2022 Archive of Books

ASAD'S AUTOCRATIC DYNASTY IN SYRIA: CIVIL WAR AND THE ROLE OF REGIONAL AND GLOBAL POWERS

By: Moshe Maoz

(Liverpool University Press, 2022, ISBN-10: ‎1789761999, ISBN-13: 978-1789761993 140 pages)

In 2011, the diplomatic and expert consensus was that Bashar al-Asad's regime would fail, causing Syria to disintegrate into several ethnic enclaves or mini-states. A decade later and Bashar is still in control, having defeated the rebels and gained the support of Russia. The years of internal warfare have brought about changes in the spectrum of parties involved in the Syrian state, and the final outcome is inevitably going to be shaped by geo-politics. The Alawi minority still in large measure controls the Sunni-Muslim (Arab) majority. The other players are a gallery of ever changing allegiances: ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, and many other radical Islamic groups; the Muslim Kurdish and Christian Arab communities; as well as Shii Lebanese Hizballah. External horizon players are Iran; Sunni Turkey and Saudi Arabia; Jewish Israel; the United States and Russia. This study aims to analyze the agendas, actions, and interrelations of these various actors from 2011 until the present. It will discuss their ongoing politics and assess forthcoming developments. Both Iran and Russia continue to support Bashar, but compete for political, military, and economic influence. The US has greatly reduced involvement, keeping only 900 troops in northeastern Syria, to protect its Kurdish allies and fight against ISIS. Turkey still occupies parts of northern Syria, with the aim of eliminating the Kurdish forces. Syrian and Russian military attempts to conquer this area continue sporadically. The Israeli air force has attacked Iranian and Hizballah positions with the tacit approval of Russia. However, Russias war on Ukraine in February 2022 may result in restricting Israeli interdictions and instead enhance cooperation with Tehran in order to counter the US and NATO. Both Russia and Iran have been incapable of reconstructing the massively destroyed Syrian infrastructure; the US and Europe are reluctant to contribute due to Bashars continued Alawi minority-based autocratic and corrupt rule.

  

UNSCOP AND THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT: THE ROAD TO PARTITION

By: Elad Ben-Dror

(Routledge, November 2022, ISBN 9781032059631, 284 Pages)

https://www.routledge.com/UNSCOP-and-the-Arab-Israeli-Conflict-The-Road-to-Partition/Ben-Dror/p/book/9781032059631

This book provides the first comprehensive account of the work of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), constituted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1947 to study the situation in Palestine at the end of the British Mandate and make recommendations about its political future.

Utilizing a wealth of archival documentation, some of it never before studied, Elad Ben-Dror explores the various aspects of UNSCOP’s activity to understand how it came to determine the fate of the country’s inhabitants. The book analyzes the methods and motivations of the various members, with special attention given to the personal viewpoint of each member of the committee. Through this Ben-Dror shows that the partition recommendation emerged after a long process of study, debate, and compromise that was very much dependent on the characters and circumstances of the individual members of the committee.

UNSCOP and the Arab-Israeli Conflict will be a key text in understanding the role of UNSCOP in shaping the modern Middle East. It will be appropriate for scholars and students of political science, Palestine and Israeli history, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the UN and diplomacy, and conflict resolution.

 

NOT ALONE: ISRAELI FOREIGN POLICY

By: Uri Bialer 

(Ben Gurion Research Institute 2022)

Available in Hebrew - click here for more

Uri Bialer lays a foundation for understanding the principal aspects of Israeli foreign policy from the early days of the state's existence to the Oslo Accords. He presents a synthetic reading of sources, many of which are recently declassified official documents, to cover Israeli foreign policy over a broad chronological expanse. Bialer focuses on the objectives of Israel's foreign policy and its actualization, especially as it concerned immigration policy, oil resources, and the procurement of armaments. In addition to identifying important state actors, Bialer highlights the many figures who had no defined diplomatic roles but were influential in establishing foreign policy goals. He shows how foreign policy was essential to the political, economic, and social well-being of the state and how it helped to deal with Israel's most intractable problem, the resolution of the conflict with Arab states and the Palestinians.

 

PROFILES IN PEACE: VOICES OF PEACEBUILDERS IN THE MIDST OF THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT

By: Ron Kronish

(L.E.A.R.H.N. Peacebuilding Publications, 2022; ISBN: 978-1-7344700-7-9, ISBN-13 : ‎978-1734470093 318 pages)

*Available on Amazon Kindle and paperback

This new book traces the lives of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs in Israel and Palestine who have dedicated their lives to building peaceful relations among the two peoples as well as between individual people who seek to live in peace and harmony with one another. These people have acted courageously and consistently in their work for peace. In this book, the author profiles the lives, thoughts, feelings and actions of six important peacebuilders -- men and women, secular and religious, 3 Jewish Israelis: Rabbi Michael Melchior, Professor Galia Golan and Mrs. Hadassah Froman; and 3 Palestinian Arabs: Professor Mohammed Dajani, Ms. Huda Abuarquob, and Bishop Munib Younan. The reader learns about their visions for peace and their activities to bring their ideals to fruition in the real world of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Too many people have given up on peace. In contrast, the people in this book persevere for peace, thus keeping a flicker of hope alive, not only for Israelis and Palestinians who live in the same land, but also for people everywhere who continue to yearn for a peace agreement to be reached in the region.

 

HOLLYWOOD AND ISRAEL: A HISTORY

By: Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman

(Columbia University Press, 2022, ISBN Paperback: 9780231183413; ISBN Hardcover: 9780231183406, ISBN e-book: 9780231544924, 368 pages)

From Frank Sinatra’s early pro-Zionist rallying to Steven Spielberg’s present-day peacemaking, Hollywood has long enjoyed a “special relationship” with Israel. This book offers a groundbreaking account of this relationship, both on and off the screen. Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman investigate the many ways in which Hollywood’s moguls, directors, and actors have supported or challenged Israel for more than seven decades. They explore the complex story of Israel’s relationship with American Jewry and illuminate how media and soft power have shaped the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Shaw and Goodman draw on a vast range of archival sources to demonstrate how show business has played a pivotal role in crafting the U.S.-Israel alliance. They probe the influence of Israeli diplomacy on Hollywood’s output and lobbying activities, but also highlight the limits of ideological devotion in high-risk entertainment industries. The book details the political involvement with Israel—and Palestine—of household names such as Eddie Cantor, Kirk Douglas, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand, Vanessa Redgrave, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert De Niro, and Natalie Portman. It also spotlights the role of key behind-the-scenes players like Dore Schary, Arthur Krim, Arnon Milchan, and Haim Saban.

Bringing the story up to the moment, Shaw and Goodman contend that the Hollywood-Israel relationship might now be at a turning point. Shedding new light on the political power that images and celebrity can wield, Hollywood and Israel shows the world’s entertainment capital to be an important player in international affairs.

 

Tony Shaw is professor of contemporary history at the University of Hertfordshire.

Giora Goodman, a historian, chairs the Department of Multidisciplinary Studies at Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee.

 

DWELLING ON THE GREEN LINE: PRIVATIZE AND RULE IN ISRAEL/PALESTINE

By: Gabriel Schwake

(Cambridge University Press, 2022, ISBN online: 9781009071246, 278 pages)

Concealed within the walls of settlements along the Green-Line, the border between Israel and the occupied West-Bank, is a complex history of territoriality, privatisation and multifaceted class dynamics. Since the late 1970s, the state aimed to expand the heavily populated coastal area eastwards into the occupied Palestinian territories, granting favoured groups of individuals, developers and entrepreneurs the ability to influence the formation of built space as a means to continuously develop and settle national frontiers. As these settlements developed, they became a physical manifestation of the relationship between the political interest to control space and the ability to form it. Telling a socio-political and economic story from an architectural and urban history perspective, Gabriel Schwake demonstrates how this production of space can be seen not only as a cultural phenomenon, but also as one that is deeply entangled with geopolitical agendas.

  

Published: Iyunim 37

(Summer 2022)

Multidisciplinary Studies in Israel and Modern Jewish Society (Hebrew)

Editors: Avi Bareli, Ofer Shiff | Assistant Editor: Orna Miller | Editorial Board: Avi Bareli, Avner Ben-Amos, Kimmy Caplan, Amir Goldstein, Danny Gutwein, Menachem Hofnung, Nissim Leon, Svetlana Natkovich, Kobi Peled, Shalom Ratzabi, Ofer Shiff.

Iyunim is a multidisciplinary research journal which holds two series: the semi-annual series and the thematic series and contains articles in various fields that specialize in modern world Jewish society and Israeli society and state. The articles address these issues from a variety of disciplines from all fields of humanities and social sciences.

Contents: Tal Elmaliach Danny Gutwein Ben-Gurion’s Attack on Mapam, 1953: Ideology as Politics * Itzhak Pass The Canaanites Following the Assassination Attempt on Minister of Transport David-Zvi Pinkas in 1952 * Chen-Tzion Nayot The Etzel Propaganda Trials during the ‘Revolt’, 1944-1948 * Itzhak Greenberg The General Staff’s Discussions on the Issue of Borders after the Six Day War  *  Giora Goodman Film Censorship in Israel and the Cold War, 1948-1967 * Roy Horovitz Lea Koenig and Miriam Zohar: Theater Actresses as Memory Agents * Tomer Mazarib Bedouin Settlement in Arab Towns and Villages in the Galilee, 1918-1948 * Shaul Marmari National and Transnational Trade: Israel and the Jewish-Yemeni Diaspora at the Red Sea * Asaf Yedidya Shaul Pinchas Rabinovich (Schepher) and the Pantheon of Heroes of Hibbat Zion * Asaf Shamis A. D. Gordon’s Green Zionism                                

The issue is available online: http://www.bgu.ac.il/iyunim (Iyunim website).

It will be available also in bookstores, academic libraries, the online bookstore 'Kotar' (https://kotar.cet.ac.il) and at the official distributor 'Sifrut Achshav'

(https://sifrut.co.il) ; info@sifrut.co.il; 03-9229175

 omiller@bgu.ac.il  | http://www.bgu.ac.il/iyunim  |  08-6596940 

Click here for Contents

  

COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE: THEORY AND LESSONS FROM ISRAEL

By: Neta Sher-Hadar, Lihi Lahat, and Itzhak Galnoor

(Palgrave Macmillan 2021, eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-45807-2, Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-45809-6, Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-45806-5, 298 pages)

This book is the first to explore collaborative governance arrangements in Israel. It offers a new, modular definition of collaborative governance, focusing on its contributions toward public values and democracy. The book discusses different kinds of collaborations, their scope, implications and impact on governability in Israel, a country which provides an interesting setting for learning about collaborative governance, given its heterogenous population and the nature of the relationship between the state’s civil service, the business sector and the civil society. The book presents examples derived from local and central government levels, and from policy areas such as education, regulation and local government.

Click here for the PDF

 

WORDS LIKE DAGGERS: THE POLITICAL POETRY OF THE NEGEV BEDOUIN 

By: Kobi Peled

(Brill, 2022, ISBN: 978-90-0450181-2, 315 pages)

The book explores the political poetry recited by the Negev Bedouin from the late Ottoman period to the late twentieth century. By closely reading fifty poems Peled sheds light on the poets’ sentiments and worldviews. To get to the bottom of the issues that inspired their poetry, he weaves an interpretive web informed by the study of language, culture and history. The poems reveal that the poets were perfectly aware of the workings of the power systems that took control of their lives and lifestyle. Their poetry indicates that they did not remain silent but practiced their art in the face of their hardships, observing the collapse of their world with a mixture of despair and inspiration, bitterness and wit.

https://brill.com/view/title/61312?language=en

 

WOMEN, SECULARISM AND BELIEF: A SOCIOLOGY OF BELIEF IN THE JEWISH-ISRAELI SECULAR LANDSCAPE

By: Hagar Lahav

(Van Leer Institute Press and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2021, Hebrew)

Women, Secularism and Belief is an original and groundbreaking book that traces the supposed “anomaly” of secular Jewish Israeli women who believe in god by combining the knowledge areas of sociology, Jewish and Christian theology, religion studies, and feminist thought. The book points out the relatively large extent of the secular-believer phenomenon (according to a rough estimate, secular-believers constitute about one-quarter of the Jewish population in Israel), identifies new feminist voices of secular-believer women, and brings their stories to the fore. It demonstrates convincingly that secular belief is not a social anomaly. Instead, it is a component of identity that is quite common in Israel but has not been studied until now because of the uncritical clinging to the customary epistemic assumptions, primarily the assumption that religion and secularism, or belief and secularism, are contrary categories.

https://www.vanleer.org.il/en/publication/women-secularism-and-belief/

 

FROM RUSSIA TO ISRAEL – AND BACK? CONTEMPORARY TRANSNATIONAL RUSSIAN ISRAELI DIASPORA

By: Vladimir Ze’ev Khanin

(De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022, Ebook ISBN: 9783110668643, Hardcover ISBN: 9783110665161, 327 pages)

Of about a million Jews that arrived to Israel from the (former) USSR after 1989 some 12% left the country by the end of 2017. It is estimated that about a half of them left "back" for the FSU, and the rest for the USA, Canada and the Western Europe. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of this specific Jewish Israeli Diaspora group through cutting-edge approaches in the social sciences, and examines the settlement patterns of Israeli Russian-speaking emigrants, their identity, social demographic profile, reasons of emigration, their economic achievements, identification, and status vis-à-vis host Jewish and non-Jewish environment, vision of Israel, migration interests and behavior, as well as their social and community networks, elites and institutions. Vladimir Ze’ev Khanin makes a significant contribution to migration theory, academic understanding of transnational Diasporas, and sheds a new light on the identity and structure of contemporary Israeli society. The book is based on the unique statistics from Israeli and other Government sources and sociological information obtained from the author’s first of this kind on-going study of Israeli Russian-speaking emigrant communities in different regions of the world.

 

THE ISRAELI ECONOMY: A STORY OF SUCCESS AND COSTS 

By: Joseph Zeira

(Princeton University Press, 2021, ISBN: 9780691199450, 408 pages)

In 1922, there were ninety thousand Jews in Palestine, a small country in a poor and volatile region. Today, Israel has a population of nine million and is one of the richest countries in the world. The Israeli Economy tells the story of this remarkable transformation, shedding critical new light on Israel’s rapid economic growth.

Joseph Zeira takes readers from those early days to today, describing how Israel’s economic development occurred amid intense fighting with the Palestinians and neighboring Arab countries. He reveals how the new state’s astonishing growth continued into the early 1970s, and traces this growth to public investment in education and to large foreign transfers. Zeira analyzes the costs of the Arab-Israeli conflict, demonstrating how economic output could be vastly greater with a comprehensive peace. He discusses how Israel went through intensive neoliberal economic policies in recent decades, and shows how these policies not only failed to enhance economic performance, but led to significant social inequality.

Based on more than two decades of groundbreaking research, The Israeli Economy is an in-depth survey of a modern economy that has experienced rapid growth, wars, immigration waves, and other significant shocks. It thus offers important lessons for nations around the world.

 

HEBRAIZING SHERLOCK HOLMES: A LITERARY AND IDEOLOGICAL AFFAIR FROM THE BRITISH MANDATE PERIOD 

By: Reuven Gafni

(Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2022, ISBN: 978-965-217-449-9, 231 Pages, Hebrew)

Hebraizing Sherlock Holmes is the story of the first translations of Arthur Conan-Doyle’s detective stories into Hebrew, and of the cultural and ideological import of the famous detective’s character to Eretz-Israel, during the British Mandate period. This unique story is presented alongside the ideological background of the creation of the first translations; The surprising controversy that often accompanied their appearance; and the various ways in which Holmes` character was used in an ideological or political context, within the local Jewish community. The literary, cultural and ideological saga unfolded in the book, traces the main characters who were involved in it, including translators, editors, journalists, critics, playwrights and publishers. It is also a lens, through which some of the fundamental issues that the Jewish cultural world debated in those years are presented: What would be the best way to create a national Hebrew literature? What should be included in it or left outside? What is the status of translated Hebrew literature? Moreover is there a difference, in this context, between children’s literature and adult literature? The tracing of how translations of these original English stories were created, distributed and received, also reveals the complex attitude of the local Jewish community to English literature and culture in general, at a time when relations between the Jews and the British authorities were becoming tense and complex. 

 

ATTRITION, ARMY AND CIVILIANS ON THE NORTHEAST FRONT, 1967-1970 

By: Eran Eldar

(Bar-Ilan University Press, 2022, ISBN: 978-965-226-609-5, 458 Pages, Hebrew)

The new circumstances following the Six Day War required the IDF to change from being an offensive army to one that carried out security and defense missions. While the Arab countries licked their wounds, the Palestinian terror organizations began guerilla and terror operations against Israel, primarily from the Jordanian, Syrian, and Lebanese borders, with the aim of exhausting the IDF and, especially, the Israeli home front. The IDF had to undertake operations that were different from those it had been used to, and the Israeli security system, headed by Moshe Dayan as defense minister, seemed to have difficulty in adapting to this type of military confrontation (as manifested, for example, in the IDF’s operation in the Fatah camp in Karameh). From 1967 to 1970, Israeli towns and villages in the Jordan Valley and the Beit She’an Valley suffered shelling and infiltration of terrorists from Jordanian territory. These localities were not prepared for the attacks from the east and complained that the country’s leadership and the IDF had left them on their own to face the Palestinian and Jordanian fire.

In this book Eran Eldar describes and analyzes the years of the War of Attrition on Israel’s northeastern front: on the one hand, the entrenchment of the Palestinian terror organizations in Jordan and Lebanon, their military and propaganda activity, and their complex relations with King Hussein of Jordan and the Lebanese government, and on the other hand, the daily coping of the inhabitants of the Jordan Valley and the Beit She’an Valley, who felt they had been abandoned.

 

ZEVULUN HAMMER – A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY

By: Aharon Kampinski

(Bar-Ilan University Press, 2021, ISBN: 978-965-226-514-2, 278 pages, in Hebrew)
 

The late Zevulun Hammer (1936-1998) was one of the prominent leaders of the National Religious Party (NRP) in Israel, and this book traces his political path. From 1969 he served as a Member of Knesset, and later served as Minister of Welfare, Minister of Religions, Minister of Education and Deputy Prime Minister. Hammer successfully navigated political waters, from being active in the NRP's youth movement in the early 1960s to the leadership positions he reached at a relatively young age. Hammer led one of the most dramatic upheavals in a political party in Israel as the leader of the youth faction, and ultimately succeeded in unseating the party elders.

Zevulun Hammer's story is not just the story of the man, it is the story of a generation: the leadership generation of the national-religious movement that rebelled against the generation above it, but found itself - after two decades - at the same leadership point as before it. A generation that sought to change world orders, but was ultimately forced to make do with preserving the interests of religious Zionism, in a reality of political power struggles threatening to erode them. A generation that tried to carry the flag of the Greater Land of Israel, but moderated its views when political reality allowed for a political breakthrough. A generation that sought to strengthen Torah religious perceptions, but later turned out to be even more liberal than its ancestors. A generation that sought to strive for general leadership, but was eventually forced to settle for a sectoral party.

 

Now available in Hebrew:

Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality

By: Ian Lustick

Resling Press has just published a Hebrew translation Paradigm Lost with a new preface, along with a 25% discount code (copy and paste: P3TJSP26).

לכל מכותבי הוצאת רסלינג שלום,
הטבה של 25% הנחה בשימוש קוד קופון P3TJSP26 (להעתיק ולהדביק) עבור צאת הספר:

הפרדיגמה האבודה 
מפתרון שתי המדינות למציאות המדינה האחת

מאת: איאן לוסטיק

ספרו המעולה של איאן לוסטיק, הפרדיגמה האבודה, מעלה את הטענה שכיום כל משא ומתן להשגת פתרון שתי מדינות בין הים התיכון לנהר הירדן נידון לכישלון ומזיק. היהודים הישראלים והערבים הפלסטינים יוכלו ליהנות מהדמוקרטיה שהם ראויים לה רק בעוד כמה עשורים של מאבק אל מול ההשלכות מרחיקות הלכת, אף אם במקורן לא היו מכוונות, של מציאות המדינה האחת הנוכחית.


בזכות מחקר מדוקדק והמשגה רעננה הספר עונה על הקושי בשינוי דרכי חשיבה בעולם שמשתנה מהר יותר מההנחות הבסיסיות שמוצעות ביחס אליו. 


לרכישת הספר
לחצו כאן

 

NATIONALISM IN THE WALLET: MONEY, IDENTITY AND IDEOLOGY IN ISRAEL

By: Na'ama Sheffi and Anat First

(Magnes Press, 2022, ISBN: 978-965-7790-33-5, 214 pages, in Hebrew)

The book examines the ideological motivations behind the selection of representations for Israeli banknotes and coins. The research is based on the proceedings and correspondence of the Bank of Israel Banknotes and Coinage Planning Committee from its inception in 1955 to 2012. The study reveals the mechanisms in which the legal tender is exploited as an expression of banal nationalism, implementing national emblems in an unnoticed manner. Banal nationalism is one of three theoretical frameworks we adopted. The other two are the long history of the Jewish people in the territory which today is the State of Israel; and selective tradition as a means for designing a nation. The book comprises eight chapters: theoretical overview; analytical portrayal of the working methods of the Bank of Israel Banknotes and Coinage Planning Committee; a study of the first designed “Allegoric Figures Series” (1959); analysis of the selection of human figures; the construction of the state borders through an array of landscape images; the reflection of the shifting boundaries in the changing representations Jerusalem; the selection of archaeological emblems as a proof for national continuity; and the symbolic role of flora as identification with the land. 

  

THE MAKING OF AN ALLIANCE: THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE US-ISRAEL RELATIONSHIP

By: David Tal

(Cambridge University Press, 2022, Online ISBN: 9781108551472, 404 pages)

Laying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and development of the 'special' relations between Israel and the United States. Questioning the usual neo-realist approach to understanding this relationship, David Tal instead suggests that the relations between the two nations were constructed on idealism, political culture, and strategic ties. Based on a diverse range of primary sources collected in archives in both Israel and the United States, The Making of an Alliance discusses the development of relations built through constant contact between people and ideas, showing how presidents and Prime Ministers, state officials, and ordinary people from both countries, impacted one another. It was this constancy of religion, values, and history, serving the bedrock of the relations between the two countries and peoples, over which the ephemeral was negotiated.

 

JEWS, MUSLIMS AND JERUSALEM: DISPUTES AND DIALOGUES
By: Moshe Ma’oz

Sussex Academic Press, Brighton & Chicago, 2021, ISBN 978-1-78976-081-1 [hardback], 270 pages)

Jews, Muslims and Jerusalem: Disputes and Dialogues examines Muslim–Jewish relations during significant periods of history in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. A deep concern in the Muslim Arab world concerns the status of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock. Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank since 1967, and its control of East Jerusalem, has reinforced anti-Jewish (Judeophobia) and anti-Israel movements. The most prominent are the Hamas, the “Liberation” Party (tahrir), the Islamic Jihad, Hizbullah, the Islamic rulers in Iran, and recently Turkey. Conversely, amongst Jews in Israel and the Diaspora (and amongst many Christians) the last decades have witnessed a rise in extreme Islamophobia in reaction to Arab terrorist attacks, and out of a religious-cultural prejudice against Muslims. Spearheading these trends are members of the Jewish underground, Gush Emunim, Loyalists of the Temple Mount, Holy Temple organizations, and members of the religious Zionist and political movements, the Bayit Yehudi Party and Likud Party.

It is noteworthy that there are numerous proactive movements for coexistence and peace amongst Jews and Muslims in Israel and throughout the world, and in that prevailing spirit dozens of ongoing religious and cultural dialogues are maintained. These interactions, and the political and economic engagement at state level, are distinguished by ambivalence given not only the historical record but through contemporary zealotary by hardliners. The US, the UN and the EU have tried to mediate, but to no avail. President Trump’s “Deal of the Century” has abandoned Washington’s neutrality. PM Netanyahu promotes Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem. This book is the most comprehensive, integrated and updated study on these formidable issues. Given the increasingly volatile language by hardline players the Middle East is at a point of critical historical change: Is it to be a political settlement via dialogue or a downward spiral to a dispute that in an age of offensive weaponry available to all parties can only have dire consequences.

 

UPHEAVALS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA: RELIGIOUS AND ETHNIC COMMUNITIES (in Hebrew)

By: Moshe Ma'Oz

(Magnes Press, 2021, ISBN: 978-965-7776-27-8 [Paperback], 281 pages)

During the last decades there have occurred significant upheavals in the political and military position of many religious and ethnic communities in the Middle East and North Africa. Communities which had been rejected and discriminated for decades rose to power or strengthened their political position in their countries by means of military struggles.Meanwhile, in Israel/Palestine, the ethnical-religious Jewish minority has become a ruling majority, while excluding the former Arab-Muslim-Sunni majority, following the wars of 1948 and 1976.

This book examines these processes.

2020 Archive of Books

RECENT PUBLICATION IN THE PERSPECTIVES ON ISRAEL STUDIES SERIES

Holocaust Memory in Ultraorthodox Society in Israel by Michal Shaul is the most recent publication in our series: Perspectives on Israel Studies (sponsored by the Schusterman Center of Israel Studies of Brandeis University and the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev).

Holocaust Memory in Ultraorthodox Society in Israel

How did the Ultraorthodox (Haredi) community chart a new path for its future after it lost the core of its future leaders, teachers, and rabbis in the Holocaust? How did the revival of this group come into being in the new Zionist state of Israel?

In Holocaust Memory in Ultraorthodox Society in Israel, Michal Shaul highlights the special role that Holocaust survivors played as they rebuilt and consolidated Ultraorthodox society. Although many Haredi were initially theologically opposed to the creation of Israel, they have become a significant force in the contemporary life and politics of the country. Looking at personal and public experiences of Ultraorthodox survivors in the first years of emigration from liberated Europe and breaking down how their memories entered the public domain, Shaul documents how they were incorporated into the collective memories of the Ultraorthodox in Israel.

Holocaust Memory in Ultraorthodox Society in Israel offers a rare mix of empathy and scholarly rigor to understandings of the role that the community's collective memories and survivor mentality have played in creating Israel's national identity.  See: https://iupress.org/9780253050816/holocaust-memory-in-ultraorthodox-society-in-israel/

Other books published in 2020 in IUP's Perspectives in Israel Studies:

-       Paula Kabalo, Israel Community Action; Living though the War of Independence

-       Uri Bialer, Israeli Foreign Policy; A People Shall Not Dwell Alone

-       Rachel Rojanski, Yiddish in Israel; A History

See: https://iupress.org/search-results-grid/?series=perspectives-on-israel-studies


Series editors: S. Ilan Troen, Natan Aridan, Donna Divine, David Ellenson, Arieh Saposnik, Jonathan Sarna

 

ISRAELI FOREIGN POLICY SINCE THE END OF THE COLD WAR

By: Amnon Aran

(City University London, 2020, IBSN: 9781107280618)

This is the first study of Israeli foreign policy towards the Middle East and selected world powers including China, India, the European Union and the United States since the end of the Cold War. It provides an integrated account of these foreign policy spheres and serves as an essential historical context for the domestic political scene during these pivotal decades. The book demonstrates how foreign policy is shaped by domestic factors, which are represented as three concentric circles of decision-makers, the security network and Israeli national identity. Told from this perspective, Amnon Aran highlights the contributions of the central individuals, societal actors, domestic institutions, and political parties that have informed and shaped Israeli foreign policy decisions, implementation, and outcomes. Aran demonstrates that Israel has pursued three foreign policy stances since the end of the Cold War - entrenchment, engagement and unilateralism - and explains why.

 

BREAKING THE BINARIES IN SECURITY STUDIES:  A GENDERED ANALYSIS OF WOMEN IN COMBAT

By: Ayelet Harel-Shalev and Shir Daphna-Tekoah

(Oxford University Press, 2020, ISBN: 9780190072582, 152 pages)

Several months after a 2014 operation in the Gaza Strip, fifty-three Israeli Defense Forces combatants and combat-support soldiers were awarded military decorations for exhibiting extraordinary bravery. From a gendered perspective, the most noteworthy aspect of these awards was not the fact that only 4 of the 53 recipients were women, but rather the fact that the men were uniformly praised for being "brave," being "heroes," "actively performing acts of bravery," "protecting," and "preventing terror attacks," while the women were repeatedly commended for "not panicking." This pattern is not unique to the Israeli case, but rather reflects the patriarchal norms that still prevail in military institutions worldwide. One might expect that, now that women serve on the battlefield as combatants, some of the gendered norms informing militaries would have long disappeared. As it stands, women in the military still face a double battle—against the patriarchal institution, as well as against the military's purported enemies.

Drawing on interviews with 100 women military veterans about their experiences in combat, this book asks what insights are gained when we take women's experiences in war as our starting point instead of treating them as "add-ons" to more fundamental or mainstream levels of analysis, and what importance these experiences hold for an analysis of violence and for security studies. Importantly, the authors introduce a theoretical framework in critical security studies for understanding (vis-à-vis binary deconstructions of the terms used in these fields) the integration of women soldiers into combat and combat-support roles, as well as the challenges they face. While the book focuses on women in the Israeli Defence Forces, the book provides different perspectives about why it is important to explore women in combat, what their experiences teach us, and how to consider soldiers and veterans both as citizens and as violent state actors—an issue with which scholars are often reluctant to engage. Breaking the Binaries in Security Studies raises methodological considerations about ways of evaluating power relations in conflict situations and patriarchal structures.

 
Three Books of Rafi Nets

 
The Israeli Collective Memory of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
By: Rafi Nets-Zehngut (email rafi.nets@gmail.com for a free PDF copy)

(Steinmetz Center, Tel Aviv University, 2020, ISBN 9789657001653, 408 pages, Hebrew).

This pioneering book is based on a PhD dissertation that won the Best Dissertation Prize of the AIS. It describes the way the causes for the 1948 Palestinian exodus (e.g., narratives of willing flight or expulsion) were described in 56 years (1949-2004) in all the publications of seven main Israeli-Jewish institutions: academia, newspapers, war veterans, NGOs, Ministry of Education, the army and the National Information Center. All this provides the descriptive aspect of the given memory. In addition, the book addresses 96 interviews with key people in these 7 institutions throughout the 56 years, interviews that explain why the analyzed publications contained a certain narrative and not another (thereby providing the explanatory aspect of the given memory). All the above mentioned empirical (descriptive and explanatory) findings are translated into theoretical insights. Lastly, based on the abovementioned wide empirical database, the book provides the first theoretical model that describes the fixation and change of the collective memory of conflicts. All in all, the books provides numerous empirical and theoretical contributions regarding collective memory in general, and that of conflicts in particular (with an empirical focus on Israel). Click here for more details. 
 

A Three-fold Model for Addressing the Aftermath of Collective Conflict: Active Reconciliation, Passive Reconciliation and Self-Healing. 

By: Rafi Nets-Zehngut (email rafi.nets@gmail.com for a free PDF copy)

(Lambert Academic Publishing, 2018, ISBN 9786139817931, 340 pages, English).

Intractable conflicts cause severe damage to the involved parties and to their relations. This damage must be properly addressed in order to ameliorate the wellbeing of the rivals and to prevent the re-eruption of conflicts. This book describes the first inclusive model to address this damage, a model that integrates three processes: a) The Active Reconciliation Process (collaboration of rivals on conflict-related issues, e.g., cultural collaborations or mutual revision of history textbooks, in order to actively promote reconciliation); b) the Passive Reconciliation Process (collaboration of rivals on instrumental non-conflict-related issues, e.g., health or economy, reconciliation is passively advanced as a by-product); c) the Self-Healing Process (each rival party heals itself independently). The book theoretically describes these processes in detail and considers their mutual relations. To this end, empirical examples, mostly from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as other conflicts worldwide, are provided. Click here for more details.

 

The Israeli and Palestinian Collective Memory of Conflict – Survey Findings, Analysis, Comparison and Collaboration.

By: Rafi Nets-Zehngut (email rafi.nets@gmail.com for a free PDF copy)

(Lambert Academic Publishing, 2017, ISBN 9786202004398, 301 pages, English).

This book addresses the collective memory of these two peoples. As for the Israeli-Jews, the main focus of the book, it describes the first representative survey that examined their memory regarding 23 major events of the Israeli-Arab/Palestinian conflict, the characteristics of the historical narratives that they adopt, and the nature of major events that they typically include in these narratives. The book also discusses the huge impact of the passing of time on memory, internal and external memories as well as the role of direct-experience people in promoting transitional justice. As for the Palestinians, the book describes their memory regarding the 1948 Palestinian exodus. Lastly, as for both parties:  the book compares the memory of the two parties regarding the 1948 Palestinian exodus and describes the massive historical-narrative-collaboration-process that took place between them in the early 2000s. Click here for more details.

     

MCGILL-QUEEN’S/ AZRIELI INSTITUTE SERIES IN ISRAEL STUDIES

The Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies is delighted to announce its new partnership with McGill-Queen’s University Press to launch the McGill-Queen’s/ Azrieli Institute Series in Israel Studies.

The publishing program of the series will reflect the disciplinary and methodological diversity that characterize the academic field of Israel Studies. Accordingly, proposals from all areas of scholarly inquiry related to the study of modern Israel including, but not limited to, Fine Arts, History, Literature, Translation Studies, Sociology, Political Science, Law, and Religious Studies are welcome. Prospective authors should contact either the Series or the Press Editor.

 

Series Editor:                                                           

Csaba Nikolenyi, Director                                         

Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies                                

Concordia  University, Canada

Email: csaba.nikolenyi@concordia.ca                         

 

Press Editor: 

Richard Ratzlaff, Editor

McGill-Queen’s University Press

Email: richard.ratzlaff@queensu.ca

 

Editorial Advisory Board:

 Name                                                 Institution, country

 Yael Aronoff                                        Michigan State University, USA

 Maya Balakirsky Katz                          Bar-Ilan University, Israel

 Yael Halevi-Wise                                  McGill University, Canada

 Daniel Heller                                       Monash University, Australia

 Menachem Hoffnung                           Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

 P. R. Kumarswamy                               Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

 Ira Robinson                                        Concordia University, Canada

 David Tal                                             University of Sussex, United Kingdom

 

JOURNAL OF ISRAELI HISTORY, VOLUME 38, ISSUE 1 (2020)
 
Special Issue: Beginnings and Endings: Narration and Emplotment in the History of Zionism and the State of Israel; Guest editor: Orit Rozin

(https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fjih20/38/1?nav=tocList)

 

THE AMERICAN PUBLIC AND ISRAEL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 

By: Eytan Gilboa

(Ramat-Gan: The BESA Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan University, 2020), 141 pages.

Supportive public opinion has been a key factor in the formation and development of the US-Israel “special relationship.” This monograph presents and analyzes long-term trends in American attitudes toward Israel since 2000. The analysis is based on the collection, integration, and analysis of data from numerous national public opinion surveys conducted in the US by the most reliable and reputable polling agencies. This study includes five chapters. The first, the milieu of opinion formation, provides brief information on key factors that influence the adoption and evolution of opinions toward Israel. The second explores views of Israel, perceptions of Israel as an American ally, and opinions on US military aid to Israel. The third presents trends on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including views of Israel and of the Palestinian Authority, sympathies with the respective sides, and opinions on the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The fourth explores opinions on Iran, mostly on the highly controversial nuclear deal of 2015. The final chapter presents and analyzes socio-demographic dimensions. This study attempts to overcome two major deficiencies in public opinion research. Certain studies focus on the results of specific polls and do not place them within long-term trends, and most present data and interpretations are divorced from their political and strategic contexts. These contexts influence the shaping of opinions and are essential to explain fluctuations over time. This study provides both long-term trends and relevant political and strategic contexts. The trends reveal strong and stable support for Israel in American public opinion on all the issues discussed in this study. The sociodemographic data and analysis, however, show serious cracks. Significant differences were found between the attitudes of Republicans and Democrats, younger and older people, and even different groups of American Jews. A long-term Israeli strategy must consider the positions and values of the groups that are less supportive, the predicted demographic changes in the American society, and the challenge of curbing the anti-Israel poisoning of students who will be assuming major elected and appointed positions in the next decades.

Click here to access the monograph.

 

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN POLITICAL CULTURE: ISRAEL AND BEYOND (HARDBACK)

By: Yael S. Aronoff (author of contributions, editor), Ilan Peleg (author of contributions, editor), Saliba Sarsar (author of contributions, editor),

Nadav G. Shelef (author of contributions), Yossi Beilin (author of contributions), Naomi Chazan (author of contributions), Joel Migdal (author of contributions)

(Rowman & Littlefield: 2020, ISBN: 9781793605702, 270 pages)

Ten leading scholars and practitioners of politics, political science, anthropology, Israel studies, and Middle East affairs address the theme of continuity and change in political culture as a tribute to Professor Myron (Mike) J. Aronoff whose work on political culture has built conceptual and methodological bridges between political science and anthropology.

Topics include the legitimacy of the two-state solution, identity and memory, denationalization, the role of trust in peace negotiations, democracy, majority-minority relations, inclusion and exclusion, Biblical and national narratives, art in public space, and avant-garde theater. Countries covered include Israel, Palestine, the United States, the Basque Autonomous Region of Spain, and Poland. The first four chapters by Yael S. Aronoff, Saliba Sarsar, Yossi Beilin, and Nadav Shelef examine aspects of the conflict and peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, including alternative solutions. The contributions by Naomi Chazan, Ilan Peleg, and Joel Migdal tackle challenges to democracy in Israel, in other divided societies, and in the creation of the American public. Yael Zerubavel, Roland Vazquez, and Jan Kubik focus their analyses on aspects of national memory, memorialization, and dramatization. Mike Aronoff relates his work on various aspects of political culture to each chapter in an integrative essay in the Epilogue.

 

THE CONFLICT IN ISRAELI SOCIETY: PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF NATIONAL CEREMONIES

By: Abromovich, R., Bar-Tal, D., & Ben-Amos A.

(Tel Aviv: Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, Tel Aviv University, 2020, in Hebrew)

The book describes a wide scope study of  the messages embodied in two official Israeli national ceremonies – the Remembrance Day commemoration for fallen soldiers and the Independence Day ceremony – in light of the intractable conflict in which Israel has been engaged for many years. Specifically, an attempt has been made to identify changes in societal beliefs of ethos of conflict as they are reflected in national ceremonies though the years, changes which are a result of events linked to the conflict. This is based on an assumption that the messages of the official ceremonies express the formal positions of the state regarding the conflict.

 

IN THE HEAD OF THE BEHOLDER: VIEWS OF THE ISRAELI-ARAB/PALESTINIAN CONFLICT BY ISRAELI JEWS

By: Bar-Tal, D., Raviv, A., & Abromovich, R.

(Tel Aviv: Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, Tel Aviv University, 2020, in Hebrew)

The book reports on a study that was conducted using in-depth interviews in order to shed light on the psychological and social world of the Jewish members of the Israeli society, by examining interviewees’ world view about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The study aims to address two gaps. The first is to use in-depth interviews to examine the repertoire of the ethos of the conflict and collective memory of the Israeli Jews. The second is to understand how this repertoire was acquired, what changes it underwent over the years, and what sources of information feed it. The study though has an additional aim too. It was conducted between 2002-2003 in order to examine the shifts and changes in the beliefs of the ethos of the conflict as a result of the pivotal events of 2000. It can be said that this study, probably unique in its breadth and depth, validates the findings from quantitative studies and surveys of the 2000s. Those studies also showed that despite differences between the Hawkish and Dovish blocs, there remains a common ground which reflects the societal beliefs which are the foundation of Israeli-Jewish society. The current study presents a clear picture regarding the ideological watershed moment. The period between 2000-2003 formed a turning point in the political structure of Jewish society in Israel. It is the first time that a comprehensive inquiry brings forth the words that systematically and extensively express the views of the Israeli-Jews. In this manner, one can begin to understand the onset of the rapid process which began in 2000 and is currently ongoing. The Left-wing bloc has dwindled over time until becoming a small minority, whereas the Right-wing bloc has grown considerably and the Centrists have grown closer and closer to it in their views. This structure of views and attitudes has a crucial impact on the course and essence of the State of Israel, governed mainly by coalitions in which the right is dominant.

 

ORTHODOX JUDAISM AND THE POLITICS OF RELIGION: FROM PREWAR EUROPE TO THE STATE OF ISRAEL

By: Daniel Mahla

(Cambridge University Press, 2020, ISBN: 1108481515, 318 Pages)

During the first half of the twentieth century, nationalizing processes in Europe and Palestine reshaped observant Jewry into two distinct societies, ultra-Orthodoxy and national-religious Judaism. Tracing the dynamics between the two most influential Orthodox political movements of the period, from their early years through the founding of the State of Israel, Daniel Mahla examines the crucial role that religio-political entrepreneurs played in these developments. He frames the contest between non-Zionist Agudat Yisrael and religious-Zionist Mizrahi as the product of wide-ranging social and cultural struggles within Orthodox Judaism and demonstrates that at the core of their conflict lay deep tensions between rabbinic authority and political activism. While Orthodoxy's encounter with modern Jewish nationalism is often cast as a confrontation between religious and secular forces, this book highlights the significance of intra-religious competition for observant Jewry's transition to the age of the nation state and beyond.

 

THE POLITICS OF MAPS:  CARTOGRAPHIC CONSTRUCTIONS OF ISRAEL/PALESTINE

By: Christine Leuenberger and Izhak Schnell

(Oxford University Press, 2020, Hardcover | 9780190076238, 244 Pages)

The  land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley has been one of the most disputed territories in history. Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Palestinians and Israelis have each sought claim to the national identity of the land through various martial, social and scientific tactics, but no method has offered as much legitimacy and national controversy as that of the map. The Politics of Maps delves beneath the battlefield to unearth the cartographic strife behind the Israel/Palestine conflict. Blending science and technology studies, sociology, and geography with a host of archival material, in-depth interviews and ethnographies, this book explores how the geographical sciences came to be entangled with the politics, territorial claim-making, and nation-state building of Israel/Palestine.

 

HOMELANDS: SHIFTING BORDERS AND TERRITORIAL DISPUTES

By: Nadav Shelef

(Cornell University Press, 2020, ISBN 9780801479922, 336 pages)

Why are some territorial partitions accepted as the appropriate borders of a nation's homeland, whereas in other places conflict continues despite or even because of division of territory? In Homelands, Nadav G. Shelef develops a theory of what homelands are that acknowledges both their importance in domestic and international politics and their change over time. These changes, he argues, driven by domestic political competition and help explain the variation in whether partitions resolve conflict. Homelands also provides systematic, comparable data about the homeland status of lost territory over time that allow it to bridge the persistent gap between constructivist theories of nationalism and positivist empirical analyses of international relations. Click here for more details.

 

ISRAEL AS A MODERN ARCHITECTURAL EXPERIMENTAL LAB, 1948-1978

Edited by: Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler and Anat Geva Series edited by Mohammad Gharipour and Christiane Gruber

(Intellect, 2020, ISBN 9781789380644, 390 pages)

This collection discusses the innovative and experimental architecture of Israel during its first three decades following the nation’s establishment in 1948. Written by leading researchers, the volume highlights new perspectives on the topic, discussing the inception, modernization and habitation of historic and lesser-researched areas alike in its interrogation. Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler and Anat Geva show how Israeli nation building, in its cultural, political and historical contexts, constituted an exceptional experiment in modern architecture. Examples include modern experiments in mass housing design; public architecture such as exhibition spaces, youth villages and synagogues; a necessary consideration of climate in modern architectural experiments; and the exportation of Israeli modern architecture to other countries.

 

NEW ISSUE OF CURRENTS: BRIEFS ON CONTEMPORARY ISRAEL FROM UCLA Y&S NAZARIAN CENTER

The UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies is pleased to announce the release of its second issue of Currents: Briefs on Contemporary Israel, a bi-annual publication series comprised of research-informed essays that explore contemporary issues and trends in Israel. Each essay approaches an issue from a theoretical, comparative, or historical perspective to offer scholarly insights on current developments.

The new issue features a timely and insightful article by Dr. Uri Dorchin, "The History, Politics and Social Construction of 'Blackness' in Israel." An anthropologist specializing in cultural interactions, Dorchin analyzes how Blackness in Israel has shaped ties between Jews and Arabs, Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, Ethiopians and other immigrants from Africa.

For a pdf copy of the new Currents, click here.

Dorchin was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and the Israel Institute Visiting Assistant Professor at the Nazarian Center. His edited book Blackness in Israel: Rethinking Racial Boundaries is forthcoming in Routledge (2020).

The Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies is an academic center that promotes a broader and deeper understanding of Israel?s history, politics, society, and culture as a modern democratic state. Through a commitment to academic rigor, interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship, and a dispassionate approach, the center provides opportunities for students, faculty and scholars to conduct research, teach and learn about Israel, whatever their politics or backgrounds.

We hope that you enjoy this second issue of Currents, and welcome your feedback.

If you are interested in contributing to Currents, please reach out to our Managing Editor.

Sincerely,

Prof. Dov Waxman                                           

Director                                                              

The Rosalinde & Arthur Gilbert

Foundation Chair in Israel Studies

 

THE WAR OF RETURN

HOW WESTERN INDULGENCE OF THE PALESTINIAN DREAM HAS OBSTRUCTED THE PATH TO PEACE

By: Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf

(St. Martin's Publishing Group, 2020, ISBN: 9781250252760, 304 Pages)

Two prominent Israeli liberals argue that for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to end with peace, Palestinians must come to terms with the fact that there will be no "right of return."

In 1948, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were forced out of their homes by the first Arab-Israeli War. More than seventy years later, most of their houses are long gone, but millions of their descendants are still registered as refugees, with many living in refugee camps. This group—unlike countless others that were displaced in the aftermath of World War II and other conflicts—has remained unsettled, demanding to settle in the state of Israel. Their belief in a "right of return" is one of the largest obstacles to successful diplomacy and lasting peace in the region.

In The War of Return, Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf—both liberal Israelis supportive of a two-state solution—reveal the origins of the idea of a right of return, and explain how UNRWA - the very agency charged with finding a solution for the refugees - gave in to Palestinian, Arab and international political pressure to create a permanent “refugee” problem. They argue that this Palestinian demand for a “right of return” has no legal or moral basis and make an impassioned plea for the US, the UN, and the EU to recognize this fact, for the good of Israelis and Palestinians alike.

A runaway bestseller in Israel, the first English translation of The War of Return is certain to spark lively debate throughout America and abroad.

 

LEAVING ZION: JEWISH EMIGRATION FROM PALESTINE AND ISRAEL AFTER WORLD WAR II

By: Ori Yehudai

(Cambridge University Press, 2020, ISBN: 1108478344, 282 pages)

The story of Israel's foundation has often been told from the perspective of Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel. Leaving Zion turns this historical narrative on its head, focusing on Jewish out-migration from Palestine and Israel between 1945 and the late 1950s. Based on previously unexamined primary sources collected from twenty-two archives in six countries, Ori Yehudai demonstrates that despite the dominant view that displaced Jews should settle in the Jewish homeland, many Jews instead saw the country as a site of displacement or a way-station to more desirable lands. Weaving together the perspectives of governments, aid organizations, Jewish communities and the personal stories of individual migrants, Yehudai brings to light the ideological, political and social tensions surrounding emigration. Covering events in the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, this study provides a fresh transnational perspective on the critical period surrounding the birth of Israel and the post-Holocaust reconstruction of the Jewish world.

 

VLADIMIR JABOTINSKY'S RUSSIAN YEARS, 1900-1925

By: Brian J Horowitz

(Indiana University Press, 2020, ISBN-10: 0253047684, ISBN-13: 978-0253047687, 290 pages)

In Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Russian Years, the award-winning scholar Brian Horowitz attempts to untangle the riddle of Jabotinsky’s life and philosophy. In vivid, graceful prose, he considers Jabotinsky’s development in the crucible of his Russian years, 1880–TK. He ponders the events and experiences that affected Jabotinsky, and the Russian milieu that shaped him so profoundly. He explains how Jabotinsky became a committed Zionist, uniquely attuned to the yearnings of the Jewish soul for a homeland.

A man of great contradictions, Jabotinsky was tough but refined, a Shakespeare-quoting humanist who relished the brutal realpolitik of state-building. Horowitz captures Jabotinsky in his entirety, never simplifying him. With insight and precision, Horowitz describes Jabotinsky’s vision for a Jewish state; his controversial position on Arab–Jewish coexistence; his obsession with Jewish honor, discipline, and self-sacrifice. Using rare and unused materials, some thought to be lost, Horowitz performs a feat of scholarly synthesis, adding insights gleaned from close readings of Jabotinsky’s essays, public statements, and autobiography, Story of My Life.

 
IYUNIM: MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN ISRAELI AND MODERN JEWISH SOCIETY (HEBREW)

Issue 33 has been published!

Editor: Avi Bareli ׀ Assistant Editor: Orna Miller

Editorial Board: Avi Bareli, Avner Ben-Amos, Kimmy Caplan, Danny Gutwein, Menachem Hofnung, Paula Kabalo, Nissim Leon, Kobi Peled, Shalom Ratzabi, Ilana Rosen, Ofer Shiff

Iyunim is a semi-annual journal, published by the Ben-Gurion

Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Sede-Boker. The journal holds two series:

I) The semi-annual series: Each volume contains research articles in various fields that specializes in modern Jewish society and Israeli society and stat, since the end of the 19th century. The articles address these issues from a variety of disciplines, such as history, sociology, philosophy, political science, economics, culture, geography, art, gender.

II) The thematic series: Each of its issues is dedicated to a significant current topic within the journal's fields of interest. This two-series format – the semi-annul and the thematic one – provides an invigorating and on-going platform for discussing the most prominent questions of state, society and culture in Israel.

Contents

Dan Naor Did All Roads Really Lead to Beirut? Menachem Begin’s Lebanese Policy, 1977-1982׀ Aharon Kampinsky Minister Zevulun Hamer’s Ambivalent Attitude to the Peace Process with Egypt ׀Uri Cohen Blocking Social Mobility in the Open University: Govering Institutions and the Council for Higher Education, 1974-1987 ׀ Ram Yehoshua Adut Dad Works, Mom Makes a Living: Life Stories of Mizrahi-Jews and Arab-Israelis of the ‘First Mobility Generation’ ׀ Deborah Bernstein, Talia Pfefferman From Haifa to Berlin: The Jewish Bourgeoisie in Palestine in the Early 20th Century from a Gender Perspective ׀ Roy Weintraub History Education in State-Religious Schools during the Past Decade ׀ Yair Seltenreich Shaping a Mobilized Culture: The 1936 Riots and the 'Hashomer' Collection ׀ Ofer Kenig, Chen Friedberg Does the Knesset Reflect the Composition of Israeli Society? Changes in Representative Gaps, 1977-2019 ׀ Tal Lento Under the Radar: The Adoption of the Constructive Vote of No-Confidence in Israel

The issue is available online on 'Iyunim' and 'Kotar' websites. For now, it is only available in digital format.

Contact info: 972-8-6596940 ; omiller@bgu.ac.il ; http://www.bgu.ac.il/iyunim

  

CAN ACADEMICS CHANGE THE WORLD? AN ISRAELI ANTHROPOLOGIST'S TESTIMONY ON THE RISE AND FALL OF A PROTEST MOVEMENT ON CAMPUS

By: Moshe Shokeid

(Berghahn 2020, ISBN 978-1-78920-698, 206 pages)

Moshe Shokeid narrates his experiences as a member of AD KAN (NO MORE), a protest movement of Israeli academics at Tel Aviv University, who fought against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, founded during the first Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993). However, since the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin and the later obliteration of the Oslo accord, public manifestations of dissent on Israeli campuses have been remarkably mute. This chronicle of AD KAN is explored in view of the ongoing theoretical discourse on the role of the intellectual in society and is compared with other account of academic involvement in different countries during periods of acute political conflict.

  

BREAKING THE BINARIES IN SECURITY STUDIES: A GENDERED ANALYSIS OF WOMEN IN COMBAT

By: Ayelet Harel-Shalev and Shir Daphna-Tekoah

(Oxford University Press, 2020; ISBN: 9780190072582; 168 Pages)

The book focuses on the study of Israeli women combat soldiers and veterans. It addresses this issue by bringing the soldiers' voices and silences to the forefront of research and by presenting the women soldiers as narrators. Our book introduces a theoretical framework in Critical Security Studies for understanding – by binary deconstructions of the terms used in these fields – the integration of women soldiers into combat and combat-support roles and the challenges they face. The book explores the voices and silences of women who served in combat roles in the Israeli Defense Forces. The analysis, however, extends beyond the Israeli case insofar as the book offers important general insights into the larger issues of the links between war and gender, trauma and gender, and politics and gender. The book draws on Feminist theories in International Relations and security studies and introduces an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective that aims to lead scholars to consider why and how women’s experiences should be incorporated into the analysis of violence, state violence, combat trauma, security and in-security. If further sheds light on under-studied aspects of the Israeli society.

 

IYUNIM: MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN ISRAELI AND MODERN JEWISH SOCIETY (HEBREW)

Issue 32 has just been published!!!

Editor: Avi Bareli/Assistant Editor:Orna Miller/Editorial Board:Avi Bareli, Avner Ben-Amos, Kimmy Caplan, Danny Gutwein, Menachem Hofnung, Paula Kabalo, Nissim Leon, Kobi Peled, Shalom Ratzabi, Ilana Rosen, Ofer Shiff

Iyunim is a semi-annual journal, published by the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Sede-Boker.

The journal holds two series:

I) The semi-annual series: Each volume contains research articles in various fields that specializes in modern Jewish society and Israeli society and state.

The articles address these issues from a variety of disciplines, such as history, sociology, philosophy, political science, economics, culture, geography, art, gender.

II) The thematic series: Each of its issues is dedicated to a significant current topic within the journal's fields of interest. This two-series format – the semi-annul and the thematic one – provides an invigorating and on-going platform for discussing the most prominent questions of state, society and culture in Israel.

Contents of 32

Ronen Traube, Moshe Dayan and the Palestinian Issue:The Local Elections in the West Bank, 1972 / Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman, The Religious Women Party in the First Knesset Election: Failure or Achievement? / Meir Chazan, Ben-Gurion and Britain, 1930-1939 / Yair Berlin, ‘Talmud Industry’: Daf Yomi and Modern Consumer Culture / Adia Mendelson Maoz, Palestine, My Love: Place and Home in the Literary Works of Sayed Kashua / Elazar Ben Lulu, Ethnography of Ethiopian Sigd in an Israeli Reform Congregation / Udi Carmi, The Americanization of Muscular Judaism / Itamar Radai, Jews from Islamic Countries – Images and Perceptions in the Yishuv Society: The Case of Hannah Helena Thon / Orly C. Meron, Haifa and Beirut in a Comparative Perspective:Jewish Entrepreneurship between the British and the French Mandates/

Kobi Cohen-Hattab, Establishing the Israel State Archives 1948-1950

The issue is available in the academic libraries, the bookstores, and at the distributor "Sifrut Ahshav", 972-3-9229175

Office: 08-6596940 ; omiller@bgu.ac.il ; http://www.bgu.ac.il/iyunim

 

ANNOUNCING THE PUBLICATION OF A SPECIAL ISSUE

"Israel at 70: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Society, Culture and Politics" in Contemporary Review of the Middle East volume 6, issue 3-4The guest editors are Csaba Nikolenyi, Director of the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies and Paula Kabalo, Director of The Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism.

Table of contents:

Csaba Nikolenyi and Paula Kabalo
Introduction: Israel Studies “Here” and “There”

Judith Weisz Woodsworth
A Language for Israel: The Role of Translation in Building the Resources of Hebrew

Sigal Barkai
Neurotic Fantasy: The Third Temple as Metaphor in the Contemporary Israeli Art of Nira Pereg and Yael Bartana

Tal-Or Ben-Choreen
The Emergence of Fine Art Photography in Israel in the 1970s to the 1990s through Pedagogical and Social Links with the United States 

Ofer Shiff and David Barak-Gorodetsky
Pan-Jewish Solidarity and the Jewish Significance of Modern Israel: The 1958 ‘Who is a Jew?’ Affair Revisited

Ira Robinson
A Life to Remember: Yehuda Even Shmuel’s Memorialization of His Son, Shmuel Asher Kaufman and the Crisis of his Zionist Vision

Andrea Gondos
Isaiah Tishby, Új Kelet (New East), and the Cultural Mediation of Zionism in Transylvania (1920-1930)

Adi Sherzer-Druckman
Mamlakhtiyut from Across the Ocean: Ben-Gurion and the American-Jewish Community

Paula Kabalo
Israeli Jews from Muslim Countries: Immigrant Associations and Civic Leverage

Yolande Cohen
Zionism, Colonialism and Post-colonial migrations: Moroccan Jews’ Memories of Displacement

Havatzelet Yahel
The Conflict over Land Ownership and Unauthorized Construction in the Negev 

Emir Galilee
A Nomadic State of Mind: Mental Maps of Bedouins in the Negev and Sinai During the Time of the Ottomans, the British Mandate and the State of Israel

Ben Herzog
Presenting Ethnicity: Israeli Citizenship Discourse

Natan Aridan
Setting up Shop for Israel Advocacy – Diaspora ‘Retailers’ and the Israeli ‘Wholesalers’ in the Early Years of Israeli Diplomacy

Csaba Nikolenyi
Party Switching in Israel: Understanding the Split of the Labor Party in 2011

 

ISRAEL UNDER NETANYAHU: DOMESTIC POLITICS AND FOREIGN POLICY

Contributing Editor: Robert O. Freedman

(London and New York: Routledge 2020, Paperback ISBN 978-0-367-35876-1, 310 pages)

The scholars participating in this book are leading experts from both the United States and Israel and represent a broad spectrum of viewpoints  on Israeli domestic politics and foreign policy. The case studies in the book cover  Israel’s main political parties;  highlight the special position in Israel of Israel’s  Arab, Russian and religious communities,  evaluate  Netanyahu’s stewardship of the Israeli economy and analyze his response to terrorism.. The foreign policy   case studies cover Israel’s relations with the United States, the American Jewish Community, Russia, the Palestinians, the Arab World, China, India, Europe , Iran and Turkey.   Another  highlight of the book is an assessment of Netanyahu’s leadership of the Likud Party, which answers the question as to whether Netanyahu is a pragmatist interested in a peace deal with the Palestinians or an ideologue  who wants to hold on to the West Bank as well as all of Jerusalem.

 

YIDDISH IN ISRAEL - A HISTORY

By: Rachel Rojanski

(Indiana University Press, 2020, Hardback ISBN: 978-0-253-04514-0, Paperback ISBN: 978-0-253-04515-7, eBook ISBN: 978-0-253-04518-8, 338 pages)

Yiddish in Israel: A History challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures. Author Rachel Rojanski tells the compelling and yet unknown story of how Yiddish, the most widely used Jewish language in the pre-Holocaust world, fared in Zionist Israel, the land of Hebrew.

Following Yiddish in Israel from the proclamation of the State until today, Rojanski reveals that although Israeli leadership made promoting Hebrew a high priority, it did not have a definite policy on Yiddish. The language's varying fortune through the years was shaped by social and political developments, and the cultural atmosphere in Israel. Public perception of the language and its culture, the rise of identity politics, and political and financial interests all played a part. Using a wide range of archival sources, newspapers, and Yiddish literature, Rojanski follows the Israeli Yiddish scene through the history of the Yiddish press, Yiddish theater, early Israeli Yiddish literature, and high Yiddish culture. With compassion, she explores the tensions during Israel's early years between Yiddish writers and activists and Israel's leaders, most of whom were themselves Eastern European Jews balancing their love of Yiddish with their desire to promote Hebrew. Finally Rojanski follows Yiddish into the 21st century, telling the story of the revived interest in Yiddish among Israeli-born children of Holocaust survivors as they return to the language of their parents.

 

2021 Archive of Books

ZIONISM’S REDEMPTIONS: IMAGES OF THE PAST AND VISIONS OF THE FUTURE IN JEWISH NATIONALISM

By: Arieh Saposnik

(Cambridge University Press, November 2021, ISBN: 9781316517116, 300 pages)

In this volume, Arieh Saposnik examines the complicated relations between nationalism and religious (and non-religious) redemptive traditions through the case study of Zionism. He provides a new framework for understanding the central ideas of this movement and its relationship to traditional Jewish ideas, Christian thought, and modern secular messianisms. Providing a longue-durée and broad view of the central themes and motivations in the making of Zionism, Saposnik connects its intellectual history with the concrete development of the Zionist project in Israel in its cultural, social, and political history. Saposnik demonstrates how Zionism offers lessons for a politics in which human perfectibility continues to serve as a guiding light and as a counter-narrative to the contemporary politics of self-interest, self-promotion and 'post-truth.' This is a study that bears implications for our understanding of modernity, of space and place, history and historical trajectories, and the place of Jews and Judaism in the modern world.

http://services.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/religion/judaism/zionisms-redemptions-images-past-and-visions-future-jewish-nationalism?format=HB&isbn=9781316517116

 

PUBLISHED: IYUNIM 36

(December 2021)

Multidisciplinary Studies in Israel and Modern Jewish Society (Hebrew)    

EditorAvi Bareli | Assistant Editor: Orna Miller | Editorial Board: Avi Bareli, Avner Ben-Amos, Amir Goldstein, Danny Gutwein, Menachem Hofnung, Paula Kabalo, Nissim Leon, Svetlana Natkovich, Kobi Peled, Shalom Ratzabi, Ofer Shiff.

Iyunim is a multidisciplinary research journal which holds two series: the semi-annual series and the thematic series and contains articles in various fields that specialize in modern world Jewish society and Israeli society and state. The articles address these issues from a variety of disciplines from all fields of humanities and social sciences.

Contents:

Gili Hartal, Homonationalism and the Politics of LGBT Movements in Israel | Yechiam Weitz, ‘The Nir Coalition’ in 1959 and the Opposition Struggle against Mapai | Yosef Gorny, From National Autonomy to Independent State: The Bund in the Face of the State of Israel, 1948-1989 | Nadav Fraenkel, The Creation of the Nahal Settlement Enterprise | Moran Benit, In the Footsteps of the Absent Father: The Protagonist as a Writing Subject in the Work of Ronit Matalon | Shiri Goren, ‘The Trump Era is Here, and I Finally Feel at Home‘: Sayed Kashua in Illinois | Erez Trabelsi, The Experience of Ethnic Estrangement of Sephardi Students in Israeli Yeshiva High Schools in the 1980s | Moshe Naor, The Sephardic Labor Organization and the Status of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in the Yishuv | Kimmy Caplan, Extremist Haredi Leaders and their Isolation from the Zionist Enterprise: Between Ideology and the Challenges of Reality | Michal Glatter, Hasidic Leaders in the Streets of Tel Aviv, 1940-1965

The issue is available online: http://www.bgu.ac.il/iyunim (Iyunim website).

It will be available also in bookstores, academic libraries, the online bookstore 'Kotar' (https://kotar.cet.ac.il) and at the official distributor 'Sifrut Achshav' (https://sifrut.co.il) ; info@sifrut.co.il; 03-9229175 

omiller@bgu.ac.il  | http://www.bgu.ac.il/iyunim  | 08-6596940 

  

PUBLIC PREFERENCES AND INSTITUTIONAL DESIGNS: ISRAEL AND TURKEY COMPARED

By: Niva Golan-Nadir

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-84554-4, Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-84553-7 270 pages)

This book explores the existence of gaps between public preferences and institutional designs in democracies, specifically in cases in which such gaps are maintained for a long period of time without being challenged by the electorate. Gaps such as these can be seen in the complex relations between the state and religion in Israel and Turkey, and more specifically in their policies on marriage. This line of investigation is interesting both theoretically and empirically, as despite their differing policies both Israel and Turkey share a similar pattern of institutional dynamics. Existing explanations for this phenomenon suggest either civil society-based arguments or intra-institutional dynamics as reasons for the maintenance of such gaps. This book enriches our understanding of policy dynamics in democratic systems by introducing a third line of argument, one that emphasizes the effective role state institutions play in maintaining such arrangements for long periods of time, often against the public will.

 

AFTER THE HOLOCAUST
By: Monty Noam Penkower

(Touro University Press, 2021 ISBN: 9781644696798 [paperback], 230 pages)

The chapters in this volume examine a few facets in the drama of how the survivors of the Holocaust contended with life after the darkest night in Jewish history. They include the Earl Harrison mission and significant report, the effort to keep Europe's borders open to refugee infiltration, the murder of the first Jew in Germany after V-E Day and its impact, and the iconic sculptures of Nathan Rapoport and Poland's landscape of Holocaust memory up to the present day. Joining extensive archival research and a limpid prose, Professor Monty Noam Penkower again displays a definitive mastery of his craft.

 

ISRAEL: AS A PHOENIX ASCENDING
By: Monty Noam Penkower

(Touro University Press, 2021, ISBN: 9781644696750 [paperback], 306 pages)

The chapters in this volume examine a few facets in the drama of how the beleaguered Jewish people, as a phoenix ascending of ancient legend, achieved national self-determination in the reborn State of Israel within three years of the end of World War II and of the Holocaust. They include the pivotal 1946 World Zionist Congress, the contributions of Jacob Robinson and Clark M. Eichelberger to Israel’s sovereign renewal, American Jewry’s crusade to save a Jewish state, the effort to create a truce and trusteeship for Palestine, and Judah Magnes’s final attempt to create a federated state there. Joining extensive archival research and a limpid prose, Professor Monty Noam Penkower again displays a definitive mastery of his craft.

              

JUDAH MAGNES: THE PROPHETIC POLITICS OF A RELIGIOUS BINATIONALIST

By: David Barak-Gorodetsky 

(The Jewish Publication Society, 2021, 978-0-8276-1516-8, 364 pages)

This comprehensive intellectual biography of Judah Magnes—the Reform rabbi, American Zionist leader, and inaugural Hebrew University chancellor—offers novel analysis of how theology and politics intertwined to drive Magnes’s writings and activism—especially his championing of a binational state—against all odds.

Like a prophet unable to suppress his prophecy, Magnes could not resist a religious calling to take political action, whatever the cost. In Palestine no one understood his uniquely American pragmatism and insistence that a constitutional system was foundational for a just society. Jewish leaders regarded his prophetic politics as overly conciliatory and dangerous for negotiations. Magnes’s central European allies in striving for a binational Palestine, including Martin Buber, credited him with restoring their faith in politics, but they ultimately retreated from binationalism to welcome the new State of Israel.

In candidly portraying the complex Magnes as he understood himself, David Barak-Gorodetsky elucidates why Magnes persevered, despite evident lack of Arab interest, to advocate binationalism with Truman in May 1948 at the ultimate price of Jewish sovereignty. Accompanying Magnes on his long-misunderstood journey, we gain a unique broader perspective: on early peacemaking efforts in Israel/Palestine, the American Jewish role in the history of the state, binationalism as political theology, an American view of binationalism, and the charged realities of Israel today.

 

STUDIES IN GENERALSHIP: LESSONS FROM THE CHIEFS OF STAFF OF THE ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES

By: Meir Finkel

(Hoover Institutiton Press, 2021, ISBN: 9780817924751, 368 pages)

The commander, or chief of staff, of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is a prominent public figure in Israel. His decisions, advice, and persona are held in high regard by Israel’s public and leadership, and have indirect impacts on social, economic, and foreign affairs. But until now, an in-depth study on the role and performance of the IDF’s chiefs of staff has been sorely absent.

In this study, Meir Finkel offers a robust and original comparative perspective on the IDF chiefs of staff throughout modern Israel’s history, examining their conduct in six key areas: identifying change in the strategic environment, developing familiarity with all military domains, managing crises with wartime generals, rehabilitating the army after a botched war, leading a transformation in force design, and building relationships with the political echelon.

The challenging and critical role of the chief of staff demands profound knowledge and authority in a vast and diverse range of fields. By providing a perspective that the IDF’s known history has lacked until now, Finkel gives insights that may assist current and future high-rank leaders worldwide in carrying out their important work and offers lessons to students everywhere of strategy, military history, and military transformation.

 

JUST, REASONABLE MULTICULTURALISM: LIBERALISM, CULTURE AND COERCION

By: Raphael Cohen-Almagor

(New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, Online ISBN - 9781108567213, Paperback ISBN - 9781108469838, 378 pages)

In Just, Reasonable Multiculturalism, Cohen-Almagor develops a comprehensive theory that tackles three major attacks on multiculturalism: that it is bad for democracy, that it is bad for women, and that it promotes terrorism, aiming to show that liberalism and multiculturalism are reconcilable. Cohen-Almagor outlines the theoretical assumptions underlying a liberal response to threats posed by cultural or religious groups whose norms entail different measures of harm. He examines the importance of cultural, ethnic, national, religious, and ideological norms and beliefs, and what part they play in requiring us to tolerate others out of respect. Cohen-Almagor formulates guidelines designed to prescribe boundaries to cultural practices and to safeguard the rights of individuals and then applies them to real life situations. Painstakingly, Cohen-Almagor balances group rights against individual rights and delineates the limits of state intervention in minority groups’ affairs in cases involving physical harm and non-physical harm. The first category includes practices such as scarring, suttee, murder for family honour, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), female circumcision and male circumcision. The second category includes arranged and forced marriages, divorce and property rights, gender segregation, denial of education, and enforcement of a strict dress code. Two country case studies, France and Israel, illustrate the power of security considerations in restricting claims for multiculturalism.

 

THE SERENDIPITOUS EVOLUTION OF THE BALFOUR DECLARATION OF NOVEMBER 2, 1917

By: Paul Goldstein

(Cambridge Scholars, 2021; ISBN: 1-5275-7055-X, ISBN13: 978-1-5275-7055-9, 317 pages)

As a Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Canada from Belgium, I have spent a lifetime trying to understand how such a horrendous catastrophe could happen in a so called civilized world. The overriding impetus that cemented my determination to pursue the exploration of this seminal episode in the history of the Jewish people, was the responsibility that my own survival bestowed on me to help ensure that their story be known and never forgotten. In the final analysis, I was strongly motivated by the martyrdom of the Jewish people in the Diaspora, before, during and after the period covered in this book.

The Balfour Declaration was one of the most important events in the history of the Jewish people prior to the Holocaust, signaling the beginning of a new era of self-determination in the reconstituted Jewish homeland.

This book provides an all-inclusive understanding of the complex geopolitical elements that shaped the facts on the ground in the Middle East. Analyzing the chain of events that led to the Balfour Declaration through a uniquely holistic approach, it demonstrates how the national interests of the nations involved in the World War I theater intersected with those of the Jewish nation in the final phase of its long march towards political sovereignty. Like the multiple parts of precision clockwork, each element, regardless of shape or size, played an essential part in the functioning of the whole, while the absence of one of them would have altered the outcome of the entire process.

As noted by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, the text is bound to be of interest to specialists and researchers wanting insights into the historic, international and psycho-sociological processes that have been changing the Middle East throughout recent decades. It will also serve as an important academic source, or even a textbook, for university courses about the history of Israel and the Middle East.

  

GENOMIC CITIZENSHIP: THE MOLECULARIZATION OF IDENTITY IN THE CONTEMPORARY MIDDLE EAST

By: Ian McGonigle

(MIT Press, 2021, ISBN-13 [978-0262542944], 220 pages)

Based on ethnographic work in Israel and Qatar, two small Middle Eastern ethnonations with significant biomedical resources, Genomic Citizenship explores the relationship between science and identity. Ian McGonigle, originally trained as a biochemist, draws on anthropological theory, STS, intellectual history, critical theory, Middle Eastern studies, cultural studies, and critical legal studies. He connects biomedical research on ethnic populations to the political, economic, legal, and historical context of the state; to global trends in genetic medicine; and to the politics of identity in the context of global biomedical research.

Genomic Citizenship is more an anthropology of scientific objects than an anthropology of scientists or an ethnography of the laboratory. McGonigle bases his untraditional project on traditional anthropological methods, including participant observation. Some of the most persuasive data in the book are from public records, legal and historical sources, published scientific papers, institutional reports, websites, and brochures.

McGonigle discusses biological understandings of Jewishness, especially in relation to the intellectual history of Zionism and Jewish political thought, and considers the possibility of a novel application of genetics in assigning Israeli citizenship. He also describes developments in genetic medicine in Qatar and analyzes the Qatari Biobank in the context of Qatari nationalism and state-building projects. Considering possible consequences of findings on the diverse origins of the Qatari population for tribal identities, he argues that the nation cannot be defined as either a purely natural or biological entity. Rather, it is reified, reinscribed, and refracted through genomic research and discourse.

McGonigle is an undeniable expert on the subject, as Assistant Professor of Anthropology and STS at Nanyang Technological University. Shai Lavi, from the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University, calls Genomic Citizenship “a highly original, thought-provoking book. McGonigle's surprising and perceptive comparison of Israel and Qatar sheds light on the relationship of politics and genomics and beautifully demonstrates the importance of genes in creating a shared past in the service of political ends.”

The book goes on sale August 10th. To access early digital review copies, click here: http://bit.ly/Genomic_Citizenship.

 

ISRAEL. POLITY HISTORIES.  

By: Alan Dowty

(Cambridge: Polity, 2021, Hardback [9781509536894]; Paperback [9781509536900]; eBook [9781509536917], 224 pages)

How did a community of a few thousand Jewish refugees become, in little over a century, a modern nation-state and homeland of half the world's Jews?  Has modern Israel fulfilled the Zionist vision of becoming "a nation like other nations," or is it still, in Biblical terns, "a people that dwells alone"?

Alan Dowty distils over half a century of study as an inside/outside analyst of Israel in tracing this remarkable story.  It begins in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, when Jews fleeing Russian persecution established a renewed Jewish presence in their historic homeland.  It continues through harsh struggle and in deep-rooted conflict with another people that sees Israel/Palestine equally as their homeland.  Immensely successful by most standards, Israel today remains a center of contention and is still torn between its hard-earned role as a "normal" nation and the call of its particularistic, and unique, Jewish history.

 

CASTING A GIANT SHADOW: THE TRANSNATIONAL SHAPING OF ISRAELI CINEMA

Edited by: Rachel S. Harris and Dan Chyutin

(Indiana University Press, 2021, Paperback [9780253056399], Hardcover [9780253056382], Ebook [9780253056429], 442 pages)

Film came to the territory that eventually became Israel not long after the medium was born. Casting a Giant Shadow is a collection of articles that embraces the notion of transnationalism to consider the limits of what is "Israeli" within Israeli cinema.

As the State of Israel developed, so did its film industries. Moving beyond the early films of the Yishuv, which focused on the creation of national identity, the industry and its transnational ties became more important as filmmakers and film stars migrated out and foreign films, filmmakers, and actors came to Israel to take advantage of high-quality production values and talent. This volume, edited by Rachel Harris and Dan Chyutin, uses the idea of transnationalism to challenge the concept of a singular definition of Israeli cinema.

Casting a Giant Shadow offers a new understanding of how cinema has operated artistically and structurally in terms of funding, distribution, and reception. The result is a thorough investigation of the complex structure of the transnational and its impact on national specificity when considered on the global stage.

  

Published! Volume 35 (June 2021)

Iyunim: Multidisciplinary Studies in Israel and Modern Jewish Society (Hebrew)

Editor: Avi Bareli | Assistant Editor: Orna Miller  | Editorial Board: Avi Bareli, Avner Ben-Amos, Amir Goldstein, Danny Gutwein, Menachem Hofnung, Paula Kabalo, Nissim Leon, Svetlana Natkovich, Kobi Peled, Shalom Ratzabi, Ofer Shiff.

Iyunim is a multidisciplinary research journal which holds two series: the semi-annual series and the thematic series, and contains articles in various fields that specialize in modern world Jewish society and Israeli society and state.
The articles address these issues from a variety of disciplines from all fields of humanities and social sciences.

 

Contents:

Society

Omri Shefer Raviv, Employment of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories in the Israeli Economy, 1967-1969 | Yael Yishai, Marginal Groups in Israel: Seen but Not All Heard | Simcha Gweta-Bukobza, The Mediating Leadership of Rabbi Azizi Di'i in Hatzor, 1951-1965

Literature

David Guedj, The Image of Immigrants from Islamic Countries in the Stories of Eliezer Smoli | Smadar Shiffman, Ethnicity and literature in the work of Orly Castel=Bloom

Education

Kfir Gold, Institutionalization of the High School Diploma in Eretz Israel, 1928–1935 | Anat Kidron, From the Green Line to the Green Golan: Ideological Education as a Political Tool

Culture

Gideon Katz, The Fear from Judaism in Israeli Culture | Arnon Palty, Ari Katorza, Localism and Exoticism in the Music of Shalom Hanoch, 1968-1976 | Yeruham Aviad Goldman, Shulchan Aruch for Children by AZAR (A.Z. Rabinowitz)

***

The issue is available online: http://www.bgu.ac.il/iyunim (Iyunim website).

It will soon be available also in bookstores, academic libraries, the online bookstore 'Kotar' (https://kotar.cet.ac.il/ ) and at the official distributor 'Sifrut Achshav' (https://sifrut.co.il ); info@sifrut.co.il; 03-9229175

omiller@bgu.ac.il  | http://www.bgu.ac.il/iyunim  |  08-6596940 

   

BNEI HA’ARETZ AND THE EAST: JEWS AND ARABS DURING THE BRITISH MANDATE

By: Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor

Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2021, 286 pages (in Hebrew) 

This book is an updated Hebrew version of Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, published in 2016 by Brandeis UP. Focusing on Oriental Jews and their relations with their Arab neighbors in Mandatory Palestine, this book analyzes the meaning of the hybrid Arab-Jewish identity that existed among Oriental Jews, and discusses their unique role as political, social, and cultural mediators between Jews and Arabs. Integrating Mandatory Palestine and its inhabitants into the contemporary Semitic-Levantine surroundings, this book illuminates broad areas of cooperation and coexistence, which coincided with conflict and friction, between Oriental and Sephardi Jews and their Arab neighbors.

 

ARCHITECTURAL CULTURE IN BRITISH MANDATE JERUSALEM, 1917-1948 

By: Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler

(Edinburgh University Press, 2020, ISBN: [Hardback] 9781474457491, ISBN: [Ebook (ePub)] 9781474457521, ISBN [Ebook (PDF)] 9781474457514], 264 pages)

An architectural history of four prominent buildings in Jerusalem.

This book examines a fascinating and critical epoch in the architectural history of Jerusalem. It proposes a fresh and analytical discussion of British Mandate-era architecture by studying four buildings that have had a lasting impact on Jerusalem’s built environment. Applying relational history methodology, the book reveals how these building projects evolved as an outcome of cross-cultural influences and relations among the British, American, Jewish-Zionist and Muslim-Palestinian communities. Further, the building and design processes behind these structures give new perspectives on the adaptation of modern architecture in the Middle East and the negotiation of historicism and vernacular architecture during the first half of the 20th century.

 

THE LAND BEYOND THE BORDER: STATE FORMATION AND TERRITORIAL EXPANSION IN SYRIA, MOROCCO, AND ISRAEL
By: Johannes Becke 

(SUNY Press, ISBN13: 978-1-4384-8223-1, 302 pages)

Uses an innovative theoretical framework to comparatively explore the dynamics of state expansion and contraction in Syria (1976-2005), Morocco (since 1975), and Israel (since 1967).

Based on three case studies from the Middle East, The Land beyond the Border advances an innovative theoretical framework for the study of state expansions and state contractions. Johannes Becke argues that state expansion can be theorized according to four basic ideal types—a form of patronage (patronization), the imposition of a satellite regime (satellization), the establishment of territorial exclaves (exclavization), or a full-fledged takeover (incorporation). Becke discusses how both irredentist ideologies and political realities have shaped the dynamics of state expansion and state contraction in the recent history of each state. By studying Israel comparatively with other Middle Eastern regimes, this book forms part of an emerging research agenda seeking to bring the research fields of Israel Studies and Middle East Studies closer together. Instead of treating Israel’s rule over the occupied territories as an isolated case, Becke offers students the chance to understand Israel’s settlement project within the broader framework of postcolonial state formation.

 

ISRAEL'S REGIME UNTANGLED: BETWEEN DEMOCRACY AND APARTHEID

By: Gal Ariely

(Cambridge University Press 2021, Hardcover ISBN: 9781108845250; 210 pages)

Israel attracts enormous attention among scholars, journalists, politicians, pundits, and the general public alike. Some regard the country as an apartheid regime that can only be democratized through boycotts and sanctions. Others believe it is a stable liberal democracy, flourishing despite extreme conditions. This book seeks to untangle these conflicting interpretations by discussing how the Israeli regime can be classified, what its borders are, and what the key factors are that shape the regime and support its relative stability. The book argues that the Israeli case illustrates the analytical weakness of the concept of democracy in the context of disputed regimes and suggests that instead of classifying the regime as a whole, analysis should focus on the levels of specific dimensions of democraticness. It also argues that the classifications of Israel proper or Israel/Palestine are insufficient for defining the borders of the regime and proposes, instead, a spatial analysis that divides the Israeli regime into different zones of control at different time periods. The book demonstrates how the Arab-Israeli conflict shapes the regime, claiming that the relative stability of the regime and various changes in the levels of democraticness and zones of control can be explained by state capacity.

   

ISRAELI THEATRE: MIZRAHI JEWS AND SELF-REPRESENTATION

By: Naphtaly Shem-Tov

(NY: Routledge, 2021, ISBN 9781138542334, 202 pages)

This book conceptualizes Mizrahi (Middle Eastern Jewish) theatre, unfolding its performances in the field of Israeli theatre with a critical gaze. It covers the conceptualization and typology, not along a chronological axis, but rather through seven theatrical forms. The author suggests a definition of Mizrahi theatre that has fluid boundaries and it can encompass various possibilities for self-representation onstage. Although Mizrahi theatre began to develop in the 1970s, the years since the turn of the millennium have seen an intense flowering of theatrical works by second- and third-generation artists dealing with issues of identity and narrative in a diverse array of forms. Mizrahi theatre is a cultural locus of self-representation, generally created by Mizrahi artists who deal with content, social experiences, cultural, religious, and traditional foundations, and artistic languages derived from the history and social reality of  Mizrahi Jews in both Israel and their Middle Eastern countries of origin. Critically surveying Mizrahi theatre in Israel, the book is a key resource for students and academics interested in theatre and performance studies, and Jewish and Israeli studies.

 

TO REPAIR A BROKEN WORLD: THE LIFE OF HENRIETTA SZOLD, FOUNDER OF HADASSAH

Foreword by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

By: Dvora HaCohen

(Harvard University Press, 2021, ISBN 9780674988095 [Hardcover], 400 pages)

Henrietta Szold was one of the most important Jewish leaders in the 20th century. Her long life, from 1860 to 1945, spanned some of the most turbulent years in modern history, when great waves of immigration transformed the United States into a powerful nation, and two global conflicts played out on the world stage. These events, which shaped the lives of millions of people, are woven into the fabric of her own life story. 

Henrietta's life was divided into two distinct parts, before she founded Hadassah and after, so different from each other as to appear to belong to two separate people. What remained consistent, however, was her lifelong commitment to the concept tikkun olam, repairing the world. Henrietta was born in Baltimore. As a young woman, she encountered many immigrants in the streets searching for work to support their families. Henrietta decided to establish an English-language night school in order to help them become integrated into the American society. Thousands of immigrants studied in the school she established, which was open to everyone, regardless of religion, gender or age. These same humanist and egalitarian values, provided her impetus to establish other projects. She was driven by a sense of mission, fighting against the exclusion and discrimination that she had experienced and witnessed during the first half of her life.

After an unrequited love that broke her heart, she suffered a deep crisis that ended when she concluded that her approach to life had been mistaken. Henrietta  experienced an internal upheaval and made a dramatic decision to change her priorities. In 1912, she established Hadassah, an organization of American Zionist Jewish Women. Hadassah would become a crucial part of her struggle for women’s empowerment and equality.


As an ardent Zionist Szold decided to help the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine who lived in abject poverty, plagued by endemic disease and a high of mortality. With the help of Hadassah, Henrietta established an infrastructure for medical health in Palestine with hospitals and clinics throughout the country. She also helped reform education and develop the social work profession in pre-state Israel.  In one of her greatest achievements, she headed the Youth Aliyah enterprise in Palestine, saving thousands of orphaned children from the clutches of the Nazis. Henrietta became an admired leader in the United States and Palestine.

 

THE LOST ORCHARD: THE PALESTINIAN-ARAB CITRUS INDUSTRY, 1850-1950

By: Mustafa Kabha and Nahum Karlinsky

(Syracuse University Press, 2021, Paperback ISBN: 9780815636809, Hardcover ISBN: 9780815636700, eBook ISBN: 9780815654957, 232 pages)

The Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, devastated Palestinian lives and shattered Palestinian society, culture, and economy. It also nipped in the bud a nascent grassroots, binational alliance between Arab and Jewish citrus growers. This significant and unprecedented partnership was virtually erased from the collective memory of both Israelis and Palestinians when the Nakba decimated villages and populations in a matter of months.

In The Lost Orchard, Kabha and Karlinsky tell the story of the Palestinian citrus industry from its inception until 1950, tracing the shifting relationship between Palestinian Arabs and Zionist Jews. Using rich archival and primary sources, as well as on a variety of theoretical approaches, Kabha and Karlinsky portray the industry’s social fabric and stratification, detail its economic history, and analyze the conditions that enabled the formation of the unique binational organization that managed the country’s industry from late 1940 until April 1948.

 

BUILDING A NEW LAND: WOMEN ARCHITECTS AND WOMEN'S ORGANIZATIONS IN MANDATORY PALESTINE

By: Sigal Davidi

(Lamda Scholarship, The Open University of Israel Press, 2020, ISBN: 978-965-06-1633-5; 441 pages; Hebrew; https://did.li/qTFNf)

Building a New Land is a historical-cultural study of the work of Jewish women architects in Mandatory Palestine. This is the first comprehensive study which reveals the work of pioneer women architects, adding a new chapter to what we know about women in architecture in the 20th century. It places women architects as key contributors in developing the design vocabulary for a new nation.

The book exposes the architectural work of a group of women who designed educational, residential and cultural institutions for various Zionist women’s organizations in Mandatory Palestine. It brings to light their impressive, but neglected, visionary body of work: the pioneering planning of institutions designed to support women while shaping the image of a “new woman.” It analyzes the unique contribution of women architects to the development of “social modernism,” a modern architecture that addresses social issues. The book portrays the important role these women architects played in promoting modern architecture in Mandatory Palestine, thus enhancing the social and cultural fabric of the nascent Jewish society.

 

BLACKNESS IN ISRAEL: RETHINKING RACIAL BOUNDARIES

Edited by: Uri Dorchin, Gabriella Djerrahian

(Routledge, 2020, Hardback ISBN 9780367629755, eBook ISBN 9781003111702, 270 pages)

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.

 

THE STAR AND THE SCEPTER: A DIPLOMATIC HISTORY OF ISRAEL

By: Emmanuel Navon

(University of Nebraska Press, 2020, Hardcover IBSN: 978-0-8276-1506-9; eBook [PDF]: 978-0-8276-1860-2; eBook [EPUB] 978-0-8276-1858-9; 536 pages)

The first all-encompassing book on Israel’s foreign policy and the diplomatic history of the Jewish people, The Star and the Scepter retraces and explains the interactions of Jews with other nations from the ancient kingdoms of Israel to modernity.

Starting with the Hebrew Bible, Emmanuel Navon argues that one cannot grasp Israel’s interactions with the world without understanding how Judaism’s founding document has shaped the Jewish psyche. He sheds light on the people of Israel’s foreign policy through the ages: the ancient kingdoms of Israel, Jewish diasporas in Europe from the Middle Ages to the emancipation, the emerging nineteenth-century Zionist movement, and Zionist diplomacy following World War I and surrounding World War II.

Navon elucidates Israel’s foreign policy from the birth of the state in 1948 to our days: the dilemmas and choices at the beginning of the Cold War; Israel’s attempts to establish periphery alliances; the Arab-Israeli conflict; Israel’s relations with Europe, the United States, Russia, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the United Nations, and the Jewish diasporas; and how twenty-first-century energy geopolitics is transforming Israel’s foreign relations today.

Navon’s analysis is rooted in two central ideas, represented by the Star of David (faith) and the scepter (political power). First, he contends that the interactions of Jews with the world have always been best served by combining faith with pragmatism. Second, Navon shows how the state of Israel owes its diplomatic achievements to national assertiveness and hard power—not only military strength but economic prowess and technological innovation. Demonstrating that diplomacy is a balancing act between ideals and realpolitik, The Star and the Scepter draws aspirational and pragmatic lessons from Israel’s exceptional diplomatic history.

 

THE OCCUPATION OF JUSTICE: THE SUPREME COURT OF ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

Second Edition

By: David Kretzmer and Yaël Ronen

(Oxford University Press, 2021, ISBN: 9780190696023, 540 pages)

Judicial review by Israel's Supreme Court over actions of Israeli authorities in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 is an important element in Israel's legal and political control of these territories. The Occupation of Justice presents a comprehensive discussion of the Court's decisions in exercising this review. This revised and expanded edition includes updated material and analysis, as well as new chapters. Inter alia, it addresses the Court's approach to its jurisdiction to consider petitions from residents of the Occupied Territories; justiciability of sensitive political issues; application and interpretation of the international law of belligerent occupation in general, and the Fourth Geneva Convention in particular; the relevance of international human rights law and Israeli constitutional law; the rights of Gaza residents after the withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlements from the area; Israeli settlements and settlers; construction of the separation barrier in the West Bank; security measures, including internment, interrogation practices, and punitive house demolitions; and judicial review of hostilities.

The study examines the inherent tension involved in judicial review over the actions of authorities in a territory in which the inhabitants are not part of the political community the Court belongs to. It argues that this tension is aggravated in the context of the West Bank by the glaring disparity between the norms of belligerent occupation and the Israeli government's policies. The study shows that while the Court's review has enabled many individuals to receive a remedy, it has largely served to legitimise government policies and practices in the Occupied Territories.

 

BOUNDED INTEGRATION: THE RELIGION-STATE RELATIONSHIP AND DEMOCRATIC PERFORMANCE IN TURKEY AND ISRAEL

By: Aviad Rubin

(SUNY series in Comparative Politics, 2020, ISBN13: 978-1-4384-8077-0, 324 pages)

In this comparative study of the religion-state relationship in Turkey and Israel in the modern era, Bounded Integration reveals the influence this dynamic interaction has had on democratic performance in both countries. In societies where a dominant religion serves as an important component of individual and collective identity, the imposition of secular policies from above may not facilitate democratization but may rather impede the embedding of democracy in society. Moreover, the inclusion or exclusion of religion following statehood may facilitate a certain type of path-dependent political culture, one with long-term political consequences. Aviad Rubin’s refreshing analytical approach comparing and contrasting the region’s only two longstanding democratic entities and the dynamics of religion and the state in two different religions, Islam and Judaism, facilitates generalizable lessons for emergent political regimes in the post–Arab Spring Middle East.

 

COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE: THEORY AND LESSONS FROM ISRAEL

By: Neta Sher-Hadar, Lihi Lahat, and Itzhak Galnoor

(Palgrave-Macmillan, 2021, ISBN: 978-3-030-45806-5 [Hardcover], ISBN: 978-3-030-45807-2 [online], 298 pages https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-45807-2)

This book is the first to explore collaborative governance arrangements in Israel. It offers a new, modular definition of collaborative governance, focusing on its contributions toward public values and democracy. The book discusses different kinds of collaborations, their scope, implications, and impact on governability in Israel, a country which provides an interesting setting for learning about collaborative governance, given its heterogeneous population and the nature of the relationship between the state's civil service, the business sector and the civil society. The book presents examples derived from local, and central government levels, and from policy areas such as education, regulation and local government.

  

ON SECURITY AND INSECURITY: THE DOUBLE BATTLE OF WOMEN IN COMBAT 

By: Ayelet Harel-Shalev and Shir Daphna-Tekoah 

(Pardes Press, 2021, ISBN: 978-1618388049; 207 pages; Hebrew; https://www.pardes.co.il/?id=showbook&catnum=978-1-61838-804-9 ) 

The current book provides new insights about one of the most heated debates in Israeli society concerning the incorporation of women to combat roles in the Israel Defense Forces.  Drawing on interviews with 100 female combat soldiers about their experiences in combat and war, this book asks what insights are gained when we take women’s experiences in war as our starting point instead of treating them as “add-ons” to more fundamental or mainstream levels of analysis, and what importance these experiences hold for an analysis of violence, trauma and for security studies. Importantly, the authors introduce a theoretical framework in critical security studies for understanding the integration of IDF women soldiers into combat and combat-support roles, as well as the challenges they face. It is a translated and revised version of their 2020 book: Breaking the Binaries in Security Studies – A gendered analysis of women in Combat (Oxford University Press).  

 

THE RETROSPECTIVE IMAGINATION OF A. B. YEHOSHUA

By: Yael Halevi-Wise

(Penn State University Press, 2020, ISBN: 978-0-271-08785-6 (hardcover, 226 pages)

Once referred to by the New York Times as the “Israeli Faulkner,” A. B. Yehoshua’s fiction invites an assessment of Israel’s Jewish inheritance and the moral and political options that the country currently faces in the Middle East. The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua is an insightful overview of the fiction, nonfiction, and hundreds of critical responses to the work of Israel’s leading novelist.

Instead of an exhaustive chronological-biographical account of Yehoshua’s artistic growth, Yael Halevi-Wise calls for a systematic appreciation of the author’s major themes and compositional patterns. Specifically, she argues for reading Yehoshua’s novels as reflections on the “condition of Israel,” constructed multifocally to engage four intersecting levels of signification: psychological, sociological, historical, and historiosophic. Each of the book’s seven chapters employs a different interpretive method to showcase how Yehoshua’s constructions of character psychology, social relations, national history, and historiosophic allusions to traditional Jewish symbols manifest themselves across his novels. The book ends with a playful dialogue in the style of Yehoshua’s masterpiece, Mr. Mani, that interrogates his definition of Jewish identity.

Masterfully written, with full control of all the relevant materials, Halevi-Wise’s assessment of Yehoshua will appeal to students and scholars of modern Jewish literature and Jewish studies.

 

THEOLOGICAL STAINS: ART MUSIC AND THE ZIONIST PROJECT

By: Assaf Shelleg

(Oxford University Press, 2021, ISBN: 9780197504642 (hardcover), 480 pages)

Theological Stains offers the first in-depth study of the development of art music in Israel from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. In a bold and deeply researched account, author Assaf Shelleg explores the theological grammar of Zionism and its impact on the art music written by emigrant and native composers. He argues that Israeli art music, caught in the tension between a bibliocentric territorial nationalism on the one hand and the histories of deterritorialized Jewish diasporic cultures on the other, often features elements of both of these competing narratives. Even as composers critically engaged with the Zionist paradigm, they often reproduced its tropes and symbols, thereby creating aesthetic hybrids with 'theological stains.'

Drawing on newly uncovered archives of composers' autobiographical writings and musical sketches, Shelleg closely examines the aesthetic strategies that different artists used to grapple with established nationalist representations. As he puts the history of Israeli art music in conversation with modern Hebrew literature, he weaves a rich tapestry of Israeli culture and the ways in which it engaged with key social and political developments throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In analyzing Israeli music and literature against the backdrop of conflicts over territory, nation, and ethnicity, Theological Stains provides a revelatory look at the complex relationship between art and politics in Israel.

  

2019 Archive of Books

THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT: AN INTRODUCTION AND DOCUMENTARY READER 2nd edition

By: Gregory Mahler, ed.

(Routledge, 2019, ISBN-13: 978-1138047686, ISBN-10: 1138047686, 416 pages)

The Arab-Israeli conflict has been one of the most protracted and contentious disputes in modern history. This wide-ranging textbook examines the diplomatic and historical setting within which the conflict developed, from both the Israeli and Palestinian perspectives, and gives a comprehensive overview of the peace process. The new edition includes a revised and updated introduction and a wider selection of documents up through the first year of the Trump presidency. Enabling students to easily access and study original documents through the supportive framework of a textbook, THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT:

* presents over 80 of the most important and widely cited documents in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

* presents these documents in an edited form to highlight key elements

* includes an introductory chapter which sets the context for the study of the history of the conflict

* covers a comprehensive historical period, ranging from the nineteenth century to the present day

* incorporates a wide range of pedagogical aids: original documents, maps, and boxed sections

This important textbook is an essential aid for courses on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Middle East peace process, and will be an invaluable reference tool for all students of political science, Middle East studies, and history.

 
IYUNIM: MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN ISRAELI AND MODERN JEWISH SOCIETY (HEBREW)

Issue 33 has been published!

Editor: Avi Bareli ׀ Assistant Editor: Orna Miller

Editorial Board: Avi Bareli, Avner Ben-Amos, Kimmy Caplan, Danny Gutwein, Menachem Hofnung, Paula Kabalo, Nissim Leon, Kobi Peled, Shalom Ratzabi, Ilana Rosen, Ofer Shiff

Iyunim is a semi-annual journal, published by the Ben-Gurion

Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Sede-Boker. The journal holds two series:

I) The semi-annual series: Each volume contains research articles in various fields that specializes in modern Jewish society and Israeli society and stat, since the end of the 19th century. The articles address these issues from a variety of disciplines, such as history, sociology, philosophy, political science, economics, culture, geography, art, gender.

II) The thematic series: Each of its issues is dedicated to a significant current topic within the journal's fields of interest. This two-series format – the semi-annul and the thematic one – provides an invigorating and on-going platform for discussing the most prominent questions of state, society and culture in Israel.

Contents

Dan Naor Did All Roads Really Lead to Beirut? Menachem Begin’s Lebanese Policy, 1977-1982׀ Aharon Kampinsky Minister Zevulun Hamer’s Ambivalent Attitude to the Peace Process with Egypt ׀Uri Cohen Blocking Social Mobility in the Open University: Govering Institutions and the Council for Higher Education, 1974-1987 ׀ Ram Yehoshua Adut Dad Works, Mom Makes a Living: Life Stories of Mizrahi-Jews and Arab-Israelis of the ‘First Mobility Generation’ ׀ Deborah Bernstein, Talia Pfefferman From Haifa to Berlin: The Jewish Bourgeoisie in Palestine in the Early 20th Century from a Gender Perspective ׀ Roy Weintraub History Education in State-Religious Schools during the Past Decade ׀ Yair Seltenreich Shaping a Mobilized Culture: The 1936 Riots and the 'Hashomer' Collection ׀ Ofer Kenig, Chen Friedberg Does the Knesset Reflect the Composition of Israeli Society? Changes in Representative Gaps, 1977-2019 ׀ Tal Lento Under the Radar: The Adoption of the Constructive Vote of No-Confidence in Israel

The issue is available online on 'Iyunim' and 'Kotar' websites. For now, it is only available in digital format.

Contact info: 972-8-6596940 ; omiller@bgu.ac.il ; http://www.bgu.ac.il/iyunim

  

RELIGIOUS MINORITIES IN NON-SECULAR MIDDLE EASTERN AND NORTH AFRICAN STATES

By: Mark Tessler

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, Print ISBN: 978-3-030-19842-8, Online ISBN: 978-3-030-19843-5, 469 pages)

This book describes and compares the circumstances and lived experiences of religious minorities in Tunisia, Morocco, and Israel in the 1970s, countries where the identity and mission of the state are strongly and explicitly tied to the religion of the majority. The politics and identity of Jews in Tunisia and Morocco and Arabs in Israel are, therefore, shaped to a substantial degree by their status as religious minorities in non-secular states. This collection, based on in-depth fieldwork carried out during an important moment in the history of each community, and of the region, considers the nature and implications of each group’s response to its circumstances.  It focuses on both the community and individual levels of analysis and draws, in part, on original public opinion surveys. It also compares the three communities in order to offer generalizable insights about ways the identity, political culture, and institutional character of a minority group are shaped by the broader political environment in which it resides. The project will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of Middle Eastern and North African studies, Judaic studies, Islamic Studies, minority group politics, and international relations and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

 

THE ROAD TO PARTITION: UNSCOP AND THE BEGINNING OF UNITED NATIONS INVOLVEMENT IN THE ARAB-ISRAEL CONFLICT

By: Elad Ben-Dror

(Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2019, ISBN 978-965-217-433-8, 364 pages, in Hebrew)

This first-ever systematic study of UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, traces how a majority of the committee’s members came to adopt, almost in full, the demands of the Zionist movement. It thus played a decisive role in establishing the state of Israel and in the evolution of Israel-Arab conflict. UNSCOP, appointed in 1947 when the British asked the United Nations to help it formulate a policy on Palestine’s future, performed an intensive inquiry into the country that summer. In the end, its eleven members, from eleven different countries, recommended the end of the British Mandate and the partition of Palestine into two independent sovereign states, one Jewish, on a majority of the territory, and one Arab. These two states, along with Jerusalem, which was designated to come under UN rule, would be linked by mechanisms that would ensure their economic unity. These recommendations formed the basis for the debate at the second session of the UN General Assembly. After making minor changes, the General Assembly adopted the plan on November 29, 1947. In large measure, the decision set in motion the establishment of Israel.

The book offers a comprehensive account of UNSCOP and its work. It is based on extensive archival material, some newly declassified and explains how the members of the committee reached their conclusions. Most of the source material comes from the UN Archives in New York. But, as it also seeks to account for the personal viewpoint of each of the committee’s members, it also makes use of documents they produced and archives of their papers. This wide-ranging approach has produced some findings of great historical importance.

 

MOVING THROUGH CONFLICT:  DANCE AND POLITCS IN ISRAEL, 1ST EDITION

Edited by: Dina Roginsky, Henia Rottenberg

(Routledge, 2019, ISBN Hardback: 9780367406875, ISBN eBook: 9780367808518, 176 pages)

Moving through Conflict: Dance and Politics in Israel is a pioneering project in examining the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through dance. It proposes a research framework for study of the social, cultural, aesthetic and political dynamics between Jews and Arabs as reflected in dance from late 19th-century Palestine to present-day Israel.

Drawing on multiple disciplines, this book examines a variety of social and theatrical venues (communities, dance groups, evening classes and staged performances), dance genres (folk dancing, social dancing and theatrical dancing) and different cultural identities (Israeli, Palestinian and American). Underlying this work is a fundamental question: can the body and dance operate as nonverbal autonomous agents to mediate change in conflicting settings, transforming the "foreign" into the "familiar"? Or are they bound to their culturally dependent significance – and thus nothing more than additional sites of an embodied politics?

This anthology expounds on various studies on dance, historical periods, points of view and points of contact that help promote thinking about this fundamental issue. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of dance studies, sociology, anthropology, art history, education and cultural studies, as well as conflict and resolution studies.

 

BEN GURION, A BIOGRAPHY
Two Volumes

Book One: The Conquest of Leadership; Book Two: The Leader - His Rise and Fall

By: Yossi Goldstein

(Bar-Ilan University Press, 2019, ISBN: 978-965-226-510-4, 1440 pages, in Hebrew)

The book covers the life of David Ben-Gurion from his early years in Plonsk, Poland, until his death in 1973. This picture of his life, presented in two volumes, differs from previous biographies and studies of Ben-Gurion with regard to the facts recounted, the insights drawn, the nature of the historical analyses, and its conclusions.

The biography is based on primary sources, some of which have never been drawn on previously—Ben-Gurion’s diary, an irreplaceable historical source for his life, actions, and thought (even though it is tendentious and of limited reliability); his letters; the minutes of meetings he attended; selections from the press—as well as secondary sources. Its composition required me to grapple with many questions associated with the historical importance of its subject—the greatest Jewish statesman of all time—and his complex personality. Who was he? The wisest of men? Gifted with superb intuition? A fierce and cantankerous fighter? A master propagandist? A political manipulator? Stubborn as a mule? An odd sort of fellow?

I found links between historical developments and his personality traits. Ben-Gurion was not afraid to make difficult decisions, even when he knew that their outcome could be disastrous, even when he recognized that his political, military, economic, and diplomatic analyses might be mistaken. He knew how to decide and impose his authority. After he did so he insisted on his way, even if the opposition to him was dramatic. There is no doubt that sometimes his analyses of the situation were erroneous, and one could see those mistakes as the essence. Nevertheless, there has been no leader of his stature who exerted such a strong influence on Jewish society in the modern age and whose dramatic decisions determined the long-term character and development of Israel.

Volume 1 of the biography begins in his birthplace, Plonsk, and continues with his immigration to Palestine and integration into the Second Aliya. It continues with his period in the United States, return to Palestine, and emergence as the leader of the Histadrut. The book describes, explains, and analyzes his success in turning the Histadrut into the most important political, economic, and social player in the Yishuv during the Mandate and the first years of statehood. It also traces how Ben-Gurion, after his elevation to the chairmanship of the Jewish Agency in 1935, became the man who led the Yishuv to political independence. Volume 2 begins with the proclamation of the state and the War of Independence, continues with a description and analysis of his years as prime minister, and concludes with his death.

 

IYUNIM: MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN ISRAELI AND MODERN JEWISH SOCIETY (HEBREW)

Issue 32 has just been published!!!

Editor: Avi Bareli/Assistant Editor:Orna Miller/Editorial Board:Avi Bareli, Avner Ben-Amos, Kimmy Caplan, Danny Gutwein, Menachem Hofnung, Paula Kabalo, Nissim Leon, Kobi Peled, Shalom Ratzabi, Ilana Rosen, Ofer Shiff

Iyunim is a semi-annual journal, published by the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Sede-Boker.

The journal holds two series:

I) The semi-annual series: Each volume contains research articles in various fields that specializes in modern Jewish society and Israeli society and state.

The articles address these issues from a variety of disciplines, such as history, sociology, philosophy, political science, economics, culture, geography, art, gender.

II) The thematic series: Each of its issues is dedicated to a significant current topic within the journal's fields of interest. This two-series format – the semi-annul and the thematic one – provides an invigorating and on-going platform for discussing the most prominent questions of state, society and culture in Israel.

Contents of 32

Ronen Traube, Moshe Dayan and the Palestinian Issue:The Local Elections in the West Bank, 1972 / Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman, The Religious Women Party in the First Knesset Election: Failure or Achievement? / Meir Chazan, Ben-Gurion and Britain, 1930-1939 / Yair Berlin, ‘Talmud Industry’: Daf Yomi and Modern Consumer Culture / Adia Mendelson Maoz, Palestine, My Love: Place and Home in the Literary Works of Sayed Kashua / Elazar Ben Lulu, Ethnography of Ethiopian Sigd in an Israeli Reform Congregation / Udi Carmi, The Americanization of Muscular Judaism / Itamar Radai, Jews from Islamic Countries – Images and Perceptions in the Yishuv Society: The Case of Hannah Helena Thon / Orly C. Meron, Haifa and Beirut in a Comparative Perspective:Jewish Entrepreneurship between the British and the French Mandates/

Kobi Cohen-Hattab, Establishing the Israel State Archives 1948-1950

The issue is available in the academic libraries, the bookstores, and at the distributor "Sifrut Ahshav", 972-3-9229175

Office: 08-6596940 ; omiller@bgu.ac.il ; http://www.bgu.ac.il/iyunim

 

ANNOUNCING THE PUBLICATION OF A SPECIAL ISSUE

"Israel at 70: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Society, Culture and Politics" in Contemporary Review of the Middle East volume 6, issue 3-4The guest editors are Csaba Nikolenyi, Director of the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies and Paula Kabalo, Director of The Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism.

Table of contents:

Csaba Nikolenyi and Paula Kabalo
Introduction: Israel Studies “Here” and “There”

Judith Weisz Woodsworth
A Language for Israel: The Role of Translation in Building the Resources of Hebrew

Sigal Barkai
Neurotic Fantasy: The Third Temple as Metaphor in the Contemporary Israeli Art of Nira Pereg and Yael Bartana

Tal-Or Ben-Choreen
The Emergence of Fine Art Photography in Israel in the 1970s to the 1990s through Pedagogical and Social Links with the United States 

Ofer Shiff and David Barak-Gorodetsky
Pan-Jewish Solidarity and the Jewish Significance of Modern Israel: The 1958 ‘Who is a Jew?’ Affair Revisited

Ira Robinson
A Life to Remember: Yehuda Even Shmuel’s Memorialization of His Son, Shmuel Asher Kaufman and the Crisis of his Zionist Vision

Andrea Gondos
Isaiah Tishby, Új Kelet (New East), and the Cultural Mediation of Zionism in Transylvania (1920-1930)

Adi Sherzer-Druckman
Mamlakhtiyut from Across the Ocean: Ben-Gurion and the American-Jewish Community

Paula Kabalo
Israeli Jews from Muslim Countries: Immigrant Associations and Civic Leverage

Yolande Cohen
Zionism, Colonialism and Post-colonial migrations: Moroccan Jews’ Memories of Displacement

Havatzelet Yahel
The Conflict over Land Ownership and Unauthorized Construction in the Negev 

Emir Galilee
A Nomadic State of Mind: Mental Maps of Bedouins in the Negev and Sinai During the Time of the Ottomans, the British Mandate and the State of Israel

Ben Herzog
Presenting Ethnicity: Israeli Citizenship Discourse

Natan Aridan
Setting up Shop for Israel Advocacy – Diaspora ‘Retailers’ and the Israeli ‘Wholesalers’ in the Early Years of Israeli Diplomacy

Csaba Nikolenyi
Party Switching in Israel: Understanding the Split of the Labor Party in 2011

 

THE DECLINE OF THE LEFT WING IN ISRAEL: YOSSI BEILIN AND THE POLITICS OF THE PEACE PROCESS

By: Avi Shilon

(I.B.Tauris, 2019, ISBN-9781838601126, 352 pages)

Yossi Beilin was a seminal figure during the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. As deputy foreign minister in the second Rabin government, he was responsible for leading the Oslo process, which was the most important attempt to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. This book is the first to tell the story of the left wing and the peace process based on the private archive of Beilin himself. The thousands of documents – shared exclusively with the author - reveal a far more complete picture of Israel's political-diplomatic history in the late 20th century, and provide new information on key events. Avi Shilon offers a critiques of the 'liberal peace-building' project and analyses the connections between the Labour party's economic policy and foreign policy since the 1970s. This book is both a political biography of Beilin and a new history which recounts the diplomatic processes and social-political changes that occurred in Israel in the past four decades.

 

ARAFAT AND ABBAS: PORTRAITS OF LEADERSHIP IN A STATE POSTPONED 

By: Menachem Klein

(Oxford University Press, 2019, ISBN-10, 0190087587, ISBN-13: 978-0190087586; 256 pages)

This landmark volume presents vivid and intimate portraits of Palestinian Presidents Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, revealing the impact these different personalities have had on the struggle for national self-determination. Arafat and Abbas lived in Palestine as young children. Uprooted by the 1948 war, they returned in 1994 to serve as the first and second presidents of the Palestinian Authority, the establishment of which has been the Palestine Liberation Organization's greatest step towards self-determination for the Palestinian nation. Both Arafat and Abbas were shaped by earlier careers in the PLO, and each adopted their own controversial leadership methods and decision-making styles.

Drawing on primary sources in Arabic, Hebrew and English, Klein gives special attention to the lesser known Abbas: his beliefs and his disagreements with Israeli and American counterparts. The book uncovers new details about Abbas' peace talks and US foreign policy towards Palestine, and analyses the political evolution of Hamas and Abbas' succession struggle. Klein also highlights the tension between the ageing leader and his society.

Arafat and Abbas offers a comprehensive and balanced account of the Palestinian Authority's achievements and failures over its twenty- five years of existence. What emerges is a Palestinian nationalism that refuses to disappear.

 

PALESTINE TO ISRAEL: MANDATE TO STATE, 1945-1948

Two volumes

Volume I:  Rebellion Launched

Volume II: Into the International Arena 

By: Monty Noam Penkower

(Touro University Press, 2019; Vol 1. IBSN: 9781618118745, Vol. 2 ISBN: 9781618118776, Vol. 1 357 pages, Vol. 2 469 pages)

Seventy years after the creation of the State of Israel, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, 1945-1948 offers the definitive narrative of the achievement of Jewish sovereignty in the beleaguered Promised Land. Professor Monty Noam Penkower explores developments in Palestine and in the Arab states, including how the Palestine quagmire became a pawn in inter-Arab feuds; British and American responses both official and public; the role of Holocaust survivors; the context of the Cold War; and the saga as it unfolded in the corridors of the United Nations. Joining extensive archival research to a lucid prose, the two volumes offer a riveting conclusion to his Palestine in Turmoil and Decision on Palestine Deferred.

 

READING ISRAEL, READING AMERICA: THE POLITICS OF TRANSLATION BETWEEN JEWS

By: Omri Asscher

(Stanford University Press, 2019, Cloth ISBN: 9781503610057, Paper ISBN: 9781503610934, Digital ISBN: 9781503610941, 256 pages)

American and Israeli Jews have historically clashed over the contours of Jewish identity, and their experience of modern Jewish life has been radically different. But what happens when the encounter between American and Israeli Jewishness takes place in literary form—when Jewish American novels make aliyah, or when Israeli novels are imported for consumption by the diaspora? Reading Israel, Reading America explores the politics of translation as it shapes the understandings and misunderstandings of Israeli literature in the United States and American Jewish literature in Israel. Engaging in close readings of translations of iconic novels by the likes of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, and Yoram Kaniuk, Asscher decodes the ideological encounter between Israeli and American Jews.   

  

SECULARIZING THE SACRED: ASPECTS OF ISRAELI VISUAL CULTURE

By: Alec Mishory

(Brill, 2019, E-Book ISBN: 978-90-04-40527-1, Hardback ISBN: 978-90-04-40526-4, 407 pages)

As historical analyses of Diaspora Jewish visual culture blossom in quantity and sophistication, this book analyzes 19th-20th-century developments in Jewish Palestine and later the State of Israel. In the course of these approximately one hundred years, Zionist Israelis developed a visual corpus and artistic lexicon of Jewish-Israeli icons as an anchor for the emerging “civil religion.” Bridging internal tensions and even paradoxes, artists dynamically adopted, responded to, and adapted significant Diaspora influences for Jewish-Israeli purposes, as well as Jewish religious themes for secular goals, all in the name of creating a new state with its own paradoxes, simultaneously styled on the Enlightenment nation-state and Jewish peoplehood.

 

THE ISRAELI PEACE MOVEMENT: ANTI-OCCUPATION ACTIVISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS SINCE THE AL-AQSA INTIFADA (I.B.TAURIS)
By: Leonie Fleischmann

(Bloomsbury, 2019, ISBN  9781838600976 [Hardback], 9781838600990 [PDF eBook], 9781838600983 [EPUB eBook], 248 pages)

The Israeli peace movement has been in decline since the 2000s. In particular, the liberal Zionist groups, who call for peace for the sake of the security and continuity of Israel, have become paralysed and almost voiceless since the second Intifada. However, despite the stagnation around the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, this book argues that other important groups have emerged that present new ways to challenge the status quo. These are radical groups that act in solidarity with the Palestinians and human rights organisations and whose aim is to reveal the realities of the occupation and hold the government to account.

Leonie Fleishmann argues that these groups have been, and remain, the agenda setters, pushing the more moderate groups to mobilise more quickly and encouraging them to take up more confrontational ideas. Using social movements theory, and based on 50 interviews and participant observation, this book sheds light on contemporary Israeli peace activism.

 

PARADIGM LOST:  FROM TWO-STATE SOLUTION TO ONE-STATE REALITY 
By: Ian Lustick

(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019, ISBN 9780812251951, 232 pages)

Why have Israelis and Palestinians failed to achieve a two-state solution to the conflict that has cost so much and lasted so long? In his new book Ian Lustick brings fifty years as an analyst of the Arab-Israeli dispute to bear on this question. He offers a radical and provocative explanation of why continued attempts to divide the land will have no more success than would negotiations to establish a one-state solution.

Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs can enjoy the democracy they deserve but only after decades of struggle amid the unintended but powerful consequences of today’s one-state reality.

 

THE HASIDIC JEWS OF MONTREAL
By: Ira Robinson and Pierre Anctil

(University of Montreal press, 2019, ISBN: ISBN 9782760640740 [paper], ISBN 9782760640764 [eBook], ISBN 9782760640757 [PDF], 208 pages, in French).

Montréal is affected by a number of religious influences that continually assert themselves in the public square, and that raise fundamental issues of coexistence, tolerance, and the meeting of beliefs. This phenomenon is particularly striking when it comes to non-Christian communities, deemed fundamentalist by outsiders, that seek to preserve their traditional values. In most cases, interested observers and the media can only observe certain practices in these communities, without being able to globally understand their beliefs and fundamental motivations. This is particularly the case for Hasidic Jews who live in the central neighborhoods of Montréal, but for whom very little reliable information circulates within the community at large.

This book presents an unprecedented portrait of Montreal’s Hasidic population and its sub-communities, while addressing the controversial issue of the education of young Hasidim and the interpersonal tensions that arise recurrently in Hasidic neighborhoods. The book is also interested in the sustained, but not very visible, economic, social, and institutional impact of Hasidic Jews on their urban environment.

 
IS THE PARTY OVER? HOW ISRAEL LOST ITS SOCIAL AGENDA
By: Laura Wharton

(Yad Levi Eshkol, 2019, ISBN: 978-965-92664-7-0)

Ideology is a real force in modern politics; it is not something ethereal and detached from reality. This book, inspired by the call fora return to examine the role that ideas play in politics—as Michael Freeden, Mark Blyth, Daniel Beland, and others have advocated— builds on this basic assumption in discussing the ideology of Israel's Labor Party.

In the period 1965-77, Mapai and its successor, the Labor Party, maintained a clear ideological line on social matters, despite growing conflict within the party's apparatus and clashing policy demands. Contrary to various claims questioning the party's primary motives and ideological consistency, an evaluation of its social policy reveals that the party maintained clear goals and pursued them vigorously, in the face of massive demographic changes and unrelenting security pressures that drained the country's resources and demanded attention be directed elsewhere. As the party disintegrated from an organizational standpoint, it lost its ability to realize its own aims. Moreover, due to the growing tendency to focus on security and foreign affairs, and in part because social policies were pursued so persistently and over such a long period of time, the electorate lost interest in them. Thus, ironically, the period in which social policy was most developed prepared the way for its later curtailment—or, to paraphrase, socialism contained the seeds of its own destruction.

 
ZIONISM’S MARITIME REVOLUTION: THE YISHUV’S HOLD ON THE LAND OF ISRAEL’S SEA AND SHORES, 1917-1948
by: Kobi Cohen-Hattab

(Co-published by The Hebrew University Magnes Press and De Gruyter, 2019, ISBN-978-3-11-062963-7, 335 pages ) 

Research on Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel in the modern era has long neglected the sea and its shores. This book explores the Yishuv’s hold on the Mediterranean and other bodies of water during the British Mandate in Palestine and the Zionist “maritime revolution,” a shift from a focus on

land-based development to an embrace of the sea as a source of security, economic growth, clandestine immigration (HaApala), and national pride. The transformation is tracked in four spheres — ports, seamanship, fishery, and education — and viewed within the context of the Jewish/Arab conflict, internal Yishuv politics, and the Second World War. Archives, memoirs, press, and secondary sources all help illuminate the Zionist Movement’s road to maritime sovereignty. By the State of Israel’s founding in 1948, the Yishuv had a flourishing nautical presence: a national shipping company, control over the country’s three active ports, maritime athletics, fish farming, and a nautical training school.

HOLOCAUST MEMORIES: A SURVEY OF HOLOCAUST MEMOIRS, HISTORIES, NOVELS AND FILMS
By: Claudia Moscovici

(Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, ISBN: 978-0-7618-7092-0 [Paperback], ISBN: 978-0-7618-7093-7 [eBook], 250 pages)

Nearly eighty years have passed since the Holocaust. There have been hundreds of memoirs, histories and novels written about it, yet many fear that this important event may fall into oblivion. As Holocaust survivors pass away, their legacy of suffering, tenacity and courage could be forgotten. It is up to each generation to commemorate the victims, preserve their life stories and hopefully help prevent such catastrophes. These were my main motivations in writing this book, Holocaust Memories, which includes reviews of memoirs, histories, biographies, novels and films about the Holocaust.  It was difficult to choose among the multitude of books on the subject that deserve our attention. I made my selections based partly on the works that are considered to be the most important on the subject; partly on wishing to offer some historical background about the Holocaust in different countries and regions that were occupied by or allied themselves with Nazi Germany, and partly on my personal preferences, interests and knowledge. The Nazis targeted European Jews as their main victims, so my book focuses primarily on them. At the same time, since the Nazis also targeted other groups they considered dangerous and inferior, I also review books about the sufferings of the Gypsies, the Poles and other groups that fell victim to the Nazi regimes. In the last part, I review books that discuss other genocides and crimes against humanity, including the Stalinist mass purges, the Cambodian massacres by the Pol Pot regime and the Rwandan genocide. I want to emphasize that history can, indeed, repeat itself, even if in different forms and contexts. Just as the Jews of Europe were not the only targets of genocide, Fascist regimes were not its only perpetrators.

 

SPOILERS AND COPING WITH SPOILERS:  ISRAELI-ARAB NEGOTIATIONS SPOILERS
Edited by: Galia Golan and Gilead Sher

(Indiana University Press, 2019, ISBN: 978-0-253-04240-8)

The volume deals with various types of non-violent spoiling and spoilers in the Israeli-Arab conflict.  Contributions by authors from varied disciplines and experience examine spoiling inside the negotiating room itself, and the possibility of leaders as spoilers - whether intentionally or unintentionally, based on case studies of two Israeli leaders; diaspora spoilers – in the American Jewish diaspora; and the spoiling potential of the media as tested in an empirical study of Israeli media at various times during the Oslo peace process.  Further, the perhaps paradoxical role of the Israeli court system is addressed as the courts themselves, become agents of spoiling, even as they are called upon to cope with or prevent settler spoiling.  Finally, potential spoiler activity is examined through a social-psychological study of settler reactions in a test case of a peace agreement-dictated evacuation of settlements.  From this, policy conclusions may be drawn for dealing with the major spoiling potential – that of the settlers - in the case of a final peace agreement.  The unique features of the volume are not only the concentration on non-violent spoilers but also a comparative study of efforts to cope with spoilers and spoilers, providing a theoretical as well as empirical analysis for dealing with this phenomenon.

 

OVERCOMING INTRACTABLE CONFLICTS:  NEW APPROACHES TO CONSTRUCTIVE TRANSFORMATIONS
Edited by: Miriam F. Elman, Catherine Gerard, Galia Golan, and Louis Kriesberg

(Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019, Hardback IBSN: 9781786610720, Paperback ISBN: 9781786610737, eBook ISBN: 9781786610744, 272 pages)

Despite considerable progress in research and practice in the constructive transformation of intractable conflicts beginning in the 1970s, many destructive conflicts have recently erupted.  New circumstances have emerged that have resulted in regressions.  The contributions in this book examine many of the new challenging obstructions, but also many new opportunities for ways to transform intractable conflicts.  The book brings together analyses from many regions of the world and regarding different scales of conflicts.   The diversity in authors provides a wide range of theoretical approaches to explaining how intractable conflicts can be transformed.  The following factors are examined: systemic changes and changes in context, new actors, changing dynamics of actors and possible intervenors, new strategies and tactics.

 
ENCOUNTERS: HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN SPACE
Edited by: Dafna Hirsch

(The Jerusalem Van Leer Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 2019, IBSN 7989650208660, 491 pages [in Hebrew])

Can the anthropological perspective shed new light on Zionist and Palestinian history, and particularly  on the reciprocal relationship between the two societies? What can a historical perspective contribute to the anthropology of Israeli and Palestinian societies and the practices of memory and history-telling that they espouse?

Encounters: History and Anthropology of the Israeli-Palestinian Space adopts a critical approach that emerges from the encounter between history, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. In contrast to "history from above," which has characterized much of the historiography of Israel and Palestine, the articles offer a view "from below" of various social spaces, including the seashore, a cooperative restaurant in Tel Aviv, the Lydda Ghetto, the Lakhish regional settlement project, house building in Deir Al-Assad, fish mongering at the Jaffa port, and urban history tours in Haifa. The volume also examines social practices of memory, including the forgetting of pre-1948 Palestinian urbanity, the representation of neighboring Arab villages in several Hashomer Hatza'ir kibbutzim , and history-telling by Bedouin women. Through a close investigation of these settings, the authors address wider questions in the study of local histories, societies and cultures, including the consolidation of the class and ethnic structure in Israel; the political economy of the military government; the social and cultural consequences of globalization and privatization; and the consolidation of historical narratives and models of knowledge. Our shared point of departure rejects "methodological nationalism" in favor of a shared space and entangled histories, in which processes of separation, distinction and "Othering" take place within a realty of contiguity, social relations and mutual shaping. The volume is the result of a research group of scholars at early stages of their academic career, which met under the auspices of the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute in 2011-2012.

 

RELIGIOUS MINORITIES IN NON-SECULAR MIDDLE EASTERN AND NORTH AFRICAN STATES
By: Mark Tessler

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, ISBN [eBook]: 978-3-030-19843-5, ISBN [Hardcover]: 978-3-030-19842-8)

This book describes and compares the circumstances and lived experiences of religious minorities in Tunisia, Morocco, and Israel in the 1970s, countries where the identity and mission of the state are strongly and explicitly tied to the religion of the majority. The politics and identity of Jews in Tunisia and Morocco and Arabs in Israel are, therefore, shaped to a substantial degree by their status as religious minorities in non-secular states. This collection, based on in-depth fieldwork carried out during an important moment in the history of each community, and of the region, considers the nature and implications of each group’s response to its circumstances.  It focuses on both the community and individual levels of analysis and draws, in part, on original public opinion surveys. It also compares the three communities in order to offer generalizable insights about ways the identity, political culture, and institutional character of a minority group are shaped by the broader political environment in which it resides. 

 
THE ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT: CONTESTED HISTORIES, 2ND EDITION
By: Neil Caplan

(Wiley-Blackwell, 2019, ISBN: 978-1-119-52387-1, 384 pages)

The Israel-Palestine Conflict introduces the historical basis of the dispute and explores the clash of narratives between the main protagonists, highlighting both the tangible issues and intangible factors that have blocked a peaceful resolution. Author Neil Caplan helps readers understand the complexities of the conflict and why the histories of Palestine and Israel are so fiercely contested. Now in its second edition, this book includes new discussions addressing recent debates over two-state versus one-state solutions, the growing polarization in public discourse outside of the Middle East and the regrettable trend of merging scholarship with advocacy. This clear and accessible volume offers a non-polemical approach to current academic discussions and political debates and identifies eleven core arguments that the author considers unwinnable. It encourages readers to go beyond simply assigning blame for missed opportunities and explores the major historiographical debates arising from the dispute. Already a standard text for courses on the history and politics of the Middle East, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Contested Histories is an indispensable resource for students, scholars, and interested general readers.

 
 

VICTIMHOOD DISCOURSE IN CONTEMPORARY ISRAEL
Edited By: Ilan Peleg

(Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield), 2019, ISBN 978-1-4985-5350-6, hardback, 215 pages)

This interdisciplinary collection of articles deal comprehensively with different aspects of collective victimhood in contemporary Israel, but also with the wider implications of this important concept for many other societies, including the Palestinian one.  The nine highly diverse, scholarly chapters included in this volume offer analysis of the politics of victimhood (viewing it as increasingly dominant in contemporary Israel), assess victimhood as a focal point in Jewish history, traces the evolution of Zionist thought as it relates to a sense of Zionist victimhood, study the possibility of the political transformation of victimhood by focusing on several Israel prime ministers (Barak, Netanyahu, Peres, Rabin, Shamir, Sharon), dwell on important events that have contributed to the evolvement of the sense of victimhood in Israel and beyond,  examine victimhood within the Palestinian national movement, and offer creative ways of moving beyond national victimhood and toward better future for people of the Middle East and others.

While focusing on Israel, the volume is highly conceptual, theoretical and comparative in nature.  It emphasizes the universality of victimhood and particularly its prevalence in modern nationalist movements.   While the book sums up the state of the field in regard to collective victimhood, it invites the readers to engage in examining the far-reaching implications of this important concept for politics in general.

This set of articles—written by Ruth Amir, Yael Aronoff, Moshe Berent, Maya Kahanoff, Irit Keynan, Yechiel Klar, Itamar Lurie, Shafiq Masalha, Daniel Navon, Ilan Peleg, and Ido Zelkovitz—is likely to generate interest among scholars in many disciplines and be of interest for students on all levels.  It could be used in courses dealing with Israel, the Middle East and Jewish Studies, but also in comparative politics and international relations.

 
ARAB-PALESTINIAN SOCIETY IN THE ISRAELI POLITICAL SYSTEM: INTEGRATION VERSUS SEGREGATION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
By: Rami Zeedan

(Lexington Books, 2019, ISBN 978-1498553148, 166 pages)

The Arab-Palestinian community, which constitutes 20 percent of Israel’s population, is an ethnic minority living mainly in ethnically homogeneous cities and villages. Arab-Palestinian Society in the Israeli Political System offers a comprehensive, detailed examination of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel within the Green Line in the twenty-first century. Rami Zeedan analyzes political trends, leadership, and the effects on Arab-Palestinian identity in Israel of recent changes, especially the 2015 legislative elections. The author also sheds light on the crisis and identifies the sources and relations to the local political structure in Arab localities in Israel. The book discusses the implications of the integration of an ethnic minority in an ethnic state and on the definition of Israel as “Jewish and Democratic.”

 

 

PROSTITUTION, PORNOGRAPHY AND TRAFFICKING IN WOMEN: ISRAEL'S BLOOD MONEY
Edited by: Esther Hertzog and Erella Shadmi

(Routledge, 2019, ISBN: 9781138364585 [Hardback], 9780429431289 [eBook], 212 pages)

The book examines the sex industry in Israel, using feminist concepts to elaborate on the power of prostitution to shape a world in which women are objects for fulfilling men's desires. This collection examines prostitution, trafficking in women and pornography from divergent disciplinary angles, highlighting the interconnectedness of these three aspects of the sex trade. Showing these practices to be embedded in a capitalist and patriarchal oppressive context that is accommodated by State institutions, this volume rejects the arguments that unlike trafficking in women, it is possible to choose prostitution and that feminist pornography is possible. 

The unique contribution of the book is reflected through three main angles:

1. It is a wide-ranging collection of essays about prostitution and pornography authored by prominent radical Israeli feminists. It offers the most comprehensive outlook that exists so far about the feminist struggle against prostitution in Israel. The essays contained in the book offer divergent perspectives of the triple facet phenomena of the sex industry in Israel. The case studies on which many of the essays are based provide down-to-earth revealing accounts of the trade sex in Israel.

2. The anthology is the first comprehensive document of State mechanisms which preserve the prostitution as an institution in Israel. Politically structured, these mechanisms serve the State to supervise women's sexuality and the connections between sex and capital. They turned Israel into one of the main target countries of the trade in women from ex-Russia. The role of the courts and the parliament in determining the status of the pornography in Israel is originally illuminated through a legal analysis and a description of the feminist organizations' success in passing a law against porn on TV channels.

3. Differing from most publications on the sex trade, this collection signals the diversion of the discourse about prostitution from the woman in prostitution to the client. The conscience dissociation of the client, entrenched in the culture of consuming prostitution, enables the de-humanization of the prostitute. Hence, it is argued that if the normative client's conscience will be breached by cultural images against choosing to consume prostitution, the client will not be comfortable with his choices. This approach entails legal, cultural and psychological implications.  

 

TZIPI LIVNI – A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY
By: Ilan Ben Ami

(Steimatzky, 2019, in Hebrew, 374 pages)

Much has been written in recent years about the reasons for the poor representation of women in Israeli politics and about the obstacles on their way to high political positions. None of these seem to apply to former Mossad agent Tzipi Livni, who entered the political system only when she was in her late 30's. Widely considered as the most powerful woman in Israeli politics since Golda Meir, Tzipi Livni has served in eight different government positions and was the first woman to serve as Vice Prime Minister. She was a member of the security cabinet during three major military operations and over two different periods, was in charge of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Within a relatively short period after joining the political system, she became a realistic candidate for the office of Israel's Prime Minister, proving that a woman can definitely reach the highest political positions and deal with the most 'masculine' issues.

Ideologically speaking, Livni's way is also a unique one. Born to a right wing, revisionist family, at a very early stage in her career, she gave up on the idea of Greater Israel. She later became one of Israel's leading voices in support of the Two-State Solution as the only way "to ensure Israel's security and identity as a Jewish and democratic state", as she puts it.

So, what are the reasons for Livni's meteoric political rise and success? What made the daughter of the Irgun's chief operations officer – a member of Beitar youth movement and a prominent member of the Likud Party – to leave her political home and join a party whose ideology is completely opposite to her upbringing? To what degree is she still led by Ze'ev Jabotinsky's ideology? How difficult was it for Livni, as a woman, to make her way in the male-dominant world of Israeli politics? Did she bring any new (feminine) agenda to the Israeli political system? Were the moderate positions she expressed during the military operations she was part of affected by the fact that she is a woman? It is with these and other questions that this book deals with.      

 

PUBLISHED! VOLUME 31 (JUNE 2019)

IYUNIM: MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN ISRAEL AND MODERN JEWISH SOCIETY (HEBREW)      

Editors: Avi Bareli, Ofer Shiff  / Assistant Editor: Orna Miller  / Editorial Board: Avi Bareli, Avner Ben-Amos, Kimmy Caplan, Danny Gutwein, Menachem Hofnung, Paula Kabalo, Nissim Leon, Kobi Peled, Shalom Ratzabi, Ilana Rosen, Ofer Shiff.

Iyunim is a multidisciplinary research journal which holds two series: the semi-annual series and the thematic series, and contains articles in various fields that specialize in modern world Jewish society and Israeli society and state.
The articles address these issues from a variety of disciplines from all fields of humanities and social sciences.

Contents: Uri Cohen: Shneior Lifson and the Founding of the Open University, 1970-1976 / Oded Heilbronner: Moral Panic and the Consumption of Pornographic Literature in Israel in the 1960s / Danny Gutwein: The Chizbatron and the Transformation of the Palmach’s Pioneering Ethos, 1948-1950 / Yogev Elbaz: A Calculated Risk: Israel’s Intervention in Jordan’s Civil War, September 1970 / Nadav Fraenkel: The Etzion Bloc Settlements and the Yishuv’s Institutions in the War of Independence / Ada Gebel: Yitzhak Breuer and the Question of Sovereignty in the Land of Israel / Dotan Goren: The Hughes Land Affair in Transjordan / Liora Bing-Heidecker: Choreo-trauma: The Poetics of Loss in the Dance Works of Judith Arnon and of Rami Beer / Or Aleksandrowicz: The Façade of Building: Exposed Building Envelope Technologies in Modern Israeli Architecture / Michael Gluzman: David Grossman’s Writing of Bereavement.

The issue is available in the academic libraries, bookstores, and the distributor: 'Sifrut Achshav' 03-9229175

http://www.bgu.ac.il/iyunim  /  omiller@bgu.ac.il  /  08-6596940

Iyunim: Multidisciplinary Studies in Israeli and Modern Jewish Society will now be a full online journal, in addition to the hard copies. Each new issue will be uploaded to the site without delay. Issue 31, published in June 2019, is already available on the website:http://www.bgu.ac.il/iyunim.

 

SPECIAL ISSUE OF THE JOURNAL OF ISRAELI HISTORY 36 (2):  A RISING TIDE? MIXED FAMILIES IN ISRAEL
Guest Editor: Sylvie Fogiel-Bijaoui

https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fjih20/36/2?nav=tocList

 
TEACHING THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT
Edited by: Rachel Harris

(Wayne State University Press, 2019, IBSN 9780814346761 [Printed Paper Cased]; ISBN: 9780814346778 [Paperback]; ISBN: 9780814346785 [eBook], 468 pages)

The Arab-Israeli conflict has become a touchstone of international politics and a flash point on college campuses. And yet, how do faculty teach such a contentious topic in class? Taught not only in international relations, peace and conflict resolution, politics and history, and Israel and Middle Eastern studies courses but also in literature, sociology, urban planning, law, cinema, fine art, and business—the subject guarantees wide interest among students. Faculty are challenged to deal with the subject’s complexity and the sensitive dynamics it creates. The result is anxiety as they approach the task and a need for guidance. Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict edited by Rachel S. Harris is the first book designed to meet this need.

Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict brings together thirty-nine essays from experienced educators who reflect on the challenges of engaging students in college classrooms. Divided into seven sections, these personal essays cover a broad range of institutional and geographical settings, as well as a wide number of academic disciplines. Some of the topics include using graphic novels and memoirs to wrestle with the complexities of Israel/Palestine, the perils of misreading in the creative writing classroom as border crossing, teaching competing narratives through film, using food to teach the Arab-Israeli conflict, and teaching the subject in the community college classroom. Each essay includes suggestions for class activities, resources, and approaches to effective teaching. Whether planning a new course or searching for new teaching ideas, this collection is an indispensable compendium for anyone teaching the Arab-Israeli conflict.

 

THE MAKING OF MODERN JEWISH IDENTITY: IDEOLOGICAL CHANGE AND RELIGIOUS CONVERSION
By: Motti Inbari

(Routledge, 2019, ISBN 9780367135959 [Hardcover], 172 pages) 

This volume explores the processes that led several modern Jewish leaders – rabbis, politicians, and intellectuals – to make radical changes to their ideology regarding Zionism, Socialism, and Orthodoxy. Comparing their ideological change to acts of conversion, the study examines the philosophical, sociological, and psychological path of the leaders’ transformation. The individuals examined are novelist Arthur Koestler, who transformed from a devout Communist to an anti-Communist crusader following the atrocities of the Stalin regime; Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, who moved from the New Left to neoconservative, disillusioned by US liberal politics; Yissachar Shlomo Teichtel, who transformed from an ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist Hungarian rabbi to messianic Religious-Zionist due to the events of the Holocaust; Ruth Ben-David, who converted to Judaism after the Second World War in France because of her sympathy with Zionism, eventually becoming a radical anti-Israeli advocate; Haim Herman Cohn, Israeli Supreme Court justice, who grew up as a non-Zionist Orthodox Jew in Germany, later renouncing his belief in God due to the events of the Holocaust; and Avraham (Avrum) Burg, prominent centrist Israeli politician who served as the Speaker of the Knesset and head of the Jewish Agency, who later became a post-Zionist. Comparing aspects of modern politics to religion, the book will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of areas including modern Jewish studies, sociology of religion, and political science.

 

MUSLIMS, JEWS AND JERUSALEM: AMBIVALENCE, DIALOGUE OR ARMAGEDDON
By: Moshe Ma'oz

(Hakibutz Hameuhad, Tel Aviv ,2019, in Hebrew, 278 pages)

The book discusses the ambivalent relations between Muslims and Jews since the 7th century in various countries, notably the Middle East, since the end of the 19th century. It highlights the issues of  East Jerusalem---Al-Quds Al-Sharif and the Temple Mount--Al-Haram-Al-Sharif in the Muslim-Jewish dispute, and the mutual radicalization of both sides since June 1967; which at the worst case scenario, can lead to a Muslim--Jewish Armageddon. 

FIGHTING FOR DIGNITY: MIGRANT LIVES AT ISRAEL’S MARGINS
By Sarah S. Willen

(University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2019, ISBN 9780812251340, 344 pages)

In Fighting for Dignity, Sarah S. Willen explores what happened when the Israeli government launched an aggressive deportation campaign targeting newly arrived migrants from countries as varied as Ghana and the Philippines, Nigeria, Colombia, and Ukraine. Although the campaign was billed as a solution to high unemployment, it had another goal as well: to promote an exclusionary vision of Israel as a Jewish state in which non-Jews have no place. The deportation campaign quickly devastated Tel Aviv's migrant communities and set the stage for even more aggressive antimigrant and antirefugee policies in the years to come. Fighting for Dignity traces the roots of this deportation campaign in Israeli history and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and shows how policies that illegalize and criminalize migrants wreak havoc in their lives, endanger their health, and curtail the human capacity to flourish. Children born to migrant parents are especially vulnerable to developmental and psychosocial risks. Drawing on nearly two decades of ethnographic engagement in homes and in churches, medical offices, advocacy organizations, and public spaces, Willen shows how migrants struggle to craft meaningful, flourishing lives despite the exclusions and vulnerabilities they endure. To complement their perspectives, she introduces Israeli activists who reject their government's exclusionary agenda and strive to build bridges across difference, repair violations of migrants' dignity, and resist policies that violate their own moral convictions. Willen's vivid and unflinching ethnography challenges us to reconsider our understandings of global migration, human rights, the Middle East— and even dignity itself.

 

DESERT IN THE PROMISED LAND 
By: Yael Zerubavel

(Stanford University Press, 2019, ISBN: 9781503606234 [Cloth], ISBN: 9781503607590 [Paper], ISBN: 9781503607606 [Digital], 368 pages)

At once an ecological phenomenon and a cultural construction, the desert has varied associations in Zionist and Israeli culture. Yael Zerubavel tells the story of the desert from the early twentieth century to the present, shedding light on romantic-mythical associations, settlement and security concerns, environmental sympathies, and the commodifying tourist gaze. Drawing on literary narratives, educational texts, newspaper articles, tourist materials, films, popular songs, posters, photographs, and cartoons, Zerubavel reveals the complexities and contradictions that mark Israeli society’s semiotics of space in relation to the Middle East, and the central role of the “besieged island” trope in Israeli culture and politics.

 
SHAPING A NATION: THE CULTURAL ORIGINS OF ZIONISM 1882-1948
By: Yitzhak Conforti

(Jerusalem, Israel: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 2019, in Hebrew. ISBN 978-965-217-427-7, 276 pages)

The central argument of Shaping a Nation is that Zionism must be understood not only from the political point of view, but also from a cultural perspective. To understand the growth of this movement and its success in establishing a modern nation-state, we must examine the way in which movement activists and leaders understood the reality of their lives, their past and their future. Zionism was formed as part of Jewish history and culture – it did not “invent a nation,” as some modernist researchers propose. On the other hand, the religious longing for Zion alone cannot explain the growth of modern Jewish nationalism. This book demonstrates that the set of values, myths and beliefs of Zionism were drawn from pre-modern Jewish culture. This culture often dictated the political agenda of Zionism, and the book examines its influence on the formation of the nation. Israeli society today is still occupied with the basic questions that engaged Zionism at its inception. What is the appropriate relationship between Zionism and the Jewish past? What is the ideal balance between the good of the Jewish people, and the Land of Israel? What is the proper character of Zionism: western or eastern, ethnic or civic? And what is the utopian vision of the future of the Jewish state? This book focuses on these questions and offers a fresh perspective on these issues. 

 

INTERNET DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL CHANGE: THE CASE OF ISRAEL
By: Carmit Wiesslitz

(Lexington Books, 2019, ISBN: 978-1-4985-3979-1 [eBook], ISBN: 978-1-4985-3978-4 [Hardback], 182 pages)

This book examines to what extent the democratic potential ascribed to the Internet is realized in practice, and how civil society organizations exploit the unique features of the Internet to attain their goals. This is the story of the organization members’ outlooks and impressions of digital platforms’ role as tools for social change; a story that debunks a common myth about the Internet and collective action. In a time when social media are credited with immense power in generating social change, this book serves as an important reminder that reality for activists and social change organizations is more complicated. Thus, the book sheds light on the back stage of social change organizations’ operations as they struggle to gain visibility in the infinite sea of civil groups competing for attention in the online public sphere. While many studies focus on the performative dimension of collective action (such as protests), this book highlights the challenges of these organizations’ mundane routines. Using a unique analytical perspective based on a structural-organizational approach, and a longitudinal study that utilizes a decade worth of data related to the specific case of Israel and its highly conflicted and turbulent society, the book makes a significant contribution to study of new media and to theories of Internet, democracy, and social change.

 

THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW®
By: Dov Waxman

(Oxford University Press, 2019, ISBN: 978-0-19-062533-7, 288 Pages)

No conflict in the world has lasted as long, generated as many news headlines, or incited as much controversy as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet, despite, or perhaps because of, the degree of international attention it receives, the conflict is still widely misunderstood. While Israelis and Palestinians and their respective supporters trade accusations, many outside observers remain confused by the conflict’s complexity and perplexed by the passion it arouses. The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know® offers an even-handed and judicious guide to the world’s most intractable dispute. Covering the conflict from its nineteenth-century origins to the latest developments of the twenty-first century, this book explains the key events, examines the core issues, and presents the competing claims and narratives of both sides.

 

 
REMAKING HOLOCAUST MEMORY, A PIONEERING ANALYSIS OF THIRD-GENERATION HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTARIES IN ISRAEL
By: Liat Steir-Livny

(Syracuse University Press, 2019, IBSN: 9780815636502 (Paper), IBSN: 9780815636328 [Hardcover], ISBN: 9780815654780 [eBook], 376 pages)

Since the late 1990s in Israel, third-generation Holocaust survivors have become the new custodians of cultural memory, and the documentary films they produce play a major role in shaping a societal consensus of commemoration.  Remaking Holocaust Memory, a pioneering analysis of third-generation Holocaust documentaries in Israel, investigates films that have been screened in Israel, Europe, and the United States, appeared in numerous international film festivals, and won international awards, but have yet to receive significant academic attention. The book shows how the “absolute truths” that appeared in the majority of second-generation films are deconstructed and disputed in the newer films, which do not dismiss their “cinematic parents’ ” approach but rather rethink fixed notions, extend the debates, and pose questions where previously there had been exclamation marks. 

 

MENACHEM BEGIN AND THE ISRAEL-EGYPT PEACE PROCESS:  BETWEEN IDEOLOGY AND POLITICAL REALISM
By: Gerald M. Steinberg and Ziv Rubinovitz

(Indiana University Press, 2019, ISBN: 978-0-253-03952-1, 280 pages)

Focusing on the character and personality of Menachem Begin, Gerald Steinberg and Ziv Rubinovitz offer a new look into the peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt in the 1970s. Begin's role as a peace negotiator has often been marginalized, but this sympathetic and critical portrait restores him to the center of the diplomatic process. Beginning with the events of 1967, Steinberg and Rubinovitz look at Begin's statements on foreign policy, including relations with Egypt, and his role as Prime Minister and chief signer of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty. While Begin did not leave personal memoirs or diaries of the peace process, Steinberg and Rubinovitz have tapped into newly released Israeli archives and information housed at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and the Begin Heritage Center. The analysis illuminates the complexities that Menachem Begin faced in navigating between ideology and political realism in the negotiations towards a peace treaty that remains a unique diplomatic achievement.

 
MY STRUGGLE FOR PEACE: THE DIARY OF MOSHE SHARETT, 1953-1956
By: Neil Caplan and Yaakov Sharett (Eds.)
(Indiana University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0-253-04325-2, 3 vols. 1950 pages)

This remarkable political document offers insights into the complex workings of the young Israeli political system, set against the backdrop of the disintegration of the country’s fragile armistice with the Arab states. Replete with the diarist’s candid comments on Israel’s first generation leaders and world statesmen of the day, the diary also tells the dramatic human story of a political career cut short—the removal of an unusually sensitive, dedicated, and talented public servant. My Struggle for Peace is, above all, an intimate record of the decline of Moshe Sharett’s moderate approach and the rise of more "activist-militant" trends in Israeli society, culminating in the Suez/Sinai war of 1956. The diary challenges the popular narrative that Israel’s confrontation with its neighbors was unavoidable by offering daily evidence of Sharett’s statesmanship, moderation, diplomacy, and concern for Israel’s place in international affairs.

This long-awaited 3-volume English abridgement of Sharett’s Yoman Ishi [Personal diary] (Ma’ariv, 1978) maintains the integrity, flavor, and impact of the 8-volume Hebrew original and includes additional documentary material that was not accessible at the time.

 

INCLUSION THROUGH EXCLUSION: HOW YOUNG IMMIGRANT ISRAELIS IN THE NATIONALIST YISRA'EL BEITENU PARTY READ ISRAELI CITIZENSHIP
By: Anja Schmidt-Kleinert

(Bielefeld: transcript, in English, ISBN print: 978-3-8376-4559-0/ ISBN pdf open access: 978-3-8394-4559-4, 218 pages)

How do young people from immigrant families become engaged in politics? Anja Schmidt-Kleinert examines the case of young Israelis who are actively engaged with the nationalist Yisra'el Beitenu party, led by the Israeli minister of defence, Avigdor Lieberman. She explores how the activists present Israeli citizenship in a way that is exclusionary to non-Jewish citizens and analyses their strategy to actively construct a sense of belonging to Israeli society or, more precisely, to the Jewish collective by (re-)producing the ethno-nationalist discourse.

 

NIETZSCHE AND JEWISH POLITICAL THEOLOGY
By: David Ohana

(London, The United Kingdom: Routledge, 2019. In English, ISBN-13: 978-1138360105 ISBN-10: 1138360104, 304 pages)

Nietzsche and Jewish Political Theology is the first book to explore the impact of Friedrich Nietzsche’s work on the formation of Jewish political theology during the first half of the twentieth century. It maps the many ways in which early Jewish thinkers grappled with Nietzsche’s powerful ideas about politics, morality, and religion in the process of forging a new and modern Jewish culture. The book explores the stories of some of the most important Jewish thinkers who utilized Nietzsche’s writings in crafting the intellectual foundations of Jewish modern political theology. These figures’ political convictions ranged from orthodox conservatism to pacifist anarchism, and their attitude towards Nietzsche’s ideas varied from enthusiastic embrace to ambivalence and outright rejection. By bringing these diverse figures together, the book makes a convincing argument about Nietzsche’s importance for key figures of early Zionism and modern Jewish political thought.

 

THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERNITY
By: David Ohana

(London, The United Kingdom: Routledge, 2019. In English, ISBN-13: 978-0815363125 ISBN-10: 0815363125, 239 pages)

The Intellectual Origins of Modernity explores the long and winding road of modernity from Rousseau to Foucault and its roots, which are not to be found in a desire for enlightenment or in the idea of progress but in the Promethean passion of Western humankind. Modernity is the Promethean passion, the passion of humans to be their own master, to use their insight to make a world different from the one that they found, and to liberate themselves from their immemorial chains. This passion created the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian regimes that arose in their wake in the twentieth.

 

BIRTHPANGS OF THE HOMELAND
By: David Ohana

(Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2019. In Hebrew, ISBN 978-965-226-533-3, 266 pages)

Birthpangs of the Homeland discusses the various interpretations of the concept of the nation in its land in the discourse of Hebrew and Israeli identity. The homeland is the original, primordial foundation of our lives, and it is the object of our deepest feelings, our hopes, fears, consolations. It is the source of life, but it sometimes leads one into a dark hole. The questions it poses are the fundamental questions of the great religions: the lust for life and the mystery of what is after, sacrifice and purification, self-denial and consolidation, where we come from, where we are going. The homeland transforms “I” into “us”, experience into memory, a territory into a land, and both into a nation. It is not surprising if modern nationalism, which made a transposition of many of the concepts of religion, sees the homeland as the cradle, the very beginning of the national collective.

 

THE CHAINS OF THE MESSIAH
By: David Ohana

(Jerusalem, Israel: Carmel Publishing House in assistance of The Ben-Gurion University, 2019. In Hebrew, ISBN 978-965-540-874-4, 238 pages)

The Chains of the Messiah is an intellectual voyage through the constantly changing profile of the Israeli society. By examining the different options that were raised through the decades for the identity of the Israeli society, the book sketches a mosaic of the different identities in Israel: The Levantine identity, the Mediterranean option, a state of all its citizens, and others. The chapters of this book reflect a life-long dialogue with historians, thinkers, and authors: Gershom Scholem, Jacob Talmon, Yehoshusha Arieli, Amos Oz, Jacqueline Kahanoff, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Boaz Evron, Yirmiyahu Yovel, David Grossman and others.

  

THE “LOST” GENERATION: YOUNG ARTISTS IN 1980S ISRAELI ART
By: Yael Guilat 

(The Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism Press, 2019, ISBN 124600100097, in Hebrew, 352 pages)

This book draws a multifaceted portrait of a young generation of artists whose doings in the 1980s set a change in the Israeli art scene into motion. These children of the 1950s were second-generation survivors of the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and mass Jewish immigration from European and Arab countries and their distinctive tracks of reception and discrimination. Among Palestinians, they are the first generation after the Nakba. Their generational narratives took shape in the shadow of events that were experienced through their formative stages as collective traumas. This generation is not the hero of the book. It’s the opposite, an antihero in the Israeli art scene. Its story is the story of the watershed that Israel’s society and culture traversed. It is a generation that was forced to deconstruct myths, shatter paradigms, and learn to walk all by itself; a generation whose women young artists operated in an aggressive male arena that compelled both of them, male and female creators (and curators), to dismiss the gender discourse, the feminist discourse and, more generally, the very mention of women as women-artists; a generation accused of “reactionism” in comparison with the modernistic 1970s generation and of lack of sophistication relative to the post-conceptualism of the 1990s generation. It may have been in the wake of all these “failures” that this generation managed to produce a story of passion and exuberance, both of which foreign to the Israeli cultural and artistic canon that had preceded it. 

 
ARABS AND JEWS IN OTTOMAN PALESTINE: TWO WORLDS COLLIDE
By: Alan Dowty


(Indiana University Press, 2019, ISBN: 978-0-253-03865-4)


When did the Arab-Israeli conflict begin? Some discussions focus on the 1967 war, some go back to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and others look to the beginning of the British Mandate in 1922. Alan Dowty, however, traces the earliest roots of the conflict to the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, arguing that this historical approach highlights constant clashes between religious and ethnic groups in Palestine. He demonstrates that existing Arab residents viewed new Jewish settlers as European and shares evidence of overwhelming hostility to foreigners from European lands. He shows that Jewish settlers had tremendous incentive to minimize all obstacles to settlement, including the inconvenient hostility of the existing population. Dowty's thorough research reveals how events that occurred over 125 years ago shaped the implacable conflict that dominates the Middle East today.

 

THE ISRAEL/PALESTINE READER
By: Alan Dowty

(Polity, 2019, ISBN: 9781509527342, 304 pages)

Introduction to any complex international conflict is enriched when the voices of the adversaries are heard. The Israel/Palestine Reader is an innovative collection, focused on the human dimension of the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian confrontation. Its vivid and illuminating readings present the voices of the diverse parties through personal testimonies and analyses. Key leaders, literary figures, prominent analysts, and simply close observers of different phases of this protracted conflict are all represented—in their own words. From Mark Twain to Theodor Herzl, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Golda Meir, Anwar Sadat, Ezer Weizman, Ehud Barak, Marwan Barghouti, Mahmoud Abbas, Benjamin Netanyahu, John Kerry, and dozens of others, the firsthand narratives brought together in this Reader bring the conflict to life as seen by those closest to it. Though structured to complement Alan Dowty’s introductory text Israel/ Palestine (4th edition, Polity 2017), this Reader also stands on its own as a survey of “voices” in the conflict. Each of the ten chapters is framed by an editorial introduction that sets the pieces in context. By juxtaposing contrasting view-points both between and within the opposed parties, these pieces underline the drama of the conflict, while final judgment is left to the reader. This lively volume will add color and texture to any study of Arab–Israeli issues or of the Middle East generally.

 

ORIENTALISM, ZIONISM AND ACADEMIC PRACTICE: MIDDLE EAST AND ISLAM STUDIES IN ISRAELI UNIVERSITIES
By: Eyal Clyne

(Routledge 2019, ISBN 9781138578654 hardcover 9780367246587, 268 pages)

Orientalism, Zionism and Academic Practice explores the field of Israeli Middle East and Islamic Studies (MEIS) sociologically and politically, as a window onto the relationship between Orientalism, Zionism and academia. The book draws special attention to neoliberal discourse and praxis in everyday higher education, the interests of scholars, and the political form that commercialisation takes in specific disciplinary and geopolitical conditions by deconstructing structural and historical presuppositions and effective ideologies that overdetermine this junction of academia, orientalism and Zionism. The multi-layered study draws on various scholarly traditions and offers new evidence for, and insights in, historical and cultural-discursive discussions. It highlights paradigmatic gaps in reading Saidian orientalism, re-evaluates the origins and evolution of the local field, contributes to the study of everyday academic culture in the social sciences and humanities (SSH), and unveils the presupposed and the unsaid of the general and the specific field, exploring the intersection of an orientalist expertise, in a settler-colonial society, and everyday academic capitalism. The expertise of this sociological and discursive study make it an invaluable resource for academics and students interested in Israel and Middle East studies, Higher Education and the Sociology of Academia.

   

CHINA AND ISRAEL : CHINESE, JEWS; BEIJING, JERUSALEM (1890-2018)
By; Aron Shai

(Academic Studies Press, 2019, ISBN13 9781618118967, 270 Pages)

In the fascinating story of Israel-China relations, unique history and culture intertwine with complex diplomacy and global business ventures—some of which have reached impressive success. China and Israel is a living collage that addresses these issues from a point of view that combines the professional and the personal. This book paints a broad picture of China-Israel relations from an historical and political perspective and from the Jewish and Israeli angle. To tell this story, Shai relies on rare documents, archival materials and interviews with individuals who were active in forming the relationship between these two states. He profiles Morris Cohen who, according to some, served as Sun Yat-sen’s personal advisor; gynecologist Dr. Ya’akov Rosenfeld, who rose to the rank of general in the Chinese Red Army and ended his career as a family physician in Tel Aviv; and international business magnate Shaul Eisenberg, otherwise known as “the king of China,” who executed the first Sino-Israeli military contacts. Shai also covers the attempts of major Israeli companies and business people to enter China, and describes the opportunities and risks involved when China purchases companies that are part of Israel’s national infrastructure.

 

TRIADIC COERCION: ISRAEL’S TARGETING OF STATES THAT HOST NONSTATE ACTORS
By: Wendy Pearlman and Boaz Atzili 

(Columbia University Press, 2019, IBSN: 9780231171854, 384 pages)

In the post–Cold War era, states increasingly find themselves in conflicts with nonstate actors. Finding it difficult to fight these opponents directly, many governments instead target states that harbor or aid nonstate actors, using threats and punishment to coerce host states into stopping those groups. Wendy Pearlman and Boaz Atzili investigate this strategy, which they term triadic coercion. They explain why states pursue triadic coercion, evaluate the conditions under which it succeeds, and demonstrate their arguments across seventy years of Israeli history. This rich analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict, supplemented with insights from India and Turkey, yields surprising findings. Traditional discussions of interstate conflict assume that the greater a state’s power compared to its opponent, the more successful its coercion. Turning that logic on its head, Pearlman and Atzili show that this strategy can be more effective against a strong host state than a weak one because host regimes need internal cohesion and institutional capacity to move against nonstate actors. If triadic coercion is thus likely to fail against weak regimes, why do states nevertheless employ it against them? Pearlman and Atzili’s investigation of Israeli decision-making points to the role of strategic culture. A state’s system of beliefs, values, and institutionalized practices can encourage coercion as a necessary response, even when that policy is prone to backfire.


TRANSFORMATION OF THE JEZREEL VALLEY- MARJ IBN ‘AMAR IN THE LATE OTTOMAN PERIOD
By: Emir Galilee and Ruth Kark

(Israel Academic Press, 2019, ISBN: 978-1-885881-70-0, 223 pages, Hebrew/English)  

This volume examines the transformations regarding land, nomadism, and settlement in the Jezreel Valley—Marj Ibn ‘Amar. This change came about as the result of long-term processes that took place in the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East, and Palestine from the mid-19th century onward. Geographical and historical developments in the Jezreel Valley occurred following changes in Ottoman land laws in the period leading up to World War I. The study draws on research carried out over many years, based on documents, maps, and sketches, some of which appear for the first time in English. It looks at the situation of the Bedouins, Muslim and Christian effendis, fellahin and tenant farmers, Christian missionaries, the early German Templer attempts to settle in the Valley, and plans for Jewish settlement that preceded the extensive Jewish settlement in the early 20th century.

 
THE RELIGIONIZATION OF ISRAELI SOCIETY
By: Yoav Peled and Horit Herman Peled

(Routledge 2019, ISBN: 9781138954793, 238 Pages)

During Israel's military operation in Gaza in the summer of 2014 the commanding officer of the Givati infantry brigade, Colonel Ofer Vinter, called upon his troops to fight "the terrorists who defame the God of Israel." This unprecedented call for religious war by a senior IDF commander caused an uproar, but it was just one symptom of a profound process of religionization, or de-secularization, that Israeli society has been going through since the turn of the twenty-first century. This book analyzes and explains, for the first time, the reasons for the religionization of Israeli society, a process known in Hebrew as hadata. Jewish religion, inseparable from Jewish nationality, was embedded in Zionism from its inception in the nineteenth century, but was subdued to a certain extent in favor of the national aspect in the interest of building a modern nation-state. Hadata has its origins in the 1967 war, has been accelerating since 2000, and is manifested in a number of key social fields: the military, the educational system, the media of mass communications, the teshuvah movement, the movement for Jewish renewal, and religious feminism. A major chapter of the book is devoted to the religionization of the visual fine arts field, a topic that has been largely neglected by previous researchers. Through careful examination of religionization, this book sheds light on a major development in Israeli society, which will additionally inform our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As such, it is a key resource for students and scholars of Israel Studies, and those interested in the relations between religion, culture, politics and nationalism, secularization and new social movements.

THE RELIGIONIZATION OF ISRAELI SOCIETY
By: Yoav Peled and Horit Herman Peled

(Routledge 2019, ISBN: 9781138954793, 238 Pages)

During Israel's military operation in Gaza in the summer of 2014 the commanding officer of the Givati infantry brigade, Colonel Ofer Vinter, called upon his troops to fight "the terrorists who defame the God of Israel." This unprecedented call for religious war by a senior IDF commander caused an uproar, but it was just one symptom of a profound process of religionization, or de-secularization, that Israeli society has been going through since the turn of the twenty-first century. This book analyzes and explains, for the first time, the reasons for the religionization of Israeli society, a process known in Hebrew as hadata. Jewish religion, inseparable from Jewish nationality, was embedded in Zionism from its inception in the nineteenth century, but was subdued to a certain extent in favor of the national aspect in the interest of building a modern nation-state. Hadata has its origins in the 1967 war, has been accelerating since 2000, and is manifested in a number of key social fields: the military, the educational system, the media of mass communications, the teshuvah movement, the movement for Jewish renewal, and religious feminism. A major chapter of the book is devoted to the religionization of the visual fine arts field, a topic that has been largely neglected by previous researchers. Through careful examination of religionization, this book sheds light on a major development in Israeli society, which will additionally inform our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As such, it is a key resource for students and scholars of Israel Studies, and those interested in the relations between religion, culture, politics and nationalism, secularization and new social movements.

2017 Archive of Books

FORTRESSES OF PAPER – THE NEWSPAPER HALEVANON AND JEWISH ORTHODOXY
By: Roni Beer-Marx
(The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, Jerusalem, 2017, in Hebrew)

This book follows the formation of Jewish East European Orthodox society during the second half of the nineteenth century by looking at the Hebrew newspaper, HaLevanon. HaLevanon was a central means for the consolidation of a group consciousness and social identity of those who remained committed to a conservative religious tradition in Eastern Europe in general, and in Lithuania in particular, at a time in which Orthodox Jewry experienced various dangers and had to face up to new challenges. However, HaLevanon fulfilled a dual function: It was created as a vehicle for fortifying, protecting and unifying a Jewish Orthodox community. On the other hand, it infused the same community with modern thought patterns and agenda. This complexity, which has been discussed in the book, reflects the ambivalence of the entire Jewish Orthodox Eastern European community, which negotiated simultaneous contradictory trends of seclusion and conservatism on the one hand, and of acceptance and adaptation on the other.

 

CIVIL ISRAEL: BOAS EVRON’S NATIONAL RECKONING
By: Israel Segal; Editor: David Ohana
(Jerusalem: Carmel Publishing House 2017; 249-505-47; 260 pages, in Hebrew)


Boas Evron’s book National Reckoning (1988) is one of the most important intellectual books written in and about the state of Israel. The late researcher Israel Segal analyses this manifest of the post-Zionist position using rare archive material, interviews and a complete collection of Evron’s writings. Civil Israel is a systematic analysis of Evron’s thought in its biographical and intellectual context, and it emphasises Evron’s importance as a bold and creative thinker.
Segal examines the intellectual climate and political background in which Evron’s ideas developed, and discusses the role of this Israeli intellectual as a critical theorist of nationalism. The discussion also concerns: the Canaanite ideas, the importance of the Bible for the national identity, the idea of the negation of the exile, the universal meaning of the Holocaust and the local identity of the state of Israel.

 

YIGAL ALLON: A NEGLECTED POLITICAL LEGACY, 1949–1980
By: Udi (Ehud) Manor
(Sussex Academic Press, 2017, ISBN: 978-1-84519-880-0, 240 pages)


Yigal Allon was a major contributor to the nation building process of the State of Israel. He did so from multiple positions he held in government. Between 1961 and 1968 he served as Labor Minister. In 1968 he became the Absorption minister and from 1969 to 1974 he served as Minister of Education. In his last role, 1974–1977, he held Israel’s foreign policy helm, encouraging countries and leaders to engage with Israel. Throughout his 17 years in government, Allon was a pivotal player in the cabinet’s security and foreign relations endeavours. From 1968 to 1977 he was also vice prime minister. This fabulous career notwithstanding, his political legacy has been ignored. In 2004 a long anticipated biography of Allon was published in Hebrew by historian Anita Shapira, 24 years after his sudden death, when he was 62. However, this eloquently written and well documented biography only covered Allon’s military career to the end of Israel’s War of Independence in 1949. The 2004 biography ended by claiming that Allon’s next 31 years (1949–1980) – his political years – was not worth a historical account. Yigal Allon: A Neglected Political Legacy, 1949–1980 sets the record straight, and reverses the injustice of ignoring his multi-faceted political talent in the service of the State of Israel. This English-language edition is a revised and smaller edition based on the widely acclaimed and reviewed Hebrew version (2016). Allon’s perceptions regarding the Territories have been borne out; equally critical, he foresaw that government policies would lead to a decline in Israel’s international status, and that Israel would be held accountable for lack of peace in the region.

 

WARRIORS, WITCHES, WHORES: WOMEN IN ISRAELI CINEMA
By: Rachel S. Harris
(Wayne State Press, 2017, ISBN: 9780814339671, 336 pages)


 Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema is a feminist study of Israel’s film industry and the changes that have occurred since the 1990s. Working in feminist film theory, the book adopts a cultural studies approach, considering the creation of a female-centered and thematically feminist film culture in light of structural and ideological shifts in Israeli society. Author Rachel S. Harris situates these changes in dialogue with the cinematic history that preceded them and the ongoing social inequalities that perpetuate women’s marginalization within Israeli society. While no one can deny Israel’s Western women’s advancements, feminist filmmakers frequently turn to Israel’s less impressive underbelly as sources for their inspiration. Their films have focused on sexism, the negative impact of militarism on women’s experience, rape culture, prostitution, and sexual abuse. These films also tend to include subjects from society’s geographical periphery and social margins, such as female foreign workers, women, and refugees. Warriors, Witches, Whores is divided into three major sections and each considers a different form of feminist engagement. The first part explores films that situate women in traditionally male spheres of militarism, considering the impact of interjecting women within hegemonic spaces or reconceptualizing them in feminist ways. The second part recovers the narratives of women’s experience that were previously marginalized or silenced, thereby creating a distinct female space that offers new kinds of storytelling and cinematic aesthetics that reflect feminist expressions of identity. The third part offers examples of feminist activism that reach beyond the boundaries of the film to comment on social issues. This section demonstrates how feminists use film (and work within the film industry) in order to position women in society. While there are thematic overlaps between the chapters, each section marks structural differences in the modes of feminist response. Warriors, Witches, Whores considers the ways social and political power have affected the representation of women and looks to how feminist filmmakers have fought against these inequities behind the camera and in the stories they tell.

 

THE MOUNT, THE DOME, AND THE GAZE: THE TEMPLE MOUNT IN ISRAELI VISUAL CULTURE
By:  Noa Hazan (ed)
(Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University and Pardes publishers, 2017, ISBN 978-1-61838-386-0, 448 pages [English- Arabic-Hebrew])


The book examines the Temple Mount as a key visual icon in a variety of cultural arenas of Israeli life. By analyzing photographs, posters, postcards, architectural models, sketches and heritage sites, its essays exposes the centrality of Temple Mount in the Zionist discourse, not only of marginal religious messianic groups, but also of the Israeli mainstream, which defines itself as ostensibly secular. The articles are accompanied by a collection of both popular and rare images of the Temple Mount, found in institutional Israeli archives and in private collections. In addition, it includes contemporary photographs that engage with the historical collection and respond to it. This book is a cross between an academic volume, a memorial album and an exhibition catalog. It presents original and critical researches, but also strives to break out beyond the boundaries of academia by its accessible form and language. It aesthetics recall memorial albums, but it also seeks to undermine the authority of memory such albums pertain to possess. It is an exhibition catalog, but the exhibition itself is borderless and without a specific time frame, as it is still growing.

 

BETWEEN EXILE AND EXODUS: ARGENTINIAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION TO ISRAEL, 1948–1967
By: Sebastian Klor
(Wayne State University Press, 2017,  ISBN: 9780814343678, 256 pages) 

Between Exile and Exodus: Argentinian Jewish Immigration to Israel, 1948–1967 examines the case of the 16,500 Argentine Jewish immigrants who arrived in Israel during the first two decades of its existence (1948–1967). Based on a thorough investigation of various archives in Argentina and Israel, author Sebastian Klor presents a sociohistoric analysis of that immigration with a comparative perspective. Although many studies have explored Jewish immigration to the State of Israel, few have dealt with the immigrants themselves. Between Exile and Exodus offers fascinating insights into this migration, its social and economic profiles, and the motivation for the relocation of many of these people. It contributes to different areas of study— Argentina and its Jews, Jewish immigration to Israel, and immigration in general. This book’s integration of a computerized database comprising the personal data of more than 10,000 Argentinian Jewish immigrants has allowed the author to uncover their stories in a direct, intimate manner. Because immigration is an individual experience, rather than a collective one, the author aims to address the individual’s perspective in order to fully comprehend the process. In the area of Argentinian Jewry it brings a new approach to the study of Zionism and the relations of the community with Israel, pointing out the importance of family as a basis for mutual interactions. Klor’s work clarifies the centrality of marginal groups in the case of Jewish immigration to Israel, and demystifies the idea that Aliya from Argentina was solely ideological. In the area of Israeli studies the book takes a critical view of the "catastrophic" concept as a cause for Jewish immigration to Israel, analyzing the gap between the decision-makers in Israel and in Argentina and the real circumstances of the individual immigrants. It also contributes to migration studies, showing how an atypical case, such as the Argentine Jewish immigrants to Israel, is shaped by similar patterns that characterize "classical" mass migrations, such as the impact of chain migrations and the immigration of marginal groups.

 

WHEN THE STATE WINKS: THE PERFORMANCE OF JEWISH CONVERSION IN ISRAEL
By: Michal Kravel-Tovi 
(Columbia University Press: New York; Series: Religion, Culture, and Public Life, 2017, ISBN 978-0231183246, 320 Pages)  

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

 

IN PURSUIT OF PEACE IN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE
By: Gershon Baskin
(Vanderbilt University Press, 2017, ISBN: 978-0826521811, 304 pages)

Gershon Baskin's memoir of thirty-eight years of intensive pursuit of peace begins with a childhood on Long Island and a bar mitzvah trip to Israel with his family. Baskin joined Young Judaea back in the States, then later lived on a kibbutz in Israel, where he announced to his parents that he had decided to make aliya, emigrate to Israel. They persuaded him to return to study at NYU, after which he finally emigrated under the auspices of Interns for Peace. In Israel he spent a pivotal two years living with Arabs in the village of Kufr Qara. Despite the atmosphere of fear, Baskin found he could talk with both Jews and Palestinians, and that very few others were engaged in efforts at mutual understanding. At his initiative, the Ministry of Education and the office of right-wing prime minister Menachem Begin created the Institute for Education for Jewish-Arab Coexistence with Baskin himself as director. Eight years later he founded and codirected the only joint Israeli-Palestinian public policy think-and-do tank in the world, the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information. For decades he continued to cross borders, often with a kaffiyeh (Arab headdress) on his dashboard to protect his car in Palestinian neighborhoods. Airport passport control became Kafkaesque as Israeli agents routinely identified him as a security threat. During the many cycles of peace negotiations, Baskin has served both as an outside agitator for peace and as an advisor on the inside of secret talks—for example, during the prime ministership of Yitzhak Rabin and during the initiative led by Secretary of State John Kerry. Baskin ends the book with his own proposal, which includes establishing a peace education program and cabinet-level Ministries of Peace in both countries, in order to foster a culture of peace.

 
THE LEFT WING’S SORROW: YOSSI BEILIN AND THE DECLINE OF THE PEACE CAMP
By: Avi Shilon 
(Dvir Publishing house: Tel Aviv, 2017, ISBN 978-965-566-603-8, 508 Pages, in Hebrew) 

Based on, inter alia, exclusive access to Yossi Belin’s private archive, where he meticulously kept almost any document (since he joined Shimon Peres as his spokesman after the 77’ upheaval until the 21th century) with respect to the peace process – from various angles: Israeli, Arab and American –Avi Shilon follows Beilin’s biography as the axis for a broader discussion about the decline of the liberal/peace camp in Israel in the last decades (Including some suggestion for amendments). Despite the fact that some of the revelations were censored by the state censor, the outcome is a book which brings some historical surprising revelations, alongside innovative analysis which fits to the current discussion about the Israeli left wing.    

 

SPEEDILY IN OUR DAYS- THE TEMPLE MOUNT ACTIVISTS AND THE NATIONAL RELIGIOUS SOCIETY IN ISRAEL
By: Sarina Chen
(The Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism Press, Ben Gurion University, ISBN: 124600100011. 216 pages, in Hebrew)

Temple Mount is considered as the holiest place for the Jewish people. After the unification of Jerusalem in 1967 the majority of the national-religious community followed the traditional order and warning of the Chief  Rabbinate: Do not visit Temple Mount . Today – 50 years later, the Temple Mount is a key site for members of the National Religious group. Many of them visit the mount, after part of their Rabbis declared it a mitzvah to visit, or, to use their term, "to ascend" to the Temple Mount. How did it happen?   The book examines contemporary Jewish groups that have placed the Temple Mount and the establishment of the Third Temple on that site at the center of the vision of redemption they seek to realize and their way to the discourse of the main stream of the Nationalist-Religious Society in Israel. This study offers a new light over these groups. Based on comprehensive field work and an analysis of the texts and the visual material produced by these groups (which are first to be shown in this research), The book explores four central subjects around which their thoughts and acts revolve: ascent to the Temple Mount, memory; femininity and sacrifice.

 

BIRTHRATE POLITICS IN ZION: JUDAISM, NATIONALISM AND MODERNITY UNDER THE BRITISH MANDATE
By: Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman
(Indiana University Press, 2017, ISBN: 978-0-2530-2898-3, 256 pages)

Despite both national and traditional imperatives to have many children, the birthrate of the Jewish community in British Mandate Palestine (the Yishuv) declined steadily from 1920-1948, due to widespread abortions; an issue which became a matter of great public concern and struggle. During these years the Yishuv grappled with conflicting value systems and goals:  it aspired to establish a Jewish majority in Palestine, a goal which would be served by having large families, but on the other hand, it envisaged itself as a modern society in which small families were increasingly common. The Yishuv was caught in contradictions between political and social objectives, religion, culture, and individual needs. The book takes a deep and detailed look at these diverse and decisive issues, including births and abortions during this period, the discourse about birthrate, and practical attempts to implement policies to counter the low birthrate. Themes that emerge include the effect of the Holocaust, economics, ethnicity, efforts by public figures to increase birthrate, and the understanding that women in the society were viewed as entirely responsible for procreation. Providing a deep examination of the day-to-day lives of Jewish families in British Mandate Palestine, this book shows how political objectives are not only achieved by political agreements, public debates, and battlefields, but also by the activities of ordinary men, women.

 

“BUT ABU IBRAHIM, WE’RE FAMILY!”
By: Lee Perlman
(The Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, Tel Aviv University, 2017, ISBN: 978-965-700-159-2, 199 pages)

“But Abu Ibrahim, We’re Family!” is a series of case studies describing collaborations between Jewish and Palestinian professional theater artists in Israel and the theater they create about their realities. It depicts the ways the artists navigate shifting power dynamics and relations between them, while working together to overcome external social and political forces which run counter to their work. It analyzes the socio-political and socio-cultural significance of four “joint productions,” collaborative professional theater productions by Jewish and Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel between 2000-2010. In these productions, Jewish Israelis and Palestinians share a stage and essentially wage the conflicts between them non-violently. These productions both represent and reflect the conflictual relations between these two national groups, by attempting to understand, present, often satirize and transform these conflicts on stage. These productions serve as a tentative model of shared citizenship in the work place - how Jewish Israelis and Palestinians can work together in professional settings, through ongoing negotiation towards equality within the present political situation.  The productions attempted and invariably succeeded in challenging inequality and disenfranchisement, amplifying the non-hegemonic voices of Palestinian citizens, that lie outside the norm of and are often excluded from social and political discourse in Israel’s Jewish polity. 

 

STATE EXPANSION AND CONFLICT: IN AND BETWEEN ISRAEL/PALESTINE AND LEBANON
By: Oren Barak
(Cambridge University Press, 2017, ISBN: 9781108415798, 271 pages)

Lebanon and Israel/Palestine are two political entities that expanded in 1920 and 1967 respectively, and became divided societies characterized by periods of stability and conflict. This book provides the first detailed comparison between the two states and also explores the effects of their expansion on their changing relations. It looks first at how both expanded states attempted to cope with their predicaments, focusing on the relationship between state, community and security, before moving on to analyze the de-stabilizing effects of expansion on Israeli-Lebanese relations. The book draws on previously unpublished official documents, memoirs, media resources and films produced in Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, in addition to existing works on the two states and the Middle East. Bridging the gap between comparative politics and international relations, it will interest students of Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, the Middle East, and conflict and peace. Contents: 1. Introduction; 2. State expansion and its effects; 3. From nation-states to divided societies: Lebanon and Israel/Palestine; 4. Lebanon: weak and legitimate; 5. Israel/Palestine: strong and illegitimate; 6. Lebanon and Israel/Palestine compared; 7. The deterioration of Israeli-Lebanese relations; 8. Two conflicts intertwined; 9. Conclusion

 

SYNAGOGUES AND JEWISH NATIONALISM IN THE YISHUV DURING THE BRITISH MANDATE
By: Reuven Gafni 
(The Ben-Gurion Research Institute, The Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2017, ISBN: 978-965-510-115-7, 409 pages, In Hebrew)

This book focuses on the fascinating encounter which took place in synagogues in Eretz-Israel during the British Mandate period, between traditional, national and cultural ingredients. During this period, in which a rich and diverse Hebrew-National culture was designed and developed by the local Jewish community, there were many who tried to also redesign the traditional character of the synagogue, in order to adjust it to the ideological, cultural and social frameworks which generated and were designed around it. This process, during which many synagogues across the country were transformed from traditional prayer-houses to institutions of national-religious character, took place with reference to the architectural and the interior design of the synagogue; several issues regarding it`s religious content and liturgy, such as the language, the pronunciation and the tone of the prayer; social frameworks and hierarchies which were created within it; And the economic infrastructure that allowed the establishment and operation of the synagogues, and which was often created in collaboration with key national institutions. This phenomenon is described in reference to events which took place in synagogues large and small, new and old, in towns and in agricultural settlements. However, a special focus is devoted to a number of large and representative synagogues in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, whose national design greatly influenced hundreds of other synagogues across Eretz-Israel. Also examined are the developments in synagogues whose population remained indifferent or even opposed to the nationalist movement, and in which the conduct was quite different from that which took place in the national synagogues. The Analysis of this phenomenon is a unique element in the understanding of the Eretz-Israeli synagogue in modern times, but also sheds light on unique cultural and national process which took place during the British Mandate, and that as yet have been unexplored.

 

HAIFA: CITY OF STEPS      
By: Nili Scharf Gold            
(Brandeis University Press, 2017, ISBN: 978-1512601183, 280 pages)

In this new slim volume Nili Gold offers a remarkable homage to Haifa in its heyday as an international port and cultural center: from the 1920s and 30s, when Jews and Arabs lived together under British rule and public buildings were erected reflecting European, modernist, Jewish, and Arab architectural influences, through 1948 when most Arabs left, and into the 50s and 60s. Gold anchors her family history in 5 landmark clusters in the Hadar HaCarmel neighborhood and describes in exquisite detail Memorial Park,Talpiot Market, Alliance School, the Great Synagogue, Struck House, Ge’ula and their environs against the backdrop of Mount Carmel and Haifa Bay - and she devotes an entire chapter to the founding of the Technion, its history and architecture, and its extraordinary role in the development of Haifa. Illustrated with more than thirty-five photographs and six maps, Gold’s astute observations of the changing landscape of her childhood and youth highlight literary works that portray deeply held feelings for Haifa, by such canonical Israeli writers as A. B. Yehoshua, Sami Michael, and Dahlia Ravikovitch.  A.B Yehoshua noted: "Haifa symbolizes Israeli normalcy at its best, and this important book proves it convincingly.”

 

THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD
By: Cyrus Schayegh
(Harvard University Press, 2017, ISBN 9780674088337, 496 pages)

In The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, Cyrus Schayegh presents an innovative socio-spatial history that traces how different geographic areas and networks molded the Middle East from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
Centering his study on an area roughly coextensive with modern Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel and Palestine, Schayegh examines the complex interplay of local and transregional forces in a diverse territory that first came under Ottoman rule in the 1500s. For centuries, the major cities of this region—Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Beirut—exercised a degree of autonomy. But in the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire, responding to the rise of a Eurocentric world economy and European imperialism, attempted to exert greater administrative control. Cities remained powerful, but their ties to one another grew stronger as the region became more integrated. These developments did not cease with the Ottoman Empire’s collapse after World War I. Partitioned by the victorious British and French, this territory (known in Arabic as Bilād al-Shām) became an umbrella region from which new nation states would emerge—states whose very foundations were transnational and tied together multiple urban areas.
Building on the Middle Eastern case, Schayegh argues that the making of the modern world is best seen as the reciprocal transformation of cities, regions, states, and global networks.

 

ADVOCATING FOR ISRAEL DIPLOMATS AND LOBBYISTS FROM TRUMAN TO NIXON
By: Natan Aridan
(Lexington Books, Lanham, Maryland, 2017, ISBN 9781498553773, 390 pages)

The book is a comprehensive academic book’s analysis of the unique triangular relationship between Israel’s diplomatic representatives, pro-Israel advocates, and US administrations that draws on a wealth of Hebrew and English primary documentation that includes; government archives, surveillance records, wiretappings, personal oral interviews, and diaries of key individuals. It demonstrates how a small new state succeeded in establishing a level of political, economic and military aid that has made for an alliance that is unique in the American experience. Revealed in considerable depth are the dilemmas facing Israeli and US leaders, and pro-Israel organizations and the extent to which individual Jewish leaders maneuvered as conduits between Israeli governments and US administrations, whose senior dramatis personae in turn attempted to influence, moderate, restrain, and change the course of policy decisions and actions. The book refutes insidious allegations that from Israel’s inception Jewish influence and a powerful Israel lobby hijacked US foreign policy to achieve unreserved military and financial support for Israel that undermined the best interests of the US. The book illustrates one of the poorly misunderstood aspects on the subject by demonstrating how Israeli governments were more astute and powerful than previous scholars have realized and that they were in fact pulling the strings far more than AIPAC and wealthy Jews. He also demonstrates that a contributing factor on the decision to aid Israel (understated in previous research) lay in Israel exploiting its ‘nuisance value.

 

THE SETTLERS IN THE HEARTS:" REDEMPTION NOW" AND ISRAELI SOCIETY 
By:  Neima Barzel
(Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2017, 610 pages, In Hebrew)

The Settlers in the Hearts is a story of a place and a biography of an Israeli group and generation, examining and analyzing the perception and practices of the "Emunim" Community in its formative years. Two groups of young people, that of “The Seventh Day” (Sihach Lochamim)on the one hand and the "Emunim" Community on the other, mark post- the Six Day War, the figure of the new Jewish pioneer as part of the ‘revelation’ the war had uncovered. The comparative discussion in the book deals with, among others, the question of the truth in the "Emunim" Community’s claim that they are the authentic successors of the Labor Movement, its philosophy, rabbis and vision of redemption. It also asks why a theological-political alternative to the" Emunim" perception, finding believers and actors within the Labor Movement, did not develop. The time frame of the historical discussion stretches from the mid- 1960s till the mid-1980s, including the question of whether or not this point in time marks the point of no return of the political situation in the occupied territories. The book examines the construction and influence of the conceptualizations created by both ideologists and people of action of the "Emunim" Community regarding the basic conceptions of Zionism and Judaism. The analysis of the construction process of this conceptualization is accompanied by a description of the impressive generational drive of the young wearers of ‘crocheted skullcaps’ (belonging to the National Religious Party) who demanded their place at the front of the New Israeliness. The Settlers in the Hearts does not claim to be an objective essay. It includes excerpts from the author’s diary written while conducting research in the settlements’ archives. Her writing, integrating research and participatory testimony, reveals to the reader the meaning of a perception of comfort depending on exclusion of ‘the other’ and justification of the usurpation as obvious.

 

KIBBUTZ: UTOPIA AND POLITICS / THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MEIR YAARI 1897–1987
By: Aviva Halamish
(Academic Studies Press, 2017, ISBN 978-1-6181-1624-6 [hardcover], 496 pages)

Meir Yaari (1897-1987), one of the founding fathers of Israel, was the leader of the socialist-Zionist movement Hashomer Hatza’ir for over fifty years. The movement he led took an active part in shaping the history of the Jewish people in the crucial decades of the twentieth century: its Kibbutzim had a prominent role in matters of immigration (Aliyah), settlement, and defense in mandatory Palestine and then independent Israel, and its members were among the organizers of Jewish resistance and revolt during the Holocaust. In addition to being the story of Yaari and of his movement, this biography presents a wider narrative of the history of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. It offers novel insights to pivotal issues and major dilemmas confronted by Zionism and Israel, such as the friction between Zionism and socialism; the attitude towards the Soviet Union; the Arab question; security vs. morality; the transformation from voluntary society to statehood; the pace and composition of Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine and later to Israel; and absorption of new immigrants. The book blends individual and collective perspectives and never loses sight of the tension between ideology and reality. 

 

NATIONALIZING JUDAISM: ZIONISM AS A THEOLOGICAL IDEOLOGY
By: David Ohana
(Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2017. ISBN 978-1-4985-4360-6, 215 pages)

Nationalizing Judaism analyzes Zionism and the Israeli state as a theological ideology. The book pursues this provocative end by showing the dialectical tension between Judaism and Zionism. How has Zionism molded perceptions and images that were formed in the Jewish past, and to what extent were these Jewish themes reflected, modified, and crystallized in the national culture of the State of Israel?
Nationalizing Judaism covers constituent topics such as Messianism, Utopianism, territorialism, collective memory, and political myths along with the critics that threatened to undermine Zionist appropriations and constructs. In its attempt to acquire historical legitimation Zionism appropriated themes and myths from the Jewish past, yet these appropriations were differentiated as they had selectively culled elements that suited the national ethos. The book opens with Ben-Gurion’s messianic vision and comes full circle with his death in 1973.


A LAND OF STONES
By: David Ohana
(Tel Aviv, Israel: Hakibbuitz Hameuchad, 2017. In Hebrew, 262 pages)

A Land of Stones is a research surveying multiple case studies concerning the ‘place’ of the Israeli identity after 1967. The book is divided into three primary parts: Intellectuals on public matters, Israeli myths after the occupation and the land of Israel in the Israeli imagination after the occupation. The chapters in the book include an explicit account of the opinions of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Gershom Scholem (and three of his disciples), Jacob Talmon, Baruch Kurzweill and others on the changed face of Israel after the occupation of 1967. The research also explicates the Zionist rehabilitation of negative myths such as Bar-Kuhkba, Nimrod and Herod. The book was published in light of fifty years long occupation of the Palestinian territories in the Six Days war.


THE MYTHICAL ORDER OF MODERNITY
By: David Ohana
(Jerusalem, Israel: Carmel, 2017. In Hebrew, 529 pages)

The Mythical Order of Modernity offers a new interpretation of the European and Zionist modernity, one that casts doubt on the primary narrative of modernity as rational, progressive and without prejudice. The book explores the construction of the Western and Zionist Mythology behind modernity using four categories: time, space, metaphor and shape. The book redirects the conception of modernity, from the rational conception of Max Weber to a new conception that exposes to its mythical dimensions: the anthropological, restorative, symbolic, national, utopian, the critical and the special. The study offers a radical attitude towards the new self-conciseness, and claims that modernity should be understood as a mythological construction which creates itself. What defines modernity, then, is not rationality or progress, but the possibility and self-awareness to construct a mythical order, and at the same time the ability to criticize it.

 

AL DA’AT HA’MAKOM: ISRAELI REALMS OF MEMORY
By: Michael Feige
Editor: David Ohana
(Sede Boker, Israel: The Ben-Gurion Research Institute, The Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2017. ISBN 978-965-510-116-4, In Hebrew, 573 pages)

Al Da’at Ha’makom is a testimony to the depth and length of research of the Israeli sociologist Michael Feige (1957-2017). Feige’s research surveys the Israeli identities: the changing ways of memory – the monument, commemoration, ritual, ceremony, and pilgrimage – through which the Israelis remember and commemorate themselves. Feige examines the attitude of the long duree of ‘Gush Emunim’ and the short time of ‘Peace Now’: the foundational myths which constitute the life and death of the Israelis; the dialectics of the real Israel and the imagined Israel. He looked for the cultural significance of secular spaces such as Dizengoff center, ‘Our tiny country’ and Azrieli Center; the sites of Trauma; Commemoration sites; and Citadels of normalcy.

 
TAX LAW AND SOCIAL NORMS IN MANDATORY PALESTINE AND ISRAEL
By: Assaf Likhovski
(Cambridge University Press, 2017, ISBN: 9781107176294, 335 pages)

This book describes how a social-norms model of taxation rose and fell in British-ruled Palestine and the State of Israel in the mid-twentieth century. Such a model, in which non-legal means were used to foster compliance, appeared in the tax system created by the Jewish community in 1940s Palestine and was later adopted by the new Israeli state in the 1950s. It gradually disappeared in subsequent decades as law and its agents, lawyers and accountants, came to play a larger role in the process of taxation. By describing the historical interplay between formal and informal tools for creating compliance, Tax Law and Social Norms in Mandatory Palestine and Israel sheds new light on our understanding of the relationship between law and other methods of social control, and reveals the complex links between taxation and citizenship.

 

ISRAEL UNDER SIEGE: THE POLITICS OF INSECURITY AND THE RISE OF THE ISRAELI NEO-REVISIONIST RIGHT
By: Raffaella A. Del Sarto  
(Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press. 2017,  ISBN 978-1626164079, 296 pages)

‘Israel under Siege’ examines the emergence of Israel's neo-revisionist consensus about security threats and regional order, which took hold of Israeli politics and society after 2000 and persists today. The failed Oslo peace process and the trauma of the Second Palestinian Intifada triggered a shift to the right; conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah and the inflammatory rhetoric of Iranian President Ahmadinejad additionally contributed to the creation of a general sense of being under siege. While Israel faces real security threats, Israeli governments have engaged in the politics of insecurity, promoting and amplifying a sense of besiegement. Lively political debate has been replaced by a general acceptance of the no-compromise approach to security and the Palestinians. The neo-revisionist right, represented by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud, has turned Israel away from the peace process and pushes maximalist territorial ambitions. But they have failed to offer a vision for an end to conflict, and there has been little debate about whether or not the hardline policies toward the region are counterproductive. Del Sarto explains this disappearance of dissent and examines the costs of Israel's policies. She concludes that Israel's feeling of being under siege has become entrenched, a two-state solution with the Palestinians is highly unlikely for the foreseeable future, and Israel's international isolation is likely to increase.

 

IS IT O.K TO LAUGH ABOUT IT? HOLOCAUST HUMOUR, SATIRE AND PARODY IN ISRAELI CULTURE
By: Liat Steir-Livny
(Vallentine Mitchell publishers, 2017, ISBN: 978-1910383353, 207 pages) 

For many years, Israeli culture recoiled from dealing with the Holocaust from a humorous perspective. The perception was that a humorous approach might threaten the sanctity of its memory, or evoke feelings of disrespect towards the subject and hurt Holocaust survivors' feelings. But, from the 1990s, a new unofficial path of commemoration has been taking shape. Texts that combine the Holocaust with humour, satire, and parody are a major aspect of it, but this remains controversial. Often, Holocaust humour is perceived as part of a dangerous process that normalizes Nazism and Hitler. In opposition to these ideas, the book claims that in Israel, a unique post-traumatic society where the trauma lives as an integral part of the present, Holocaust humour in Hebrew functions as an important defence mechanism. The book argues that Holocaust humour, satire, and parody rebel against the way this trauma affects Israeli society in the present by challenging and deconstructing the fear. Is It Ok to Laugh About It? shows that paradoxically, Holocaust humour also strengthens the dominance of the trauma in the present by inserting it even more into everyday life and popular culture. Thus, Holocaust humour, satire, and parody in Israel are a double-edged sword: on the one hand, they function as an attempt to fight the acting out of the trauma in Israeli society but, on the other, they strengthen certain elements of it.

 

THE RUSSIAN-JEWISH TRADITION: INTELLECTUALS, HISTORIANS, REVOLUTIONARIES
By: Brian Horowitz, introduction William Craft Brumfield
(Academic Studies Press, 2017, ISBN: 9781618115560, 2017, 282 pages)

In their diasporic cultural creations, Russia's Jews employed the general themes of artists under tsars and Soviets, but they modified these themes to fit their own needs. The result was a hybrid, Russian-Jewish culture, unique and dynamic. Few today consider that Jewish Eastern Europe, the "old world," was in fact a power incubator of modern Jewish consciousness. Brian Horowitz presents essays on Zionism, Jewish education, historiography, and literature. It contains two articles on Vladimir Jabotinsky, an article on Semyon Dubnov and Pre-state Palestine, and pieces on Semyon An-sky, Saul Borovoi, and the Russian philosopher, Vladimir Solov'ev.

 

WOMEN OF THE WALL: NAVIGATING RELIGION IN SACRED SITES
By:  Yuval Jobani and Nahshon Perez
(Oxford University Press, 2017, ISBN: 9780190280444, 248 pages)

For more than twenty five years, the Women of the Wall have been waging a campaign to gain the Israeli government's permission to pray at the Western Wall. Despite widespread media coverage, this is the first comprehensive study of their struggle. Yuval Jobani and Nahshon Perez offer an in-depth analysis of the Women of the Wall's attempts to modify Jewish-orthodox mainstream religious practice from within and invest it with a new, egalitarian content. They present a comprehensive survey of the numerous legal rulings about the case and consider the broader political and social significance of the Women of the Wall's activism. In this way, Jobani and Perez are able to address broader issues of religion-state relations: How should governments manage religious plurality within their borders? How should governments respond to the requests of minorities that conflict with ostensibly mainstream interpretations of a given tradition? How should governments manage disputed sacred sites and spaces located in the public sphere? Women of the Wall: Navigating Religion in Sacred Sites offers a critical new look at theories of religion-state relations and a fresh examination of religious conflicts over sacred sites and public spaces.


MEMORY ACTIVISM: REIMAGINING THE PAST FOR THE FUTURE IN ISRAEL-PALESTINE
By: Yifat Gutman
(Vanderbilt University Press, 2017, ISBN 978-0-8265-2134-7, 200 pages)

Set in Israel in the first decade of the 21st century and based on long-term fieldwork, this book offers an innovative analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It explores practices of "memory activism" by three groups of Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian citizens—Zochrot, Autobiography of a City, and Baladna—showing how they appropriated the global model of truth and reconciliation while utilizing local cultural practices such as tours and testimonies. These activist efforts gave visibility to a silenced Palestinian history in order to come to terms with the conflict's origins and envision a new resolution for the future. This unique focus on memory as a weapon of the weak reveals a surprising shift in awareness of Palestinian suffering among the Jewish majority of Israeli society in a decade of escalating violence and polarization—albeit not without a backlash. Contested memories saturate this society. The 1948 war is remembered as both Independence Day by Israelis and al-Nakba ("the catastrophe") by Palestinians. The walking tour and survivor testimonies originally deployed by the state for national Zionist education that marginalized Palestinian citizens are now being appropriated by activists for tours of pre-state Palestinian villages and testimonies by refugees.

 
ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEUMS IN ISRAEL
By: Noam Perry and Ruth Kark
(Israel Academic Press, 2017, ISBN 978-1885881489, 220 pages)

This monograph focuses on a new dimension of the Israeli museological landscape. Since the 1970s Jewish ethnic groups that were dissatisfied with the way large-scale museums had displayed (or ignored) their heritage, began to erect museums dedicated to their own culture. These include museums dedicated exclusively to the cultural heritage of the Jews of Germany, Hungary, India, Iraq, Italy, Libya, Morocco, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Yemen, depicting the “glorious past” of these ethnic groups. In parallel, Arab (including Bedouin), Druze, and Circassian minorities of Israel and Palestinians began creating museums that challenge the narrative portrayed in the museums of Jewish settlement, and highlight their own cultural heritage. Taken as a whole, these museums and heritage centers, portray the ethnic diversity of Israeli society, and preserve this diverse cultural heritage for future generations.

 
NORMALIZING OCCUPATION: THE POLITICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE WEST BANK SETTLEMENTS
By: Marco Allegra, Ariel Handel, and Erez Maggor (eds.)
(Indiana University Press, 2017, ISBN: 978-0-253-02473-2, 244 pages)

Much controversy surrounds Israel's settlement project in the occupied West Bank, and the extremist national and religious agendas at play there have come to define these territories in the minds of most scholars and political commentators. This deeply entrenched framework, however, fails to account for the prevailing pattern of settlement development and the steady growth of the settler population. 
In contrast to the common emphasis of religious ideology and messianic faith, this collection of essays considers an array of conventionally downplayed historical and structural factors that place the origins and everyday reality of the settlements into a wider perspective, recounting their proliferation as a process of ‘normalization’ – i.e. their ongoing incorporation into Israel’s social, economic and legal fabric.
The collected works consider the transformation of the landscape, the patterns of relationships between the region's residents, Palestinian and Jewish alike, and the lasting effects of Israel’s settlement policy. They stress, in particular, how factors such as urban and regional planning, rising inequality and the retreat of the welfare state within Israel proper, and the changing political economy of industry and employment in the region, have all played a crucial, yet underappreciated role in determining the ongoing expansion and resilience of Israel's settlement project. In doing so, the collection provides new insights into the integration and segregation processes that are an integral part of the broader historical trends shaping Israel/Palestine.

 
CITY ON A HILLTOP: AMERICAN JEWS AND THE ISRAELI SETTLER MOVEMENT

By: Sara Yael Hirschhorn
(Harvard University Press, 2017, ISBN 9780674975057, 368 pages)

Since 1967, more than 60,000 Jewish-Americans have settled in the territories captured by the State of Israel during the Six Day War. Comprising 15 percent of the settler population today, these immi¬grants have established major communities, transformed domestic politics and international relations, and committed shocking acts of terrorism. They demand attention in both Israel and the United States, but little is known about who they are and why they chose to leave America to live at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this deeply researched, engaging work, Sara Yael Hirschhorn un¬settles stereotypes, showing that the 1960s generation who moved to the occupied territories were not messianic zealots or right-wing ex¬tremists but idealists engaged in liberal causes. They did not abandon their progressive heritage when they crossed the Green Line. Rather, they saw a historic opportunity to create new communities to serve as a beacon—a “city on a hilltop”—to Jews across the globe. This pio-neering vision was realized in their ventures at Yamit in the Sinai and Efrat and Tekoa in the West Bank. Later, the movement mobilized the rhetoric of civil rights to rebrand itself, especially in the wake of the 1994 Hebron massacre perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein, one of their own. On the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 war, Hirschhorn illuminates the changing face of the settlements and the clash between liberal values and political realities at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

 

NEOLIBERALISM AS A STATE PROJECT: CHANGING THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ISRAEL
By: Asa Maron and Michael Shalev (eds.)
(Oxford University Press, 2017, ISBN: 9780198793021, 256 pages)

This book explores the political and institutional dynamics of neoliberal restructuring in Israel. It puts forward a bold theoretical proposition: that the very creation of a neoliberal political economy may be largely a state project. Correspondingly, neoliberal restructuring and the institutionalization of permanent austerity are dependent on reconfigured power relations between state actors, manifested in a new institutional architecture of the state. This architecture, in turn, is the context in which efforts to change social and employment policies play themselves out.
The volume frames the coming of neoliberalism in Israel as a set of concrete and far-reaching changes in the power and modes of operation of the key players in the political economy – organized labor, big business, and the state. These changes undermined and neutralized veto players and enabled the ascendance of macroeconomic state agencies, which won greatly augmented authority and autonomy. The key agents of innovation were politicians and economists in state agencies, and their initiatives combined processes of both punctuated and incremental change. Within the overarching transformation of the state, the book explores case studies of specific social and labor market policies. These reveal a close elective affinity between programmatic neoliberal reforms and the proactive drive of the Ministry of Finance to enhance its control over public spending and policy design. The case studies also document instances in which neoliberal reforms were blocked, undermined, or overturned by opposition from inside or outside the state.

 

MOTHERING, EDUCATION AND CULTURE: RUSSIAN, PALESTINIAN AND JEWISH MIDDLE-CLASS MOTHERS IN ISRAELI SOCIETY
By: Deborah Golden, Lauren Erdreich, and Sveta Roberman
(Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2017, 225 page)

This book is an ethnographically-informed interview study of the ways in which middle-class mothers from three Israeli social-cultural groups – immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Palestinian Israelis and Jewish native-born Israelis – share and differ in their understandings of a ‘proper’ education for their children and of their role in ensuring this. The book highlights the importance of education in contemporary society, and argues that mothers' modes of engagement in their children's education are formed at the junction of class, culture and social positioning. It examines how cultural models such as intensive mothering, parental anxiety, individualism, and ‘concerted cultivation’ play out in the lives of these mothers and their children, shaping different ways of participating in the middle class. The book will be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists studying mothering, education, parenting, gender, class and culture, to readers curious about daily life in Israel, and to professionals working with families in a multicultural context.

 

CONTEMPORARY ALTERNATIVE SPIRITUALITIES IN ISRAEL
By: Shai Feraro and James R. Lewis(Eds.) 
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, ISBN: 978-1-137-54741-5, 249 pages)

This volume is the first English-language anthology to engage with the fascinating phenomena of recent surges in New Age and alternative spiritualties in Israel. Contributors investigate how these New Age religions and other spiritualties—produced in Western countries within predominantly Protestant or secular cultures–transform and adapt themselves in Israel. The volume focuses on a variety of groups and movements, such as Theosophy and Anthroposophy, Neopaganism, Channeling, Women’s Yoga, the New Age festival scene, and even Pentecostal churches among African labor migrants living in Tel Aviv. Chapters also explore more Jewish-oriented practices such as Neo-Kabballah, Neo-Hassidism, and alternative marriage ceremonies, as well as the use of spiritual care providers in Israeli hospitals. In addition, contributors take a close look at the state’s reaction to the recent activities and growth of new religious movements.  

2015 Archive of Books

THE MYTHOLOGY AND THE SYMBOLS OF THE HERUT MOVEMENT 1948-1965 (IN HEBREW) 
By: Ofira Gruweis-Kovalsky 
(The Ben-Gurion Research Institute Ben Gurion University of the Negev press, Bialik Institute  2015, ISBN 9789655100990, 300 pages) 

The book "The Vindicated and the Persecuted"- put the spotlight on the symbolic capital (Pierre Bourdieu) of the Herut Movement; its myths symbols and narratives. The book examined the Herut rituals and symbols and its influence on the institutionalization of the movement, its leader and the Herut political culture, 1948 -1965. The first part of the book examined the Herut Movement rituals; the second part dealt with its symbols. The third part focused on the myth of Zeev Jabotinsky.  Jabotinsky considered as the founding father of the Heruth Movement even though he pass away on 1940 and the Herut was founded on 1948. This part explored the changing attitude toward Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the influence of this changing on the Herut Movement.

 

PRACTICAL SOLDIERS: ISRAEL’S MILITARY THOUGHT AND ITS FORMATIVE FACTORS
By: Avi Kober
(Leiden: Brill, 2015, ISBN 98-90-04-30653-0, hardback, 212 Pages, $120)

The book suggests a general framework for the analysis of formative factors in military thought and offers an account of the Israel Defense Forces’ state of intellectualism and modernity. This account is followed by an attempt to trace the factors that have shaped Israeli military thought. The explanations are a mixture of realist and non-realist factors which can be found at both the systemic and the state level of analysis. At the systemic level, realist evaluations focus on factors such as the dominance of the technological dimension and the pervasiveness of asymmetrical low intensity conflicts, whereas at the state level one can find realist explanations, cultural factors and societal influences. Moral and legal constraints also factor into both the systemic and state levels.

 

A CLOSE-REMOTE ISLAND: RURAL JEWISH SETTLEMENT IN CYPRUS 1883-1939 (IN HEBREW)
By: Yossi Ban Artzi
(Bar-Ilan UP, December 2015, ISBN: 978-965-226-470-1, 228 Pages)

This book exposes the [almost] unknown Jewish settlement efforts in Cyprus in modern times, conducted in parallel to the beginning of Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel and not without connection to it. The Book analyses the geo-strategic situation that made Cyprus as a real opportunity to use its proximity to Palestine as a temporary solution for Jewish immigration, while political conditions put obstacles on land purchase and immigration to the promised land. Moreover, not only the geographical situation played a catalyst role, the British rule in Cyprus from 1878 on, was regarded as a possible cooperator in general, and specially  due to its policy to encourage immigration to Cyprus so to enhance the island's economy. The Jewish rural existence in Cyprus ceased throughout the 1940s, yet some relics remained on the landscape, to commemorate the story. The book revealed this affair in a comprehensive manner, using archive resources, literature and field work.

 

LIVING ON THE EDGE: THE EXISTENTIAL UNCERTAINTY OF ZIONISM (IN HEBREW)
By: Uriel Abulof 
(Haifa University Press and Yedioth Books, 2015, ISBN: 978-965-545-950-0, 443 Pages)

Living on the Edge probes Jewish existential uncertainty in the age of Zionism. It demonstrates that, despite its attempt to quell the perils of Jewish life, the Zionist movement has been immersed in existential uncertainty. It carefully examines the manifold “existential threats” as these were framed by Zionist elite and public alike, showing that while the people always saw before them the gaping abyss, its nature and depth constantly changes. Living on the Edge further detects the Zionist coping strategies, the “existential threads,” underscoring the role of morality. Zionists, living on the edge, have attempted to weave a security net, based not only on power, but also on moral justification—lending both meaning and cause to their identity and polity. Moral discourse, moreover, does not merely reflect changes within a nation, but may also hint at that nation’s prospects.

 

CHANCES FOR PEACE: MISSED OPPORTUNITIES IN THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT

By: Elie Podeh
(University of Texas Press, November 2015, 426 Pages, ISBN: 9781477305607, £45.00 HB)

From Arab-Zionist negotiations at the end of World War I to the subsequent partition, the aftermath of the 1967 War and the Sadat Initiative, and numerous agreements throughout the 1980s and 1990s, concluding with the Annapolis Conference in 2007 and the Abu Mazen-Olmert talks in 2008, pioneering scholar Elie Podeh uses empirical criteria and diverse secondary sources to assess the protagonists’ roles at more than two dozen key junctures. A resource that brings together historiography, political science, and the practice of peace negotiation, Podeh’s insightful exploration also showcases opportunities that were not missed. Three agreements in particular (Israeli-Egyptian, 1979; Israeli-Lebanese, 1983; and Israeli-Jordanian, 1994) illuminate important variables for forging new paths to successful negotiation. By applying his framework to a broad range of power brokers and time periods, Podeh also sheds light on numerous incidents that contradict official narratives. This unique approach is poised to reshape the realm of conflict resolution.

 
MOSHE SHARETT: POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY (IN HEBREW)
By: Gabriel (Gabi) Sheffer
(Carmel Publishing House, December 2015, ISBN: 978-965-540-521-7, 750 Pages)

This is the first Hebrew biography of Moshe Sharett, a moderate politician and one of the founders of the State of Israel. He served as Foreign Minister from 1948-1956, and second Prime Minister from 1953-1955, as well as in other various political positions. He was at the center of events in the Yishuv and Israel for about four decades. The biography describes and analyses his functions and activities. Under his leadership, the "moderate camp" exerted great influence on the orientation and politics of the Yishuv and the young Israel.

 

YELLOW WORLD : THE BIRTH OF HEBREW POPULAR PRESS IN PALESTINE : FROM HAZEVI TO HAOR 1884-1914 (IN HEBREW)
By : Ouzi Elyada
(Tel-Aviv University, The Shalom Rosenfeld for Research of Jewish Media and Communication, 2015, ISBN : 978-965-92374-0-1, 278 Pages)

The Book trace the birth and evolution of popular Hebrew journalism in Palestine at the end of the Ottoman regime. This journalistic genre was introduced to the local reader in 1884 by Eliezer Ben- Yehuda as a part of his campaign for the revival of the Hebrew language. Ben-Yehuda considered the popular newspaper as an instrument for the distribution and the insemination of the Hebrew language as a vivid spoken language, but also as an instrument for the formation of a National, Secular, Modern-Eurocentric identity.  Influenced by the French model of journalism, Ben-Yehuda newspaper was full of life and fire. It was d a sensational newspaper with stories covering horrible crimes, and natural catastrophes, International wars and world conquests adventures, gossips, but also violent campaigns against local opponents from the orthodox Jews of the old Yeshuv to the socialites of the second Aliya.  The book follow the evolution of Ben-Yehuda’s newspaper Hazevi from weekly to daily (in 1908), its relations with other popular newspapers (Hacheuth created in 1909) which imitated him,  and it’s influence on local public opinion and its contribution to the formation of new secular identity.

 

MISSION AND TESTIMONY: POLITICAL ESSAYS
By: Jacob L. Talmon, Ed. David Ohana
(Sussex Academic Press, 2015, 400pp, ISBN 10: 1845197410, 34.95$)

Jacob L.Talmon was chosen by an international committee of scholars as one of the twenty major historians of the twentieth century, declaring that “his historiography was a convincing apologia for human freedom.” He owes his fame primarily to his magnum opus, the trilogy that began with The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, continued with Political Messianism and concluded with The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution. This edited collection by David Ohana, of Talmon’s essays comprises the following: Part I, “The Nature of Jewish history”, deals with the Jewish presence in history, the universal significance of Jewish history, and the impact of Jewish intellectuals. Part II, “From Anti-Semitism to the Holocaust”, concerns the anti-Semitic climate of opinion that led to the Holocaust. Part III depicts the regional and global situation of the State of Israel. In Part IV, “Intellectual and Political Debates”, Talmon confronts intellectuals and statesmen such as Arnold Toynbee and Menachem Begin. Part V, “Profiles in History”, depicts the intellectual portraits of the historian Lewis Namier and the physicist and champion of human rights Andrei Sakharov.

 

DESTRUCTION AND ACCOUNTING: THE STATE OF ISRAEL AND THE REPARATIONS FROM GERMANY 1949 – 1953  (IN HEBREW)
By:  Jacob Tovy
(Tel-Aviv and Bar-Ilan Universities, 2015, ISBN: 978-965-7241-66-0, 505 Pages)

The reparations agreement was the first bridge built between the Jewish people and the Germans after the Holocaust. The book Destruction and Accounting recounts the story of the sequence of events of this agreement, from the very first time it was contemplated (in the spring of 1949) to it's ratification by the Israeli government and the German president (in March 1953). The book is based on a variety of archival sources, some published here for the first time, from Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom. It is the most comprehensive and exhaustive study ever written on one of the most dramatic events in Israel's history.

 

THANK YOU FOR DYING FOR OUR COUNTRY: COMMEMORATIVE TEXTS AND PERFORMANCES IN JERUSALEM
By: Chaim Noy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015, ISBN: 9780199398980, 304 pages)

Description Combining ethnographic, semiotic, and performative approaches, this book examines texts and accompanying acts of writing of national commemoration. The commemorative visitor book is viewed as a mobilized stage, a communication medium, where visitors' public performances are presented, and where acts of participation are authored and composed. The study contextualizes the visitor book within the material and ideological environment where it is positioned and where it functions. The semiotics of commemoration are mirrored in the visitor book, which functions as a participatory platform that becomes an extension of the commemorative spaces in the museum. The study addresses tourists' and visitors' texts, i.e. the commemorative entries in the book, which are succinct dialogical utterances. Through these public performances, individuals and groups of visitors align and affiliate with a larger imagined national community. Reading the entries allows a unique perspective on communication practices and processes, and vividly illustrates such concepts as genre, voice, addressivity, indexicality, and the very acts of writing and reading. The book's many entries tell stories of affirming, but also resisting the narrative tenets of Zionist national identity, and they illustrate the politics of gender and ethnicity in Israel society

 

PRIVATISATION IN ISRAEL: STATE RESPONSIBILITY AND THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE (IN HEBREW)
By: Itzhak Galnoor, Amir Paz-Fuchs, (eds.)
(Van Leer and Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 2015, 579 pages) 

More than any other public reform, privatisation policy in Israel, in place since 1980s, has changed the face of the country’s society and economy. It is not to be viewed as a purely economic issue. Rather, privatisation is inherently linked to a world view as to the desired relationship between the state and its citizens.
This book is the result of collaborative, interdisciplinary project that began in 2007 in the Hazan Centre for Social Justice at the Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem. It covers political and economic theory, and includes in depth analysis of a wide range of areas of state responsibility. It documents and criticises the shift in boundaries between the public and the private, and the corresponding tools of regulation that the state has put in place, or that has failed to do so. The book’s chapters focus on sectors such as utilities, education, health, pension, the workforce, and more, in a coherent analytical framework, thus suggesting that the reforms in the particular sectors should not viewed as isolated, but rather are a product of a common agenda – the privatisation policy in Israel.

 

ABBA EBAN: A BIOGRAPHY
By: Asaf Siniver
(The Overlook Press, New York, 2015, ISBN-13: 978-1468309331, 464 pages)

The definitive biography of Abba Eban, an Israeli diplomat often revered by every nation except the one he represented. The book draws from a wide range of primary sources to create a complex portrait of a man who left an indelible mark on the quest for peace in the Middle East. A skilled debater, a master of language, and a passionate defender of Israel, Abba Eban’s diplomatic presence was in many ways a contradiction unlike any the world has seen since. While he was celebrated internationally for his exceptional wit and his moderate, reasoned worldview, these same qualities painted him as elitist and foreign in his home country. The disparity in perception of Eban at home and abroad was such that both his critics and his friends agreed that he would have been a wonderful prime minister—in any country but Israel. In Abba Eban, Asaf Siniver paints a nuanced and complete portrait of one of the most complex figures in twentieth-century foreign affairs. We see Eban growing up and coming into his own as part of the Cambridge Union, and watch him steadily become known as “The Voice of Israel.” Siniver draws on a vast amount of interviews, writings, and other newly available material to show that, in his unceasing quest for stability and peace for Israel, Eban’s primary opposition often came from the homeland he was fighting for; no matter how many allies he gained abroad, the man never understood his own domestic politics well enough to be as effective in his pursuits as he hoped. The first examination of Eban in nearly forty years, Abba Eban is a fascinating look at a life that still offers a valuable perspective on Israel even today.

 

THE MIZRAHI ERA OF REBELLION: ISRAEL'S FORGOTTEN CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE 1948-1966 

By: Bryan Roby
(Syracuse University Press, 2015, 978-0-8156-3411-9, 288 Pages, $39.95)

During the postwar period of 1948–56, over 400,000 Jews from the Middle East and Asia immigrated to the newly established state of Israel. By the end of the 1950s, Mizrahim, also known as Oriental Jewry, represented the ethnic majority of the Israeli Jewish population. Despite their large numbers, Mizrahim were considered outsiders because of their non-European origins. Viewed as foreigners who came from culturally backward and distant lands, they suffered decades of socioeconomic, political, and educational injustices. In this pioneering work, Roby traces the Mizrahi population’s struggle for equality and civil rights in Israel. Although the daily "bread and work" demonstrations are considered the first political expression of the Mizrahim, Roby demonstrates the myriad ways in which they agitated for change. Drawing upon a wealth of archival sources, many only recently declassified, Roby details the activities of the highly ideological and politicized young Israel. Police reports, court transcripts, and protester accounts document a diverse range of resistance tactics, including sit-ins, tent protests, and hunger strikes. Roby shows how the Mizrahi intellectuals and activists in the 1960s began to take note of the American civil rights movement, gaining inspiration from its development and drawing parallels between their experience and that of other marginalized ethnic groups. The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion shines a light on a largely forgotten part of Israeli social history, one that profoundly shaped the way Jews from African and Asian countries engaged with the newly founded state of Israel.

 

ISLAM AND POLITICS IN THE MIDDLE EAST: EXPLAINING THE VIEWS OF ORDINARY CITIZENS

By: Mark Tessler  
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2015, ISBN: 978-0-253-01643-0, 264 pages)

Some of the most pressing questions in the Middle East and North Africa today revolve around the proper place of Islamic institutions and authorities in governance and political affairs.  Drawing on data from 42 surveys carried out in fifteen countries between 1998 and 2011, representing the opinions of more than 60,000 men and women, this study investigates the reasons that some individuals support a central role for Islam in government while others favor a separation of religion and politics.  Utilizing his newly constructed Carnegie Middle East Governance and Islam Dataset, which has been placed in the public domain for use by other researchers, Mark Tessler formulates and tests hypotheses about determinants of the views held by ordinary citizens, offering insights into the individual-level and country-level factors that shape attitudes toward political Islam.

 

ISRAELINESS IN NO MAN'S LAND: CITIZENSHIP IN THE WEST BANK OF ISRAEL/PALESTINE
By: Yarden Enav 
(Peter Lang Academic Research, 2014, ISBN 978-3-631-65395-1, 216 pages, $54.95)

This book is the result of ethnographic research carried out in the Academic College of Judea & Samaria (The ACJS), located in the West Bank of Israel/Palestine. The book deals with Israeli citizenship and identity, and examines the ways in which it is being understood and imagined by ACJS students and teachers. The book also analyzes the Zionist organizational culture of the ACJS.  This book is not an ethnographic study executed in the standard manner. The research strategy reflects a mix of qualitative methods such as observations and interviews. The book offers a new socio-political model of Israel/Palestine:  Israel as a 'Zionist Democracy'.

 

THE "MAGIC CARPET" EXODUS OF YEMENITE JEWRY: AN ISRAELI MYTH
By: Esther Meir-Glitzenstein 
(Sussex Academic Press, 2014, ISBN: 978-1-84519-616-5, 256 Pages)

This book reexamining the heroic myth that has developed around Operation Magic Carpet, during which the majority of Yemeni Jews—through the cooperation among the imam of Yemen, the British colonial rulers of Aden, the Israeli government, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—were resettled in Israel in 1949 and 1950. Based on archival documents, the author reveals the enormous personal cost of the operation. The abandonment of immigrants to death in the desert during their trek to Aden, and the substantive loss of personal property in leaving their homes at short notice, calls into question the personal benefit of such a brutal upheaval and demands a re-assessment of the aims of the immigration operation and its prime movers. Of particular importance is a discussion of the interests of the various states and organizations that were involved in the exodus, which can be seen as the first stage in the evacuation of ancient Jewish communities throughout the Middle East and their transfer to Israel.

 

LET’S CELEBRATE! FESTIVALS AND CIVIC CULTURE IN ISRAEL (IN HEBREW)
By: Hizky Shoham
(Jerusalem: the Israel Democracy Institution, 2014, ISBN 978-965-519-146-2, 246 pages)

Israeli culture is the product of multiple civilizational influences: Jewish, Sabra, Western, and Arab. The book employs the historical anthropology of three Jewish holidays as celebrated in Israel to track the assimilation of Jewish rituals, myths, and symbols by Israeli culture ,from the early days of Zionism until the present, and to demonstrate how the Israeli grassroots produced a new strand of Judaism. The book further argues that this popular culture may come to define Jewish identity in twenty-first-century Israel. It differs from earlier studies and essays on the Jewishness of Israeli culture in that it probes the political implications of the minutiae of daily life. Let’s Celebrate! suggests a multicontextual and nuanced approach to Israeli culture, one that stands in contrast to the dominant scholarly trend. The latter has all too often advanced the simplistic claim that Zionism rebelled against Jewish tradition, thereby overemphasizing the opposition between Israeli culture and Jewish culture (which is frequently misidentified with Orthodoxy). The author builds on the book’s descriptive core to look closely at the role of grassroots Israeli culture in the formation of civic culture and the civic domain in Israel. The book discusses the possible ramifications of viewing this culture as a major component of Jewish and Israeli identity. Could this perspective support a political alternative for the definition of Jewish identity, which is currently held to be exclusively determined by Jewish ancestry? More specifically, could Israeli grassroots culture constitute a new symbolic space shared by Jews and non-Jews (Arabs or labor migrants), as in other local-national cultures in the modern era? The book offers a fresh point of view, no doubt somewhat polemical, of the current debates about identity and citizenship in Israel.

 

2018 Archive of Books

TRANSFORMING THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT: FROM MUTUAL NEGATION TO RECONCILIATION
By: Herbert C. Kelman
Edited by: Philip Mattar & Neil Caplan

(Routledge, 2018, ISBN: 9781138047969, Hardback, 248 pages)

This book is a collection of essential essays on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by eminent social psychologist Herbert C. Kelman. For over forty years Kelman conducted interactive problem-solving workshops at Harvard University and elsewhere, engaging more than one hundred Israeli, Arab and Palestinian political activists, journalists and intellectuals in constructive dialogue. Spanning the years 1978 to 2017, the essays gathered here are still relevant today, and attest to the author’s broad empathy for Palestinians and Israelis and his passionate pursuit of a resolution of their conflict based on consistent principles that satisfy the essential psychological needs and minimum political interests of both. The selected essays are not only insightful academic papers, but also serve as snapshots-in-time of the ebb and flow of conflict and peace efforts as well as guideposts for future would-be negotiators and facilitators.

This volume will be of much interest to students of Middle Eastern politics, peace and conflict studies, and international relations, and will help would-be negotiators and mediators in practice. 

 

 

OVERLOOKING THE BORDER: NARRATIVES OF DIVIDED JERUSALEM
By: Dana Hercbergs

(Wayne State University Press - Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology, Detroit, 2018, 336 pages)

Also available as an audio book.

Overlooking the Border examines the social and geographic significance of borders for Jerusalem residents’ sense of self, place, and community, and for representations of the city both locally and abroad. Anchoring this work is the border that separated Jerusalem between Jordan and Israel in 1948–1967, a lesser-known but significant period for cultural representations of the city. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book juxtaposes Israeli and Palestinian personal narratives about the past with contemporary museum exhibits, street plaques, tourism, and real estate projects that are reshaping the city since the decline of the peace process and the second intifada.

The book begins with the historically Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, whose streets are a battleground for competing historical narratives about the Israeli-Arab War of 1948. It goes on to explore the connections and tensions between Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians living across the border from one another in Musrara, a neighborhood straddling West and East Jerusalem. The author rounds out the monograph with a semiotic analysis of contemporary tourism and architectural ventures that are entrenching ethno-national separation in the post-Oslo period. What emerges is a portrayal of Jerusalem both as a local place with unique rhythms and topography and as a setting for national imaginaries and agendas with their attendant political and social tensions.

 

THE SMILE OF THE HUMAN BOMB: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON SUICIDE TERRORISM
By: Gideon Aran

(Cornell University Press, 2018, ISBN13: 9781501724756, ISBN10: 1501724754, 376 pages)

In 2017, nearly six thousand people were killed in suicide attacks across the world.

In The Smile of the Human Bomb, Gideon Aran dissects the moral logic of the suicide terrorism that led to those deaths. The book is based on an extended study of the Palestinian terrorism in Israel conducted during the second Intifada in Jerusalem. It is a firsthand examination of the bomb site at the moment of the explosion, during the first few minutes after the explosion, and in the last moments before the explosion. Aran uncovers the suicide bomber’s final preparations before embarking on the suicide mission: the border crossing, the journey toward the designated target, penetration into the site, and the behavior of both sides within it. The book sheds light on the truth of the human bomb.

Aran’s gritty and often disturbing account is built on a foundation of participant observation with squads of pious Jewish volunteers who gather the scorched fragments of the dead after terrorist attacks; newly revealed documents, including interrogation protocols; interviews with Palestinian armed resistance members and retired Israeli counterterrorism agents; observations of failed suicide terrorists in jail; and conversations with the acquaintances of human bombs.

The Smile of the Human Bomb provides new insights on the Middle East conflict, Israeli culture, Jewish contemporary religiosity, Palestinian resistance, political violence, radicalism, victimhood, ritual, and death and unveils a suicide terrorism scene far different from what is conventionally pictured. By departing from the traditional political, military, economic, and theological analyses of suicide terrorism, Aran presents an intriguing and novel view of the this horrific enigmatic phenomenon.  In the end, Aran discovers, the suicide terrorist is an unremarkable figure, and the circumstances of his or her recruitment and operation are prosaic and often accidental. The smiling human bomb is neither larger than life nor a monster, but an actor on a human scale. And suicide terrorism is a drama in which clichés and chance events play their role.

   

HOW YOUNG HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS REBUILT THEIR LIVES, FRANCE, THE UNITED STATES, AND ISRAEL 
By: Françoise S. Ouzan

(Indiana University Press, 2018, series: Studies in Antisemitism; paperback, hardback (ISBN: 978-0-253-03313-0), ebook)

Drawing on testimonies, memoirs, and personal interviews of Holocaust survivors, Françoise S. Ouzan reveals how the experience of Nazi persecution impacted their personal reconstruction, rehabilitation, and reintegration into a free society. She sheds light on the life trajectories of various groups of Jews, including displaced persons, partisan fighters, hidden children, and refugees from Nazism. Ouzan shows that personal success is not only a unifying factor among these survivors but is part of an ethos that unified ideas of homeland, social justice, togetherness, and individual aspirations in the redemptive experience. Exploring how Holocaust survivors rebuilt their lives after World War II, Ouzan tells the story of how they coped with adversity and psychic trauma to contribute to the culture and society of their country of residence.

  
HEBREW FASCISM IN PALESTINE, 1922 – 1942
By Dan Tamïr

(London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018, ISBN 978-3-319-73678-5, xii + 201 pages)

The current discussion in Israel about rising fascist movements and organisations gained momentum during the past decade. Historically, since the early 1930s, the term 'fascist' was regularly used by Labour Zionists in order to defame their right-wing opponents, the 'Revisionists'; the latter group, for its part, tended to reject such accusations. Up to this point, however, little comprehensive research has been carried out for examining the possible existence of a genuine Hebrew fascism in Palestine according to a global comparative model of generic fascism. This book is an attempt to do so, examining the first wave of fascism in Palestine, from the early 1920s to the early 1940s. It argues that the social and political circles created by activists and intellectuals such as Itamar Ben Avi, Abba Ahimeir, Wolfgang von Weisl and Joshua Yevin indeed formed the basis for a genuine fascist movement. Telling the story of a yet relatively hidden part of the roots of the Israeli right wing may not only shed light on the past, but also provide us with a historical perspective when measuring contemporary political movements and events.

 
INCLUSION THROUGH EXCLUSION: HOW YOUNG IMMIGRANT ISRAELIS IN THE NATIONALIST YISRA'EL BEITENU PARTY READ ISRAELI CITIZENSHIP
By: Anja Schmidt-Kleinert

(Bielefeld: transcript, in English, ISBN print: 978-3-8376-4559-0/ ISBN pdf open access: 978-3-8394-4559-4, 218 pages)

How do young people from immigrant families become engaged in politics? Anja Schmidt-Kleinert examines the case of young Israelis who are actively engaged with the nationalist Yisra'el Beitenu party, led by the Israeli minister of defence, Avigdor Lieberman. She explores how the activists present Israeli citizenship in a way that is exclusionary to non-Jewish citizens and analyses their strategy to actively construct a sense of belonging to Israeli society or, more precisely, to the Jewish collective by (re-)producing the ethno-nationalist discourse.

 

ISRAEL'S LONG WAR WITH HEZBOLLAH: MILITARY INNOVATION AND ADAPTATION UNDER FIRE
By: Raphael D. Marcus

(Georgetown University Press, 2018. ISBN: 9781626166110. 320 pages)

The new book Israel's Long War with Hezbollah is the first complete military history of the decades-long Israel-Hezbollah conflict and an analysis of military innovation and adaptation. Raphael D. Marcus examines the conflict since the formation of Hezbollah during Israel's occupation of Lebanon in the early 1980s. He critically evaluates events including Israel's long counterguerrilla campaign throughout the 1990s, the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, the 2006 summer war, and concludes with an assessment of current tensions on the border between Israel and Lebanon related to the Syrian civil war. The book is based on unique fieldwork in Israel and Lebanon, extensive research into Hebrew and Arabic primary sources, and dozens of interviews conducted with Israeli defense officials, high-ranking military officers of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), United Nations personnel, a Hezbollah official, and Western diplomats. As an expert on organizational learning, Marcus analyzes ongoing processes of strategic and operational innovation and adaptation by both the IDF and Hezbollah throughout the long guerrilla conflict. His conclusions illuminate the dynamics of the ongoing conflict and illustrate the complexity of military adaptation under fire.

  

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK ON ISRAELI SECURITY
By: Stuart Cohen and Aharon Klieman (ed.)

(Routledge, 2018, ISBN: 9781138217300, 350 pages)

This Handbook provides an authoritative survey of both the historical roots of Israel’s national security concerns and their principal contemporary expressions. Following an introduction setting out its central themes, the Handbook comprises 27 independent chapters, all written by experts in their fields, several of whom possess first-hand diplomatic and/or military experience at senior levels. An especially noteworthy feature of this volume is the space allotted to analyses of the impact of security challenges not just on Israel’s diplomatic and military postures (nuclear as well as conventional) but also on its cultural life and societal behavior. This comprehensive and up-to-date collection of studies provides an authoritative and interdisciplinary guide to both the dynamism of Israel’s security dilemmas and to their multiple impacts on Israeli society. In addition to its insights and appeal for all people and countries forced to address the security issue in today’s world, this Handbook is a valuable resource for upper-level undergraduates and researchers with an interest in the Middle East and Israeli politics, international relations and security studies.

 

UNDERSTANDING ISRAEL: POLITICAL, SOCIETAL AND SECURITY CHALLENGES
By: Joel Peters and Rob Geist Pinfold (eds.)

(Routledge, 2018, ISBN: 9781138125650, 292 pages)

This book provides a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary analysis of the external and internal threats, opportunities and issues facing contemporary Israel. The book comprises sixteen chapters written by recognized authorities in the field of Israel Studies. Together, the chapters offer a detailed overview of Israel while separately they provide stand-alone coverage of specific topics under discussion. Part I examines the Israeli Political System, such as the Knesset, political parties and extra-parliamentary politics; Part II addresses issues in Israeli society, including the Israeli economy, the divides between Jews and Arabs, religious and secular Israelis and the struggle for gender equality; and Part III focuses on security, geopolitical and foreign policy challenges, looking at relations between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, Israeli foreign policy, borders and settlements and regional security threats. By filling an important gap in the study of contemporary Israel, this book is of interest to multiple audiences, most notably students and scholars of Israeli politics, the Middle East and comparative politics. The book has been positively reviewed by leading Israel Studies academics, such as Naomi Chazan, Gad Barzilai and Clive Jones.

 

ISRAEL IN THE AMERICAN MIND: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF US-ISRAELI RELATIONS, 1958–1988
By: Shaul Mitelpunkt

(Cambridge University Press, 2018, ISBN: 9781108381635, 386 Pages)

This book examines the changing meanings Americans and Israelis invested in the relationship between their countries from the late 1950s to the 1980s. Bringing to light previously unexamined sources, this study is the first to investigate the intricate mechanisms that defined and redefined Israel's place in American imagination through the war-strewn 1960s and 1970s. Departing from traditional diplomatic histories that focus on the political elites alone, Shaul Mitelpunkt places the relationship deep in the cultural, social, intellectual, and ideological landscapes of both societies. Examining Israeli propaganda operations in America, Mitelpunkt also pays close attention to the way Israelis manipulated and responded to American perceptions of their country, and reveals the reservations some expressed towards their country's relationship with the United States. By contextualizing the relationship within the changing domestic concerns in both countries, this book provides a truly transnational history of US-Israeli relations.

 
STRATEGIC ELITES IN ISRAEL: THE DISTRIBUTION OF POWER IN THE ISRAELI SOCIETY
By: Sagi Elbaz and Niva Golan-Nadir

(Carmel Publishing, 2018, 193 pages, ISBN: 9789655407921, in Hebrew)

This book seeks to achieve two main goals. The first, and more general, is to show that the Israeli society is an elitist one. The second, and more focused goal is to explain that the Israeli society consists of three groups of power: a political elite, a military elite, and an economic elite. These groups are ‘strategic elites’ because they hold power, influence decision-making processes, and possess more resources any than other power groups, let alone the general public, and certainly the weaker sectors in society. At its core, the book develops a theoretical model that assumes that these three power groups - political, military and economic elites use the media, education and culture systems to mobilize broad public consent for the existing order, and to justify their rule. Among other things, the three groups form ‘core value consensus’, the main ones being: A. Jewish nationalism. B. Security culture. C. Economic Liberalism. Each of these core consensuses is produced, replicated, and disseminated to the masses through the mediation of the media and the educational and cultural institutions – i.e. the ideological consent mechanisms subordinate to the elites. At the basis of this book is the assumption that the ‘national agenda’ is merely a code name for the elite's belief system and values, which supposedly identify its interests with the public interest. This is the undemocratic element embedded in a social structure that preserves the gaps between elites and the general public.

 

BEYOND THE NATION-STATE: THE ZIONIST POLITICAL IMAGINATION FROM PINSKER TO BEN-GURION
By: Dmitry Shumsky

(Yale University Press, 2018, ISBN: 9780300230130, 320 pages)

The Jewish nation-state has often been thought of as Zionism’s end goal. In this bracing history of the idea of the Jewish state in modern Zionism, from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century until the establishment of the state of Israel, Dmitry Shumsky challenges this deeply rooted assumption. In doing so, he complicates the narrative of the Zionist quest for full sovereignty, provocatively showing how and why the leaders of the pre-state Zionist movement imagined, articulated and promoted theories of self-determination in Palestine either as part of a multinational Ottoman state (1882-1917), or in the framework of multinational democracy. In particular, Shumsky focuses on the writings and policies of five key Zionist leaders from the Habsburg and Russian empires in central and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Leon Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and David Ben-Gurion to offer a very pointed critique of Zionist historiography.

 

JERUSALEM: A BRIEF HISTORY
By: Michael Zank

(Wiley-Blackwell, 2018, ISBN: 9781405179720, 272 Pages)

Jerusalem - A Brief History shows how Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptures confer providential meaning to the fate of the city and how modern Jerusalem is haunted by waves of biblical fantasy aiming at mutually exclusive status-quo rectification. It presents the major epochs of the history of Jerusalem’s urban transformation, inviting readers to imagine Jerusalem as a city that is not just sacred to the many groups of people who hold it dear, but as a united, unharmed place that is, in this sense, holy. Jerusalem - A Brief History starts in modern Jerusalem—giving readers a look at the city as it exists today. It goes on to tell of its emergence as a holy city in three different ways, focusing each time on another aspect of the biblical past. Next, it discusses the transformation of Jerusalem from a formerly Jewish temple city, condemned to oblivion by its Roman destroyers, into an imperially sponsored Christian theme park, and the afterlife of that same city under later Byzantine and Muslim rulers. Lastly, the book returns to present day Jerusalem to examine the development of the modern city under the Ottomans and the British, the history of division and reunification, and the ongoing jostling over access to, and sovereignty over, Jerusalem’s contested holy places.

 
BORDERS, TERRITORIES, AND ETHICS: HEBREW LITERATURE IN THE SHADOW OF THE INTIFADA
By: Adia Mendelson-Maoz 

(Purdue University Press, 2018, ISBN: 978-1557538208 252 pages)

Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadow of the Intifada by Adia Mendelson-Maoz presents a new perspective on the multifaceted relations between ideologies, space, and ethics manifested in contemporary Hebrew literature dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the occupation. In this volume, Mendelson-Maoz analyzes Israeli prose written between 1987 and 2007, relating mainly to the first and second intifadas, written by authors such as Yehoshua, Grossman, Matalon, Castel-Bloom, Govrin, Kravitz, and Levy. Mendelson-Maoz raises critical questions regarding militarism, humanism, the nature of the State of Israel as a democracy, national identity and its borders, soldiers as moral individuals, the nature of Zionist education, the acknowledgment of the Other, and the sovereignty of the subject. She discusses these issues within two frameworks. The first draws on theories of ethics in the humanist tradition and its critical extensions, especially by Levinas. The second applies theories of space, and in particular deterritorialization as put forward by Deleuze and Guattari and their successors. Overall this volume provides an innovative theoretical analysis of the collage of voices and artistic directions in contemporary Israeli prose written in times of political and cultural debate on the occupation and its intifadas.

 

THE REVOLUTIONARY: ADA FISHMAN MAIMON: A BIOGRAPHY
By: Bat-Sheva Margalit Stern

(Ben-Gurion University Press and Yad Ben Zvi, 2018, in Hebrew, ISBN 978-965-510-123-2, 541 pages)

Born in 1893 in Bessarabia, Ada Fishman Maimon was known from an early age for her intellectual acuity, strong-mindedness and ability to hold her own in a debate. Fishman Maimon was a feminist who fought for suffrage, and for women’s right to get work, earn money, and become independent; who kept the Jewish Mitzvoth, but chose the secular sector of the Zionist movement as her political home. Ada Fishman was one of the few women founders of the Women Workers Movement in Eretz Israel; a relentless entrepreneur, founder and manager of Ayanot, the big women’s farm established in the early 1930s near Ness Ziona, where she lived very modestly until the end of her life in 1973, and a prolific member of the Knesset. A member of the leadership of Ha-Poel ha –Tzair party, and later of Mapay’s, she assigned the gender principle priority over class, political and other affiliations. Although she never married, she took a feminist attitude toward women’s status as wives and mothers, and toward the economic and social significance of their labor. In unfolding Ada Fishman’s life story this book weaves together the personal dimension of her life with her public persona; her biography with the history of the Zionist movement she influenced and helped mold. Her intricate life, her triumphs and disappointments, achievements and lost battles, are the threads this book sets to untangle.

  

PREVENTING PALESTINE: A POLITICAL HISTORY FROM CAMP DAVID TO OSLO
By: Seth Anziska 

(Princeton University Press, 2018, ISBN 9780691177397, 464 Pages)

For seventy years Israel has existed as a state, and for forty years it has honored a peace treaty with Egypt that is widely viewed as a triumph of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East. Yet the Palestinians—the would-be beneficiaries of a vision for a comprehensive regional settlement that led to the Camp David Accords in 1978—remain stateless to this day. How and why Palestinian statelessness persists are the central questions of Seth Anziska’s groundbreaking book, which explores the complex legacy of the agreement brokered by President Jimmy Carter.
Based on newly declassified international sources, Preventing Palestine charts the emergence of the Middle East peace process, including the establishment of a separate track to deal with the issue of Palestine. At the very start of this process, Anziska argues, Egyptian-Israeli peace came at the expense of the sovereignty of the Palestinians, whose aspirations for a homeland alongside Israel faced crippling challenges. With the introduction of the idea of restrictive autonomy, Israeli settlement expansion, and Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the chances for Palestinian statehood narrowed even further. The first Intifada in 1987 and the end of the Cold War brought new opportunities for a Palestinian state, but many players, refusing to see Palestinians as a nation or a people, continued to steer international diplomacy away from their cause.
Combining astute political analysis, extensive original research, and interviews with diplomats, military veterans, and communal leaders, Preventing Palestine offers a bold new interpretation of a highly charged struggle for self-determination.

 

JEREMIAH IN ZION: THE RELIGION AND POLITICS OF JUDAH LEIB MAGNES
By David Barak-Gorodetsky

(Ben-Gurion University Press, 2018, in Hebrew, ISBN124600100141, 279 pages)

This manuscript is an intellectual biography of Judah Leib Magnes – a Reform Rabbi and American Zionist leader, who immigrated to Palestine to become the first Chancellor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His politics of binationalism was the outcome of his religious understanding of Judaism and of Zionism as its modern expression. Contrasted with the central-European thinkers who were his allies in the effort to realize the binational idea in Palestine – like Martin Buber and Hugo Bergman – the uniqueness of Magnes’s position lies in its American religious and political underpinnings. The case of Magnes can therefore be understood as an attempt to transport the Reform Jewish-American political theology to the Zionist arena in Palestine, while utilizing the American federative political ideas and the precepts of Jewish morality in the constituting processes of Jewish statehood in Israel.

 

 

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT HEBREW (AND WHAT IT MEANS TO AMERICANS)
By: Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg (eds.)

(University of Washington Press, 2018, ISBN: 9780295743769, 256 pages)

Why Hebrew, here and now? What is its value for contemporary Americans? In What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (and What It Means to Americans) scholars, writers, and translators tackle a series of urgent questions that arise from the changing status of Hebrew in the United States. To what extent is that status affected by evolving Jewish identities and shifting attitudes toward Israel and Zionism? Will Hebrew programs survive the current crisis in the humanities on university campuses? How can the vibrancy of Hebrew literature be conveyed to a larger audience? The volume features a diverse group of distinguished contributors, including Sarah Bunin Benor, Dara Horn, Adriana Jacobs, Alan Mintz, Hannah Pressman, Adam Rovner, Ilan Stavans, Michael Weingrad, Robert Whitehill-Bashan, and Wendy Zierler. With lively personal insights, their essays give fellow Americans a glimpse into the richness of an exceptional language. Celebrating the vitality of modern Hebrew, this book addresses the challenges and joys of being a Hebraist in America in the twenty-first century. Together these essays explore ways to rekindle an interest in Hebrew studies, focusing not just on what Hebrew means-as a global phenomenon and long-lived tradition-but on what it can mean to Americans.

THE HANDBOOK OF ISRAEL’S POLITICAL SYSTEM
By: Itzhak Galnoor and Dana Blander
(Cambridge University Press, 2018; ISBN: 9781107097858, 1016 pages)

There is growing interest in Israel's political system from all parts of the world. This Handbook provides a unique comprehensive presentation of political life in Israel from the formative pre-state period to the present. The themes covered include: political heritage and the unresolved issues that have been left to fester; the institutional framework (the Knesset, government, judiciary, presidency, the state comptroller and commissions of inquiry); citizens’ political participation (elections, political parties, civil society and the media); the four issues that have bedevilled Israeli democracy since its establishment (security, state and religion, the status of Israel’s Arab citizens and economic inequities with concomitant social gaps); and the contours of the political culture and its impact on Israel's democracy. The authors skilfully integrate detailed basic data with an analysis of structures and processes, making the Handbook accessible to both experts and those with a general interest in Israel.

 

POINTS OF CONTACT: DANCE, POLITICS AND JEWISH-ARAB RELATIONS IN ISRAEL
By: Henia Rottenberg and Dina Roginsky (eds.)
(Resling press, 2018, 330 pages, in Hebrew)

Points of Contact proposes a framework for the research and discussion of the changing nature of Jewish-Arab relations as reflected in dance from the late 19th century Palestine until the present day Israel. Drawing on multiple disciplines from the social sciences, humanities, and arts, this book examines dance across multiple historical periods and in a variety of social venues and dance genres, and touches on related issues of Israeli, Palestinian and also Jewish-American identities as reflected in dance. It seeks to answer a fundamental question: can the body and dance operate as non-verbal autonomous agents of change, or are they just another manifestation of an embodied politics?

 
RINGWORM: HISTORICAL, MEDICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF ITS TREATMENT
By:   Shifra Shvarts and Sadetzki Siegal (eds.)
(Ben-Gurion University publication, 2018, ISBN 2302118, in Hebrew)

The book "Ringworm" presents for the first time a series of Israeli and international studies focusing on historical, social and political aspects of the treatment of ringworm in Israel and worldwide. The studies describe how various countries cope with the ringworm epidemic through mass radiation therapy such as France, England and the United States, and in the Jewish Yishuv in Mandate Palestine and the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and North Africa. The second part of the book presents research on the social and political aspects of the treatment of ringworm in Israel, with emphasis on the period of mass immigration during the first decade of the State and the Law on Compensation for Ringworm Victims, 1994, which was legislated only in Israel.

 

A JEWISH COMMUNITY IN AN ARAB TOWN: BEIT SHE`AN, 1890-1936
By: Reuven Gafni
(Magnes press, 2018, ISBN: 978-965-7763-36-0, 275 pages [Hebrew])

This book focuses on the history and the fall of the Jewish community that existed in Beit She`an, from the end of the 19th century until the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in 1936. This first attempt to sketch the story of the community, which was almost entirely obliterated from the public memory and even the academic consciousness, is based on an in-depth study of public and local archives, as well as other sources, including the Jewish and Arab local press during this period, literary and autobiographical sources, and several oral interviews with the descendants of the short-lived community.
The book follows the history of the community through the years of it`s existence, describing its growth from a small group of local Jewish settlers into a stable and growing community, which at it`s peak numbered hundreds of people and operated communal and religious institutions. The first abandonment of the community after the 1929 riots, the attempts to resuscitate it in the early 1930s, and its gradual decline until its demise with the outbreak of the Arab Revolt, are also described broadly, as well as the activities of the main community institutions, the Hebrew school and Jewish clinic. Other issues discussed in the book are the community's ties with the surrounding agricultural Jewish settlement, with the Jewish community in Tiberias, the local Arab population and, above all, its complex and changing relations with the Jewish national institutions.
Other than the story of the Beit She'an community itself, the book sheds light on the usually forgotten phenomenon of  several other small Jewish communities, which existed during this period in a number of Arab cities and towns throughout the country: Gaza, Be'er Sheva, Ramle, Lod, Nazareth, Jenin, Samakh, Jericho And others. The story of these communities enables a reevaluation of various histographic issues, amongst them the evolving relations between Jews and Arabs in mandatory Palestine during this period, as well as the unique national and social identity of various marginal Jewish groups, which disappeared from Zionist historiography as well as from the public memory.

 

GERSHOM SCHOLEM: FROM BERLIN TO JERUSALEM AND BACK
By: Noam Zadoff
(Brandeis University Press, 2018, ISBN: 978-1512601138, 344 pages)

German-born Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem (1897–1982), the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, delved into the historical analysis of kabbalistic literature from late antiquity to the twentieth century. His writings traverse Jewish historiography, Zionism, the phenomenology of mystical religion, and the spiritual and political condition of contemporary Judaism and Jewish civilization. Scholem famously recounted rejecting his parents’ assimilationist liberalism in favor of Zionism and immigrating to Palestine in 1923, where he became a central figure in the German Jewish immigrant community that dominated the nation’s intellectual landscape in Mandatory Palestine. Despite Scholem’s public renunciation of Germany for Israel, Zadoff explores how the life and work of Scholem reflect ambivalence toward Zionism and his German origins.

 

THE ROAD TO '77: THE COLLAPSE OF THE HEGEMONY OF THE LABOR PARTY, 1965-1977
By: Eran Eldar
(Am-Oved 2018, ISBN: 978-965-13-2705-6, 299 pages)

The ninth Knesset election, in May 1977, caused what came to be known as the “upheaval”—a vastly significant event in Israeli politics. After thirty years of unquestioned rule by the Mapai (Labor) Party, the voters sent it into the opposition. The shock and surprise were enormous. After the election, the party head Shimon Peres wrote to his friend, the novelist A.B. Yehoshua, “We were cut off from the people, we were insensitive to their wishes, and our ears were closed to their expectations.” He went on to describe the power games within the party and its intellectual poverty. Eran Eldar’s new book argues that the party’s many achievements during the thirty years of its rule—including establishing the country’s economy and stabilizing its security and borders— masked internal processes and developments that eroded its power and distanced it from the hearts of its electorate. The book does not deal with the winning side, the Likud Party headed by Menachem Begin, but rather with the losing side. The close examination of the gradual decline of the workers parties’ hegemony between 1965 and 1977 reveals that the “upheaval” was essentially the obvious and inevitable conclusion of a long process of disintegration and loss of power.

 

EMPTIED LANDS: A LEGAL GEOGRAPHY OF BEDOUIN RIGHTS IN THE NEGEV
By: Alexandre Kedar, Ahmad Amara, and Oren Yiftachel
(Stanford University Press, 2018, ISBN: 9781503603585, 424 pages)

Emptied Lands investigates the protracted legal, planning, and territorial conflict between the settler Israeli state and indigenous Bedouin citizens over traditional lands in southern Israel/Palestine. The authors place this dispute in historical, legal, geographical, and international-comparative perspectives, providing the first legal geographic analysis of the "dead Negev doctrine" used by Israel to dispossess and forcefully displace Bedouin inhabitants in order to Judaize the region. The authors reveal that through manipulative use of Ottoman, British and Israeli laws, the state has constructed its own version of terra nullius. Yet, the indigenous property and settlement system still functions, creating an ongoing resistance to the Jewish state. Emptied Lands critically examines several key land claims, court rulings, planning policies and development strategies, offering alternative local, regional, and international routes for justice.

 

JERUSALEM'S JEWISH QUARTER: HERITAGE AND POSTWAR RESTORATION
By: Bracha Slae and Ruth Kark
(Israel Academic Press, 2018, ISBN: 978-1885881649, 186 pages) 

This scholarly, incisive, and thought provoking book provides an in depth account of Israel’s rebuilding of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem after the 1967 Six Day War, in the context of approaches to post-war restoration and heritage preservation and development, both local and worldwide. Inward-directed heritage development and its importance to collective identity, and outward directed heritage development (primarily tourist but also strategic and political) were decisive concerns. The rebuilding of the Jewish Quarter is compared to contemporary preservation old cities of Jaffa, Acre and Safed, activity in the historic to heritage conservation in Old Cairo, and to postwar conservation of Beirut, Warsaw and York.

 

ISRAELI NATIONAL SECURITY: A NEW STRATEGY FOR AN ERA OF CHANGE
By: Charles D. Freilich
(Oxford University Press, 2018, ISBN: 9780190602932, 496 pages)

National security has been at the forefront of the Israeli experience for seven decades, with threats ranging from terrorism, to vast rocket and missile arsenals, and even existential nuclear dangers. Yet, despite its overwhelming preoccupation with foreign and defense affairs, Israel does not have a formal national security strategy. In Israeli National Security, Chuck Freilich presents an authoritative analysis of the military, diplomatic, demographic, and societal challenges Israel faces today, to propose a comprehensive and long-term Israeli national security strategy. The heart of the new strategy places greater emphasis on restraint, defense, and diplomacy as means of addressing the challenges Israel faces, along with the military capacity to deter and, if necessary, defeat Israel’s adversaries, while also maintaining the resolve of its society. By bringing Israel’s most critical debates about the Palestinians, demography, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, US relations and nuclear strategy into sharp focus, the strategy Freilich proposes addresses the primary challenges Israel must address in order to chart its national course. The most comprehensive study of Israel’s national security to date, this book presents the first ever public proposal for a comprehensive Israeli national security strategy and prescribes an actionable course forward. The US-Israeli relationship, both at the governmental level and the Jewish community, is a considerable focus in the book, which weighs four critical questions in this regard: to what extent the price of an extraordinary bilateral relationship has been a loss of Israel's independence, whether Israel could even survive today without the United States, where the relationship is heading and what is or should be doing about it.

 

THE ACADEMIC MIDDLE-CLASS REBELLION: SOCIO-POLITICAL CONFLICT OVER WAGE-GAPS IN ISRAEL, 1954-1956
By: Avi Bareli and Uri Cohen
(Brill, 2018, ISBN 9789004357853, 288 pages)

This new research investigates socio-political and ethnic-cultural conflicts over wage gaps in Israel during the 1950s. The Academic Middle-Class Rebellion exposes the struggle of the Ashkenazi (European) professional elite to capitalize on its advantages during the first decade of Israeli statehood, by attempting to maximize wage gaps between themselves and the new Oriental Jewish proletariat. This struggle was met with great resistance from the government under the ruling party, Mapai, and its leader David Ben-Gurion. The clash between the two sides revealed diverse, contradictory visions of the optimal socio-economic foundation for establishing collective identity in the new nation-state. The study by Avi Bareli and Uri Cohen uncovers patterns that merged nationalism and socialism in 1950s Israel confronting a liberal and meritocratic vision.

 

IN SEARCH OF ISRAEL: THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA
By: Michael Brenner
(Princeton University Press, 2018, ISBN 9780691179285, 392 pages)

Many Zionists who advocated the creation of a Jewish state envisioned a nation like any other. Yet for Israel's founders, the state that emerged against all odds in 1948 was anything but ordinary. Born from the ashes of genocide and a long history of suffering, Israel was conceived to be unique, a model society and the heart of a prosperous new Middle East. It is this paradox, says historian Michael Brenner--the Jewish people's wish for a homeland both normal and exceptional—that shapes Israel's ongoing struggle to define itself and secure a place among nations. In Search of Israel is a major new history of this struggle from the late nineteenth century to our time. When Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897, no single solution to the problem of "normalizing" the Jewish people emerged. Herzl proposed a secular-liberal "New Society" that would be home to Jews and non-Jews alike. East European Zionists advocated the renewal of the Hebrew language and the creation of a distinct Jewish culture. Socialists imagined a society of workers' collectives and farm settlements. The Orthodox dreamt of a society based on the laws of Jewish scripture. The stage was set for a clash of Zionist dreams and Israeli realities that continues today.  Seventy years after its founding, Israel has achieved much, but for a state widely viewed as either a paragon or a pariah, Brenner argues, the goal of becoming a state like any other remains elusive. If the Jews were the archetypal "other" in history, ironically, Israel—which so much wanted to avoid the stamp of otherness—has become the Jew among the nations.

 

THE JEWISH ORIGINS OF ISRAELI FOREIGN POLICY: A STUDY IN TRADITION AND SURVIVAL
By: Shmuel Sandler
(London: Routledge, 2018, ISBN: 978-1-138-72049-7, 210 pages)

The conventional understanding of Israeli foreign policy has been that it is a relatively new phenomenon, with some claiming that the ‘Jewish People’ is an invention by mid-19th century Jewish historians, or simply an ‘imagined community’. 
This book disputes these claims by demonstrating that the Jews have a tradition of foreign relations based on an historical political tradition that goes back thousands of years, and that this tradition has been carried over to the State of Israel. The Jewish political tradition in foreign policy has always been defensive-oriented, whether under sovereignty or in the Diaspora. In order to explore the question of whether it is possible to identify patterns of international behaviour in the foreign policy of the Jews, the book begins with the Bible and continues through the period of the First and Second Temples, then looks at the long generations when the Jewish people were stateless, continues with the birth of Zionism and accordingly examines the foreign policy of the sovereign Jewish state of Israel.  The underlying assumption is that an understanding of these characteristics derived from International relations theory will allow us to derive a better understanding of Israel’s foreign policy.

2016 Archive of Books

CONNECTING WITH THE ENEMY: A CENTURY OF PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI JOINT NONVIOLENCE
By: Sheila H. Katz 
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016, ISBN: 978-1-4773-1062-5, 307 pages)

Thousands of ordinary people in Israel and Palestine have engaged in a dazzling array of daring and visionary joint nonviolent initiatives for more than a century. They have endured despite condemnation by their own societies, repetitive failures of diplomacy, harsh inequalities, and endemic cycles of violence.                     
Connecting with the Enemy presents the first comprehensive history of unprecedented grassroots efforts to forge nonviolent alternatives to the lethal collision of the two national movements. Bringing to light the work of over five hundred groups, Sheila H. Katz describes how Arabs and Jews, children and elders, artists and activists, educators and students, garage mechanics and physicists, and lawyers and prisoners have spoken truth to power, protected the environment, demonstrated peacefully, mourned together, stood in resistance and solidarity, and advocated for justice and security. She also critiques and assesses the significance of their work and explores why these good-will efforts have not yet managed to end the conflict or occupation. This previously untold story of Palestinian-Israeli joint nonviolence will challenge the mainstream narratives of terror and despair, monsters and heroes, that help to perpetuate the conflict. It will also inspire and encourage anyone grappling with social change, peace and war, oppression and inequality, and grassroots activism anywhere in the world.

  
IN THE SHADOW OF MOSES: NEW JEWISH MOVEMENTS IN AFRICA AND THE DIASPORA
By: Daniel Lis, William F.S. Miles, Tudor Parfitt (eds.)
(Tsehai Publishers, 2016 ISBN 978-1-59-907146-6, 275 pp.)

In the Shadow of Moses: New Jewish Movements in Africa and the Diaspora presents original research by an international group of twelve scholars who have been conducting fieldwork on historic and emerging Jewish communities in Africa as well as on the interaction of Jews and Africans (and their descendants) in precolonial Africa and modern day Israel. These “New Jewish Movements” are part of the “New Religious Movements” that has intrigued sociologists and historians of religion for some time; now, the book argues, the phenomenon contains a global Jewish component as well. Case studies include Cameroon, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, France, Gabon, Ghana, Jamaica, Madagascar, Nigeria, Uganda, and African immigrants in Israel.  Illustrated by original drawings by graphic novel artist Jérémie Dres, the volume will appeal to scholars and general readers in African as well as Jewish studies. 

 
THE PROMISE OF INTEGRATED AND MULTICULTURAL BILINGUAL EDUCATION: INCLUSIVE PALESTINIAN-ARAB AND JEWISH SCHOOLS IN ISRAEL
By: Zvi Bekerman  
(Oxford University Press, 2016, ISBN: 978-0199336517, 368 Pages)

The Promise of Integrated and Multicultural Bilingual Education presents the results of a long-term ethnographic study of the integrated bilingual Palestinian-Jewish schools in Israel that offer a new educational option to two groups of Israelis--Palestinians and Jews--who have been in conflict for the last one hundred years. Their goal is to create egalitarian bilingual multicultural environments to facilitate the growth of youth who can acknowledge and respect "others" while maintaining loyalty to their respective cultural traditions. In this book, Bekerman reveals the complex school practices implemented while negotiating identity and culture in contexts of enduring conflict. Data gathered from interviews with teachers, students, parents, and state officials are presented and analyzed to explore the potential and limitations of peace education given the cultural resources, ethnic-religious affiliations, political beliefs, and historical narratives of the various interactants. The book concludes with critique of Western positivist paradigmatic perspectives that currently guide peace education, maintaining that one of the primary weaknesses of current bilingual and multicultural approaches to peace education is their failure to account for the primacy of the political framework of the nation state and the psychologized educational perspectives that guide their educational work. Change, it is argued, will only occur after these perspectives are abandoned, which entails critically reviewing present understandings of the individual, of identity and culture, and of the learning process.

 

BANKING REGULATION IN ISRAEL: PRUDENTIAL REGULATION VERSUS CONSUMER PROTECTION
By: Ruth Plato-Shinar
(Wolters Kluwer, 2016, ISBN: 978-90-411-6791-0, 328pp)

In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, many governments are seeking ways to improve their banking regulation systems in the interests of both economic health and consumer protection. Among the globally competitive countries that withstood the crisis with no significant disruption, Israel stands out, suggesting that other countries might benefit from an in-depth analysis of its banking system. This is the first book in English to provide such an analysis, emphasizing the crucial balance between prudential regulation and conduct of business regulation, which in Israel are both regulated by the same agency, unlike the ‘Twin Peaks’ model that prevails in other market-based economies. With recommendations that are highly applicable to many countries, the book examines a broad range of issues that are of current concern to the banking community worldwide. Even though the book focuses on Israeli banking regulation, its detailed attention to the development of a suitable supervisory model is of immeasurable international value for regulators, lawyers, bankers, academics, and business people who are in any way connected to the banking world; particularly following the 2008 crisis and its devastating effects. It is sure to be of service as many jurisdictions continue to search for optimal tools designed to prevent another such crisis.

  

UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE RISING SUN – JAPAN AND THE JEWS DURING THE HOLOCAUST ERA
By: Meron Medzini
(Academic Studies Press, Brighton, MA, 2016, ISBN 978-1-61811-522-5, 220 pp.)

Under the Shadow of the Rising Sun analyses the attitude of the government and people of Japan towards persecuted Jews in various historical contexts, including Japan in modern world history; Japan in Asia; the history of Jewish communities in Asia as well as their relations with Jewish communities elsewhere and the Zionist Movement; and Japan's attitude towards Zionism and the State of Israel. Israel-Japan relations were partly affected by Japan's attitude towards the 40,000 Jews who came under its control in the Japanese occupied countries in South and East Asia. Unlike their brethren in Europe, virtually all of them survived, partly due to the granting of visas to Japan by a Japanese diplomat Sugihara Chiune who is the only Japanese Righteous Gentile recognized as such by Yad Vashem.

 

'TO BE A HEALTHY NATION':  MASS IMMIGRATION AND PUBLIC HEALTH IN ISRAEL 1948-1960 (IN HEBREW)
By: Sachlav Stoler-Liss, Shifra Shvarts, Mordechai Shani
(Ben Gurion University Press 2016, SBN 978-965-536-190-2, 338 pp., Hebrew)

The book constitutes a breakthrough examination from a research perspective:  Its examination of the ways the State of Israel grappled with health absorption challenges during mass immigration following establishment of the state brings together statistics that reveal the scope of health operations. Its quantitative examination of morbidity and its treatment disclose how emerging challenges were often addressed in ways and methods developed ad hoc according to the needs of the immigrants. The research examines to what an extent health absorption was successful, while also addressing the shifting weight of various agencies that partook in this endeavor; the difficulties those engaged in the health had to grapple with throughout the first decade (1948-1958); the degree to which various political agents in the young Israeli state were involved and their influence on health policy; and discusses the ‘unavoidable’ clash between immigrants and the medical establishment over various aspects of public health.   The book is based on archives in Israel and abroad, as well as input from newspapers of the period, books, personal diaries, and interviews with individuals who were part of health endeavors at the time - nurses, immigrants and other players who contributed to the study with their reminiscences and experiences.  

 

TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES - WOMEN, ART, AND MIGRATION IN CONTEMPORARY ISRAEL
By; Tal Dekel 
(Wayne State University Press, 2016, ISBN: 9780814342503, 172 Pages) 

Translated originally from Hebrew, Transnational Identities: Women, Art, and Migration in Contemporary Israel offers a critical discussion of women immigrants in Israel through an analysis of works by artists who immigrated to the country beginning in the 1990s. Though numerous aspects of the issue of women migrants have received intense academic scrutiny, no scholarly books to date have addressed the gender facets of the experiences of contemporary women immigrants in Israel. The book follows an up-to-date theoretical model, adopting critical tools from a wide range of fields and weaving them together through an in-depth qualitative study that includes the use of open interviews, critical theories, and analysis of artworks, offering a unique and compelling perspective from which to discuss this complex subject of citizenship and cultural belonging in an ethno-national state. It therefore stands to make a significant contribution to research into women's lives, citizenship studies, global migration, Jewish and national identity and women's art in contemporary Israel. The book is divided into sections, each of which aims a spotlight on women artists belonging to a distinct groups of immigrants—the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and the Philippines—and shows how their artwork reflects various conflicts regarding citizenship and identity-related processes, dynamics of inclusion-exclusion, and power relations that characterize their experiences. Transnational Identities integrates theories from various disciplines, including art history, citizenship studies and critical political theory, gender studies, cultural studies, and migration studies in an interdisciplinary manner that those teaching and studying in these fields will find relevant to their continued research.

 

HANDBOOK OF ISRAEL: MAJOR DEBATES
By: Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Julius H. Schoeps, Yitzhak Sternberg, Olaf Glöckner (eds.)
(De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016, SBN 978-3-11-035164, 2 volumes, 1,330 pages)

The Handbook of Israel: Major Debates serves as an academic compendium for people interested in major discussions and controversies over Israel. It provides innovative, updated and informative knowledge on a range of acute debates. Among other topics, the handbook discusses post-Zionism, militarism, democracy and religion, (in)equality, colonialism, today’s criticism of Israel, Israel-Diaspora relations,and peace programs. Outstanding scholars face each other with unadulterated, divergent analyses. These historical, political and sociological texts from Israel and elsewhere make up a major reference book within academia and outside academia. About seventy contributions grouped in thirteen thematic sections present controversial and provocative approaches reflecting, from different angles, on the present-day challenges of the State of Israel. 

 

SEARCH FOR THE IMAGE OF FOREFATHER IN DREAMS: AMONG FORMER BEDOUIN NOW LIVING IN TOWN
By:  Gideon M. Kressel 
(IUniverse, 2016, ISBN: 978-1491788288, 176 Pages)

On evaluating dreams as the most important source of information concerning the unconscious, we are to bear in mind the contemporary cultural conscience that effect both the capacity of dreams and their interpretation. Dreams reflect memorized occurrences that have an impact on people's psyche. Although human minds are shaped alike and dreams may occur, confronting them with a self-same manner, the analysis of dreaming materials and the sense given to dreams are culturally varied. It is the cultural accent tested at a Middle Eastern society that promotes the appearance of elderly men while conceals speaking on the presence of women (mothers or others) in dreams. Assimilation of the fundamental insight causing psychic life is founded on two poles, maternal and paternal. It is the accent of cultural life that differentiates estimation of the image of each parent when appearing in dreams; whether the first or the second is left largely "unobserved", the other obliges a perceiving attention. Primordial images of The Great Mother find an outward expression in the ritual, mythology and art of early man. Revealing in track of The Golden Bough of J. G. Frazer, present-day accounts of dreams evince its relevance in tackling with modern man's dreams. We call attention to selective concerns with Great Fathers appearing in dreams, a pattern born in mind following the ancient ‘matriarchal era', that causes an avoidance of talk of dreams engaging the visit of mothers in dreamers' minds.

 

THE JARRING ROAD TO DEMOCRATIC INCLUSION: A COMPARATIVE ASSESSMENT OF STATE–SOCIETY ENGAGEMENTS IN ISRAEL AND TURKEY
BY: Aviad Rubin Yusuf Sarfati (eds.)  
(Lexington Books, 2016, ISBN 978-1498525077, 264 Pages) 

This edited volume brings together chapters that offer theoretically pertinent comparisons between various dimensions of Israeli and Turkish politics. Each chapter covers a different aspect of state–society interactions in both countries from a comparative perspective, including the public role of religion, political culture, women rights movements, religious education, religious movements, marriage regulation, labor market inclusion, and ethnic minorities. Israel and Turkey share significant similarities, such as state formation under nationalist ideologies, familiarity with democratic governance since the 1940s, strong affiliation with the West, recent resurgence of religious parties, ongoing conflict with ethno-national minority groups that challenge the dominant national project, contemporary popular protests against the incumbent regime, and recent serious erosion of democratic rights. At the same time they differ on major variables, such as size, majority religion, geopolitical location, level of economic development, policy towards ethnic minorities, and institutional arrangements to managing the state–religion relations. The presence of these differences in face of common backgrounds facilitates analytically grounded comparisons in a host of dimensions. Therefore, employing a case-oriented comparative method, this book provides historically interpretative and causally analytic accounts on the politics of both societies. The contributions reveal the dynamic and complex—rather than one-dimensional and linear—nature of political processes in both settings. This empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated volume should contribute to a better understanding of these two important states, and, no less important, stimulate new directions for comparative research, especially on Middle East regimes, social movements, and democratization.

 

IF ONLY HE HAD DIED IN THE WAR: THE IMPACT OF SUICIDE ON SURVIVNG FAMILY MEMBER (IN HEBREW)
By: Shirley Avrami
(Ofir Publication, 2016, ISBN: 2016, 978-1-5396-5366-0, 180 pages)

Many researchers, writers and poets have described, defined and tried to explain the suicide phenomenon. Yet, even in the 21st century, it is still a mystery, shrouded in secret, stigma and shame. These characteristics are transmitted, after the suicide, to the surviving family members. What happens to them? What is the impact of the suicide of their relative, on them?
Through interviews with parents, children, spouses and siblings of people who have committed suicide, this book explores the long lasting and heavy burden the survivors themselves are being left with. Revealing herself as part of the survivors' community, it manages to capture their shared feelings of guilt and anger, fears and anxieties. The bottom line of the book is surprisingly optimistic, finding the power in sharing, talking about the unspoken and showing ways of growth out of the sadness and grief: finding a meaning in the meaningless.

 
ORIENTAL NEIGHBORS: MIDDLE EASTERN JEWS AND ARABS IN MANDATORY PALESTINE
By: Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor
(Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, ISBN: 2016, 978-1-5126-0006-3, 288 pages)  

Focusing on Oriental Jews and their relations with their Arab neighbors in Mandatory Palestine, this book analyzes the meaning of the hybrid Arab-Jewish identity that existed among Oriental Jews, and discusses their unique role as political, social, and cultural mediators between Jews and Arabs. Integrating Mandatory Palestine and its inhabitants into the contemporary Semitic-Levantine surroundings, Oriental Neighbors illuminates broad areas of cooperation and coexistence, which coincided with conflict and friction, between Oriental and Sephardi Jews and their Arab neighbors. The book brings the Oriental Jewish community to the fore, examines its role in the Zionist nation-building process, and studies its diverse and complex links with the Arab community in Palestine.

 

CIVIC AESTHETICS: MILITARISM, ISRAELI ART AND VISUAL CULTURE
By: Noa Roei
(Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, ISBN 978-1474253154, 240 Pages)

Exploring the politics of the image in the context of Israeli militarized visual culture, Civic Aesthetics examines both the omnipresence of militarism in Israeli culture and society and the way in which this omnipresence is articulated, enhanced, and contested within local contemporary visual art. Looking at a range of contemporary artworks through the lens of “civilian militarism”, Roei employs the theory of various fields, including memory studies, gender studies, landscape theory, and aesthetics, to explore the potential of visual art to communicate military excesses to its viewers.
This study builds on the specific sociological concerns of the chosen cases to discuss the complexities of visuality, the visible and non-visible, arguing for art's capacity to expose the scopic regimes that construct their visibility. Images and artworks are often read either out of context, on purely aesthetic or art-historical ground, or as cultural artefacts whose aesthetics play a minor role in their significance. This book breaks with both traditions as it approaches all art, both high and popular art, as part of the surrounding visual culture in which it is created and presented. This approach allows a new theory of the image to come forth, where the relation between the political and the aesthetic is one of exchange, rather than exclusion.

 
ISRAEL'S GOVERNABILITY CRISIS:  QUANDARIES, UNSTRUCTURED INSTITUTIONS, AND ADAPTATION
By: Maoz Rosenthal
(Lexington Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1-4985-1341-8, 162 pages) 

This book examines the governability crisis faced by Israeli governmental institutions. For a long period of time, observers of Israel’s government have reported the same phenomena: instability in most political positions not allowing for proper policy design, enhanced control of the bureaucracy over the policy making process, and complete uncertainty regarding the implementation of policies by the bureaucracy. However, while one expects that with such a toxic combination of all the wrong policy making components Israel would collapse, Israel has been able to achieve quite impressive landmarks in its overall performance. During the first decade of the 21st century, Israel became an OECD member and enjoyed high growth when the world was facing stagnation and economic collapse. Israel’s government, which regularly faces quandaries in a variety of policy fields, is able to initiate large scale policies when needed. Yet, this same government refrains from initiating large-scale reforms in institutional structures. Hence, for analysts of political institutions, the Israeli state of affairs is one of choice: while initiating changes to reform and overhaul the Israeli institutional system is possible it is also perilous. To cope with that duality Israeli political leadership on all sides has developed a variety of mechanisms that allow it to provide the policy output needed so as to maintain the status-quo. This book examines these mechanisms as they exist in different facets of government work and explains their output and persistence. Examples include coalitional making and breaking, the ways in which ruling coalitions maneuver in parliament, and policy design and implementation. The book also explores the problem that exists in Israel’s governability: the lack of a strategic high-order far sighted decision making. Finally, it offers a method of electoral reform that can address both of these systemic maladies.

 

ZIONISM WITHOUT ZION: THE JEWISH TERRITORIAL ORGANIZATION AND ITS CONFLICT WITH THE ZIONIST ORGANIZATION
By: Gur Alroey
(Wayne State University Press,  2016, ISBN-13: 978-0814342060 , 372 pages) 

While the ideologies of Territorialism and Zionism originated at the same time, the Territorialists foresaw a dire fate for Eastern European Jews, arguing that they could not wait for the Zionist Organization to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. This pessimistic worldview led Territorialists to favor a solution for the Jewish state "here and now"-and not only in the Land of Israel. In Zionism without Zion: The Jewish Territorial Organization and Its Conflict with the Zionist Organization, author Gur Alroey examines this group's unique perspective, its struggle with the Zionist movement, its Zionist rivals' response, and its diplomatic efforts to obtain a territory for the Jewish people in the first decades of the twentieth century. 
Alroey begins by examining the British government's Uganda Plan and the ensuing crisis it caused in the Zionist movement and Jewish society. He details the founding of the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO) in 1903 and explains the varied reactions that the Territorialist ideology received from Zionists and settlers in Palestine. Alroey also details the diplomatic efforts of Territorialists during their desperate search for a suitable territory, which ultimately never bore fruit. Finally, he attempts to understand the reasons for the ITO's dissolution after the Balfour Declaration, explores the revival of Territorialism with the New Territorialists in the 1930s and 1940s, and describes the similarities and differences between the movement then and its earlier version. Zionism without Zion sheds new light on the solutions Territorialism proposed to alleviate the hardship of Eastern European Jews at the start of the twentieth century and offers fresh insights into the challenges faced by Zionism in the same era. The thorough discussion of this under-studied ideology will be of considerable interested to scholars of Eastern European history, Jewish history, and Israel studies.

 

WRITING PALESTINE, 1933-1950: DOROTHY KAHN BAR-ADON
By: Esther Carmel-Hakim & Nancy Rosenfeld (eds.) 
(Academic Studies Press, August 2016,  ISBN: 9781618114952, ) 290 pp. Price: $79.00 USD) 

From her immigration to Mandatory Palestine in 1933 until her death in 1950 American-born Dorothy Kahn Bar-Adon worked as a reporter for The Palestine Post (later The Jerusalem Post), while freelancing for periodicals in Palestine and abroad. Bar-Adon covered life in towns, kibbutzim and Arab communities of Mandatory Palestine during this period of World War, armed conflict between Arabs and Jews, immigration to Israel of Holocaust survivors. Close to 60 years after her death, this edited collection of Bar-Adon’s writing offers a vivid view both of daily life in the Jewish and Arab communities of pre-State Israel, and of the burning issues of the day.

 
DIRECTED BY GOD, JEWISHNESS IN CONTEMPORARY ISRAELI FILM AND TELEVISION
By: Yaron Peleg
(University of Texas Press, 2016, ISBN: 1477309519, 200 pages)

As part of its effort to forge a new secular Jewish nation, the nascent Israeli state tried to limit Jewish religiosity. However, with the steady growth of the ultraorthodox community and the expansion of the settler community, Israeli society is becoming increasingly religious. Although the arrival of religious discourse in Israeli politics has long been noticed, its cultural development has rarely been addressed. Directed by God explores how the country’s popular media, principally film and television, reflect this transformation. In doing so, it examines the changing nature of Zionism and the place of Judaism within it.

 

PATH OF THE PAST- CHAPTERS IN THE HISTORY OF THE JEWISH NATIONAL FUND AND JEWISH SETTLEMENT OF THE LOWER GALILEE (IN HEBREW)
By: Ofira Gruweis-Kovalsky (ed)
(Bar Ilan University Press 2016, ISBN 110-20232, 207 pages)

The aim of this collection of articles is to give a voice to new research on both subjects: firstly the JNF and its influence on the geographical and the cultural dimensions; secondly, the historical geography of the Lower Galilee from the end of the 19th century to the mid-20th century. This collection is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the JNF and its influence on the consolidation of Jewish nationalism in the land of Israel and in the Jewish Diaspora and also on settlement in the land of Israel in practice, with emphasis on the Lower Galilee; the second part deals with a different practical aspect of the Jewish national consolidation in the land of Israel – settlement in the Lower Galilee. Concern with land and Zionist settlement and examination of their cultural aspect is a central theme of this book.

 
 
EUROPEAN MILITARY CULTURE AND SECURITY GOVERNANCE: SOLDIERS, SCHOLARS AND NATIONAL DEFENCE UNIVERSITIES
By: Tamir Libel
(Routledge, 2016, ISBN-13: 978-0415732659, 228 pages)

Based on an analysis of military education institutions in the UK, Germany, Finland, Romania and the Baltic States, this book demonstrates that the convergence of European military cultures since the end of the Cold War is linked to changes in military education. The process of convergence originates, at least in part, from the full or partial adoption of a new concept by post-commissioning professional military education institutions: the National Defence University. Officers are now educated alongside civilians and public servants, wherein they enjoy a socialization experience that is markedly different from that of previous generations of European officers, and is increasingly similar across national borders. In addition, this book argues that with the control over the curricula and graduation criteria increasingly set by civilian higher education authorities, the European armed forces, while continuing to exist, and hold significant (although declining) capabilities, stand to lose their status as a profession in the traditional sense.

 
THE NIHILIST ORDER: THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM 

By: David Ohana
(Sussex Academic Press, 2016, ISBN-13: 978-1845197957, 660 pages)

Until now, nihilism and totalitarianism were considered opposites: one an orderless state of affairs, the other a strict regimented order. On closer scrutiny, however, a surprising affinity can be found between these two concepts that dominated the history of the first half of the twentieth century. Starting with Nietzsche’s philosophy, this book traces the development of an intellectual school characterized by the paradoxical dual purpose of a wish to destroy, coupled with a strong desire to create imposing structures. This explosive combination of nihilist leanings together with a craving for totalitarianism was an ideal of philosophers, cultural critics, political theorists, engineers, architects and aesthetes long before it materialized in flesh and blood, not only in technology, but also in fascism, Nazism, bolshevism and radical European political movements.

 

ZARATHUSTRA IN JERUSALEM: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND JEWISH MODERNITY (IN HEBREW)
By: David Ohana
(Mosad Bialik, 2016, ISBN 978-965-536-197-1, 424 pages)

Zarathustra in Jerusalem: Friedrich Nietzsche and Jewish Modernity is the third part of the trilogy The ways of Modernity. The Trilogy appeared in its full in 2016, and the first two parts of it were republished: The Nihilist Order: The Birth of Political Culture in Europe 1870-1930 and The Promethean Passion: The Intellectual Origins of the 20's Century from Rousseau to Foucault.  The Nietzschean revolution which engulfed the intellectual, cultural and political life of Europe began in the year in which its initiator died, the year in which the twentieth century was born. That century was in many ways an echo-chamber of some of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical ideas which were elaborated, internalised, distorted and transfigured in a thousand ways. The reverberations of Nietzsche's “philosophical hammer” did not pass over the culture of the Hebrew revival and the new Jewish thinking. The fascinating and complex interrelationship between Nietzsche and Jewish modernity can be examined from three points of view: that of his attitude to historical Judaism as a religion and as a cultural phenomenon; that of the place of Judaism in his thought as a whole and with regard to his genealogy of Western culture; and that of the attraction to the philosopher, both during his lifetime and after his death, of Jewish thinkers and cultural critics from Georg Brandes to Walter Kauffman. They discovered him, translated his works and disseminated his reputation as one of the thinkers of modernity and at the same time a sharp critic of its objectives. 3 This study will deal with the third aspect - the relationship to Nietzsche of modern Jewish thought – and will focus on Jewish modernity through six Jewish thinkers influenced by Nietzsche: Hillel Zeitlin, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Baruch Kurzweil and Israel Eldad.

 

MARGARET THATCHER AND THE MIDDLE EAST
By: Azriel Bermant 
(Cambridge University Press, 2016, ISBN: 978-1107151949, 274 pages)

Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East examines Thatcher’s policy on the Middle East, with a spotlight on her approach towards the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It questions claims that she sought to counter the Foreign Office Middle East policy, and maintains that the prime minister was actually in close agreement with the Whitehall bureaucracy on the Arab–Israeli conflict. In particular, the volume argues that Thatcher’s concerns over Soviet ambitions in the Middle East encouraged her to oppose the policies of Israel’s Likud governments, and to work actively for an urgent resolution of the conflict. Furthermore, while Thatcher was strongly pro-American, this was not translated into automatic support for Israel. Indeed, the Thatcher government was very much at odds with the Reagan administration over the Middle East, as a result of Washington’s neglect of the forces of moderation in the region.

 

POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT IN ISRAEL: THE MATURATION OF A MODERN STATE 
By:  Gregory S. Mahler
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, Third Edition, 978-1-4422-6535-6, 402 Pages)

This balanced and comprehensive text explores Israeli government and politics from both institutional and behavioral perspectives. After briefly discussing Israel’s history and the early development of the state, Gregory Mahler then examines the social, religious, economic, cultural, and military contexts within which Israeli politics takes place, taking special note of Israel’s geopolitical situation of sharing borders with, and being proximate to, several hostile Arab nations. The book explains the operation of political institutions and behavior in Israeli domestic politics, including the constitutional system and ideology, parliamentary government, the prime minister and the Knesset, political parties and interest groups, the electoral process and voting behavior, and the machinery of government. Mahler also considers Israel's foreign policy setting and apparatus, the existence of the Palestinians and the Palestinian conflict, the particularly sensitive questions of Jerusalem and the Israeli settlement movement, and the Middle East peace process overall. This clear and concise text provides an invaluable starting point for all readers needing a cogent introduction to Israel today.

  

GIRLS OF LIBERTY: THE STRUGGLE FOR SUFFRAGE IN MANDATORY PALESTINE
By: Margalit Shilo
(Brandeis University Press, 2016, ISBN 9781611689259, 232 pages)

Following the Balfour Declaration and the British conquest of Palestine (1917–1918), the small Jewish community that lived there wanted to establish an elected assembly as its representative body. The issue that hindered this aim was whether women would be part of it. A group of feminist Zionist women from all over the country created a political party that participated in the elections, even before women’s suffrage was enacted. This unique phenomenon in Mandatory Palestine resulted in the declaration of women’s equal rights in all aspects of life by the newly founded Assembly of Representatives.

Margalit Shilo examines the story of these activists to elaborate on a wide range of issues, including the Zionist roots of feminism and nationalism; the ultra-Orthodox Jewish sector’s negation of women’s equality; how traditional Jewish concepts of women fashioned rabbinical attitudes on the question of women’s suffrage; and how the fight for women’s suffrage spread throughout the country. Using current gender theories, Shilo compares the Zionist suffrage struggle to contemporaneous struggles across the globe, and connects this nearly forgotten episode, absent from Israeli historiography, with the present situation of Israeli women.

This rich analysis of women’s right to vote within this specific setting will appeal to scholars and students of Israel studies, and to feminist and social historians interested in how contexts change the ways in which activism is perceived and occurs.

 

A HOME FOR ALL JEWS: CITIZENSHIP, RIGHTS, AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE NEW ISRAELI STATE
By: Orit Rozin
(Brandeis University Press, University Press of New England 2016 ISBN: 978-1611689501, 224 pages)  

The book focuses on the construction and negotiation of citizenship in Israel during the state’s first decade. Positioning itself both within and against much of the critical literature on the period, this work reveals the dire historical circumstances and the ideological and bureaucratic pressures, that limited the freedoms of Israeli citizens. At the same time it shows the capacity of the bureaucracy for flexibility and of the populace for protest against measures it found unjust and humiliating.


Rozin sets her work within a solid analytical framework, drawing on a variety of historical sources portraying the voices, thoughts, and feelings of Israelis, as well as theoretical literature on the nature of modern citizenship and the relation between citizenship and nationality. She takes on both negative and positive freedoms (freedom from and freedom to) in her analysis of three discrete yet overlapping issues: the right to childhood (and freedom from coerced marriage at a tender age); the right to travel abroad (freedom of movement being a pillar of a liberal society); and the right to speak out—not only to protest without fear of reprisal, but to speak in the expectation of being heeded and recognized.

 

JEWS AND ARABS ENCOUNTERING THEIR IDENTITIES: TRANSFORMATIONS IN DIALOGUE
By: Maya Kahanoff
(Lexington Books, Co published by Van Leer Institute Press 2016, ISBN: 9781498504973, 280 pages) 

Controlled and intentional intergroup encounters have been a feature of Arab-Jewish relations in Israel for more than four decades. They have a long and well-documented track record and an almost equally-long literature critical of their goals, intentions, and success. The book describes the multidimensional process of intergroup dialogue between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, revealing the profound inner turmoil it creates beneath the surface and its powerful potential to transform mutually negating relations. Kahanoff takes us beyond the usual level of the intergroup encounter to examine the dynamics that take place between and within each group and then, most boldly, within the consciousness of individual participants. She argues for the unsettling and dangerous nature of dialogue as crafting a space where individuals encounter not only the image or narrative of the other but also the image or narrative of the self. The author argues that dialogue contains the potential to destabilize a person's sense of identity and that the seeming failure of overt dialogue may signal the beginning of a process of inner dialogue and transformation.  By uncovering the reality of the wide spectrum of feelings associated with multiple identities in each Arab and Jewish dialoguer, Kahanoff manages to break away from the simplistic and classic dichotomies of victim/oppressor; weak/strong; bad/good; moral/immoral. This book offers powerful insights in the professional and personal development of a peacemaker who dares to question the emotions associated with the power dynamics of Arab-Jewish encounters. In addition, it offers useful analytical frameworks to make sense of the complexity of meeting and handling the ‘other’ inside each of us. The insights in this book will contribute to understanding the psychological dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and be useful in breaking impasses in other conflict situations.

 

BEN-GURION: HIS LATER YEARS IN THE POLITICAL WILDERNESS
By: Avi Shilon
(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016, 284 Pages, ISBN-13: 9781442249462)

This is the first in-depth account of the later years of David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), Israel’s first Prime Minister and founding father. Ben-Gurion stepped down from office in 1963 and retired from political life in 1970, deeply disappointed about the path on which the state had embarked and the process that brought about the end of his political career. Robbed of the public aura that had wrapped him for decades, his revolutionary passion, which was not weakened in his 80s, pushed him to continue seeking social and moral change in Israel, a political solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict, and to conduct a personal and national soul-searching about the development of the State he himself had declared. 
Based on his personal archives and new interviews with his intimate friends and family, the book reveals how the founding father explored the Israeli establishment he created and from which he later disengaged. It provides a thorough examination of the decisive moments in the annals of Zionism as revealed through the lens of Ben-Gurion’s worldview, which are still relevant to present-day Israel.

 

AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF TURKISH NATIONALISM: BETWEEN TURKISH ETHNICITY AND ISLAMIC IDENTITY

By: Umut Uzer
(University of Utah Press, Utah Series in Middle East Studies, 2016, 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1607814658)

Turkish nationalism erupted onto the world stage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as first Greeks, then Armenians and other minority groups within the Ottoman Empire began to assert national identity and seek independence. Umut Uzer examines the ideological evolution and transformation of Turkish nationalism from its early precursors to its contemporary protagonists. Through a textual analysis of nationalist writings, this volume considers how political developments influenced Turkish nationalism. It tackles the question of how an ideology that began as a revolutionary, progressive, forward-looking ideal eventually transformed into one that is conservative, patriarchal, and nostalgic to the Ottoman and Islamic past. Between Islamic and Turkish Identity is the first book in any language to comprehensively analyze Turkish nationalism with such scope and engagement with primary sources, dissecting the phenomenon in all its manifestations.

 
TROUBLE IN THE TRIBE: THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONFLICT OVER ISRAEL 

By: Dov Waxman
(Princeton University Press, 2016, ISBN: 9780691168999, 328 pages) 

Trouble in the Tribe explores the increasingly contentious place of Israel in the American Jewish community. In a fundamental shift, growing numbers of American Jews have become less willing to unquestioningly support Israel and more willing to publicly criticize its government. More than ever before, American Jews are arguing about Israeli policies, and many, especially younger ones, are becoming uncomfortable with Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Dov Waxman argues that Israel is fast becoming a source of disunity for American Jewry, and that a new era of American Jewish conflict over Israel is replacing the old era of solidarity. Drawing on a wealth of in-depth interviews with American Jewish leaders and activists, Waxman shows why Israel has become such a divisive issue among American Jews. He delves into the American Jewish debate about Israel, examining the impact that the conflict over Israel is having on Jewish communities, national Jewish organizations, and on the pro-Israel lobby. Waxman sets this conflict in the context of broader cultural, political, institutional, and demographic changes happening in the American Jewish community. He offers a nuanced and balanced account of how this conflict over Israel has developed and what it means for the future of American Jewish politics. Israel used to bring American Jews together. Now it is driving them apart. Trouble in the Tribe explains why.

 

CHANA MAISEL: AGRICULTURAL TRAINING FOR WOMEN
By: Esther Carmel Hakim
(Brandeis University Institutional Repository, 2016, HBI Translation Series  http://bir.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/31730)

Chana Maisel: Agricultural Training for Women, tells of an unknown chapter in the history of the Zionist settlements in the Land of Israel: the story of the female pioneer- the professional agriculturalist, who bore the burden mixed farming, in collective settlements as well as family farms. Chana Maisel played a central role in establishing frameworks for women’s agricultural training in pre-State Israel. With her great vision, perseverance, and professional knowledge Maisel created a new horizon for women to contribute to the Zionist agricultural development of the Land of Israel. Maisel's projects had a remarkable influence on the history of the Yishuv, from the Women’s Training Farm at Kinneret (1911-1917) to the establishment of the Young Women’s Agricultural School at Nahalal (1923) Maisel’s biography includes her youth in Russia, her studies in Switzerland and France, as well as to her life in Segera (one of the earliest male training farms); participation in international Zionist Congresses; the establishment of a women-workers’ trade union; establishment of women's farms; establishment of home-economics courses and more.

 

WE WERE FIRST: A HISTORY OF HIBAT ZION, 1881-1918 (IN HEBREW)
By: Yossi Goldstein 
(Bialik Institute, Jerusalem, 2016, ISBN 978-965-536-193-3, 360 pages)

This book, which traces the development of the first Jewish national movement from its establishment in the early 1880s until its dissolution by the Bolsheviks, is based on research conducted by its author, Prof. Yossi Goldstein, over the course of three decades. In it, Prof. Goldstein explores the secret of the movement’s emergence and its contribution to the development of Zionism. A particularly innovative aspect of the book stems from the fact that the previous research paid little attention to the organization’s existence as a concrete historical phenomenon after 1897. A number of other factors also highlight the need for a new historical account of Hibat Zion. One is the large number of studies on European and Jewish nationalism that have been published since the 1970s, which have yielded a unique historical perspective on the establishment of the Jewish national movement that was not addressed by previous historical accounts. Another is the more recent publication of multiple studies that have led to the discovery of important documents that offer new insight into a number of dramatic events in the history of Hibat Zion. And still another is the discovery of important documents in Israeli archives, particularly the Jewish National and University Library and the Central Zionist Archive, which are revealed in this book for the first time.

 

TRAVELS IN TRANSLATION: SEA TALES AT THE SOURCE OF JEWISH FICTION
By: Ken Frieden
(Syracuse University Press, 2016, 978-0-8156-3457-7, 360 pages) 

For centuries before its "rebirth" as a spoken language, Hebrew writing was like a magical ship in a bottle that gradually changed design but never voyaged out into the world. Isolated, the ancient Hebrew ship was torpid because the language of the Bible was inadequate to represent modern life in Europe. Early modern speakers of Yiddish and German gave Hebrew the breath of life when they translated dialogues, descriptions, and thought processes from their vernaculars into Hebrew. By narrating tales of pilgrimage and adventure, Jews pulled the ship out of the bottle and sent modern Hebrew into the world. 


In Travels in Translation, Frieden analyzes this emergence of modern Hebrew literature after 1780, a time when Jews were moving beyond their conventional Torah- and Zion-centered worldview. Enlightened authors diverged from pilgrimage narrative traditions and appropriated travel narratives to America, the Pacific, and the Arctic. The effort to translate sea travel stories from European languages—with their nautical terms, wide horizons, and exotic occurrences—made particular demands on Hebrew writers. They had to overcome their tendency to introduce biblical phrases at every turn in order to develop a new, vivid, descriptive language.  As Frieden explains through deft linguistic analysis, by 1818, a radically new travel literature in Hebrew had arisen. Authors such as Moses Mendelsohn-Frankfurt and Mendel Lefin published books that charted a new literary path through the world and in European history. Taking a fresh look at the origins of modern Jewish literature, Frieden launches a new approach to literary studies, one that lies at the intersection of translation studies and travel writing.

 

JEWISH RADICAL ULTRA-ORTHODOXY CONFRONTS MODERNITY, ZIONISM AND WOMEN'S EQUALITY
By: Motti Inbari
(Cambridge University Press, 2016, ISBN: 9781107088108, 279 Pages, £64.99)

In Jewish Radical Ultra-Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, Zionism and Women's Equality Professor Motti Inbari undertakes a study of the culture and leadership of Jewish radical ultra-Orthodoxy in Hungary, Jerusalem and New York. He reviews the history, ideology and gender relations of prominent ultra-Orthodox leaders Amram Blau (1894–1974), founder of the anti-Zionist Jerusalemite Neturei Karta, and Yoel Teitelbaum (1887–1979), head of the Satmar Hasidic movement in New York. Focussing on the rabbis’ biographies the author analyzes their enclave building methods, their attitude to women and modesty, and their eschatological perspectives. The research is based on newly discovered archival materials, covering many unique and remarkable findings. The author concludes with a discussion of contemporary trends in Jewish religious radicalization. Inbari highlights the resilience of the current generations’ sense of community cohesion and their capacity to adapt and overcome challenges such as rehabilitation into potentially hostile secular societies.

 

POLITICS IN ISRAEL: GOVERNING A COMPLEX SOCIETY
By: Brent E. Sasley and Harold M. Waller
(Oxford University Press, 2016, ISBN: 9780199335060, 368 Pages, $39.95)

Politics in Israel is the first textbook on Israel to utilize a historical-sociological approach, telling the story of Israeli politics rather than simply presenting a series of dry facts and figures. The book emphasizes six specific dimensions of the conduct of Israeli politics: the weight of historical processes, the struggle between different groups over how to define the country's identity, changing understandings of Zionism, a changing political culture, the influence of the external threat environment, and the inclusive nature of the democratic process. These themes offer students a framework to use for understanding contemporary political events within the country. Politics in Israel also includes several chapters on topics not previously addressed in competing texts, including historical conditions that led to the emergence of Zionism in Israel, the politics of the Arab minority, and interest groups and political protest.

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