The Bride from the Sea: Three Israeli-Palestinian Mothers Playing in the Sand Box
I focus on the community performance The Bride from the Sea عروس البحر performed by three young Israeli-Palestinian mothers in a sand box in a Jewish-Arab kindergarten in Jaffa (2008). From the beginning of the creative process the group struggled to overcome the barriers erected by their intricate, oppressive daily life, trying their best to push forward the original text to the stage of a full production. They eventually managed to perform a short incomplete performance. My deep emotional response has led me to discuss it as a special form of women-based community theatre reflecting the harsh daily life of these young mothers trapped between in-group and out-group power regimes.
Exposing the ways in which colonial technologies create informal space in a city, in this case Hebron, I argue that in a colonial state they produce a bilateral process. The informal space leads to Ghettoization of the Jewish settlement, which has been established as fortified enclave, and the Ghetto characteristics produce and reproduce an informal urban space. Ghettoization as an informalizer of the urban colonial space has been hardly debated. The colonial frontier developed as informal from “above”, in contrast to a parallel process from “below”, arising out of weakness. The settlers’ status includes both power and weakness, so that they could obtain only a very limited and fractured space.
Yearly since 2001 the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has sent several delegations of officers to Poland that visit death camps, ghettoes, killing sites, cemeteries and synagogues. This article explains the origin and meaning of these visits. First we describe the symbolic and pedagogical connection between the IDF and the Holocaust. In the second and main part we analyze the different phases of each visit. We conclude that the journeys are a combination of pilgrimages and symbolic conquests, whose aim is to efface the difference between the Holocaust victims and the officers, to justify the participants’ deeds as soldiers, and to enhance the symbolic capital of the IDF.
Reminiscences from 1948: Personal Stories on the Internet
The research investigated online “small stories” by elderly people reminiscing about being in Israel in 1948 to find out how the writers construct their identities in their stories and suggest a possible significance of the stories for them. Narrative holistic analysis of content and form revealed two main groups of identities that partially overlap: “Sabras” and “Survivors-rebuilders”. Both share values of solidarity and devotion to the collective, which reflect their generational identities. The strategy of telling a personal-collective story fulfills their identity needs in old age. The writers’ preservation of the traditional Israeli collective identity raises issues concerning the nature of this identity today.
To examine whether and how the theatre represents its senior actors, in 2007 I interviewed 22 senior actors aged 62–95 years. As an organization, a domain of gameplay, and a basis for theatrical metaphors in theories, theatre represents the social situation of the elderly and the self-perception of senior actors. “Theatre logic” makes it necessary to cast senior actors as “old” characters while forcing them to maintain professional role distance. A gap exists between the meanings of theatrical metaphors in gerontological theories and actors’ perceptions that these metaphors purport to represent their world.
Tel-Avivian Prayer: An Israeli Prayer House in Tel-Aviv
This paper offers an anthropological analysis of an Israeli prayer house. The paper focusses upon the Jewish identity constructed by the prayer house, which consists of a combination of the elements included in its name – prayers, the Israeli culture and way of life, Tel-Aviv as a modern urbanistic scene, and homeliness. I wish to argue that there is a strong connection between the Jewish identity constructed by the prayer house and the biographies and motivations of its entrepreneurs and activists. I further argue that the Jewish identity constructed by the prayer house, as well as the main characteristics of its actors, display post-modern processes prevalent in the contemporary religious context.
Naomi Weiner-Levy and Ariela Popper-Giveon
This article examines and elucidates researcher–participant gift exchanges in the field, a phenomenon whose implications enjoy little attention in the relevant literature even though exchange of gifts prevails in ethnographic research. The effects and implications of gift exchange on the research is analyzed, illustrating that in one case gift-giving in the field is perceived as a violation of the interviewer–interviewee context, while in another it reflects asymmetry and mutual dependence of researchers and participants. The article addresses issues and concerns evolving from gift exchanges in the field as attempts at balancing reciprocal relations, and the implications of gift-giving on the establishment of the research context and on researcher–participant relations in the field.
Being a unique case of hegemonic religious regulation of marriage, Israel provides an opportunity to clarify the nature of secular identities connected to long-term cohabitation. Our main objective was to map the characteristics and content of secular identities. From a qualitative study in which 20 long-term cohabiting Israeli couples responded through semi-structured interviews, our findings indicate three secular identities: radical, moderate and passive. Secular identities seem to nurture a cohabiting identity performed through a daily ‘work ethics’ relationship. The social distance between the participants and the communities around them, along with a gender identity that distances participants from hierarchical patterns of masculinity and femininity, support the cohabiting identity as well.
Book Reviews:
On: Women Abandoned \ Anat Gur
On: Rape Stories in the Court: Narrative Analysis of Supreme Court Judgments \ Irit Negbi
On: Trafficking in Women in Argentina and Israel \ Haim Avni
On: Excluded and Loved: Educated Bedouin Women's Life Stories \ Sarab Aburabia-Queder
On: Aesthetics of Sorrow: The Wailing Culture of Yemenite-Jewish Women \ Tova Gamliel
On: Sabras Don't age: Life Stories of Senior Officers from 1948's Israeli Generation \ Gabriela Spector-Mersel
On: Transforming Kibbutz Research: Trust and Moral Leadership in the Rise and Decline of Democratic Cultures \ Reuven Shapira
On: Kibbutz on Paths Apart \ Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Menachem Topel (eds.)
On: Duty and Love: Individualism and Collectivism in 1950's Israel \ Orit Rozin
On: Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity \ Jackie Feldman
On: Nation Like a All Nations: Towards the Establishment of an Israeli Republic \ Moshe Berent
On: The Production of Educational Knowledge in the Global Era \ Julia Resnik (Ed.)
On: Coming Home: Media and Returning Diaspora in Israel and Germany \ Nelly Elias
On: The Wonder Phone in the Land of Miracles: Mobile Telephony in Israel \ Akiba A. Cohen, Dafna Lamish and Amit M. Schejter