New Article: Weiss, The Politics of Yiddish in Israeli Popular Culture

Weiss, Shayna. “Shtisel’s Ghosts: The Politics of Yiddish in Israeli Popular Culture.” In Geveb, March 6, 2016.

 

URL: http://ingeveb.org/blog/shtisel-s-ghosts-the-politics-of-yiddish-in-israeli-popular-culture

 

Extract

The popular embrace, in newspapers and talkbacks, of Shtisel’s Yiddish stands in contrast to the unease with which Arabic is received in Israeli society, even on television; Yiddish is a softer, safer other for mainstream Jewish Israeli viewers. Yet Yiddish is not feminized and defanged, because Shtisel succeeds in challenging those stereotypes by displaying the breadth of Yiddish in the Israeli Hasidic context. Shtisel also humanizes Israeli Haredim, whose reputation among secular Israelis is often stereotyped to the point of invoking anti-Semitic tropes. Not all non-Hebrew languages in Israel are created equal.

ToC: Hebrew Studies 56 (2015)

Below are the relevant articles for Israel Studies from the latest issue of Hebrew Studies. For a full Table of Contents,click here.

 

Innovative Designation of Diminution in the Writings of Abraham Shlonsky

pp. 231-243

Bat-Zion Yemini

Memory and History in Israeli Post-Apocalyptic Theater

pp. 245-263

Zahava Caspi

Questioning Boundaries of Language and the World: Ambivalence and Disillusionment in the Writings of Shimon Adaf

pp. 265-294

Dorit Lemberger

Hebrew Neologisms in the Writings of Anton Shammas

pp. 295-314

Adel Shakour, Abdallah Tarabeih

The Pain of Two Homelands: Immigration to Israel in Twenty-First Century Hebrew Prose Fiction

pp. 315-331

Smadar Shiffman

“Our Virgin Friends and Wives”?: Female Sexual Subjectivity in Yona Wallach’s Poetry

pp. 333-356

Amalia Ziv

New Testament Jesus in Modern Jewish Literature: A Symposium

pp. 357-358

Zev Garber

Jesus and the Pharisees through the Eyes of Two Modern Hebrew Writers: A Contrarian Perspective

pp. 359-365

Neta Stahl

A Question of Truth: Form, Structure, and Character in Der man fun Natseres

pp. 367-376

Melissa Weininger

Overtones of Isaac and Jesus in Modern Hebrew Narrative

pp. 377-384

Aryeh Wineman

The Jewish Jesus: Conversation, Not Conversion

pp. 385-392

Zev Garber

Reviews

 

Compassion and Fury: On The Fiction of A. B. Yehoshua by Gilead Morahg (review)

pp. 433-436

Yael Halevi-Wise

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Periodicals

pp. 437-456

Books Received — 2015

pp. 457-460

New Article: Pinsker, Yiddish in Israeli Literature

Pinsker, Shachar. “‘That Yiddish Has Spoken to Me’: Yiddish in Israeli Literature.” Poetics Today 35.3 (2014): 323-56.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1215/03335372-2803437 

 

Abstract

This essay examines the ways in which Yiddish—as a language, a set of literary traditions and practices, and a “postvernacular”—operates within the context of Israeli, Hebrew-dominated literature. After establishing the subject’s poetic, historical, and political framework, I present two examples of how Yiddish exerted a (largely unacknowledged) influence on Israeli literature. The first concerns the striking similarities and intersections between two literary groups active in Israel during the 1950s: a famous Hebrew group (Likrat) and a little-known Yiddish group (Yung Yisroel). The second example consists in the parallels and intertwined literary histories of two writers, Yossl Birshtein (who was a member of Yung Yisroel) and the Hebrew writer Ya’acov Shabtai, in order to demonstrate the presence of Yiddish in Shabtai’s poetic work and to discover an untold story in the history of modern Hebrew literature.

New Article: Gechtman, Zionist Historiography and the Jewish Labour Movement

Gechtman, Roni. “Nationalising the Bund? Zionist Historiography and the Jewish Labour Movement.” East European Jewish Affairs 43.3 (2013): 249-264.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13501674.2013.852802

 

Abstract

This article examines the academic historiography on the Jewish Workers’ Bund produced by Israeli and Zionist scholars. While the contribution of Israeli scholars to the historiography on the Bund has been significant in both quantity and quality, their works have had to grapple with the tension between the goals of Zionist historiography and the Bund’s political and ideological commitments, namely the party’s radical opposition to nationalism in general and to Zionism in particular. To various degrees, Israeli scholars sought to “nationalise” the Yiddish-speaking labour movement in Eastern Europe and incorporate it into a coherent narrative of the Jews’ past as an “organic” nation. As a result of their authors’ ideological and methodological preconceptions, and by portraying it as a nationalist movement, these works often misrepresent the Bund’s ideas, policies and activities.

Conference Program: Jewish Languages and Contemporary Hebrew

Conference on Jewish Languages and Contemporary Hebrew

University of Haifa

Sunday, 29 December 2013

For program (in Hebrew), click here.

New Publication: Segal, A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry

 

Miryam Segal. A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry. Poetics, Politics, Accent. Jewish Literature and Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind. : Indiana University Press, 2010.

 

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URL: http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/product_info.php?isbn=978-0-253-35243-9

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Keywords:  Israel: Literature, Poetry, Education, Nationalism / Patriotism, Gender, Yiddish, , Hebrew Language, Avraham Shlonsky