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"Toward an Anthropology of Nation Building and Unbuilding in Israel presents twenty-two original essays offering a critical survey of the anthropology of Israel inspired by Alex Weingrod, emeritus professor and pioneering scholar of Israeli anthropology. In the late 1950s Weingrod's groundbreaking ethnographic research of Israel's underpopulated south complicated the dominant social science discourse and government policy of the day by focusing on the ironies inherent in the project of Israeli nation building and on the process of migration prompted by social change. Drawing from Weingrod's perspective, this collection considers the gaps, ruptures, and juxtapositions in Israeli society and the cultural categories undergirding and subverting these divisions. Organized into four parts, the volume examines our understanding of Israel as a place of difference, the disruptions and integrations of diaspora, the various permutations of Judaism, and the role of symbol in the national landscape and in Middle Eastern studies considered from a comparative perspective. These essays illuminate the key issues pervading, motivating, and frustrating Israel's complex ethnoscape. "--
Volume XXII of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry explores the major and rapid changes experienced by a population known variously as "Sephardim," "Oriental" Jews and "Mizrahim" over the last fifty years. Although Sephardim are popularly believed to have originated in Spain or Portugal, the majority of Mizrahi Jews today are actually the descendants of Jews from Muslim and Arab countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. They constitute a growing proportion of Israeli Jewry and continue to revitalize Jewish culture in places as varied as France, Latin America, and the United States. Sephardic Jewry and Mizrahi Jews offers a collection of new scholarship on the i...
In many respects this book represents a considerable departure from traditional works on international relations in the Middle East. Instead of offering partial explanations based on conventional approaches, this book attempts to incorporate studies with different methodological approaches and with the Middle East. Foreign affairs specialists offer balanced and linguistically neutral commentaries, while marshalling empirical data to support their analyses. The result is a broad synthesis which helps the reader see the larger picture despite its complexity. The Middle East is considered as a subordinate system of the international political system in Part 1. The chapters in this section focus...
This study argues that there are historical reasons to focus on Jerusalem first and to use an international Holy Basin methodology to bring Israel and the Palestinian National Authority together toward a workable compromise. This analysis identifies the strategic compromises required to create two distinct capital zones that grants sovereignty and legitimacy over respective capitals for the state of Israel and a future state of Palestine. In terms of religion and national identity, Jerusalem is a central factor for both Israelis and Palestinians, to the people of three world religions, and to the international community. The critical factors to achieve compromise are sovereignty over their r...
Serendipity in Anthropological Research explores the role of fortune and happenstance in anthropology. It conceives of anthropological research as a lifelong nomadic journey of discovery in which the world yields an infinite number of unexplored issues and innumerable ways of studying them, each study producing its own questions and demanding its own methodologies.
Modern urban spaces are, by definition, mixed socio-spatial configurations. In many ways, their enduring success and vitality lie in the richness of their ethnic texture and ongoing exchange of economic goods, cultural practices, political ideas and social movements. This mixture, however, is rarely harmonious and has often led to violent conflict over land and identity. Focusing on mixed towns in Israel/Palestine, this insightful volume theorizes the relationship between modernity and nationalism and the social dynamics which engender and characterize the growth of urban spaces and the emergence therein of inter-communal relations. For more than a century, Arabs and Jews have been interacti...
This book intends to systematically overcome the received practice of treating religion and politics as wholly separate and independent domains. It studies power and meaning in their "antagonistic interdependencies" rather than approaching religion purely as a realm of meaning without reference to issues of power, or dealing with politics as the province of power without raising questions of meaning. Religion and politics are thus seen in relation to one another, and attention is focused on the disputes about how political and religious regimes should be formed. Religious Regimes and State Formation will convince the reader that god and politics have much in common and offers surprising new perspectives on old problems.
For Our Soul describes the ongoing process of adjustment and absorption that the Ethiopian Jewish immigrants experienced in Israel. Between 1977 and 1992, practically all Ethiopian Jews migrated to Israel. This mass move followed the 1974 revolution in Ethiopia and its ensuing economic and political upheavals, compounded by the brutality of the military regime and the willingness—after years of refusal—of the Israeli government to receive them as bona fide Jews entitled to immigrate to that country. As the sole Jewish community from sub-Sahara Africa in Israel, the Ethiopian Jews have met with unique difficulties. Based on fieldwork conducted over several years, For Our Soul describes the ongoing process of adjustment and absorption that the Ethiopian Jewish immigrants, also known as Falasha or Beta Israel, experienced in Israel.
Reorienting the East explores the Islamic world as it was encountered, envisioned, and elaborated by Jewish travelers from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. The first comprehensive investigation of Jewish travel writing from this era, this study engages with questions raised by postcolonial studies and contributes to the debate over the nature and history of Orientalism as defined by Edward Said. Examining two dozen Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic travel accounts from the mid-twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries, Martin Jacobs asks whether Jewish travelers shared Western perceptions of the Islamic world with their Christian counterparts. Most Jews who detailed their journeys during thi...
The articles in this influential journal placed it in the thick of a turbulent period for anthropology. Reacting to current research interests and launching what were often heated debates, it set the agenda for disciplinary change and new research. Once described the American Anthropological Association as creating 'a strong voice for anthropology in the public arena', the Founder Editor, Jonathan Benthall, introduces here a personal selection of articles and letters with his own candid retrospect, arguing that the discipline's greatest strength and potential lies in testing and refining the ideas of other disciplines. Once described by the American Anthropological Association as creating 'a strong voice for anthropology in the public arena', the founder editor, Jonathan Benthall, introduces here a personal selection of articles and letters with his own candid retrospect, arguing that the discipline's greatest strength and potential lies in telling and refining the ideas of other disciplines.