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While early Zionists envisioned the Jewish state as an outpost of Europe in the Middle East, modern Israel is—geographically speaking—located in Asia and incorporates elements from both “Orient and Occident.” This book sheds light on how the Mediterranean region, its history, traditions, climate, and attitudes have shaped Israeli lived experience and consciousness. It offers new perspectives on the evolving phenomenon of Yam Tikhoniut (hebr. Mediterraneanism), which centers around the longing to find a "natural" place in order that Israel be accommodated in the region, both culturally and politically. This book explores Mediterraneanism as reflected in popular music, literature, architecture, and daily life and analyzes the ways in which the notion comprises cultural identity, societal concepts, and political realities.
Guillaume de Machaut was the foremost poet-composer of his time. Studies look at all aspects of his prodigious output.
The State of Afterness traces the histories and cultural histories of contemporary music in Israel since the 1980s and through the 2020s. With afterness defined as the state of being unconditioned by territorialism while opting for previously unavailable temporalities and ethnographies, Assaf Shelleg studies the compositional approaches that record the attenuation of territorial nationalism, and assembles a network of composers trained in the post-ideological climate of the 1970s and 80s. This network features operas, electronic music, orchestral, and chamber and ensemble works by Chaya Czernowin, Betty Olivero, Luciano Berio, Leon Schidlowsky, Josef Bardanashvili, and Arik Shapira, in addit...
A minority within Judaism, the Karaites are known as a 'reading community'-one that looks to the Bible as the authority in all areas of life, including intimate relations and hygiene. Here Ruth Tsoffar considers how Egyptian Kariates of the San Francisco Bay Area define themselves, within both California culture and Judaism, in terms of the Bible and its bearing on their bodies. Women's perspectives play a large role in this ethnography; it is their bodies that are especially regulated by rules of cleanliness and purity to the point where their biological cycles-menstruation, procreation, childbirth, lactation-determine their place in the community. As Tsoffar notes, the female body itself b...
In this provocative and wide-ranging history, Joel Beinin examines fundamental questions of ethnic identity by focusing on the Egyptian Jewish community since 1948. A complex and heterogeneous people, Egyptian Jews have become even more diverse as their diaspora continues to the present day. Central to Beinin's study is the question of how people handle multiple identities and loyalties that are dislocated and reformed by turbulent political and cultural processes. It is a question he grapples with himself, and his reflections on his experiences as an American Jew in Israel and Egypt offer a candid, personal perspective on the hazards of marginal identities.
In this in-depth study of Israeli art music in the second half of the twentieth century, author Assaf Shelleg explores how art music and modern Hebrew literature engaged with Zionism and competing diasporic Jewish histories that are not grounded in notions of territory.
Jewish culture places a great deal of emphasis on texts and their means of transmission. At various points in Jewish history, the primary mode of transmission has changed in response to political, geographical, technological, and cultural shifts. Contemporary textual transmission in Jewish culture has been influenced by secularization, the return to Hebrew and the emergence of modern Yiddish, and the new centers of Jewish life in the United States and in Israel, as well as by advancements in print technology and the invention of the Internet. Volume XXXI of Studies in Contemporary Jewry deals with various aspects of textual transmission in Jewish culture in the last two centuries. Essays in ...
Twelve-tone and serial music were dominant forms of composition following World War II and remained so at least through the mid-1970s. In 1961, Ann Phillips Basart published the pioneering bibliographic work in the field.
This important volume rethinks the conventional parameters of Middle East studies through attention to popular cultural forms, producers, and communities of consumers. The volume has a broad historical scope, ranging from the late Ottoman period to the second Palestinian uprising, with a focus on cultural forms and processes in Israel, Palestine, and the refugee camps of the Arab Middle East. The contributors consider how Palestinian and Israeli popular culture influences and is influenced by political, economic, social, and historical processes in the region. At the same time, they follow the circulation of Palestinian and Israeli cultural commodities and imaginations across borders and che...
Marian Anderson was a woman with two disparate voices. The first - a powerful, majestic contralto spanning four octaves - catapulted her from Philadelphia poverty to international fame. A second, softer voice emanated from her mere presence. This study of Anderson's life features separate appendices for Anderson's repertory and discography.