New Article: Azaryahu, Battle Remains and the Formation of a Battlescape, Sha’ar HaGai

Azaryahu, Maoz. “Wrecks to Relics: Battle Remains and the Formation of a Battlescape, Sha’ar HaGai, Israel.” In Memory, Place and Identity: Commemoration and Remembrance of War and Conflict (ed. Danielle Drozdzewski, Sarah De Nardi, and Emma Waterton; Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2016).

 

 

Absract

Beyond prior knowledge about the association of the relics with history, their interpretation and evaluation in terms of memory and legacy is a matter of perspective based on particular ideological premises. Writing about his bus ride from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 1994, the travel writer Paul Theroux mentioned these relics: ‘Old-fashioned armored cars and rusty trucks had been left by the roadside as memorials to the men who had died in what the Israelis call the War of Liberation. The vehicles, so old, so clumsy, roused pity.’ To Theroux the relics ‘roused pity’. In Israeli patriotic culture they have been associated with heroic sacrifice, evoking veneration and respect. Despite their repeated relocations in the local landscape, the authenticity they exude substantially augments their symbolic capacity to conflate the historical battlefield at Bab el Wad and the contemporary battlescape at Sha’ar HaGai.

 

 

New Book: Mechter and Maya-Mechter, Between the Intimate and the Anonymous in Urban Space

Mechter, Eytan, and Avital Maya. Between the Intimate and the Anonymous in Urban Space. A Socio-Cultural Perspective on Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2016 (in Hebrew).

 

 

This book seeks to contribute to the socio-cultural discourse on the first Hebrew-cosmopolitan city, a discourse that may serve as an alternative to the conventional economic content in relation to urban processes. The attempt to decipher the secret of the transformation of the first Hebrew city into a “world city” will be made by examining the uniqueness of the culture and ethos of Tel Aviv in connection with universal norms. The socio-cultural discussion presents the tension between rationality and desire that late capitalism is based on, while highlighting the manifestations of this tension in the urban, local, and general arenas–both by the conquest of space through capital and in the design of and objectified consciousness and consumerist styles.

Multiculturalism and density are distinct urban characteristics contributing to urban activity based on openness, creativity, innovation and sophistication, but also reflect expressions of convergence and alienation. The individuation process serves as a central axis f or the translation of the rational subject into an object of consumerist desire as a result of the capitalist system. Individuation and the process of self-branding encourage the growth of various forms of unique and dynamic identities and styles, but hinder the constructions of relationships based on emotions and commitment. “The neighborhood community” is offered in this book as a possible solution to anonymity and the instrumentalism of interpersonal relationships, a solution which enables interpersonal relationships in the metropolin without disrupting the dynamic nature of variability and diversity, while creating a stable core, whether territorial or virtual.

The concluding chapter discusses the spiritual challenge of the big city to cultivate expressions of “Hard Liberty” following Levinas, as a substitute for the splitting of the subject and the self-alienation which endanger the urban soul.

 

Eytan Mechter is a scholar and lecturer of sociology of culture at the NB Haifa School of Design, Holon Institute of Technology, and the Arts Faculty of the Kibbutzim College.Avital Maya Mechter was a lecture of creative education at Hemdat Hadarom college.

 

 

 

New Book: Levy, Israeli Theatre (in Hebrew)

Levy, Shimon. Israeli Theatre. Time, Space, Plot. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2016 (in Hebrew).

 

 

In the absence of a well-established tradition of drama, the new Hebrew theatre in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century, is caught in a fruitful and fascinating bind. Processes of secularization and liberalization among world Jewry and pre-State Israel fostered openness towards the theatre. This relatively new art in Jewish tradition was also seen as entertainment, but in its early years it was primarily employed as an educational and ideological tool in the service of Zionist national needs in the struggle for the creation of a Hebrew culture. The dramatic nature of this change in the status of Jews and Israel not only summoned a revived reading of Jewish history, but also its staging, pun intended, on the Hebrew stage, in the Land of Israel, and of course – the Hebrew language.

This book addresses issues and topics of Israeli drama and theatre from a social-artistic perspective. The prologue treats the development of a Jewish-Hebrew-Israeli theatre against the backdrop of secularization of the Jewish community from the early 19th century to its flourish in contemporary Israel. The basic conditions for theatre in general and Israeli theatre in particular are discussed in a chapter on space in Israeli drama. Theatrical props are discussed in a chapter which examines the idiosyncrasy of local drama through one of the elements of its space design. The Hebrew Bible and Judaism are addressed in a chapter on secular sanctity, characteristic to our stage. Another component of Israeli identity, its attitude toward Arabs, wars and the protracted conflict, is discussed in a chapter entitled “captive in fiction.” A discussion of three giants in Israeli drama – Nissim Aloni, Joshua Sobol and Hanoch Levin – is structured by the meta-theatrical intentionalism of each of them. the Acco Festival, an annual event since 1980, is discussed as a key component in the Israeli theatrical scene. The book concludes with a eulogy for the Hebrew radio drama, a celebrated genre in its heyday until it was marginalized by television, but its significant contribution to Israeli drama nevertheless remains.

 

SHIMON LEVY is a Professor Emeritus of Theatre at Tel Aviv University, where he taught for many years, and was chair of the Department of Theatre Arts. His main areas of research are Hebrew-Israeli theatre and drama, the works of Samuel Beckett, and theories of chaos in relation to theatre. He has published dozens of articles, and hundreds of essays on theatre in Hebrew, English, and German, as well as about ten books. He has translated over 100 plays for the stage, and continues to be active as a director in Israel and abroad.

 

 

 

New Article: Harris, Opening Up Geographies of the Three-Dimensional City

Harris, Andrew. “Vertical Urbanisms. Opening Up Geographies of the Three-Dimensional City.” Progress in Human Geography 39.5 (2015): 601-20.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132514554323

 

Abstract

This paper develops a more diverse and multi-dimensional agenda for understanding and researching urban verticality. In particular, it argues for vertical geographies that encompass more than issues of security and segregation and are not necessarily framed by the three-dimensional politics of Israel/Palestine identified by some commentators. In opening up a wider world of vertical urbanisms, the paper outlines three key approaches: close attention to where urban verticality is theorised and the relationship between power and height, the importance of ethnographic detail to emphasise more everyday verticalities and disrupt top-down analytical perspectives, and geographical imaginations that carefully attend to the myriad spatial entanglements of the three-dimensional city.

 

 

New Article: Omer, Hitmazrehut or Becoming of the East

Omer, Atalia. “Hitmazrehut or Becoming of the East: Re-Orienting Israeli Social Mapping.” Critical Sociology (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0896920515604475

 

Abstract

Through developing of the concept of hitmazrehut, the article highlights avenues for decolonializing and de-orientalizing sociopolitical theory and practice in Israel/Palestine. Hitmazrehut (literally ‘becoming of the East’) is understood as the transformation of relations between space, identity, and narrative through an intersectionality framework of social movement activism and intellectual counter-discourse. Exposing the intersections among sites of marginality as well as cultivating localized interpretations of identity (delinked from the orientalist positing of Israel in the ‘West’) would contribute to the possibility of the formation of transformative coalition building across national boundaries. Hitmazrehut is both an outcome and a necessary process for enabling geopolitical reframing. The article begins with the ahistorical and orientalist biases of sociological inquiry into the region. It continues with an analysis of efforts to localize and re-orient Jewish identity as well as the Mizrahi discursive critique of epistemological violence guiding sociological scholarship, double consciousness and patterns of ethnic passing.

 

 

New Book: Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom

Kotef, Hagar. Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

 

We live within political systems that increasingly seek to control movement, organized around both the desire and ability to determine who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces, from gated communities to nation-states. In Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, Hagar Kotef examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces. Ranging from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control that circumscribe the lives of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, this book shows how concepts of freedom, security, and violence take form and find justification via “regimes of movement.” Kotef traces contemporary structures of global (im)mobility and resistance to the schism in liberal political theory, which embodied the idea of “liberty” in movement while simultaneously regulating mobility according to a racial, classed, and gendered matrix of exclusions.

 

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements

• Introduction
• 1. Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and Its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine / Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir
• 2. An Interlude: A Tale of Two Roads—On Freedom and Movement
• 3. The Fence That “Ill Deserves the Name of Confinement”: Locomotion and the Liberal Body
• 4. The Problem of “Excessive” Movement
• 5. The “Substance and Meaning of All Things Political”: On Other Bodies
• Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

 

HAGAR KOTEF is based at the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University.

 

 

New Article: Shokeid, Transforming Urban Landscapes and the Texture of Citizenship

Shokeid, Moshe. “Newcomers at the Israeli National Table: Transforming Urban Landscapes and the Texture of Citizenship.” City & Society 27.2 (2015): 208-30.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12061

 

Abstract

Advocating research of the “ethnographic present,” the article portrays the recent evolvement of two constituencies in Israeli urban society conceived as new socio-economic-cultural and spatial social “banks”: Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia residing in ethnically segregated urban neighborhoods; the gradual concentration in Tel Aviv’s downtown neighborhoods of authorized and undocumented labor migrants from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, as well as asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan. It reports on the growing protest by local Israeli residents, the government’s efforts to limit the presence of “uninvited strangers,” as well as the active response of the unwelcome aliens. I posit that the emergence of these new ethnic enclaves converges with other critical changes in Israeli institutional life. Major transformations in the texture and tenets of Israeli citizenry, its spatial construction and national identity are steadily progressing.

 

 

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.

Dissertation: Bardi, Cleansing, Constructing, and Curating the State: India/Pakistan ’47 and Israel/Palestine ’48

Bardi, Ariel Sophia. Cleansing, Constructing, and Curating the State: India/Pakistan ’47 and Israel/Palestine ’48 , PhD Dissertation, Yale University, 2015.

 
URL: http://gradworks.umi.com/36/63/3663495.html

 
Abstract

This dissertation looks at the ways in which the landscape and the built environment have been called upon and transformed into conduits of national belonging, focusing on the near-simultaneous emergences of Israel, India, and Pakistan. It considers the role of space in consolidating new national bodies, drawing on a variety of texts from both regions: memoirs, films, archival and field photos, housing plans, and the architectural landscape itself.

The first chapter explores the Jewish and Indian Muslim bids for sovereign lands along with the rise of Hindu nationalism. Looking at the founding of Pakistan and Israel, it considers the self-replicative logic of partition and the emergence of the homeland state. Arguing for the importance of image and space in conjuring new nationhoods, the second chapter compares systems of spatial control, visual regimes that mounted and imposed new national imaginaries. In India, Pakistan, and Israel/Palestine, selective acts of destruction transformed formerly shared spaces, inflecting the landscape with three distinct new states.

The third chapter looks at post-state refugee rehabilitation projects, focusing specifically on Mizrahi, or Arab Jewish, immigration to the Israeli hinterlands, and Mizrahi, or Indian refugee, resettlement within the Pakistani province of Sindh. In both regions, housing projects re-circumscribed place of origin, challenging the purported unity of each religiously pooled state and relegating refugees to the margins of each new nation. Tracing the relationship between architecture and partition, it considers the different modalities bound up in the process of national absorption. The fourth chapter compares historical preservation projects in India, Pakistan, Israel, and Palestine, and examines the role of heritage sites in visualizing statehood and homogenizing mixed spaces. Considering the furor over India’s Babri Masjid, it posits preservation as a corollary to demolition, and examines a selection of heritage locations in Israel and Pakistan while arguing for the uses of the past in upholding majority collectivities. Finally, the conclusion considers the afterlives of partition in places such as Kashmir, the West Bank, and India’s far northeast, in ongoing occupations that are as visual and spatial as they are material, economic, and political.

 

 

New Article: Tesdell, Territoriality and the Technics of Drylands Science in Palestine and North America

Tesdell, Omar Imseeh. “Territoriality and the Technics of Drylands Science in Palestine and North America.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47.3 (2015): 570-573.

 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0020743815000586

 
Abstract
At the turn of the 20th century, agricultural experts in several countries assembled a new agro-scientific field: dryland farming. Their agricultural research practices concomitantly fashioned a new agro-ecological zone—the drylands—as the site of agronomic intervention. As part of this effort, American scientists worked in concert with colleagues in the emerging Zionist movement to investigate agricultural practices and crops in Palestine and neighboring regions, where nonirrigated or rainfed agriculture had long been practiced. In my larger manuscript project, I consider how the reorganization of rainfed farming as dryfarming is central to the history of both the Middle East and North America, where it was closely related to modern forms of power, sovereignty, and territoriality. I suggest that American interest in dryfarming science emerged out of a practical need to propel and sustain colonization of the Great Plains, but later became a joint effort of researchers from several emerging settler enterprises, including Australia, Canada, and the Zionist movement. In contrast to a naturally ocurring bioregion, I argue that the drylands spatiality was engineered through, rather than outside, the territorialization of modern power.

 

 

New Article: Livio, Constructions of Space in the Discourse of Israeli Military Refuseniks

Livio, Oren. “The Path of Least Resistance: Constructions of Space in the Discourse of Israeli Military Refuseniks.” Discourse, Context and Media (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2015.02.002

 

Abstract

In this article I examine the ways in which Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories use spatial representations and metaphors in discourse explaining their decision to refuse. Using Lefebvre’s (1995) framework regarding spaces of representation as sites of political struggle, I analyze how selective refuseniks construct the Territories as a space of pollution, irrationality, disorder and death, expressing fear that these qualities might contaminate Israeli space, and thus implicitly promoting a separatist logic of exclusion. Refuseniks employ metaphors of movement to portray the transition from ‘here’ to ‘there’ as a shift into an alternate universe, and attempt to appropriate hegemonic discursive conceptualizations associated with three culturally loaded spaces: the prison, the Jewish settlements, and Nazi Germany. The ambivalent dialectics of dominant and resistant ideologies in refuseniks’ discourse and their cultural implications are discussed.

 

New Article: Aronoff & Aronoff, Spatial Narratives of Border Crossings between Israel, Jordan and Egypt

Aronoff, Eric and Yael Aronoff. “Bordering on Peace: Spatial Narratives of Border Crossings between Israel, Jordan and Egypt.” In The Design of Frontier Spaces. Control and Ambiguity (ed. Carolyn Loeb and Andreas Luescher; Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 129-55.

Excerpt

These questions about border narratives are the focus of this essay. Examining the border crossings between Israel and the two neighboring states with which it has open borders, Jordan and Egypt, we analyze the narratives created in these spaces through

the arrangement of space, iconography, and signage, as well as the legal elements that also regulate the flow of persons across the borders. These sites, in effect, constitute the first encounter of travelers with the new state about to be entered; as such, these spatial, visual and legal elements combine to create a “story” being told to that traveler (even if that traveler is a member of that community who is returning). That story may be intentional, the result of a conscious effort or policy on the part of the state, or unintentional as the ad hoc reflection of attitudes and ideas expressing themselves through the choices made “on the ground” by border personnel. That story is both about who “they” – the imagined community whose territory the traveler is about to enter – are and what they represent; it also simultaneously is about who “you,” the traveler, might be – why you might be there, the relationship imagined between “they” and “you.” Like a text, these spaces construct both their ideal “author” and their ideal “reader.”

In this way, like many of the chapters in this volume, our approach extends but also differs from much of the scholarship that makes up the recent resurgence of border studies. As many scholars have pointed out, rising attention across multiple disciplines to issues of globalism and transnationalism, as well as cultural studies approaches to concepts heretofore in the domain of social science, have resulted in increased interest in borders (Newman, 2011). Until relatively recently, borders have been approached within the fields of international relations or geography as static, empirical entities, largely in the context of examining relations between states (Sack, 1986; Taylor, 1994; Shapiro and Alker, 1996). More recent theories emanating from anthropology and cultural studies have emphasized the social construction of boundaries as processes for defining personal, group and national identities, through processes of inclusion and exclusion, defining the “self” and the “Other.” These approaches have broadened the concept of “borders” to include not only the actual borderline between states, but many other kinds of borders. In this conception, borders are everywhere, and the “border narratives” that constitute them are made up of multiple discourses and texts: newspapers, political speeches, posters, poems, plays, novels, everyday speech that give meaning to the border as the “construction of institutionalized forms of ‘we’ and the ‘other’ which are produced and perpetually reproduced in education texts, narratives and discourses” (Newman and Paasi, 1998, p. 196).

New Article: Lapidot-Lefler et al, Social Space and Field as Constructs for Evaluating Social Inclusion

Lapidot-Lefler, Noam, Victor J. Friedman, Daniella Arieli, Noha Haj, Israel Sykes, and Nasreen Kais. “Social Space and Field as Constructs for Evaluating Social Inclusion.” New Directions for Evaluation 146 (2015): 33-43.

 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ev.20118

 
Abstract
This paper addresses the role of evaluation in promoting social inclusion, an important component of social justice, with a focus on exclusion resulting from physical disability. We argue that the evaluation of social exclusion and social inclusion requires evaluators not only to reconsider their role and methods, but also to revise the fundamental constructs through which they study how programs and other interventions generate change at the individual, group, community, and societal levels. Drawing on field theory, we suggest that social inclusion processes can be understood and assessed in terms of the expansion of individuals’ life space, which consists of social, political, cultural, and resource dimensions. The paper illustrates these constructs with data from a participative action evaluation of a pilot program for providing services to people with disabilities in Israel. Our aim in developing these constructs is to provide not only tools for assessment, but also ways of thinking that may enable socially excluded people to be more active agents of inclusion.