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Gendering Politics
Women in Israel
Hanna Herzog
University of Michigan Press, 1999
What are the cultural and structural mechanisms that exclude women from politics in general and from local politics in particular? What meaning is ascribed to women's political activity?
Gendering Politics explores the place of women in democratic politics by means of a detailed study of women in Israeli politics who were elected to municipal councils from 1950 to 1989. Drawing from a variety of sources, including questionnaires, interviews, newspaper coverage, and existing statistical data, as well as examinations of studies of the role of women in politics in other democracies, Herzog analyzes the extent of success and failure of women in Israeli elections. She then explores reasons why female participation in Israeli politics has been relatively slight, despite historical precedents and social circumstances that would indicate otherwise.
The author examines the gendered bias of the power structure as it is shaped by basic cultural organizing principles. She exposes hidden assumptions--and notes the overt assumptions--which by definition exclude women from politics. The author also looks at the structure of opportunities within the prevailing political system, uncovering the relevant blocking and facilitating elements.
Gendering Politics will be of interest to students and scholars of women's studies, Israeli studies, political sociology, and political science.
Hanna Herzog is Associate Professor of Sociology, Tel Aviv University.
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Generation Palestine
Voices from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement
Edited by Rich Wiles
Pluto Press, 2013

The unique model of apartheid, colonisation and military occupation that Israel imposes on the Palestinians, along with myriad violations of international law, have made Palestine the moral cause of a generation. Yet many people continue to ask, ‘what can we do?’

Generation Palestine helps to answer this question by bringing together Palestinian and international activists in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The movement aims to pressure Israel until it complies with International Law, mirroring the model that was successfully utilised against South African apartheid.

With essays written by a wide selection of contributors, Generation Palestine follows the BDS movement’s model of inclusivity and collaboration. Contributors include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Ken Loach, Iain Banks, Ronnie Kasrils, Professor Richard Falk, Ilan Pappe, Omar Barghouti, Ramzy Baroud and Archbishop Attallah Hannah, alongside other internationally acclaimed artists, writers, academics and grassroots activists.

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Gershom Scholem
An Intellectual Biography
Amir Engel
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) was ostensibly a scholar of Jewish mysticism, yet he occupies a powerful role in today’s intellectual imagination, having influential contact with an extraordinary cast of thinkers, including Hans Jonas, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno. In this first biography of Scholem, Amir Engel shows how Scholem grew from a scholar of an esoteric discipline to a thinker wrestling with problems that reach to the very foundations of the modern human experience.
           
As Engel shows, in his search for the truth of Jewish mysticism Scholem molded the vast literature of Jewish mystical lore into a rich assortment of stories that unveiled new truths about the modern condition. Positioning Scholem’s work and life within early twentieth-century Germany, Palestine, and later the state of Israel, Engel intertwines Scholem’s biography with his historiographical work, which stretches back to the Spanish expulsion of Jews in 1492, through the lives of Rabbi Isaac Luria and Sabbatai Zevi, and up to Hasidism and the dawn of the Zionist movement. Through parallel narratives, Engel touches on a wide array of important topics including immigration, exile, Zionism, World War One, and the creation of the state of Israel, ultimately telling the story of the realizations—and failures—of a dream for a modern Jewish existence.
 
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Gershom Scholem
From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back
Noam Zadoff
Brandeis University Press, 2017
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.
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Gershom Scholem
Kabbalah and Counter-History, Second Edition
David Biale
Harvard University Press, 1982

Through a lifetime of passionate scholarship, Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) uncovered the “domains of tradition hidden under the debris of centuries” and made the history of Jewish mysticism and messianism comprehensible and relevant to current Jewish thought.

In this paperback edition of his definitive book on Scholem’s work, David Biale has shortened and rearranged his study for the benefit of the general reader and the student. A new introduction and new passages in the main text highlight the pluralistic character of Jewish theology as seen by Scholem, the place of the Kabbalah in debates over Zionism versus assimilation, and the interpretation of Kafka as a Jewish writer.

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The Global Political Economy of Israel
Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler
Pluto Press, 2002

Over the past century, Israel has been transformed from an agricultural colony, to a welfare-warfare state, to a globally integrated "market economy" characterised by great income disparities. What lies behind this transformation? In order to understand capitalist development, argue Bichler and Nitzan, we need to break the artificial separation between "economics" and "politics", and think of accumulation itself as "capitalisation of power". Applying this concept to Israel, they reveal the big picture that never makes it to the news. Diverse processes – such as regional conflicts and energy crises, ruling class formation and dominant ideology, militarism and dependency, inflation and recession, the politics of high-technology and the transnationalisation of ownership – are all woven into a single story. The result is a fascinating account of one of the world’s most volatile regions.

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