New Article: Dominguez, On Anthropology in Israel

Dominguez, Virginia R. “On Anthropology in Israel.” American Anthropologist 118.1 (2016): 142-158 (with responses).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/aman.12506

 

Extract

The following subsection includes responses to three questions I formulated and sent to all living past heads of the Israel Anthropological Association. Marked with asterisks below are the past and living IAA heads who responded to my request, but I nonetheless include the full list of past heads (called chairs until relatively recently but now called presidents). Nineteen colleagues have served the IAA in that capacity since the founding of the association in 1973; nine of them responded to my three questions, and those answers appear in this special World Anthropology subsection.

My questions were as follows:

• (1)What kind of work do you associate with Israeli anthropology—Now? Twenty to thirty years ago? Fifty to sixty years ago?
• (2)What do you find most challenging in Israeli anthropology or as an anthropologist in Israel?
• (3)What do you find most praiseworthy and productive in (the practice of) anthropology in Israel?

Responses by Henry Abramovitch, Tel Aviv University; Nurit Bird-David, University of Haifa; Harvey E. Goldberg, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; André Levy, Ben-Gurion University; Dan Rabinowitz, Tel Aviv University; Amalia Sa’ar, University of Haifa; Moshe Shokeid, Tel Aviv University; Alex Weingrod, Ben-Gurion University; Meira Weiss, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

 

 

 

New Book: Feldman, A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land

Feldman, Jackie. A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land. How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.

 

 

For many Evangelical Christians, a trip to the Holy Land is an integral part of practicing their faith. Arriving in groups, most of these pilgrims are guided by Jewish Israeli tour guides. For more than three decades, Jackie Feldman—born into an Orthodox Jewish family in New York, now an Israeli citizen, scholar, and licensed guide—has been leading tours, interpreting Biblical landscapes, and fielding questions about religion and current politics. In this book, he draws on pilgrimage and tourism studies, his own experiences, and interviews with other guides, Palestinian drivers and travel agents, and Christian pastors to examine the complex interactions through which guides and tourists “co-produce” the Bible Land. He uncovers the implicit politics of travel brochures and religious souvenirs. Feldman asks what it means when Jewish-Israeli guides get caught up in their own performances or participate in Christian rituals, and reflects on how his interactions with Christian tourists have changed his understanding of himself and his views of religion.

 

Table of Contents

• 1. How Guiding Christians Made Me Israeli
• 2. Guided Holy Land Pilgrimage—Sharing the Road
• 3. Opening Their Eyes: Performance of a Shared Protestant-Israeli Bible Land
• 4. Christianizing the Conflict: Bethlehem and the Separation Wall
• 5. The Goods of Pilgrimage: Tips, Souvenirs, and the Moralities of Exchange
• 6. The Seductions of Guiding Christians
• 7. Conclusions: Pilgrimage, Performance, and the Suspension of Disbelief

 

JACKIE FELDMAN a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is author of Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity. He has been a licensed tour guide in Jerusalem for over three decades.

 

 

 

New Article: Piterberg, Israeli Sociology’s Young Hegelian: Gershon Shafir and the Settler-Colonial Framework

Piterberg, Gabriel. “Israeli Sociology’s Young Hegelian: Gershon Shafir and the Settler-Colonial Framework.” Journal of Palestine Studies 44.3 (2015): 17-38.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jps.2015.44.3.17

 

Abstract

In April 2014, the Center for Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) convened a conference titled “The Settler Colonial Paradigm: Debating Gershon Shafir’s Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict on Its 25th Anniversary.” This essay emanates from the conference. I first chart the dialectical emergence of Shafir’s thought out of Israeli sociology, and then gauge its impact on the growing presence of the settler-colonial framework in the study of Palestine/Israel. The analysis of Shafir’s book shows how a powerful hegemony has produced its disavowal. The examination of Palestine/Israel as a settler-colonial situation past and present underscores the benefit of studying this topic comparatively and as part of a global phenomenon.