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A selection of some of Israels finest writers.
In From Schlemiel to Sabra Philip Hollander examines how masculine ideals and images of the New Hebrew man shaped the Israeli state. In this innovative book, Hollander uncovers the complex relationship that Jews had with masculinity, interrogating narratives depicting masculinity in the new state as a transition from weak, feminized schlemiels to robust, muscular, and rugged Israelis. Turning to key literary texts by S. Y. Agnon, Y. H. Brenner, L. A. Arieli, and Aharon Reuveni, Hollander reveals how gender and sexuality were intertwined to promote a specific Zionist political agenda. A Zionist masculinity grounded in military prowess could not only protect the new state but also ensure its procreative needs and future. Self-awareness, physical power, fierce loyalty to the state and devotion to the land, humility, and nurture of the young were essential qualities that needed to be cultivated in migrants to the state. By turning to the early literature of Zionist Palestine, Hollander shows how Jews strove to construct a better Jewish future.
“History writing at its best . . . teasing out extraordinary parallels between our current world and that of a century ago.” —Tim Butcher, author of Blood River A pandemic has killed millions. Violent uprisings are tearing apart the Middle East. Nationalism is on the march in Europe. An unlikely candidate is running for president in the US on a populist platform to put “America first.” The year is 1920. 1920: A Year of Global Turmoil tells the story of twelve months that set in motion one hundred years of history. From America to Asia, the events of 1920 foreshadowed the decline of empires, the coming of another global conflict, and the rise of an American president who would change his country's relationship with the world. Weaving personal accounts with grand narrative, it vividly illuminates a past that echoes the present.
The contemporary Hebrew novelist Aharon Appelfeld is one of the foremost chroniclers of the impact of the Holocaust on the human psyche. His fiction weaves sensitive and disturbing tales about individuals in the pre- and post-Holocaust worlds. In the first book devoted entirely to Appelfeld's work, Gila Ramras-Rauch explores his life, his shattered universe, and the development of his unique esthetic. A book-by-book analysis of his entire body of fiction - short stories, novellas, and novels from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, including such works as Smoke; Tzili, the Story of a Life; Badenheim 1939; and Katerina - provides a perceptive guide to Appelfeld's enchanted yet terrifying fictional world.
This book examines contending visions on nomadism in modern Palestine, with a special focus on the British Mandate period. Extending from the late Ottoman period to the founding of the State of Israel, it highlights both ruptures and continuities with the Ottoman past and the Israeli present, to prove that nomadism was not invented by the British or the Zionists, but is the shared legacy of Ottoman, British, Zionist, Palestinian, and most recently, Israeli attitudes to the Bedouin of Palestine. Drawing on primary sources in Arabic and Hebrew, the book shows how native conceptions of nomadism have been reconstructed by colonial and national elites into new legal taxonomies rooted in modern Eu...
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 complexitie...
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The study of technical treatises in Indian art has increasingly attracted much interest. This work puts forward a critical re-examination of the key Indian concepts of painting described in the Sanskrit treatises, called citrasutras. In an in-depth and systematic analysis of the texts on the theory of Indian painting, it critically examines the different ways in which the texts have been interpreted and used in the study of Indian painting, and suggests a new approach to reading and understanding their concepts. Contrary to previous publications on the subject, it is argued that the intended use of such texts as a standard of critique largely failed due to a fundamental misconceptualization ...