a Secular Age Producing Spoilers: Peacemaking and the Production of Enmity in a Secular Age by Joyce Dalsheim Review by: Anna Bernard Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 101-103. Review: Violence and Understanding in Gaza: The British Broadsheets’ Coverage of the War Violence and Understanding in Gaza: The British Broadsheets’ Coverage of the War by Dávid Kaposi Review by: Ben White Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 103-105. Review: Intellectual Resistance and the Struggle for Palestine Intellectual Resistance and the Struggle for Palestine by Matthew Abraham Review by: Bruce Robbins Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 105-106. Review: Steve Sabella: Photography, 1997–2014 Steve Sabella: Photography, 1997–2014 by Hubertus von Amelunxen; Hubertus von Amelunxen; Kamal Boullata Review by: Dorothea Schoene Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 106-108. SELECTIONS FROM THE PRESS Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 109-136. PHOTOS FROM THE QUARTER Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 137-144. PALESTINE UNBOUND Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 145-152. UPDATE ON CONFLICT AND DIPLOMACY Paul Karolyi Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 153-193. CONGRESSIONAL MONITOR Paul Karolyi Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 194-243. DOCUMENTS AND SOURCE MATERIAL Journal of Palestine Studies Summer 2015, Vol. 44, No. 4: 244-268.

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 Book: Guez, Pre-Israeli Orientalism (in Hebrew)

Guez, Dor. Pre-Israeli Orientalism: A Photographic Portrait. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2015 (in Hebrew).

 

 

 

This book explores the complexity of expression of Orientalist perceptions as it formed during the first three decades of the 20th century among the first waves of immigration. Photographs of the period, presenting the Jewish immigrants with oriental clothing and accessories, are impressed by the yearning to assimilate in the East and belong to an authentic native source an aspiration maintained but for a moment, until its collapse in the aftermath of the 1929 riots. Immigrants wanted to experience the east as a “reality” with which they were familiar prior to their arrival. Their experience was thus painted by the initial experience of representation. It was as if they walked into a carefully staged photograph, confined by its frame and its codes of interpretation. The immigrants arrived in the East, after “seeing” it countless times, envisioning it as an ancient homeland with which they that can easily renewed their ties.

The book focuses in particular photograph of Abraham Soskin, “Tel Aviv’s photographer.” It presents a comparative discussion of orientalist photographs of other Jewish photographers and photographs of local and European photographers of the era. The Pre-Israeli Orientalist gaze, as reflected in these photographs, is characterized by an ambivalent attitude to the East and the indigenous Palestinians. Members of the Zionist movements left Europe that marked them as Orientals and the Semitic race, and sought to adopt here local identity markers. At the same time, by referring to this identity they sought to establish their western superiority through the adoption of colonial and Eurocentric practices – thus gaining a sense of superiority that was deprived of them in Europe.
The photos studied in this book reveal the overt fantasy of Zionism while forming a the “New Jew.” Today they might stir curiosity, surprise, amusement or revulsion and even ethical and ideological rejections. These reactions raise questions concerning contemporary culture as much as they concern the culture of that time. They indicate that this is a particularly suitable platform for a multifaceted discussion on the formation of Zionist consciousness in contemporary contexts.

 

Dr. Dor Guez was born in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem. He is the founder of the Christian Palestinian Archive and serves as the chair of the Department of Photography at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. As a scholar and an artist who displays his work in Israel and abroad, he focuses on the link between cultural discourse and national, political, and social reality in the Middle East, while examining the role of contemporary art in the composition process of historical narratives.

 

 

 

New Photobook: Hush, by Noa Ben-Shalom

Sternthal Books is proud to announce the nomination of Noa Ben Shalom’s ‘Hush: Israel Palestine 2000-2014’ for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation’s First PhotoBook Prize

All shortlisted titles will be featured in the forthcoming issue of the PhotoBook Review and exhibited at Paris Photo, November 12-15, 2015. Additional exhibitions of the shortlist will appear in New York at Aperture Gallery in December, and in Tokyo at IMA Concept Store (exact dates to be confirmed) and at other venues thereafter. The shortlist jurors included Yannick Bouillis (Offprint Projects); Julien Frydman (LUMA Foundation); Lesley A. Martin (Aperture Foundation); Mutuko Ota (IMA magazine); and Christoph Weisner (Paris Photo). The final selection will be chosen by a jury in Paris, consisting of Frish Brandt (Fraenkel Gallery); Christophe Boutin (onestar press); Clement Chéroux (Centre Pompidou); Donatien Grau (author and editor); and Lorenzo Paini (EneaRighi Collection, Bologna). The final round of judging will take place during Paris Photo and the winners of each category will be announced at the fair on November 13, 2015 at 1:00 p.m.

 

Hush tells the story of a society living through a recurring loop of violent outbursts, in which, time and again, life is shattered into pieces and reconstructed. Through personal correspondence and Photographs spanning over a decade, Noa Ben-Shalom turns her camera away from the more obvious scenes of direct violence in order to focus on the subtle ways this conflict has permeated all aspects of life in Israel.

Click here for a video of the photographs in the book.

New Book: Kuntsman and Stein, Digital Militarism

Kuntsman, Adi, and Rebecca L. Stein. Digital Militarism. Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age, Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.

 

 

Israel’s occupation has been transformed in the social media age. Over the last decade, military rule in the Palestinian territories grew more bloody and entrenched. In the same period, Israelis became some of the world’s most active social media users. In Israel today, violent politics are interwoven with global networking practices, protocols, and aesthetics. Israeli soldiers carry smartphones into the field of military operations, sharing mobile uploads in real-time. Official Israeli military spokesmen announce wars on Twitter. And civilians encounter state violence first on their newsfeeds and mobile screens.

Across the globe, the ordinary tools of social networking have become indispensable instruments of warfare and violent conflict. This book traces the rise of Israeli digital militarism in this global context—both the reach of social media into Israeli military theaters and the occupation’s impact on everyday Israeli social media culture. Today, social media functions as a crucial theater in which the Israeli military occupation is supported and sustained.

 

Table of Contents

Preface

1 When Instagram Went to War: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age
2 “Another War Zone”: The Development of Digital Militarism
3 Anatomy of a Facebook Scandal: Social Media as Alibi
4 Palestinians Who Never Die: The Politics of Digital Suspicion
5 Selfie Militarism: The Normalization of Digital Militarism

Afterword: #Revenge

Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Adi Kuntsman is Lecturer in Information and Communications at Manchester Metropolitan University, and author of Figurations of Violence and Belonging: Queerness, Migranthood and Nationalism in Cyberspace and Beyond (2009).

Rebecca L. Stein is the Nicholas J. & Theresa M. Leonardy Associate Professor of Anthropology at Duke University, and author of Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism (2008).

 

 

New Article: Kohn, Instagram as a Naturalized Propaganda Tool

Kohn, Ayelet. “Instagram as a Naturalized Propaganda Tool. The Israel Defense Forces Web Site and the Phenomenon of Shared Values.” Convergence (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1354856515592505

 

Abstract

This article examines the methods through which the formal and emotional components, embedded in the photo sharing and social networking application Instagram, are utilized as a propaganda tool to cultivate solidarity with promoted agendas. The test case is Instagram photos posted on the official Web site of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The article juxtaposes two conceptual systems, the one shared by the members of Instagram and a system based on presuppositions regarding the ideologies, values, and emotional attitudes shared by Israeli Instagram users toward the IDF. This juxtaposition is made possible, thanks to the resemblance found between the aesthetic and emotional aspects of Instagram and the ideological and emotional aspects emphasized by IDF. Three main interrelated motifs demonstrate the article’s argument: soldiers as civilians/photographers in momentary disguise, army and nature, and admiration for appearances of weapons.

 

 

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.

 

 

Photo essay: Levac, Eye on Israel

Levac, Alex. “Eye on Israel.” Jewish Quarterly 62.2 (2015): 18-23.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0449010X.2015.1051695

 

Excerpt

Photography is supposed to be an international language. But is it really so? My photography is extremely culture-related. Since it’s concerned with human situations, mostly, it could be misunderstood, even meaningless, to people outside Israel. Understanding culture is easier for a native.

I photograph in Israel, for the Israeli viewer. It is not that I am aware of it all the time – but it is always there, in the back of my mind. It’s the way I see. I’m directing the sharpness and irony at us, Israelis.

 
 
 
 

New Article: Sela, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Israel’s National Photography Archives

Sela, Rona. “Rethinking National Archives in Colonial Countries and Zones of Conflict: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Israel’s National Photography Archives as a Case Study.” In Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Competing Narratives in the Middle East (ed. Anthony Downey; London: Tauris, 2015), 79-91.

 

Excerpt

My research over the years has dealt with the question of tyranny that characterizes the activities of Israel’s national institutional photography archives. I discussed the power relations that shaped them and the significant role they played in determining the perception and writing of history. Derrida points to violence as one of the main features inherent in the archive, embodying governmental information/power relations. These aggressive relationships are intensified in a country where two peoples—occupiers and occupied—live in a national conflict and are present, for example, in the way institutional archives control both the national treasures of the vanquished and the knowledge of their history and culture. Pointing out the overt and covert mechanisms in these national institutional archives by stripping away and exposing their inherent national bias, lays the foundation for building an alternative, layered database, different from the one-sided worldview that characterizes them. This enables the original purpose of the archives to be undermined and, in the words of McEvan, put through a process of democratization. However, while in South Africa civil organizations and government are aware of the importance of establishing post-colonial (post-apartheid) archives, in Israel the situation is different. Although in recent years additional studies have started to breach this national cover, exposing excluded areas of knowledge and research, in Israel they still exist on the margins and there is ample room to read archives in a way that penetrates their façade of physical violence.

It is also necessary to deconstruct the archive’s structure, and to propose alternative mechanisms of reading, interpretation and criticism in addition to those discussed in this essay.

The voice of the subjugated is not entirely absent from national, insti-tutional archives in Israel, but exists in an emasculated and misleading form. In this essay, I wanted to raise the possibility of hearing these voices that are seemingly missing from the archives. Freeing the national archives from their chains, and the construction of an independent memory and history—by challenging the national database and providing a platform for Palestinian voices and the return of their looted and seized materials—are the first steps in establishing alternative national archives in Israel. However, stripping away their outer-wrapping does not replace the importance of hearing the voices of the oppressed, learning their history and restoring their ownership and rights.

New Article: Louise Bethlehem, Scratching the Surface

Bethlehem, Louise. “Scratching the Surface: The Home and the Haptic in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo city and Elsewhere.” Scrutiny2 20.1 (2015): 3-23.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/18125441.2015.1035745

 

Abstract

This paper deploys the haptic, and more broadly speaking, notions of multisensory reading and spectatorship to reconfigure perceptions of home. It explores configurations of home in the practice of the late French-Israeli visual artist, Absalon, to draw tropes of “complicity” and “contagion” into an intersection with discourses of moral hygiene arising from the modernist preoccupation with denuded surface in the history of architecture. It then goes on to read a postapartheid South African text, Lauren Beukes’s Zoo city (2010), through the lens of these concerns. Beukes’s text, it claims, can be made to precipitate the historicity of the white suburban home under apartheid. The novel offers alternative iterations of domesticity, however, as metonymies of contagion shift into metonymies of conviviality. The final section of the paper investigates the vulnerability of the home against the background of the 2014 Israeli war on Gaza and its assault on the built environment. It explores an art exhibition, Postcards for Gaza, staged by the dissident Israeli organization, Zochrot, in the context of a previous military assault on Gaza in 2008. Here the reworking of photographic surface is made to gesture towards the possibility of political reparation in an alternate modality of complicity that Mark Sanders parses as “human-foldedness” (Sanders 2002).

 

 

New Book: Hochberg, Visual Occupations

 

Hochberg, Gil Z. Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, Perverse Modernities. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015.

 

 

In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists’ creation of new ways of seeing—such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists’ exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness —offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel’s militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.

Gil Z. Hochberg is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at UCLA. She is the author of In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the Limits of Separatist Imagination.

 

Table of Contents

 

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction. Visual Politics at a Conflict Zone  1

Part I. Concealment  

1. Visible Invisibility: On Ruins, Erasure, and Haunting  37

2. From Invisible Spectators to the Spectacle of Terror: Chronicles of a Contested Citizenship  57

Part II. Surveillance  

3. The (Soldier’s) Gaze and the (Palestinian) Body: Power, Fantasy, and Desire in the Militarized Contact Zone  79

4. Visual Rights and the Prospect of Exchange: The Photographic Event Placed under Duress  97

Part III. Witnessing

5. “Nothing to Look At”; or, “For Whom Are You Shooting?”: The Imperative to Witness and the Menace of the Global Gaze  115

6. Shooting War: On Witnessing One’s Failure to See (on Time)  139

 

Closing Words  163

Notes  167

Bibliography  187

Index  207

New Article: Hagin & Wagner, A Deleuzian Analysis of Videos from the Israeli Occupation

Hagin, Boaz and Roy Wagner. “The Occupation-Image: A Deleuzian Analysis of Videos from the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.” Journal of Film and Video 66.4 (2014): 19-33.

 

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_film_and_video/v066/66.4.hagin.html

 

Excerpt

b’tselem (hebrew for “in the image of” ), the Israeli information center for human rights in the occupied territories, is one of Israel’s most prominent human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Founded in 1989, its goal is to document and educate about human rights violations in the occupied territories, to combat denial among the Israeli public about what goes on in the territories, and to ensure that Israel’s government “protects the human rights of residents there and complies with its obligations under international law” (“About B’Tselem”).

In 2005, B’Tselem established a video department and added moving images to its human rights reports. In this article we look mainly at two groups of videos distributed by B’Tselem. One is the video reports by B’Tselem’s researchers, which document Israeli violations of the human rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories and which B’Tselem has been making since 2005. The second is videos that were made as part of B’Tselem’s camera distribution project. Launched at the beginning of 2007, this project provides Palestinians with video cameras in order to document their lives under the occupation themselves (“B’Tselem’s Camera Project”). B’Tselem’s videos have been posted on its website (“Video”) and YouTube channel (“B’Tselem: Video”), and some of them have garnered considerable public interest, although they have received almost no attention within film studies. Some of the videos have been circulated by the Israeli and international media.

B’Tselem and the media frequently see these moving images as representations of facts that lie behind the images, coded in terms of human rights and national conflict. This is indeed the chief interest of NGOs such as B’Tselem as well as the police, the courts, and the media. In this article, we would like to put these issues in parentheses and argue that what the images show is not reducible to such an account.

The media discourse surrounding these videos has frequently focused on facts and on issues of objectivity and relations between the people involved, such as the ethics of depicting the suffering of others, self-representation, and the degree to which filmmakers can and should intervene in the lives and deaths of those they depict. According to the videos’ supporters, the media attention and public pressure have encouraged Israelis to raise questions about settlers in the occupied territories; impelled the Israeli police and military police to conduct investigations that might not have been opened based only on spoken or written testimony from Palestinians; and sometimes resulted in arrests and convictions. Moreover, according to B’Tselem and its advocates, the presence of cameras can be a powerful deterrent and has reduced settler and army violence while offering an empowering form of nonviolent resistance for Palestinians. Critics have asked whether B’Tselem gives a fair and impartial picture of events in the territories (and whether it is biased against Israel or even “anti-Semitic”); whether the making of the videos puts the Palestinian photographers, especially children, in danger; and whether the project has any long-term impact beyond the initial media interest.

New Book: Ginsburg, Ye may be to us instead of eyes. Israel Human Rights Organizations in the Occupied Territories through the Camera Lens (Hebrew)

גינזבורג, רותי. והייתם לנו לעיניים. ארגוני זכויות אדם ישראלים בשטחים הכבושים מבעד לעין המצלמה. תל אביב: רסלינג, 2014.

 

URL: http://www.resling.co.il/book.asp?series_id=3&book_id=789

Abstract

What do human rights activists see? What do their organizations show in their reports? How do the choices of visual images report on the conflict? What kind of gaze does human rights discourse produce? How does the universal discourse meet with local discourse in visual documentation? How does the citizenry of activist framework their field of view, and how does the universal discourse do this? In Ruthie Ginsburg’s book, Ye may be to us instead of eyes, the visual plane is not merely a representation added to the verbal one, it is instrumental in designing the questions.

The book offers a theoretical space and historic mapping of Israeli human rights organizations. A discussion of the discourse of local human rights organizations active in the occupied is through interdisciplinary study that combines analysis of photographs, interviews with key individuals in these organizations and a close reading of their reports is offered here for the first time. The different chapters offer a comparative examination of three major human rights organizations operating in Israel: B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, and Machsom Watch. By studying the archives created in each of these organizations, the material and emotional conditions that shape the reports, along with spatial and political relations produced in their activity can be examined. The Analysis of the activists’ gaze strives to understand the practice of these organizations, located amidst a polarized system between occupier and occupied, perpetrator and victim.

This book joins pioneering studies conducted worldwide that examine visual, aesthetic, and sensory elements that shape civil negotiations and visual aspect which it designs.

Dissertation: Amihay, The Imagetext Turn in the Hebrew Novel

Amihay, Ofra. Migrating Images: The Imagetext Turn in the Hebrew Novel. New York University, 2014.

 

URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/1518939613

 

Abstract

This dissertation examines the effect of twentieth-century “new media” models on literature, in the form of the late twentieth-century wave of literary works in which visual images play a central poetic role. Demarcating this body of works as an independent cultural turn, I label this “the imagetext turn” thus following two groundbreaking terms coined by W. J. T. Mitchell, “the pictorial turn” and “imagetext.” Based on philosophical discussions regarding the egalitarianism behind text and image hybrids (Benjamin, Rancière, Mitchell), and theories of the democratic nature of the novel (Auerbach, Lukács, Bakhtin) and photography (Sontag, Barthes, Azoulay), I focus on the marriage of novels and photographs. The case study for this exploration is three contemporary Israeli novelists: Yoel Hoffmann, Ronit Matalon, and Michal Govrin. Following a survey of the approach towards the visual image in Modern Hebrew literature, I identify their works as comprising the “imagetext turn” in Hebrew literature while marking their importance within a general literary development, primarily through a comparison to W. G. Sebald’s novels. My study of Hoffmann analyzes the web of Others in his novels through the photographic mechanism of the negative, suggesting the juxtaposition of text and photographs in How Do You Do Dolores echoes the Other behind text, place, and language in all his work. In my analysis of Matalon I discuss the double role photographs play in Matalon’s pursuit of postcolonial ideas in The One Facing Us, operating both as “portable roots” and as “poetic immigrants,” thus offering a subversive reading of reality that undermines nostalgia. Finally I show how through an intricate combination of narrative and visual images Govrin creates in Snapshots a literary representation of both the ideals and the blind spots of the 1990s left-wing movement of secular return to Jewish sources in Israel.

Subject: Comparative literature; Middle Eastern literature; Judaic studies

Classification: 0295: Comparative literature; 0315: Middle Eastern literature; 0751: Judaic studies

Identifier / keyword: Language, literature and linguistics, Social sciences, Hebrew literature, Govrin, Michal, Photography, Matalon, Ronit, Sebald, W. G., Hoffmann, Yoel

Number of pages: 308

Publication year: 2014

Degree date: 2014

School code: 0146

Source: DAI-A 75/07(E), Jan 2015

Place of publication: Ann Arbor

Country of publication: United States

ISBN: 9781303805424

Advisor: Feldman, Yael

Committee member: Hirsch, Marianne; Mann, Barbara E.; Engel, David; Kaplan, Marion

University/institution: New York University

Department: Hebrew and Judaic Studies

University location: United States — New York

Degree: Ph.D.

Source type: Dissertations & Theses

Language: English

Document type: Dissertation/Thesis

Dissertation/thesis number: 3614848

ProQuest document ID: 1518939613

Cite: Bram, Dan Pagis and the Photograph

Bram, Shahar. “Remembering the Past and the Trap of Consciousness: Dan Pagis and the Photograph.” Prooftexts 32.3 (2012): 357-80.

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/prooftexts/v032/32.3.bram.html

Abstract

Photographs are a recurrent motif in Dan Pagis’s poetry, which attests to the profound connection between his poetry and various aspects of the art of photography. In Pagis’s work, poems dealing with photographs usually illustrate the limitations of memory. It is ironic that photographs, which can ostensibly bring us closer to the past, serve as additional means in the poetics of displacement that characterizes the poetry of a survivor unable, or unwilling, to remember. In my article I focus on the erasure of memory that characterizes most of his poetry. I prefer to analyze Pagis’s use of photographs to point to the captivity of consciousness, and offer several prominent examples that place his photography poems in the broader context of his oeuvre.

New Publication: Harris and Omer-Sherman, eds., Narratives of Dissent

Harris, Rachel S. and Ranen Omer-Sherman. Narratives of Dissent. War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture. Detroit : Wayne State University Press, 2012.

 

 

 

URL: http://wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/narratives-dissent

The year 1978 marked Israel’s entry into Lebanon, which led to the long-term military occupation of non-sovereign territory and the long, costly war in Lebanon. In the years that followed, many Israelis found themselves alienated from the idea that their country used force only when there was no alternative, and Israeli society eventually underwent a dramatic change in attitude toward militarization and the infallibility of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces). In Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture editors Rachel S. Harris and Ranen Omer-Sherman collect nineteen essays that examine the impact of this cultural shift on Israeli visual art, music, literature, poetry, film, theatre, public broadcasting, and commemoration practices after 1978.

Divided into three thematic sections-Private and Public Spaces of Commemoration and Mourning, Poetry and Prose, and Cinema and Stage-this collection presents an exciting diversity of experiences, cultural interests, and disciplinary perspectives. From the earliest wartime writings of S. Yizhar to the global phenomenon of films such as Beaufort, Waltz with Bashir, and Lebanon, the Israeli artist’s imaginative and critical engagement with war and occupation has been informed by the catalysts of mourning, pain, and loss, often accompanied by a biting sense of irony. This book highlights many of the aesthetic narratives that have wielded the most profound impact on Israeli culture in the present day.

These works address both incremental and radical changes in individual and collective consciousness that have spread through Israeli culture in response to the persistent affliction of war. No other such volume exists in Hebrew or English. Students and teachers of Israeli studies will appreciate Narratives of Dissent.

 

 

Table of Contents (from Library of Congress)

Introduction: zionism and the culture of dissent / Ranen Omer-Sherman — Private and public spaces of commemoration and mourning — "Music of peace" at a time of war : Middle Eastern music amid the second intifada / Galeet Dardashti — Privatizing commemoration : the helicopter disaster monument and the absent state / Michael Feige — "Cyclic interruptions" : popular music on Israeli radio in times of emergency / Danny Kaplan — Consuming nostalgia : greetings cards and soldier-citizens / Noa Roei — The photographic memory of Asad Azi / Tal Ben Zvi — "We shall remember them all" : the culture of online mourning and commemoration of fallen soldiers in Israel / Liav Sade-Beck — Poetry and prose — Bereavement and breakdown : war and failed motherhood in Raya Harnik’s work / Esther Raizen — From IDF to .pdf : war poetry in the Israeli digital age / Adriana X. Jacobs — "Unveiling injustice" : Dahlia Ravikovitch’s poetry of witness / Ilana Szobel — War at home : literary engagements with the Israeli political crisis in two novels by Gabriela Avigur-Rotem / Shiri Goren — Forcing the end : apocalyptic Israeli fiction, 1971-2009 / Adam Rovner — Oh, my land, my birthplace : Lebanon war and intifada in Israeli fiction and poetry / Glenda Abramson — Vexing resistance, complicating occupation : a contrapuntal reading of Sahar Khalifeh’s wild thorns and David Grossman’s The smile of the lamb / Philip Metres — Gender, war, and zionist mythogynies : feminist trends in Israeli scholarship / Esther Fuchs — Cinema and stage — Representations of war in Israeli drama and theater / Dan Urian — From national heroes to postnational witnesses : a reconstruction of Israeli soldiers’ cinematic narratives as witnesses of history / Yael Munk — A woman’s war : The Gulf War and popular women’s culture in Israel / Rachel S. Harris — Beaufort the book, beaufort the film : Israeli militarism under attack / Yaron Peleg — Shifting manhood: masculinity and the Lebanon war in Beaufort and waltz with Bashir / Philip Hollander — List of contributors — Index.

ToC: Journal of Israeli History 32,1 (2013)

 

 

Special Issue: House as Home in Israeli Culture

Articles

Introduction

Orit Rozin
pages 1-5

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• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.768026

 

Separate spheres, intertwined spheres: Home, work, and family among Jewish women business owners in the Yishuv

Talia Pfefferman
pages 7-28

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• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.768028

 

Just ring twice: Law and society under the rent control regime in Israel, 1948–1954

Maya Mark
pages 29-50

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• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.768029

 

The evolution of the inner courtyard in Israel: A reflection of the relationship between the Western modernist hegemony and the Mediterranean environment

Hadas Shadar
pages 51-74

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• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.768031

 

The P6 Group and critical landscape photography in Israel

Jochai Rosen
pages 75-85

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• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.768033

 

Visions of identity: Pictures of rabbis in Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) private homes in Israel

Nissim Leon
pages 87-108

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• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.768035

 

Soft power: The meaning of home for Gush Emunim settlers

Michael Feige

pages 109-126

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• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.768041

 

Heading home: The domestication of Israeli children’s literature in the 1960s as reflected in Am Oved’s Shafan ha-sofer series

Yael Darr
pages 127-139

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• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.768042

House and home: A semantic stroll through metaphors and symbols

Tamar Sovran
pages 141-156

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• DOI:10.1080/13531042.2013.768044

New Publication: Brownfield-Stein, A Fantasy of the State (Hebrew)

Brownfield-Stein, Chava. A Fantasy of the State. Photographs of Female Soldiers and the Eroticization of Civil Militarism in Israel. Fetish Series. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2012 (in Hebrew).

 

 

For further details on the book (in Hebrew), click here.