Download or read book Israeli Identities written by Yair Auron and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of identity is one of present-day Israel's cardinal and most pressing issues. In a comprehensive examination of the identity issue, this study focuses on attitudes toward the Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora; the Holocaust and its repercussions on identity; attitudes toward the state of Israel and Zionism; and attitudes toward Jewish religion. Israeli Arab students (Israeli Palestinians) and Jewish Israeli students were asked corresponding questions regarding their identity. It was found that, rather than lessening its impact over the years, the Holocaust has become a major factor, at times the paramount factor in Jewish identity. Similarly, among Palestinians the Naqba has become a major factor in Palestinian-Israeli identity. However, the overall results show that the identity of a Jewish citizen of Israel is not purely Israeli, nor is it purely Jewish. It is, to varying degrees, a synthesis of Jewish and Israeli components, depending on the particular sub-groups or sub-identities. The same holds for Israeli-Arabs or Israeli-Palestinians who have neither a purely Israeli identity nor a purely Palestinian (or Arab) one.
Download or read book Israeli Identity written by David Tal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many years before and after the establishment of the state of Israel, the belief that Israel is a western state remained unchallenged. This belief was founded on the predominantly western composition of the pre-statehood Jewish community known as the Yishuv. The relatively homogenous membership of Israeli/Jewish society as it then existed was soon altered with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Middle Eastern countries during the early years of statehood. Seeking to retain the western character of the Jewish state, the Israeli government initiated a massive acculturation project aimed at westernizing the newcomers. More recently, scholars and intellectuals began to question the validity and logic of that campaign. With the emergence of new forms of identity, or identities, two central questions emerged: to what extent can we accept the ways in which people define themselves? And on a more fundamental level, what weight should we give to the ways in which people define themselves? This book suggests ways of tackling these questions and provides varying perspectives on identity, put forward by scholars interested in the changing nature of Israeli identity. Their observations and conclusions are not exclusive, but inclusive, suggesting that there cannot be one single Israeli identity, but several. Tackling the issue of identity, this multidisciplinary approach is an important contribution to existing literature and will be invaluable for scholars and students interested in cultural studies, Israel, and the wider Middle East.
Download or read book Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen written by Yosefa Loshitzky and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2002 — A Choice Outstanding Academic Book The struggle to forge a collective national identity at the expense of competing plural identities has preoccupied Israeli society since the founding of the state of Israel. In this book, Yosefa Loshitzky explores how major Israeli films of the 1980s and 1990s have contributed significantly to the process of identity formation by reflecting, projecting, and constructing debates around Israeli national identity. Loshitzky focuses on three major foundational sites of the struggle over Israeli identity: the Holocaust, the question of the Orient, and the so-called (in an ironic historical twist of the "Jewish question") Palestinian question. The films she discusses raise fundamental questions about the identity of Jewish Holocaust survivors and their children (the "second generation"), Jewish immigrants from Muslim countries or Mizrahim (particularly the second generation of Israeli Mizrahim), and Palestinians. Recognizing that victimhood marks all the identities represented in the films under discussion, Loshitzky does not treat each identity group as a separate and coherent entity, but rather attempts to see the conflation, interplay, and conflict among them.
Download or read book Identity Place and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel written by Yaron Shemer and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel , Yaron Shemer presents the most comprehensive and systematic study to date of Mizrahi (Oriental-Jewish or Arab-Jewish) films produced in Israel in the last several decades. Through an analysis of dozens of films the book illustrates how narratives, characters, and space have been employed to give expression to Mizrahi ethnic identity and to situate the Mizrahi within the broader context of the Israeli societal fabric. The struggle over identity and the effort to redraw ethnic boundaries have taken place against the backdrop of a long-standing Zionist view of the Mizrahi as an inferior other whose “Levantine” culture posed a threat to the Western-oriented Zionist enterprise. In its examination of the nature and dynamics of Mizrahi cinema (defined by subject-matter), the book engages the sensitive topic of Mizrahi ethnicity head-on, confronting the conventional notion of Israeli society as a melting pot and the widespread dismissal of ethnic divisions in the country. Shemer explores the continuous marginalization of the Mizrahi in contemporary Israeli cinema and the challenge some Mizrahi films offer to the subjugation of this ethnic group. He also studies the role cultural policies and institutional power in Israel have played in shaping Mizrahi cinema and the creation of a Mizrahi niche in cinema. In a broader sense, this pioneering work is a probing exploration of Israeli culture and society through the prism of film and cinematic expression. It sheds light on the play of ethnicity, class, gender, and religion in contemporary Israel, and on the heated debates surrounding Zionist ideology and identity politics. By charting a new territory of academic inquiry grounded in an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, the study contributes to the formation of “Mizrahi Cinema” as a recognized and vibrant scholarly field.
Download or read book Israel s Jewish Identity Crisis written by Yaacov Yadgar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-30 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative and provocative study tackling the main assumptions surrounding Israel's claim to Jewish identity.
Download or read book The Shaping of Israeli Identity written by Robert Wistrich and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-05 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dozen essays document the evolution of national myths in Israel as the heroic figures and events of independence and survival transmute into blind fanaticism, great-power manipulation, and traditional colonialism and genocide. Without passing any judgement on the changes, they delve into the meani
Download or read book Israel and the Politics of Jewish Identity written by Asher Cohen and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2000-06-16 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of religion in a democratic society Best Book award given by the Israel Political Science Association Since the 1980s, relationships between secular and religious Israelis have gone from bad to worse. What was formerly a politics of accommodation, one whose main objective was the avoidance of strife through "arrangements" and compromises, has become a winner-take-all, zero-sum game. The conflict is not over who gets what. Rather, it is a conflict over the very character of the polity, a struggle to define Israel's collective character. In Israel and the Politics of Jewish Identity Asher Cohen and Bernard Susser show how this transformation has been caused by structural changes in Israel's public sphere. Surveying many different levels of public life, they explore the change of Israel's politics from a dominant-party system to a balanced two-camp system. They trace the rise of the Haredi parties and the growing consonance of religiosity with right-wing politics. Other topics include the new Basic Laws on Freedom, Dignity, and Occupation; the effects of massive immigration of secular Jews from the former Soviet Union; the greater emphasis on liberal "good government"; and the rise of an aggressive investigative press and electronic media.
Download or read book Words and Stones written by Daniel Lefkowitz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-22 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social and ethnic identity are nowhere more enmeshed with language than in Israel. Words and Stones explores the politics of identity in Israel through an analysis of the social life of language. By examining the social choices Israelis make when they speak, and the social meanings such choices produce, Daniel Lefkowitz reveals how Israeli identities are negotiated through language. Lefkowitz studies three major languages and their role in the social lives of Israelis: Hebrew, the dominant language, Arabic, and English. He reveals their complex interrelationship by showing how the language a speaker chooses to use is as important as the language they choose not to use - in the same way that a claim to an Israeli identity is simultaneously a claim against other, opposing identities. The result is a compelling analysis of how the identity of "Israeliness" is linguistically negotiated in the three-way struggle among Ashkenazi (Jewish), Mizrahi (Jewish), and Palestinian (Arab) Israelis. Lefkowitz's ethnography of language-use is both thoroughly anthropological and thoroughly linguistic, and provides a comprehensive view of the role language plays in Israeli society. His work will appeal to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, anthropology, and linguistic anthropology, as well as students and scholars of Israel and the Middle East.
Download or read book Clash of Identities written by Baruch Kimmerling and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By revisiting the past hundred years of shared Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli history, Baruch Kimmerling reveals surprising relations of influence between a stateless indigenous society and the settler-immigrants who would later form the state of Israel. Shattering our assumptions about these two seemingly irreconcilable cultures, Kimmerling composes a sophisticated portrait of one side's behavior and characteristics and the way in which they irrevocably shaped those of the other. Kimmerling focuses on the clashes, tensions, and complementarities that link Jewish, Palestinian, and Israeli identities. He explores the phenomena of reciprocal relationships between Jewish and Arab communities in mandatory Palestine, relations between state and society in Israel, patterns of militarism, the problems of jurisdiction in an immigrant-settler society, and the ongoing struggle of Israel to achieve legitimacy as both a Jewish and a democratic state. By merging Israeli and Jewish studies with a vast body of scholarship on Palestinians and the Middle East, Kimmerling introduces a unique conceptual framework for analyzing the cultural, political, and material overlap of both societies. A must read for those concerned with Israel and the relations between Jews and Arabs, Clash of Identities is a provocative exploration of the ever-evolving, always-contending identities available to Israelis and Palestinians and the fascinating contexts in which they take form.
Download or read book The Pursuit of Peace and the Crisis of Israeli Identity written by D. Waxman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-09-02 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a theoretically-informed analysis of the way in which Israeli national identity has shaped Israel's foreign policy. By linking domestic identity politics to Israeli foreign policy, it reveals how a crisis of Israeli identity inflamed the debate in Israel over the Oslo peace process.
Download or read book Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine written by Zvi Gitelman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the USSR collapsed, ethnic identities were imposed by the state. This book analyzes how and why Jews decided what being Jewish meant to them after the state dissolved and describes the historical evolution of Jewish identities. Surveys of more than 6,000 Jews in the early and late 1990s reveal that Russian and Ukrainian Jews have a deep sense of their Jewishness but are uncertain what it means. They see little connection between Judaism and being Jewish. Their attitudes toward Judaism, intermarriage and Jewish nationhood differ dramatically from those of Jews elsewhere. Many think Jews can believe in Christianity and do not condemn marrying non-Jews. This complicates their connections with other Jews, resettlement in Israel, the United States and Germany, and the rebuilding of public Jewish life in Russia and Ukraine. Post-Communist Jews, especially the young, are transforming religious-based practices into ethnic traditions and increasingly manifesting their Jewishness in public.
Download or read book Israeli Cinema written by Miri Talmon and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With top billing at many film forums around the world, as well as a string of prestigious prizes, including consecutive nominations for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, Israeli films have become one of the most visible and promising cinemas in the first decade of the twenty-first century, an intriguing and vibrant site for the representation of Israeli realities. Yet two decades have passed since the last wide-ranging scholarly overview of Israeli cinema, creating a need for a new, state-of-the-art analysis of this exciting cinematic oeuvre. The first anthology of its kind in English, Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion presents a collection of specially commissioned articles in which leading Israeli film scholars examine Israeli cinema as a prism that refracts collective Israeli identities through the medium and art of motion pictures. The contributors address several broad themes: the nation imagined on film; war, conflict, and trauma; gender, sexuality, and ethnicity; religion and Judaism; discourses of place in the age of globalism; filming the Palestinian Other; and new cinematic discourses. The authors' illuminating readings of Israeli films reveal that Israeli cinema offers rare visual and narrative insights into the complex national, social, and multicultural Israeli universe, transcending the partial and superficial images of this culture in world media.
Download or read book Mapping Jewish Identities written by Laurence J. Silberstein and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2000-07 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Jewish identity flourishing or in decline? Community leaders and scholarly researchers continually seek to determine the attitudes, beliefs, and activities that best measure Jewish identity. At issue, according to these studies, is the very survival of the Jewish community itself. But such studies rarely ask what actually is being examined when we attempt to assess "Jewish identity" or any identity. Most tend to assume that identity is a preexisting, relatively fixed frame of reference reflecting shared cultural and historical experiences. Drawing on recent work in such fields as cultural studies, poststructuralist theory, postmodern philosophy, and feminist theory, Mapping Jewish Identities challenges this premise. Contesting conventional approaches to Jewish identity, contributors argue that Jewish identity should be conceptualized as an ongoing dynamic process of "becoming" in response to changing cultural and social conditions rather than as a stable defining body of traits. Contributors, including Daniel Boyarin, Laura Levitt, Adi Ophir, and Gordon Bearn, examine such topics as American Jews' desires to connect with a lost immigrant past through photography, the complicated function of the Holocaust in the identity formation of contemporary Jews, the impact of the struggle with the Palestinians on Israeli group identity construction, and the ways in which repressed voices such as those of women, Mizrahim, and Israeli Arabs have changed our ways of thinking about Jewish and Israeli identity.
Download or read book The Limits of Coexistence written by Rebecca L. Torstrick and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assesses the factors that will determine whether Jews and Palestinians can live together in peace
Download or read book Jewish Identities in Contemporary Europe written by Andrea Reiter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing an assessment of Jewish identity, this volume presents critical engagements with a number of Jewish writers and filmmakers from a variety of European countries, including Austria, France, Germany, Poland, and the UK. The novels and films discussed explore the meaning of being Jewish in Europe today, and investigate the extent to which this experience is shaped by factors that lie outside the national context, notably by the relationship to Israel. As the recent attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and the targeting of a Jewish supermarket in Paris, demonstrate, these questions are more pressing than ever, and will challenge Jews, as well as Jewish writers and intellectuals, as they explore the answers. This book was originally published as a special issue of Jewish Culture and History.
Download or read book Re envisioning Jewish Identities written by Efraim Sicher and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative study combines readings of contemporary literature, art, and performance to explore the diverse and complex directions of contemporary Jewish culture in Israel and the diaspora.
Download or read book Jewish Identities in East and Southeast Asia written by Jonathan Goldstein and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-11-13 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jewish communities of East and Southeast Asia display an impressive diversity. Jonathan Goldstein’s book covers the period from 1750 and focuses on seven of the area’s largest cities and trading emporia: Singapore, Manila, Taipei, Harbin, Shanghai, Rangoon, and Surabaya. The book isolates five factors which contributed to the formation of transnational, multiethnic, and multicultural identity: memory, colonialism, regional nationalism, socialism, and Zionism. It emphasizes those factors which preserved specifically Judaic aspects of identity. Drawing extensively on interviews conducted in all seven cities as well as governmental, institutional, commercial, and personal archives, censuses, and cemetery data, the book provides overviews of communal life and intimate portraits of leading individuals and families. Jews were engaged in everything from business and finance to revolutionary activity. Some collaborated with the Japanese while others confronted them on the battlefield. The book attempts to treat fully and fairly the wide spectrum of Jewish experience ranging from that of the ultra-Orthodox to the completely secular.
