Download or read book Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature written by E. Miller Budick and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2001-08-30 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how Israeli and American Jewish literatures share commonalities and affinities.
Download or read book The Boom in Contemporary Israeli Fiction written by Alan L. Mintz and published by UPNE. This book was released on 1997 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Five essays explore facets of what Mintz calls the complexity of cultural reverberations in Israeli fiction of the past two decades.
Download or read book Identity and Modern Israeli Literature written by Risa Domb and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores through literature the long and complex evolution of Jewish identity in Israel and the central role that language, ideology, memory, and culture have played in that journey. Language is possibly the most important component of any collective identity. Indeed, any nation can be better understood through its imaginative literature and never more so than in the case of Israeli literature, whose story runs in parallel with that of the State of Israel and with Zionism. The political task of nationalism directed the course of Israeli literature into a distinct national literature and in turn the literature participated in the formation of the nation. Language became inseparable from identity. But whose Hebrew is it? Through key texts by such authors as Y. H. Brenner, S. Y. Agnon, Nathan Shaham, Yoram Kaniuk, Aharon Appelfeld, A. B. Yehoshua, Gabriela Avigur-Rotem and Sami Michael, Risa Domb explores the connections between language, ideology, memory, culture, and identity, and asks whether ideology and identity are on an inescapable collision course.
Download or read book Essential Israel written by S. Ilan Troen and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most Americans are ill-prepared to engage thoughtfully in the increasingly serious debate about Israel, its place in the Middle East, and its relations with the United States. Essential Israel examines a wide variety of complex issues and current concerns in historical and contemporary contexts to provide readers with an intimate sense of the dynamic society and culture that is Israel today. The expert contributors to this volume address the Arab-Israeli conflict, the state of diplomatic efforts to bring about peace, Zionism and the impact of the Holocaust, the status of the Jewish state and Israeli democracy, foreign relations, immigration and Israeli identity, as well as literature, film, and the other arts. This unique and innovative volume provides solid grounding to understandings of Israel's history, politics, culture, and possibilities for the future.
Download or read book The Place of the Mediterranean in Modern Israeli Identity written by Alexandra Nocke and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-03-25 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While early Zionists envisioned the Jewish state as an outpost of Europe in the Middle East, modern Israel is—geographically speaking—located in Asia and incorporates elements from both “Orient and Occident.” This book sheds light on how the Mediterranean region, its history, traditions, climate, and attitudes have shaped Israeli lived experience and consciousness. It offers new perspectives on the evolving phenomenon of Yam Tikhoniut (hebr. Mediterraneanism), which centers around the longing to find a "natural" place in order that Israel be accommodated in the region, both culturally and politically. This book explores Mediterraneanism as reflected in popular music, literature, architecture, and daily life and analyzes the ways in which the notion comprises cultural identity, societal concepts, and political realities.
Download or read book Neuland written by Eshkol Nevo and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-02-27 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dori’s father has gone travelling in South America and, suffering from some kind of breakdown, following the death of his wife, he goes missing. Dori sets out to find him, leaving his wife and young son at home in Israel. Inbar is escaping from her life – from the grief that she can’t shake after her brother’s death, from the boyfriend she doesn’t love – and impulsively sets out for South America. While she’s there she meets a man who is searching for his father... In his most ambitious novel to date, Eshkol Nevo weaves a beautiful love story with two tales: the story of the wandering Jews who came to their Promised Land in the wake of the Second World War, embodied by Inbar’s grandmother Lily’s narrative of her sea journey over from Poland, and the story of a new generation of wandering Israelis who leave again to go backpacking, perhaps hoping that the distance will allow them to see their homeland more clearly. Neuland is a romantic adventure, a search for a father that leads to love, and a quest for an understanding of identity and for second chances. Is it ever possible to start again? Nevo has produced a daring, epic novel that asks profound questions, but the truth and warmth of his writing make it all-consuming and irresistibly loveable.
Download or read book American Hebrew Literature written by Michael Weingrad and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last one hundred years, the story of Jews in the United States has been, by and large, one of successful and enthusiastic Americanization. Hundreds of thousands of Jews began the twentieth century as new arrivals in a foreign land yet soon became shapers and definers of American culture itself. One of the clearest expressions of this transformation has been the quick linguistic march of immigrant Jews and their children from Yiddish to English. In this book, Michael Weingrad presents a counter history of American Jewish culture, one that tells the story of literature written by a group whose core identity was neither American nor Jewish American. These writers were ardently and nationalistically Jewish and, despite adopting a new country, their linguistic and cultural allegiance was to the Hebrew language. Producing poetry, short fiction, novels, essays, and journals, these writers sought to express a Jewish cultural nationalism through literature. Weingrad explores Hebrew literature in the United States from the emergence of a group of writers connected with the Hebraist movement in the early twentieth century to the present. Radically expanding and challenging our conceptions of American and Jewish identities in literature, the author offers wide-ranging cultural analyses and thoughtful readings of key works. American Hebrew Literature restores a lost piece of the canvas of Hebrew literature and Jewish culture in the twentieth century and invites readers to reimagine Jewish American writers of our own time.
Download or read book The Zionist Paradox written by Yigal Schwartz and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many contemporary Israelis suffer from a strange condition. Despite the obvious successes of the Zionist enterprise and the State of Israel, tension persists, with a collective sense that something is wrong and should be better. This cognitive dissonance arises from the disjunction between ÒplaceÓ (defined as what Israel is really like) and ÒPlaceÓ (defined as the imaginary community comprised of history, myth, and dream). Through the lens of five major works in Hebrew by writers Abraham Mapu (1853), Theodor Herzl (1902), Yosef Luidor (1912), Moshe Shamir (1948), and Amos Oz (1963), Schwartz unearths the core of this paradox as it evolves over one hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s.
Download or read book Israeli Humor written by Elliott Oring and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Derived from the Arabic word for "lie," the word "chizbat" was chosen by members of the Palmah to designate the particular form of narrative joke exchanged by these volunteer defenders of Jewish settlements in Israel during the uncertain years 1941—48. Elliott Oring concentrates his attention on how the chizbat represents the expression of a distinctly Israeli identity and the disparate elements of this identity: sabra/European, Arab/Israeli, East/West. He shows how chizbat humor depends, not so much on novelty or punch line, as on displaying these incongruities of Israeli identity. Oring also discusses the sociocultural context in which the chizbat developed and examines how various theories of humor apply to understanding the chizbat. In an appendix invaluable for the folklorist, Oring has translated hundreds of chizbat into English. some are from written sources and others are verbal accounts he obtained during his months of research in Israel.
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 To the End of the Land written by David Grossman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-09-21 with total page 661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A stunning novel that tells the powerful story of Ora, an Israli mother, and her extraordinary love for her son, Ofer, in a haunting meditation on war and family. “One of the few novels that feel as though they have made a difference to the world.” —The New York Times Book Review Just before his release from service in the Israeli army, Ora’s son Ofer is sent back to the front for a major offensive. In a fit of preemptive grief and magical thinking, so that no bad news can reach her, Ora sets out on an epic hike in the Galilee. She is joined by an unlikely companion—Avram, a former friend and lover with a troubled past—and as they sleep out in the hills, Ora begins to conjure her son. Ofer’s story, as told by Ora, becomes a surprising balm both for her and for Avram.
Download or read book Israeli Identity in Transition written by Anita Shapira and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-10-30 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last 15 years have witnessed deep changes in Israeli society. The naive solidarity of the early years of statehood has given way to more sophisticated approaches, and the atmosphere of the 1990s was conducive towards critique and open discussion. It was the age of the Oslo Accords, of the large wave of immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, economic growth and prosperity, and a concurrent feeling of security and well-being. Israel was fast becoming a postcapitalist society, a junior member of the global village. This newly acquired self-assurance led to openness towards unorthodox views on basic questions of Israeli identity. The new mood found expression in the cultural climate and in the public debates. The Zionist narrative in relation to the Palestinians; the early troubled absorption of immigrants from Islamic countries; the discrimination against the Arab Israeli minority; the delay in the 1950s in incorporating the memory of the Holocaust into collective memory; the Zionist attitude towards the Jewish Diaspora, all these were issues on the cultural and intellectual agenda, subjects of heated controversies. This book attempts to come to grips with these themes. The complex texture of Israeli society is drawn here by a number of hands, presenting up-to-date approaches, as viewed by experts.
Download or read book The Invention of the Land of Israel written by Shlomo Sand and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a homeland and when does it become a national territory? Why have so many people been willing to die for such places throughout the twentieth century? What is the essence of the Promised Land? Following the acclaimed and controversial The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the mysterious sacred land that has become the site of the longest-running national struggle of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Invention of the Land of Israel deconstructs the age-old legends surrounding the Holy Land and the prejudices that continue to suffocate it. Sand’s account dissects the concept of “historical right” and tracks the creation of the modern concept of the “Land of Israel” by nineteenth-century Evangelical Protestants and Jewish Zionists. This invention, he argues, not only facilitated the colonization of the Middle East and the establishment of the State of Israel; it is also threatening the existence of the Jewish state today.
Download or read book Identity and Territory written by Eyal Ben-Eliyahu and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, the relationship between Jews and their land has been a vibrant, much-debated topic within the Jewish world and in international political discourse. Identity and Territory explores how ancient conceptions of Israel—of both the land itself and its shifting frontiers and borders—have played a decisive role in forming national and religious identities across the millennia. Through the works of Second Temple period Jews and rabbinic literature, Eyal Ben-Eliyahu examines the role of territorial status, boundaries, mental maps, and holy sites, drawing comparisons to popular Jewish and Christian perceptions of space. Showing how space defines nationhood and how Jewish identity influences perceptions of space, Ben-Eliyahu uncovers varied understandings of the land that resonate with contemporary views of the relationship between territory and ideology.
Download or read book Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought written by Moshe Behar and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2013 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first anthology of modern Middle Eastern Jewish thought
Download or read book Our American Israel written by Amy Kaplan and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential account of America’s most controversial alliance that reveals how the United States came to see Israel as an extension of itself, and how that strong and divisive partnership plays out in our own time. Our American Israel tells the story of how a Jewish state in the Middle East came to resonate profoundly with a broad range of Americans in the twentieth century. Beginning with debates about Zionism after World War II, Israel’s identity has been entangled with America’s belief in its own exceptional nature. Now, in the twenty-first century, Amy Kaplan challenges the associations underlying this special alliance. Through popular narratives expressed in news media, fiction, and film, a shared sense of identity emerged from the two nations’ histories as settler societies. Americans projected their own origin myths onto Israel: the biblical promised land, the open frontier, the refuge for immigrants, the revolt against colonialism. Israel assumed a mantle of moral authority, based on its image as an “invincible victim,” a nation of intrepid warriors and concentration camp survivors. This paradox persisted long after the Six-Day War, when the United States rallied behind a story of the Israeli David subduing the Arab Goliath. The image of the underdog shattered when Israel invaded Lebanon and Palestinians rose up against the occupation. Israel’s military was strongly censured around the world, including notes of dissent in the United States. Rather than a symbol of justice, Israel became a model of military strength and technological ingenuity. In America today, Israel’s political realities pose difficult challenges. Turning a critical eye on the turbulent history that bound the two nations together, Kaplan unearths the roots of present controversies that may well divide them in the future.
Download or read book Above the Death Pits Beneath the Flag written by Jackie Feldman and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Israeli youth voyages to Poland are one of the most popular and influential forms of transmission of Holocaust memory in Israeli society. Through intensive participant observation, group discussions, student diaries, and questionnaires, the author demonstrates how the State shapes Poland into a living deathscape of Diaspora Jewry. In the course of the voyage, students undergo a rite de passage, in which they are transformed into victims, victorious survivors, and finally witnesses of the witnesses. By viewing, touching, and smelling Holocaust-period ruins and remains, by accompanying the survivors on the sites of their suffering and survival, crying together and performing commemorative ceremonies at the death sites, students from a wide variety of family backgrounds become carriers of Shoah memory. They come to see the State and its defense as the romanticized answer to the Shoah. These voyages are a bureaucratic response to uncertainty and fluidity of identity in an increasingly globalized and fragmented society. This study adds a measured and compassionate ethical voice to ideological debates surrounding educational and cultural forms of encountering the past in contemporary Israel, and raises further questions about the representation of the Holocaust after the demise of the last living witnesses.
