You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Reel Gender is a groundbreaking collection that addresses the collective realities and the filmic representations of Palestinian and Israeli societies. The eight essays, by leading scholars, demonstrate how Palestinian and Israeli film production-despite obvious overlaps and similarities and while keeping in mind the inherent asymmetry of power dynamics-are at the forefront of engaging gender and sexuality. The scholars of this volume construct and deconstruct still and moving images, characters, and stories that create an entanglement of Palestinian and Israeli cinema. Together they portray the region's diverse but unexpectedly intermingled ethnic, religious, and national communities, framed or countered by various societal norms, laws, and expectations, while also defined by colonial realities. The essays draw methodologically from the fields of media and cultural studies, critical and postcolonial theory, feminism, post-feminism, and queer theory.
Jewish Women: Between Conformity and Agency examines the concepts of gender and sexuality through the primary lens of visual and material culture from antiquity through to the present day. The backbone of this transhistorical and transcontextual study is the question of Jewish women’s agency in four different geographical, chronological, and methodological contexts, beginning with women’s dress codes in Roman-Byzantine Syro-Palestine, continuing with rituals of purity in medieval Ashkenaz, worship in papal Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, and ending with marriage and divorce in Israeli film. Each of these explorations is interested in creating a dialogue between the patriarchal legacy o...
Calling into question prevailing notions about Orientalism, Yaron Peleg shows how the paradoxical mixture of exoticism and familiarity with which Jews related to Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century shaped the legacy of Zionism. In Peleg's view, the tension between romancing the East and colonizing it inspired a revolutionary reform that radically changed Jewish thought during the Hebrew Revival that took place between 1900 and 1930. Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination introduces a fresh voice to the contentious debate over the concept of Orientalism. Zionism has often been labeled a Western colonial movement that sought to displace and silence Palestinian Arabs. Based on h...
The multilingualism and polyphony of Jewish literary writing across the globe demands a collaborative, comparative, and interdisciplinary investigation into questions regarding methods of researching and teaching literatures. Disseminating Jewish Literatures compiles case studies that represent a broad range of epistemological and textual approaches to the curricula and research programs of literature departments in Europe, Israel, and the United States. In doing so, it promotes the integration of Jewish literatures into national philologies and the implementation of comparative, transnational approaches to the reading, teaching, and researching of literatures. Instead of a dichotomizing app...
Contemporary Israeli cinema's engagement with Judaism as cultural identity and mystical tradition. Over the past several decades, the prevailing attitude toward Judaism in Israeli society has undergone a meaningful shift; where the national ethos had once deemed Judaic traditions a vestige of an arcane past incompatible with the culture of a modern state, there is now greater acceptance of these traditions by a sizeable part of Israeli society. Author Dan Chyutin reveals this trend through a parallel shift toward acceptance and celebration of Judaic identity and lifestyle in modern Israeli cinema. Hidden Light explores the Judaic turn in contemporary Israeli filmmaking for what it can tell u...
Were David and Jonathan 'gay' lovers? This very modern question lies behind the recent explosion of studies of the David and Jonathan narrative. Interpreters differ in their assessment of whether 1 and 2 Samuel offer a positive portrayal of a homosexual relationship. Beneath the conflict of interpretations lies an ambiguous biblical text which has drawn generations of readers - from the redactors of the Hebrew text and the early translators to modern biblical scholars - to the task of resolving its possible meanings. What has not yet been fully explored is the place of David and Jonathan in the evolution of modern, Western understandings of same-sex relationships, in particular how the story of their relationship was read alongside classical narratives, such as those of Achilles and Patroclus, or Orestes and Pylades. The Love of David and Jonathan explores this context in detail to argue that the story of David and Jonathan was part of the process by which the modern idea of homosexuality itself emerged.
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 well-known 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 ...
Imaginationen vom "Anderen": deutsche Orientbilder. Vorstellungen von Deutschland, Europa und dem Orient entstehen immer in Relation zueinander. Die Beiträger des vorliegenden Bandes untersuchen die Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Christen, Juden und Muslimen in der deutschen Kultur, wie sie sich und den anderen vorstellten – mitunter, ohne sich je begegnet zu sein. Auf eine zeitliche Eingrenzung wurde bewusst verzichtet, denn vormoderne Orientbilder überlagern sich mit den modernen. Als besonders fruchtbar für die Untersuchung der gesellschaftlichen Imaginationen des Orient erweisen sich die Themenbereiche Nationalismus, Wissenschaften und Identität.
This innovative study combines readings of contemporary literature, art, and performance to explore the diverse and complex directions of contemporary Jewish culture in Israel and the diaspora.
Reading a wide range of novels from post-war Germany to Israeli, Palestinian and postcolonial writers, The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature is a comprehensive exploration of changing cultural perceptions of Jewishness in contemporary writing. Examining how representations of Jewishness in contemporary fiction have wrestled with such topics as the Holocaust, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Jewish diaspora experiences, Isabelle Hesse demonstrates the 'colonial' turn taken by these representations since the founding of the Jewish state. Following the dynamics of this turn, the book demonstrates new ways of questioning received ideas about victimhood and power in contemporary discussions of postcolonialism and world literature.