Results by title

9 books match the query 'Israelis'

Sort by

Glorious, Accursed Europe

Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit

Brandeis University Press, 2010

This volume offers a fascinating look at the complex relationship between Jews and Europe during the past two hundred years, and how the European Jewish and non-Jewish intelligentsia interpreted the modern Jewish experience, primarily in Germany, Russia, and Central and Eastern Europe. Beginning with premodern European attitudes toward Jews, Reinharz and Shavit move quickly to “the glorious nineteenth century,” a period in which Jewish dreams of true assimilation came up against modern antisemitism. Later chapters explore the fin-de-siècle “crisis of modernity”; the myth of the modern European Jew; expectations and fears in the interwar period; differences between European nations in their attitude toward Jews; the views of Zionists and early settlers of Palestine and Israel toward the Europe left behind; and views of contemporary Israeli intellectuals toward Europe, including its new Muslim population—the latest incarnation of the Jewish Question in Europe.

[more]

In the Land of the Patriarchs

Design and Contestation in West Bank Settlements

Noam Shoked

University of Texas Press, 2023

2024 On The Brinck Book Award and Lecture Series, University of New Mexico
2024 PROSE Award, Architecture–Urban Planning, Association of American Publishers

An on-the-ground account of the design and evolution of West Bank settlements, showing how one of the world’s most contested landscapes was produced by unexpected conflicts and collaborations among widely divergent actors.

Since capturing the West Bank in 1967, Israel has overseen the construction of scores of settlements across the territory’s rocky hilltops. The settlements are part of a fierce political conflict. But they are not just hotly contested political ventures. They are also something more everyday: residential architectural projects.

In the Land of the Patriarchs is an on-the-ground account of the design and evolution of West Bank settlements. Noam Shoked shows how settlements have been shaped not only by the decisions of military generals, high-profile politicians, and prominent architects but also by a wide range of actors, including real estate developers, environmental consultants, amateur archeologists, and Israelis who feel unserved by the country’s housing system. The patterns of design and construction they have inspired reflect competing worldviews and aesthetic visions, as well as everyday practices not typically associated with the politics of the Israeli occupation. Revealing the pragmatic choices and contingent circumstances that drive what appears to be a deliberately ideological landscape, Shoked demonstrates how unpredictable the transformation of political passion into brick and mortar can be.

[more]

Itineraries in Conflict

Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism

Rebecca L. Stein

Duke University Press, 2008

In Itineraries in Conflict, Rebecca L. Stein argues that through tourist practices—acts of cultural consumption, routes and imaginary voyages to neighboring Arab countries, culinary desires—Israeli citizens are negotiating Israel’s changing place in the contemporary Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted throughout the last decade, Stein analyzes the divergent meanings that Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel have attached to tourist cultures, and she considers their resonance with histories of travel in Israel, its Occupied Territories, and pre-1948 Palestine. Stein argues that tourism’s cultural performances, spaces, souvenirs, and maps have provided Israelis in varying social locations with a set of malleable tools to contend with the political changes of the last decade: the rise and fall of a Middle East Peace Process (the Oslo Process), globalization and neoliberal reform, and a second Palestinian uprising in 2000.

Combining vivid ethnographic detail, postcolonial theory, and readings of Israeli and Palestinian popular texts, Stein considers a broad range of Israeli leisure cultures of the Oslo period with a focus on the Jewish desires for Arab things, landscapes, and people that regional diplomacy catalyzed. Moving beyond conventional accounts, she situates tourism within a broader field of “discrepant mobility,” foregrounding the relationship between histories of mobility and immobility, leisure and exile, consumption and militarism. She contends that the study of Israeli tourism must open into broader interrogations of the Israeli occupation, the history of Palestinian dispossession, and Israel’s future in the Arab Middle East. Itineraries in Conflict is both a cultural history of the Oslo process and a call to fellow scholars to rethink the contours of the Arab-Israeli conflict by considering the politics of popular culture in everyday Israeli and Palestinian lives.

[more]

Occupied Minds

A Journey Through the Israeli Psyche

Arthur Nelsen

Pluto Press, 2006

Israel's founders sought to create a nation of new Jews who would never again go meekly to the death camps. Yet Israel's strength has become synonymous with an oppression of the Palestinians that provokes anger throughout the Muslim world and beyond. How are Israelis able to see themselves as victims while victimizing others? What does Israeli Jewish identity mean today?

Arthur Neslen explores the dynamics, distortions and incredible diversity of Israeli society. From the mouths of soldiers, settlers, sex workers and the victims of suicide attacks, Occupied Minds is the story of a national psyche that has become scarred by mental security barriers, emotional checkpoints and displaced outposts of self-righteousness and aggression.

From vignettes to in-depth interviews, more than fifty Israelis offer their accounts. What they reveal is in turn powerful, haunting, subtle and disturbing. Illustrated throughout with photographs, this unique book offers an unrivalled insight into Israeli consciousness, private and public.

It charts the evolution of a communal self-image based on cultural and religious values towards one formed around a single militaristic imperative: national security.

[more]

Tell Your Life Story

Creating Dialogue among Jews and Germans, Israelis and Palestinians

Dan Bar-On

Central European University Press, 2006

Describes Dan Bar-On's method of using storytelling as both a qualitative biographical research method and as an intervention, to bring people from opposite sides of an abyss to a dialogue. Such work needs slow pace and long-term commitment, with a special combination of a scientific rigorous analysis with a sensitive approach toward the people one approaches.

[more]

The Colonizing Self

Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine

Hagar Kotef

Duke University Press, 2020

Colonizers continuously transform spaces of violence into spaces of home. Israeli Jews settle in the West Bank and in depopulated Palestinian houses in Haifa or Jaffa. White missionaries build their lives in Africa. The descendants of European settlers in the Americas and Australia dwell and thrive on expropriated indigenous lands. In The Colonizing Self Hagar Kotef traces the cultural, political, and spatial apparatuses that enable people and nations to settle on the ruins of other people's homes. Kotef demonstrates how the mass and structural modes of violence that are necessary for the establishment and sustainment of the colony dwell within settler-colonial homemaking, and through it shape collective and individual identities. She thus powerfully shows how the possibility to live amid the destruction one generates is not merely the possibility to turn one's gaze away from violence but also the possibility to develop an attachment to violence itself. Kotef thereby offers a theoretical framework for understanding how settler-colonial violence becomes inseparable from one's sense of self.

[more]

The Modern Israeli and Palestinian Diasporas

A Comparative Approach

Edited by Nahum Karlinsky

University of Texas Press, 2024

A comparative study of contemporary Israeli and Palestinian diasporas.

Exilic and diasporic experience have become ubiquitous in recent decades. Jews, lacking a homeland, spread to various parts of the world, making the Jewish diaspora paradigmatic. But after the establishment of Israel in 1948, a different kind of diaspora emerged, as more than a tenth of Israeli citizens have chosen to leave their newly established state and resettle. Meanwhile, about half of all Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, now reside in exile, predominantly as a result of the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Recognizing that Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab societies coexist and are engaged in constant relations, Nahum Karlinsky has assembled an impressive array of contributors to explore these diasporas alongside one another and in dialogue with other diasporic communities. The collected essays cover such topics as Palestinian exiles and diasporas, the demographics of today’s Israeli diaspora, immigrant enterprises, transnationalism and development, the unique place of Israeli Jews in the United States, the literature of Palestinian transnationals, and the emergence of Berlin as a queer Israeli-Jewish immigrant enclave.The Modern Israeli and Palestinian Diasporas challenges and reimagines the very notion of a homeland.

[more]

The Moral Triangle

Germans, Israelis, Palestinians

Sa'red Atshan and Katharina Galor

Duke University Press, 2020

Berlin is home to Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora community and one of the world’s largest Israeli diaspora communities. Germany’s guilt about the Nazi Holocaust has led to a public disavowal of anti-Semitism and strong support for the Israeli state. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Berlin report experiencing increasing levels of racism and Islamophobia. In The Moral Triangle Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans in Berlin to explore these asymmetric relationships in the context of official German policies, public discourse, and the private sphere. They show how these relationships stem from narratives surrounding moral responsibility, the Holocaust, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and Germany’s recent welcoming of Middle Eastern refugees. They also point to spaces for activism and solidarity among Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians in Berlin that can help foster restorative justice and account for multiple forms of trauma. Highlighting their interlocutors’ experiences, memories, and hopes, Atshan and Galor demonstrate the myriad ways in which migration, trauma, and contemporary state politics are inextricably linked.

[more]

The Struggle for Peace

Israelis and Palestinians

Edited by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea and Mary Evelyn Hocking

University of Texas Press, 1992

The determination of ordinary people to end regional and global conflicts is powerful despite the forces opposing them. The Struggle for Peace explores how average citizens on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict worked for peace in the late twentieth century. Essays by noted scholars are juxtaposed with profiles of individual Israelis and Palestinians involved in peace activism. What emerges is a unique perspective on the prospects for peace in this troubled area.

Coordinated with a documentary film of the same name, the book is designed as a tool for the study of conflict resolution generally and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. The twelve original essays deal with the issues from different disciplinary perspectives: political science (Yehoshafat Harkabi, A. R. Norton, Muhammad Muslih, and Robert Vitalis); history (Avraham Zilkha and Joel Beinin); anthropology (Robert Rubinstein); sociology (Salim Tamari); film (Steven Talley); law (Edward Sherman); and international peacekeeping (Christian Harleman). The human side of the struggle is presented through brief biographies and portraits of twenty-five ordinary Israelis and Palestinians involved in peace activities in Israel and the West Bank.

[more]

Publisher Login