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: Omer & Goldblatt, Spatial Patterns of Retail Activity in Israeli Cities

Omer, Itzhak, and Ran Goldblatt. “Spatial Patterns of Retail Activity and Street Network Structure in New and Traditional Israeli Cities.” Urban Geography (early view; online first).

 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2015.1101258
 
Abstract

The association between spatial patterns of retail activity and the spatial configuration of street networks was examined by means of the space syntax methodology in eight Israeli cities that represent two city types, characterized by different planning approaches and urban growth: (i) new towns, which were established according to a comprehensive city plan and modern planning concepts of “tree-like” hierarchical street networks and “neighborhood units”; (ii) older cities, where street networks and the spatial patterns of retail activity were formed incrementally during their growth. Unlike in older cities, retail activity in new towns concentrates in relatively less-accessible and intermediate locations. This is indicated by a weak correlation between retail activity and the street network’s Integration and Choice centrality measures. The comparison between Israeli cities illustrates the influence of urban growth and planning approaches on the formation of retail activity and its interaction with the structure of the street network.

 

 

 

New Article: Tsapovsky and Frosh, Television Audiences and Transnational Nostalgia: Mad Men in Israel

Tsapovsky, Flora and Paul Frosh, “Television Audiences and Transnational Nostalgia: Mad Men in Israel.” Media, Culture & Society 37.5 (2015): 784-99.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443715587872

 

Abstract

Nostalgia is a transnational condition. It not only describes temporal displacement from a vanished past but also spatial dislocation from a lost dwelling place: home. What happens, then, when the spatio-temporal dimensions of nostalgia are realigned by media globalization? Can the transnational consumption of media texts create memory-structures that allow viewers to feel ‘at home’ in a past that is not ‘theirs’? What might such a reconstitution of nostalgia tell us about practices of interpretation, recollection, and identification among media audiences? Addressing these questions, this article investigates the responses of Israeli television viewers to a purportedly nostalgic US drama series, Mad Men. In the process, it reemphasizes nostalgia’s spatial axis, while reframing nostalgia as a construct of viewer engagement rather than as a feature of media texts. Ultimately, it proposes that contemporary transnational nostalgia possesses a double structure: it is selective, acting as an emotional and cognitive resource consciously used by audiences to examine their present personal and socio-political realities; that very use, however, depends on a ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ in which the mediated pasts of distant societies are seamlessly experienced as a part of viewers’ proximate lifeworlds.

Reviews: Shemer, Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema

Shemer, Yaron. Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2013.

 

 

Reviews

• Belinfante, Randall C. “Review.” Jewish Book Council, n.d.
• Sokoloff, Naomi. “Cinema Studies/Jewish Studies, 2011-2013.” AJS Review 38.1 (2014): 153-4.
• Bashkin, Orit. “Review.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47.2 (2015): 395-7.

 

 

 

New Book: Tzur, Space and Place in the Novels of S. Yizhar (in Hebrew)

צור, דביר. בין הבית לשדה, בין אדם למקום. המרחב והמקום בספריו של ס. יזהר ‘מקדמות’ ו’צלהבים’. ירושלים: מאגנס, 2015.

URL: http://www.magnespress.co.il/

 

Abstract

S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky), one of Israel’s most prominent authors, is considered by many to be the greatest literary conqueror of the local Israeli space, of which he wrote his epic novels and short stories. With his pen Yizhar transformed space into a place which is an integral part of the world for many, a place that is theirs and to which they belong.

In 1992, after 28 years of literary silence, Yizhar published his novel Preliminaries. The following year he published Zalhavim. These two books were the opening notes for his later wave of writing which included, in addition to these novels the short stories collections Asides, and By the Sea, and the novels Lovely Malcolmia and Discovering Elijah.

In this book, Tzur follows the footsteps of Preliminaries and Zalhavim. He examines their poetics of space, focused on the home and the field, two places that Yizhar alludes to time and again. In these novels Yizhar is not the literary conqueror of Israeli space, but rather one who observes his home and environment in a complex way. The Yizharian space is revealed as a world where the private and the public are intermingled with each other side by side. This is a space where the concrete and the envisioned, the universal and the local, are combined and intertwined with one another; a very Israeli space, very local and yet at the same time a space that raises existential and political questions, the answers to which is always nuanced, always multi-dimensional.

New Article: Bishara, Driving while Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank

Bishara, Amahl. “Driving while Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The Politics of Disorientation and the Routes of a Subaltern Knowledge.” American Ethnologist 42.1 (2015): 33-54.

 

URL: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.12114/abstract

 

Abstract

Israel’s system of closure divides Palestinian citizens of Israel from Palestinians of the West Bank. For members of both categories, road journeys spur political analysis, explicitly stated or implicitly packed into jokes or offhand comments. If, in liberal traditions, political knowledge is idealized as disembodied, abstract, and dispassionate, Palestinian knowledge gained while driving is none of these things. Yet it can provide important insights into the operations of Israeli power less easily represented in more formal outlets. Because the road system is an everyday site at which its users come into contact with the work of the state, driving is an important practice through which to examine popular conceptions of politics. Still, these two communities of Palestinians face obstacles in communicating about shared understandings of space and politics. In examining everyday political knowledge of subaltern people, we must attend to varieties of subalterneity to examine how these differences can perpetuate marginalization.

New Book: Rotbard, White City, Black City. Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa

Rotbard, Sharon. White City, Black City. Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015.

 

URL: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/white-city-black-city

 

n 2004, the city of Tel Aviv was declared by UNESCO a World Heritage Site, an exemplar of modernism in architecture and town planning. Today, the Hebrew city of Tel Aviv gleams white against the desert sky, its Bauhaus-inspired architecture betraying few traces of what came before it: the Arab city of Jaffa. In White City, Black City, the Israeli architect and author Sharon Rotbard offers two intertwining narratives, that of colonized and colonizer. It is also a story of a decades-long campaign of architectural and cultural historical revision that cast Tel Aviv as a modernist “white city” emerging fully formed from the dunes while ignoring its real foundation—the obliteration of Jaffa. Rotbard shows that Tel Aviv was not, as a famous poem has it, built “from sea foam and clouds” but born in Jaffa and shaped according to its relation to Jaffa. His account is not only about architecture but also about war, destruction, Zionist agendas, erasure, and the erasure of the erasure.

Rotbard tells how Tel Aviv has seen Jaffa as an inverted reflection of itself—not shining and white but nocturnal, criminal, dirty: a “black city.” Jaffa lost its language, its history, and its architecture; Tel Aviv constructed its creation myth. White City, Black City—hailed upon its publication in Israel as ”path-breaking,” “brilliant,” and “a masterpiece”—promises to become the central text on Tel Aviv.

New Book: Grassiani, Soldiering under Occupation

Grassiani, Erella. Soldiering under Occupation. Processes of Numbing among Israeli Soldiers in the Al-Aqsa Intifada. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013.

URL: http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=GrassianiSoldiering

Often, violent behavior or harassment from a soldier is dismissed by the military as unacceptable acts by individuals termed, “rotten apples.” In this study, the author argues that this dismissal is unsatisfactory and that there is an urgent need to look at the (mis)behavior of soldiers from a structural point of view. When soldiers serve as an occupational force, they find themselves in a particular situation influenced by structural circumstances that heavily influence their behavior and moral decision-making. This study focuses on young Israeli men and their experiences as combat soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), particularly those who served in the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” (OPT) during the “Al Aqsa Intifada,” which broke out in 2000. In describing the soldiers’ circumstances, especially focusing on space, the study shows how processes of numbing on different levels influence the (moral) behavior of these soldiers.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Preface
Methodology

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Studying Soldiers
Chapter 3. Checkpoints, Arrests and Patrols: Spaces of Occupation
Chapter 4. Performing as Occupiers: Operational Dynamics
Chapter 5. Tired, Bored and Scared: Emotional, Physical and Cognitive Numbing
Chapter 6. Blurring morals: the numbed moral competence of soldiers
Chapter 7. Morality in Speech: Discursive Strategies of Soldiers
Chapter 8. Conclusion

References

New Article: Shumsky, Travel, Tourism, and Cultural Zionism in Herzl’s Altneuland

Shumsky, Dimitry. “‘This Ship Is Zion!’: Travel, Tourism, and Cultural Zionism in Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland.” Jewish Quarterly Review 104.3 (2014): 471-93.

 

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jewish_quarterly_review/v104/104.3.shumsky.html

 

 

Abstract

One of the central elements of Herzlian spatial-political thought that has been filtered out of the deterministic historiographical discourse on Herzl-the-visionary-of-the-nation-state is that of travel and tourism, as well as the cultural significance and political context of the representations of travel and tourism in his utopian-political novel Altneuland.

The present article argues, however, that it is precisely through accounting for the notions of travel and tourism at work in Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland that one can appreciate Herzl’s perception of homecoming in its full complexity. The development of this argument is divided into the following three areas: (1) a survey of the expressions of the theme of travel and tourism in Altneuland which have been largely overlooked by virtually all the historians, political scientists and literary scholars dealing with Herzl’s novel; (2) a rethinking of the cultural and political aspects of Herzlian Zionism given the appropriate assessment of the role played by the motif(s) of travel and tourism in his vision of the future Palestine, as well as placing those aspects within the wider historical context of the contemporary development of political territorially-oriented national movements in the Habsburg Central Europe where Herzlian nationalism had emerged; (3) framing discussion on the journey element in the Herzlian Zionism in terms of relevant theoretical discourse on travel, tourism and homecoming, with purpose of drawing through the case of Herzl’s employment of travel motifs some broad theoretical reflections on travel, Zionism and homecoming in the time (and space) of fin-de-siècle multiethnic empires.

 

 

 

 

New Article: Yacobi and Pullan, Jerusalem’s Colonial Space Revisited

Yacobi, Haim and Wendy Pullan. “The Geopolitics of Neighbourhood: Jerusalem’s Colonial Space Revisited.” Geopolitics, published online, May 9, 2014.

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14650045.2013.857657

 

Abstract

This article will focus on an ongoing process of Jerusalem’s contested urban space during the last decade namely the immigration of Palestinians, mostly Israeli citizens, to “satellite neighbourhoods”, i.e. Jerusalem’s colonial neighbourhoods that were constructed after 1967. Theoretically, this paper attempts to discuss neighbourhood planning in contested cities within the framework of geopolitics. In more details, we will focus on the relevance of geopolitics to the study of neighbourhood planning, by which we mean not merely a discussion of international relations and conflict or of the roles of military acts and wars in producing space. Rather, geopolitics refers to the emergence of discourses and forces connected with the technologies of control, patterns of internal migrations by individuals and communities, and the flow of cultures and capital.

Dissertation: Araj, Planning under deep political conflict: The relationship between afforestation planning and the struggle over space in the Palestinian Territories

Araj, Fidaa Ibrahim Mustafa. Planning under deep political conflict: The relationship between afforestation planning and the struggle over space in the Palestinian Territories. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010.

 

URL: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/16959

 

Abstract

Struggle over space is at the core of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Different actors are involved in this struggle. The Israeli occupation with its planning system, and the Israeli settlers, since the beginning of the occupation, has been enforcing different policies of using space to achieve control over the Palestinians. The Palestinian authority with its planning system under the Israeli policies of control does not have enough power to deal with the different spatial problems that face planning endeavor. Palestinian planners find their autonomy challenged and abilities limited under Israeli policies of control. Among different actors in the spatial struggle in the Palestinian Territories (PT) are Palestinian people who despite their deep suffering from the Israeli policies of control continue making claim to their rights to use space through their spatial practices. Within this complexity of struggle over space in the context of occupation, between actors seeking control and those who resist that control and groups claiming their conflicting rights to the same space, I aim to understand whether and how spatial planning could play a role by understanding the relationship between space, power, and planning. Existing literature is limited in its ability to explain this role. For example, post colonial planning literature, theoretically, addresses the problem of planning as becoming a tool to achieve control. Additionally, radical planning and insurgent planning approaches discuss how in authoritarian political contexts, transformation can be achieved by the engagement of populace in a kind of covert radical or insurgent planning. However, existing literature is mostly focused on conflict between authoritarian state and its citizens, not a state of occupation that involves an occupation of indigenous state and citizens. In order to achieve its goal, the research asks this main question: what is the role of spatial planning in the struggle over space (control and resistance) in the complex context of occupation, and what are the probabilities and the constraints of professional planners’ intervention in such complex context? Since Palestine has a long history of occupation and domination and the phenomenon of the use of planning in the struggle over space in the Palestinian areas is historically rooted, the research takes an historical approach and examines this relationship in two distinct historical colonial periods: the British Mandate in Palestine and the current Israeli occupation. The study hopes to result into conceptual contributions for spatial planning in the PT. The conceptualization of this research will provide an understanding for future studies about planning in cities under deep political conflict such as occupation. It will develop the idea of planning as a form of resistance. The significance of this research lies in its addressing lack of knowledge about planning within the complex context of colonial/occupational areas. It has practical and conceptual contributions. Practically, it documents processes and decisions of planning under occupation. Conceptually, the study contributes to scholarship in planning and political geography by illuminating the spatial practices of different actors in their spatial struggle. To planning scholarship it adds voice to those who have called for an expanded definition of planning. That is planning is not limited to practices of trained professionals. Rather it includes everyday spatial practices of people that are powerful in shaping the space and its territorial control.

Subject: Middle Eastern Studies; Urban planning

 

Classification: 0555: Middle Eastern Studies; 0999: Urban planning

 

Identifier / keyword: Social sciences, Spatial planning, Covert planning, Insurgent planning, Residence planning, Spatial struggle, Radical planning, Palestinian Territories, Afforestation

 

Title: Planning under deep political conflict: The relationship between afforestation planning and the struggle over space in the Palestinian Territories.

 

 

Number of pages: 247

Publication year: 2010

Degree date: 2010

School code: 0090

Source: DAI-A 72/06, Dec 2011

Place of publication: Ann Arbor

Country of publication: United States

ISBN: 9781124580883

Advisor: Miraftab, Faranak

University/institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

University location: United States — Illinois

Degree: Ph.D.

Source type: Dissertations & Theses

Language: English

Document type: Dissertation/Thesis

Dissertation/thesis number: 3452051

ProQuest document ID: 863584246

Cite: Abu-Rabia-Queder and Karplus, Bedouin women’s mobility higher education

Abu-Rabia-Queder, Sarab and Yuval Karplus. “Regendering Space and Reconstructing Identity: Bedouin Women’s Translocal Mobility into Israeli-Jewish Institutions of Higher Education.” Gender, Place & Culture 20.4 (2013): 470-86.

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0966369X.2012.701200

Abstract

This article offers a geographic perspective on the mutually constitutive
relations between institutions of higher education and Bedouin women’s
gendered spaces, identities and roles. Situated beyond Bedouin women’s
permitted space and embedded in Israeli-Jewish space, institutions of
higher education are sites of displacement that present Bedouin women
students with new normative structures, social interactions and
opportunities for academic learning. As such, they become a discursive
arena for the articulation and reconstruction of their previously held
conceptions and identities. Often the journey to institutions of higher
education signifies for Bedouin women the first opportunity to venture
out of their community. Traveling to the university as students,
returning home as educated women and embarking on professional careers
outside tribal neighborhoods and villages involves moving across and
beyond different locales. Such translocal mobility necessitates constant
negotiation between seemingly contradictory cultural constructs and the
development of varied spatial bridging strategies. The article seeks to
contribute to Bedouin gender studies by going beyond the functional
role of higher education institutions as well as the gendered
hierarchies of women’s mobility, placing emphasis, instead, on the
effects of socio-spatial contextuality that shapes Bedouin women’s
experiences.

Cite: Abu-Rabia-Queder & Weiner-Levy, Agency of Palestinian Women in Israel

Abu-Rabia-Queder, Sarab and Naomi Weiner-Levy. “Between Local and Foreign Structures: Exploring the Agency of Palestinian Women in Israel.” Social Politics 20.1 (2013): 88-108.

 

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/social_politics/v020/20.1.abu-rabia-queder.html

 

Abstract

Stemming from the literature that examines the importance of structure as a means that produces agency, this article aims to analyze Palestinian women’s agency in Israel as negotiation with particular conflicting structures. While Middle Eastern women’s agency is structured within Arab religious and cultural resources, Palestinian women’s agency in Israel, We claim, is not only structured by Arab cultural and religious resources, but is also structured by Jewish-Israeli spatial-cultural resources. This paper analyses two sources from which Palestinian women in Israel derive agency and examines the interplay between them: (a) Palestinian cultural resources and (b) Israeli-Jewish cultural-spatial resources. By analyzing this agency and coping resources, we seek to conceptualize a more extensive theoretical model that draws on existing Middle Eastern feminist literature concerning Arab women, with attention to the unique realities of Palestinian women’s life in Israel and the varied structuring resources available to them.

Space and Place in Jewish Studies—Conference on March 10 at JTS

 

"The Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies"

March 10, 2013
9:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

The Jewish Theological Seminary
Mendelson Convocation Center
3080 Broadway (at 122nd Street)
New York City

Space and place have become increasingly important terms for understanding Jewish cultures. Join us for an interdisciplinary gathering of scholars, who will discuss their work in relation to recent intellectual and scholarly trends. Topics will include a range of areas, including architecture in the Talmud, the Bible in Israeli cultural memory, Agnon’s Buczacz, language wars in the Yishuv, and post-Holocaust Jewish architecture. A reception will follow the day’s panel discussions.

No RSVP is necessary. Contact Dr. Barbara Mann, associate professor of Jewish Literature and Simon H. Fabian Chair in Hebrew Literature at JTS, at bamann@jtsa.edu or (212) 678-8816 for more information.

The program is cosponsored by The Jewish Theological Seminary, the Zvia Ginor Fund, the Columbia University Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, and Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.

Full Conference Program

9:30 a.m.

Coffee

10:00 a.m.

Opening Remarks

Welcome
Alan Cooper, provost, The Jewish Theological Seminary

"Space Matters"
Barbara Mann, The Jewish Theological Seminary

10:30 a.m.

Text/Culture/Memory

Chair: Stefanie Siegmund, The Jewish Theological Seminary

"Torah and Topography: Late Antique Rabbinic Culture Between Real and Symbolic Space"
Gil Klein, Loyola Marymount University

"Space, Memory, and th*e ‘Return to the Bible’ in Israeli Culture"
Yael Zerubavel, Rutgers University

"A Baedeker to Buczacz: Agnon as Tour Guide"
Alan Mintz, The Jewish Theological Seminary

12:30 p.m.

Break

2:00 p.m.

Geography/Landscape/Architecture

Chair: TBA

"Mapping Language Diversity in a Hebrew Society: A Spatial Approach to the Cultural History of the Yishuv"
Liora Halperin, Princeton University

"Space and Place in Diaspora Tourism"
Shaul Kelner, Vanderbilt University

"Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust"
Gavriel Rosenfeld, Fairfield University

4:30 p.m.

Closing Reception

Cite: Pullan, Conflict’s Tools. Borders, Boundaries and Mobility in Jerusalem’s Spatial Structures

Pullan, Wendy. “Conflict’s Tools. Borders, Boundaries and Mobility in Jerusalem’s Spatial Structures.” Mobilities 2013.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17450101.2012.750040

 

Abstract

Transformed communications and mobility have led to the reinterpretation of urban space, so that instead of regarding it as primarily bounded and geometrically definable, it may be understood as based on a series of relations and, thus, continuously open to its own temporality. So where does this leave contested cities where differences in civic populations are so often represented through the rigid division and bounding of territory? This article examines borders, boundaries and mobility regimes in Jerusalem in terms of the spatial qualities of the city that have formed from the deceptively simple formula of more borders/less mobility. Clearly, an unbalanced and inequitable city has developed, and the research reveals that the politically motivated planning system has stamped out the fluid ‘relational’ space needed to enhance diverse interactions. Not only Palestinians but also Israelis are subject to this extreme binary vision of the city.

CFP: Israel in Time and Space, Graduate Student Conference, May 12 2013, Yeshiva U

Israel in Time and Space

An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference in Israel Studies

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Yeshiva University, New York City

The Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies and the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies invite graduate students to join us for a day of learning, community building and professional growth.  The conference will explore Israel from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives.   We imagine a broad range of papers, spanning from antiquity through the contemporary era that examine Israel as a place, as a people (or, peoples) and as an idea. Potential topics include but are not limited to: Israel and the diasporas, visual and literary representations of Israel, minorities in Israel, Israel in collective memory, and Israel in comparative perspectives.  Ideas for complete panels are also most welcome.

Yeshiva University faculty from such areas as literature, visual studies, sociology, and Jewish studies will participate in the discussions of this student conference.  The keynote speaker will be announced shortly.

Small amounts of travel support may be available to participants beyond our region, and  we are prepared to arrange home hospitality for participants traveling to the conference.  Please send abstracts to Israel.studies@yu.edu by January 20, 2013, with notification by February 20.  All are welcome!

For further information about the YU Center for israel Studies, visit yu.edu/cis

CFP: Narrative of Land of Israel, for AJS (Chicago 2012)

I am seeking participants for an AJS session on how ancient and contemporary narratives of the Land of Israel have shaped the contours of Israeli territorial politics. Papers that consider contemporary political applications of traditional Jewish sources on the boundaries of the Land of Israel, explore the impact of religious and secular narratives of Jewish homeland on popular Israeli (and diaspora Jewish) territorial discourse, or highlight debates between and within different sectors of Israeli society on "defensible borders", "land for peace," "the whole Land of Israel,"

Israel as a "Jewish state," etc. as they apply to the Jewish and/or Israel "national" experience are strongly encouraged to participate. Proposals are welcome from all disciplines.

 

Ariel Zellman

Northwestern University

 

write: azellman [at] gmail [dot] com

Reviews: Tzfadia and Yacobi, Rethinking Israeli Space

Tzfadia, Erez and Haim Yacobi. Rethinking Israeli Space. Periphery and Identity. Routledge Advances in Middle East and Islamic Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

Reviews

• Mazza, Roberto. “Review.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44.2 (2012): 374-376.

Cite: Greenberg, Private-Public Dichotomy in Girls’ Education in Mandate Palestine

Greenberg, Ela. “Invading Spaces: Challenging the Private-Public Dichotomy in Girls’ Education in Mandate Palestine.” Hawwa 10:1-2 (2012): 59-76.

 

URL: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/haw/2012/00000010/F0020001/art00004

Abstract

This paper examines gendered space within the framework of the education and training of Palestinian Arab girls in Mandate Palestine. Concepts of gendered space, at least within the sphere of education, were rooted in the Ottoman period, with the British reinforcing or adapting already existing ideas that shaped girls’ education by gender and spatial norms. Some of these ideas were also colonial imports, and did not reflect the attitudes of the local Palestinian Arabs. The local population often defied this spatial dichotomy, or internalized it. Women also had to negotiate notions of gendered space so that they could become educated, especially in terms of higher education.

 

Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World

Cite: Ben Ya’akov, North African Jewish Widows in Late-Ottoman Palestine

Ben Ya’akov, Michal. “Space and Place: North African Jewish Widows in Late-Ottoman Palestine.” Hawwa 10:1-2 (2012): 37-58.

 

URL: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/haw/2012/00000010/F0020001/art00003

 

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, the number of Jews in Jerusalem soared, including Jews in the North African Jewish community, which witnessed a significant growth spurt. Within the Jewish community, the number of widows, both young and old, was significant—approximately one-third of all adult Jews. This paper focuses on the spatial organization and residential patterns of Maghrebi Jewish widows and their social significance in nineteenth-century Jerusalem. Although many widows lived with their families, for other widows, without family in the city, living with family was not an option and they lived alone. By sharing rented quarters with other widows, some sought companionship as well as to ease the financial burden; others had to rely on communal support in shelters and endowed rooms. Each of these solutions reflected communal and religious norms regarding women in general, and widows in particular, ranging from marginalization and rejection to sincere concern and action.

 

Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World