New Article: Katz, Religion and Ethnicity in Israeli National Dolls

Katz, Maya Balakirsky. “Dressing Up: Religion and Ethnicity in Israeli National Dolls.” Religion & Gender 5.1 (2015): 71-90.

 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.18352/rg.10108  [PDF]
 

 
Abstract

This article considers Israel’s national image both at home and abroad through the framework of Israeli costume dolls, looking specifically at the way that gender played a role in Israel’s national image as it travelled from domestic production to international reception. Initially, predominantly female doll makers produced three main types of Israeli dolls, but over time the religious Eastern European male doll triumphed in the pantheon of national types. Produced for retail sale to non-Hebrew speaking tourists by immigrant woman, the Eastern European religious male doll came to represent Israel abroad while the market pushed representations of the Middle Eastern Jewish woman and the native sabra child to the side-lines. This article examines the shift from the multi-ethnic collection of dolls as representative of the nation’s idea of itself to the privileging of the male Eastern European doll as representative of the normative image of Israel abroad.

 

 

New Article: Caspi, Apocalypse, Territory and Identity in Joseph Mundi’s Plays

Caspi, Zahava. “Apocalypse, Territory and Identity in Joseph Mundi’s The Ruler of Jericho and The Messiah.” Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 27 (2014): 205ff (in Hebrew).

 

Abstract

My article deals with two of Joseph Mundi’s plays The Ruler of Jericho (1975) and The Messiah (1982). Though the first one was written after Yom Kippur War and the other seven years later, concerning the First Lebanon War – basically they treat the same topic. Both reveal the danger which is inherent in the aspiration for absolute unification between an imagined Utopian object (be it ‘the Promised Land’ or the ‘Ideal Sabra’) and its actual implementation in reality. Using two concepts which underlie every national entity – territory and identity – Mundi examines the apocalyptic implications of founding nationality upon biblical myths and utopian conceptions.

The relations between ‘place’ and ‘the place’ will be dealt through Foucault’s spatial terms: ‘Heterotopia’ as the opposite term of ‘Utopia’; and the question of Israeli identity will be explained through the concept of ‘Schizophrenia’, as used by Deleuze and Guattari. I will show that Mundi is proposing differentiality, multiplicity, and schizoidism – as defense mechanisms against the utopian desire for the ultimate.

כספי, זהבה. “אפוקליפיטקה, מרחב וזהות ב’מושל יריחו’ ו’המשיח’ מאת יוסף מונדי”. מחקרי ירושלים בספרות עברית כז (2014): 205 ואילך.