Download or read book Ethnographic Encounters in Israel written by Fran Markowitz and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on the challenges of anthropological work in a complicated country: “A compelling anthology.” —Ruth Behar Israel is a place of paradoxes, a small country with a diverse population and complicated social terrain. Studying its culture and social life means confronting a multitude of ethical dilemmas and methodological challenges. These first-person accounts by anthropologists engage contradictions of religion, politics, identity, kinship, racialization, and globalization to reveal fascinating and often vexing dimensions of the Israeli experience. Caught up in pressing existential questions of war and peace, social justice, and national boundaries, the contributors explore the contours of Israeli society as insiders and outsiders, natives and strangers, as well as critics and friends.
Download or read book Jaffa Shared and Shattered written by Daniel Monterescu and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-24 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Binational cities play a pivotal role in situations of long-term conflict, and few places have been more marked by the tension between intimate proximity and visceral hostility than Jaffa, one of the "mixed towns" of Israel/Palestine. In this nuanced ethnographic and historical study, Daniel Monterescu argues that such places challenge our assumptions about cities and nationalism, calling into question the Israeli state’s policy of maintaining homogeneous, segregated, and ethnically stable spaces. Analyzing everyday interactions, life stories, and histories of violence, he reveals the politics of gentrification and the circumstantial coalitions that define the city. Drawing on key theorists in anthropology, sociology, urban studies, and political science, he outlines a new relational theory of sociality and spatiality.
Download or read book Toward an Anthropology of Nation Building and Unbuilding in Israel written by Fran Markowitz and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Toward an Anthropology of Nation Building and Unbuilding in Israel presents twenty-two original essays offering a critical survey of the anthropology of Israel inspired by Alex Weingrod, emeritus professor and pioneering scholar of Israeli anthropology. In the late 1950s Weingrod's groundbreaking ethnographic research of Israel's underpopulated south complicated the dominant social science discourse and government policy of the day by focusing on the ironies inherent in the project of Israeli nation building and on the process of migration prompted by social change. Drawing from Weingrod's perspective, this collection considers the gaps, ruptures, and juxtapositions in Israeli society and the cultural categories undergirding and subverting these divisions. Organized into four parts, the volume examines our understanding of Israel as a place of difference, the disruptions and integrations of diaspora, the various permutations of Judaism, and the role of symbol in the national landscape and in Middle Eastern studies considered from a comparative perspective. These essays illuminate the key issues pervading, motivating, and frustrating Israel's complex ethnoscape. "--
Download or read book Tragic encounters and ordinary ethics written by Ruth Sheldon and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over four decades, events in Palestine-Israel have provoked raging conflicts within British universities around issues of free speech, 'extremism', antisemitism and Islamophobia. But why is this conflict so significant for student activists living at such a geographical distance from the region itself? And what role do emotive, polarised communications around Palestine-Israel play in the life of British academic institutions committed to the ideal of free expression? This book draws on original ethnographic research with student activists on different sides of this conflict to initiate a conversation with students, academics and members of the public who are concerned with the transnational politics of Palestine-Israel and with the changing role of the public university. It shows how, in an increasingly globalised world that is shaped by entangled histories of European antisemitism and colonial violence, ethnography can open up ethical responses to questions of justice
Download or read book Israel Diaspora and the Routes of National Belonging Second Edition written by Jasmin Habib and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second edition of Israel, Diaspora, and the Routes of National Belonging builds upon Habib's groundbreaking research and reflects on the changes to scholarship since the book's publication in 2004.
Download or read book Blackness in Israel written by Uri Dorchin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-26 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores contemporary inflections of blackness in Israel and foreground them in the historical geographies of Europe, the Middle East, and North America. The contributors engage with expressions and appropriations of modern forms of blackness for boundary-making, boundary-breaking, and boundary-re-making in contemporary Israel, underscoring the deep historical roots of contemporary understandings of race, blackness, and Jewishness. Allowing a new perspective on the sociology of Israel and the realm of black studies, this volume reveals a highly nuanced portrait of the phenomenon of blackness, one that is located at the nexus of global, regional, national and local dimensions. While race has been discussed as it pertains to Judaism at large, and Israeli society in particular, blackness as a conceptual tool divorced from phenotype, skin tone and even music has yet to be explored. Grounded in ethnographic research, the study demonstrates that many ethno-racial groups that constitute Israeli society intimately engage with blackness as it is repeatedly and explicitly addressed by a wide array of social actors. Enhancing our understanding of the politics of identity, rights, and victimhood embedded within the rhetoric of blackness in contemporary Israel, this book will be of interest to scholars of blackness, globalization, immigration, and diaspora.
Download or read book Security and Suspicion written by Juliana Ochs and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Israel, gates, fences, and walls encircle public spaces while guards scrutinize, inspect, and interrogate. With a population constantly aware of the possibility of suicide bombings, Israel is defined by its culture of security. Security and Suspicion is a closely drawn ethnographic study of the way Israeli Jews experience security in their everyday lives. Observing security concerns through an anthropological lens, Juliana Ochs investigates the relationship between perceptions of danger and the political strategies of the state. Ochs argues that everyday security practices create exceptional states of civilian alertness that perpetuate—rather than mitigate—national fear and ongoing violence. In Israeli cities, customers entering gated urban cafés open their handbags for armed security guards and parents circumnavigate feared neighborhoods to deliver their children safely to school. Suspicious objects appear to be everywhere, as Israelis internalize the state's vigilance for signs of potential suicide bombers. Fear and suspicion not only permeate political rhetoric, writes Ochs, but also condition how people see, the way they move, and the way they relate to Palestinians. Ochs reveals that in Israel everyday practices of security—in the home, on commutes to work, or in cafés and restaurants—are as much a part of conflict as soldiers and military checkpoints. Based on intensive fieldwork in Israel during the second intifada, Security and Suspicion charts a new approach to issues of security while contributing to our appreciation of the subtle dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This book offers a way to understand why security propagates the very fears and suspicions it is supposed to reduce.
Download or read book Going to the People written by Jeffrey Veidlinger and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-22 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking S. An-sky's expeditions to the Pale of Jewish Settlement as its point of departure, the volume explores the dynamic and many-sided nature of ethnographic knowledge and the long and complex history of the production and consumption of Jewish folk traditions. These essays by historians, anthropologists, musicologists, and folklorists showcase some of the finest research in the field. They reveal how the collection, analysis, and preservation of ethnography intersect with questions about the construction and delineation of community, the preservation of Jewishness, the meaning of belief, the significance of retrieving cultural heritage, the politics of accessing and memorializing "lost" cultures, and the problem of narration, among other topics.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Israel written by Bernard Reich and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 781 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its creation, the State of Israel has been a magnet for attention. A country beset by conflict in its region and faced with the need to integrate mainly Jewish immigrants of disparate backgrounds into a modern and advanced democratic state and society, Israel has preoccupied observers, scholars and journalists since its independence in May 1948. Although a Jewish state Israel is also a democratic state that guarantees the rights of all of its citizens, including its large Arab and Moslem minority, in law and in practice. Israel and its modern history and politics have been the subject of substantial and often highly partisan literature, being hotly and vigorously debated both at home and abroad. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Israel contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1100 cross-referenced entries onsignificant persons, places, events, government institutions, political parties, and battles, as well as entries on Israel’s economy, society, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the various diplomatic and political personalities, institutions, organizations, events, concepts, and documents that together define the political life of the Jewish state of Israel.
Download or read book Israel Has a Jewish Problem written by Joyce Dalsheim and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-standing debate about whether the State of Israel can be both Jewish and democratic raises important questions about the rights of Palestinian Arabs. In Israel Has a Jewish Problem, Joyce Dalsheim argues that this debate obscures another issue: Can the Jewish state protect the right to be Jewish, whatever form that "being" might take? Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, she investigates that question by looking at ways in which Jewish citizens of Israel struggle to be Jewish within the confines of a Jewish state. She focuses on everyday experiences, on public interpretations of the possibilities of being Jewish in the context of state policy, and on media representations of conflicts between Jewish citizens over social, religious, and political issues. Despite Israel's claim that every religious community "is free, by law and in practice, to exercise its faith, observe its holidays ... and administer its internal affairs," Israel is foundationally a Jewish state. It privileges Orthodox regulation of who will be considered a Jew, of marriage and family law, and of conversion. This arrangement, and the constant tensions it has produced over the years, is often understood as a compromise between secular and religious political factions. But this religious-secular framing conceals broader patterns inherent in nationalist projects more generally. Using insights from Franz Kafka's writing as a theoretical lens through which the ethnographic data can be viewed, Dalsheim interrogates the relationship between nationalism and religion, asking what kinds of liberation have been achieved by Jews in the Jewish State. Ultimately the book argues, in a Kafkaesque reversal of the liberatory promise of national sovereignty, that national self-determination involves collective self-elimination.
Download or read book Israel in the Making written by Hagar Salamon and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The brilliant kaleidoscope of everyday creativity in Israel is thrown into relief in this study, which teases out the abiding national tensions and contradictions at work in the expressive acts of ordinary people. Hagar Salamon examines creativity in Israel’s public sphere through the lively discourse of bumper stickers, which have become a potent medium for identity and commentary on national and religious issues. Exploring the more private expressive sphere of women’s embroidery, she profiles a group of Jerusalem women who meet regularly and create "folk embroidery." Salamon also considers the significance of folk expressions at the intersections of the public and private that rework change and embrace transformation. Far ranging and insightful, Israel in the Making captures the complex creative essence of a nation state and vividly demonstrates how its citizens go about defining themselves, others, and their country every day.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Ethnography written by Italo Pardo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These ethnographically-based studies of diverse urban experiences across the world present cutting edge research and stimulate an empirically-grounded theoretical reconceptualization. The essays identify ethnography as a powerful tool for making sense of life in our rapidly changing, complex cities. They stress the point that while there is no need to fetishize fieldwork—or to view it as an end in itself —its unique value cannot be overstated. These active, engaged researchers have produced essays that avoid abstractions and generalities while engaging with the analytical complexities of ethnographic evidence. Together, they prove the great value of knowledge produced by long-term fieldwork to mainstream academic debates and, more broadly, to society.
Download or read book In the Company of Others written by Orit Abuhav and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Israel, anthropologists have customarily worked in their “home”—in the company of the society that they are studying. In the Company of Others: The Development of Anthropology in Israel by Orit Abuhav details the gradual development of the field, which arrived in Israel in the early twentieth century but did not have an official place in Israeli universities until the 1960s. Through archival research, observations and interviews conducted with active Israeli anthropologists, Abuhav creates a thorough picture of the discipline from its roots in the Mandate period to its current place in the Israeli academy. Abuhav begins by examining anthropology’s disciplinary borders and practices, addressing its relationships to neighboring academic fields and ties to the national setting in which it is practiced. Against the background of changes in world anthropology, she traces the development of Israeli anthropology from its pioneering first practitioners—led by Raphael Patai, Erich Brauer, and Arthur Ruppin—to its academic breakthrough in the 1960s with the foreign-funded Bernstein Israel Research Project. She goes on to consider the role and characteristics of the field’s professional association, the Israeli Anthropological Association (IAA), and also presents biographical sketches of fifty significant Israeli anthropologists. While Israeli anthropology has historically been limited in the numbers of its practitioners, it has been expansive in the scope of its studies. Abuhav brings a firsthand perspective to the crises and the highs, lows, and upheavals of the discipline in Israeli anthropology, which will be of interest to anthropologists, historians of the discipline, and scholars of Israeli studies.
Download or read book Walking on the Pages of the Word of God written by Aron Engberg and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-10-07 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Walking on the Pages of the Word of God Aron Engberg explores the religious language and identities of evangelical volunteer workers in contemporary Jerusalem. The volunteers are connected to Christian organizations which consider their work a natural consequence of the biblical promises to Israel and their responsibility to “bless the Jewish people”. Relying on ethnographic data of the discursive practices of the volunteers, the book explores a central puzzle of Zionist Christianity: the narrative production of Israel’s religious significance and its relationship to broader Christian language traditions. By focusing on the volunteers’ stories about themselves, the land and the Bible, Aron Engberg offers a convincing account about how the State of Israel is finding its way into evangelical identities.
Download or read book The Nun in the Synagogue written by Emma O’Donnell Polyakov and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-05-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nun in the Synagogue documents the religious and cultural phenomenon of Judeocentric Catholicism that arose in the wake of the Holocaust, fueled by survivors who converted to Catholicism and immigrated to Israel as well as by Catholics determined to address the anti-Judaism inherent in the Church. Through an ethnographic study of selected nuns and monks, Emma O’Donnell Polyakov explores how this Judeocentric Catholic phenomenon began and continues to take shape in Israel. This book is a case study in Catholic perceptions of Jews, Judaism, and the state of Israel during a time of rapidly changing theological and cultural contexts. In it, Polyakov listens to and analyzes the stories of individuals living on the border between Christian and Jewish identity—including Jewish converts to Catholicism who continue to harbor a strong sense of Jewish identity and philosemitic Catholics who attend synagogue services every Shabbat. Polyakov traces the societal, theological, and personal influences that have given rise to this phenomenon and presents a balanced analysis that addresses the hermeneutical problems of interpreting Jews through Christian frameworks. Ultimately, she argues that, despite its problems, this movement signals a pluralistic evolution of Catholic understandings of Judaism and may prove to be a harbinger of future directions in Jewish-Christian relations. Highly original and methodologically sophisticated, The Nun in the Synagogue is a captivating exploration of biographical narratives and reflections on faith, conversion, Holocaust trauma, Zionism, and religious identity that lays the groundwork for future research in the field.
Download or read book When the State Winks written by Michal Kravel-Tovi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious conversion is often associated with ideals of religious sincerity. But in a society in which religious belonging is entangled with ethnonational citizenship and confers political privilege, a convert might well have multilayered motives. Over the last two decades, mass non-Jewish immigration to Israel, especially from the former Soviet Union, has sparked heated debates over the Jewish state’s conversion policy and intensified suspicion of converts’ sincerity. When the State Winks carefully traces the performance of state-endorsed Orthodox conversion to highlight the collaborative labor that goes into the making of the Israeli state and its Jewish citizens. In a rich ethnographic narrative based on fieldwork in conversion schools, rabbinic courts, and ritual bathhouses, Michal Kravel-Tovi follows conversion candidates—mostly secular young women from a former Soviet background—and state conversion agents, mostly religious Zionists caught between the contradictory demands of their nationalist and religious commitments. She complicates the popular perception that conversion is a “wink-wink” relationship in which both sides agree to treat the converts’ pretenses of observance as real. Instead, she demonstrates how their interdependent performances blur any clear boundary between sincere and empty conversions. Alongside detailed ethnography, When the State Winks develops new ways to think about the complex connection between religious conversion and the nation-state. Kravel-Tovi emphasizes how state power and morality is managed through “winking”—the subtle exchanges and performances that animate everyday institutional encounters between state and citizen. In a country marked by tension between official religiosity and a predominantly secular Jewish population, winking permits the state to save its Jewish face.
Download or read book Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures written by Avriel Bar-Levav and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish culture places a great deal of emphasis on texts and their means of transmission. At various points in Jewish history, the primary mode of transmission has changed in response to political, geographical, technological, and cultural shifts. Contemporary textual transmission in Jewish culture has been influenced by secularization, the return to Hebrew and the emergence of modern Yiddish, and the new centers of Jewish life in the United States and in Israel, as well as by advancements in print technology and the invention of the Internet. Volume XXXI of Studies in Contemporary Jewry deals with various aspects of textual transmission in Jewish culture in the last two centuries. Essays in this volume examine old and new kinds of media and their meanings; new modes of transmission in fields such as Jewish music; and the struggle to continue transmitting texts under difficult political circumstances. Two essays analyze textual transmission in the works of giants of modern Jewish literature: S.Y. Agnon, in Hebrew, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, in Yiddish. Other essays discuss paratexts in the East, print cultures in the West, and the organization of knowledge in libraries and encyclopedias.
