Jackie Feldman | Ben Gurion University of the Negev (original) (raw)

Videos by Jackie Feldman

The lecture was presented at a refesher course for Israeli tour guides at Yad Ben-Zvi in Jerusale... more The lecture was presented at a refesher course for Israeli tour guides at Yad Ben-Zvi in Jerusalem on October 26, 2020. The talk provides a brief introduction to Evangelical Christiainty, outlines Evangelical connections to Israel and the Jewish people, primarily as expressed in Evangelical pilgrimages, which I have guided and studied for several decades. The talk ends with advice for tour guides on how best to approach key sites and dynamics in guiding Evangelicals. Yisca Harni provides the introduction.

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Papers by Jackie Feldman

Religion and society, 2011

Routledge eBooks, Jan 6, 2023

Berghahn Books, Sep 26, 2022

Tourism is one of the most salient cultural phenomena of the last 50 years and a central feature ... more Tourism is one of the most salient cultural phenomena of the last 50 years and a central feature of modern life and post-industrial globalization. However, many tourists think of tourism as an escape from modern life and as a quest for meaning and identity. This course will deal with the essence of tourism: its motivations and cultural features, the tourism industry and the inter-cultural meetings between hosts and guests. The course will include fieldtrips to tourism sights and students will conduct relevant fieldwork.

UNP - Nebraska eBooks, Sep 7, 2017

The Seductions of Pilgrimage, 2016

Shortly after I switched from guiding pilgrims to lecturing in anthropology, my wife remarked, "A... more Shortly after I switched from guiding pilgrims to lecturing in anthropology, my wife remarked, "As a lecturer, your first responsibility is to instruct; as a guide it is to seduce." She was referring to the role of tour guides to convey the proper appearance, to ferret out the desires and beliefs of the pilgrims and "play the game" in ways that would win their confidence, satisfy their expectations, and yield compliments, requests for future services and generous tips. The use of the term "seduction" with respect to Christian pilgrimage may seem surprising. As Jean Baudrillard formulated it: "For religion, seduction was a strategy of the devil, whether in the guise of witchcraft or love" (1990: 1). Seduction was generally seen as evil, a sin, a diversion of mankind from its goal by the temptations of the flesh. Fornication, unfaithfulness and idolatry are frequently linked in the Hebrew Bible (for example, Hosea 2, Ezekiel 15). Numbers 15:39 commands the believer to remember and perform the commandments of the Lord and "not prostitute yourselves by chasing after the lusts of your own hearts and eyes." Unlike the ideal pilgrim in search of transcendent meaning, with his eyes fixed on the goal, seduction, says Baudrillard, "is the sacred horizon of appearances" (1990: 153). Yet in the encounter between Christian Holy Land pilgrim and Jewish-Israeli guide, appearances are of the essence. The pilgrim in search of Christ often projects his expectations and (mis)conceptions of the Jewish people onto his guide; he may also try to convince him of the beauty of his faith. The success of the guide involves much impression management. 1 He must scan the pilgrim group for signs in order to place them on the Christian map, sometimes testing them through games or jokes (see Feldman 2007: 357-360; Bajc 2007), and display a serious and empathetic demeanor in 1 On impression management and face work, see Goffman 2005 (1967). On the display of cheerful (sexualized) welcome as part of "emotional work" among stewardesses, see Hochschild 1983.

The Life of Judaism, 2019

Memory Studies, 2023

Selfies at Auschwitz have become increasingly popular, and have generated agitated public debate.... more Selfies at Auschwitz have become increasingly popular, and have generated agitated public debate. While some see them as an engaged form of witnessing, others denounce them as a narcissistic desecration of the dead. We analyze the taking, composition, and circulation of several of the most popular selfies of Auschwitz and the online reactions to them. The practice of selfies marks a shift from witness to witnessee and from onsite to online presence. Yet it also builds on previous practices: photography, postcards and souvenirs, the affordances of the architecture of the memorial site, the bodily presence of the survivor-witness as mediator of the Holocaust, and the redemptive value assigned to the physical presence of the visitor as “witness of the witness.” We suggest that the combination of continuities with the past alongside the radical break with previous witnessing practices empowers selfie-takers, while arousing the indignation of gatekeepers of Holocaust memory.

Social Compass, 2021

This ethnography analyzes three Israeli Reform Jewish rituals as manifestations of interreligious... more This ethnography analyzes three Israeli Reform Jewish rituals as manifestations of interreligious hospitality. The Daniel Reform congregation invites Muslim residents of Jaffa to participate in rituals incorporating Arabic and Muslim clergy and prayers. The egalitarian and pluralistic Jewish symbols and narratives promote neighborly relationships. Nevertheless, some participants’ responses reaffirm popular suspicions and prejudices, which the ceremony seeks to overcome. Interreligious hospitality here is not so much an act of theological reconciliation, but a political act also directed toward other actors – like the Israeli right-wing and Israeli society, which grant the Orthodox a monopoly on Judaism. While the shared ritual practice offers a dialogical model that engages broader publics through doing, the analytic frame of hospitality sensitizes us to the importance of space and language in the power relationships of hosts and guests. It helps explain the challenges to the messag...

Interreligious Relations and the Negotiation of Ritual Boundaries, 2019

Pilgrim itineraries often promote trips to the Holy Land so that pilgrims may see where Jesus wal... more Pilgrim itineraries often promote trips to the Holy Land so that pilgrims may see where Jesus walked, make the Bible more real, and strengthen their Christian faith. I suggest, however, that Christian pilgrimage may also be an interreligious and intercultural encounter. The environmental bubble of the guided group pilgrimage encloses not only the Christian pilgrim and his pastor but often the Jewish-Israeli guide as well. In such groups, Christian pilgrims’ initial religious views may be confirmed or challenged through the guide’s presentation of Christian holy sites, the Bible, and his own life history. Guides may struggle with their attraction to and repulsion from Christianity and their own Jewish commitments in the course of shepherding pilgrims through the Land.

246 views

Religion and society, 2011

Routledge eBooks, Jan 6, 2023

Berghahn Books, Sep 26, 2022

UNP - Nebraska eBooks, Sep 7, 2017

The Seductions of Pilgrimage, 2016

The Life of Judaism, 2019

Memory Studies, 2023

Social Compass, 2021

Interreligious Relations and the Negotiation of Ritual Boundaries, 2019

Long Abstract The Holy Land and Zion have fueled the American imagination since Puritan times. I... more Long Abstract
The Holy Land and Zion have fueled the American imagination since Puritan times. If Biblical visions of Zion shaped pioneers' understandings of America, the visions of the frontier constitute many American Protestants' expectations of Israel. Their ways of viewing and experiencing the Holy Land are conditioned through the reading of the Bible, as well as through model cities and media images diffused throughout the USA. Practices such as in situ Bible reading, the search for uncluttered nature, the viewing of the land from broad vistas, the adulation of technological progress, the penchant for archaeology and Orientalism all inscribe American Protestant understandings on the land to produce a textualized sacred landscape.
By examining the theming of Protestant sacred sites in Israel, the narrative techniques of Jewish-Israeli guides working with American Protestant pilgrims, and the itineraries of tour companies catering to the American Christian market, we demonstrate how the Holy Land is tailored to the American Protestant gaze. The theme sites and guiding techniques reflect contemporary processes, such as the salience of media images, and the increased importance of sensory experiences in forming contemporary American identity. Yet such sites and guiding narratives are oriented, not to provide thrills, but to develop meaningful relationships with God, the Bible, and the past.
The products and performances employed increase the authority of new religious tour sites, while generating political support for the State of Israel. We also demonstrate how alternative organizations employ related tropes and techniques to garner American Christian support for the Palestinian cause.

Erinneren und Vergessen: Psychosoziale Arbeit mit Uberlebenden der Shoah und ihre Nachkommen, 2020

beschäftigt sich mit den Bereichen Bildung und Erinnerung. Wir werden beleuchten, inwiefern sich ... more beschäftigt sich mit den Bereichen Bildung und Erinnerung. Wir werden beleuchten, inwiefern sich Kontext und Status der Zeugenschaft Überlebender derzeit verändern, und dabei die gesellschaftlichen Prozesse in den Blick nehmen, die beides formen. Unsere Herangehensweise stützt sich auf die Arbeiten von Maurice Halbwachs1 sowie Jan und Aleida Assmann2 zum kollektiven Gedächtnis. Erinnerung, betonen sie, ist nicht etwas, das im Kopf eines Individuums aufbewahrt wird, sondern vielmehr in sozialen Gefügen verortet ist, ermöglicht durch sich verändernde Medientechnologien, gebildet in der Auseinandersetzung mit Kulturinstitutionen und geformt von politischen Umständen. Für die Überlieferung von Shoah-Erinnerung nutzen Bildungseinrichtungen eine Vielzahl von Technologien. Wir werden verschiedene aktuelle Medienpraktiken innerhalb eines historischen und sozialen Rahmens der Shoah-Überlieferung verorten und darlegen, dass zeitgenössische digitale Technologien versuchen, das Antlitz des Zeugen zu erhalten (und nicht nur seine Geschichte), während die Zeugen selbst versterben. Zu Beginn geben wir eine Einführung in die kollektive Erinnerung an die Shoah und skizzieren das Verhältnis zwischen den Generationen im Hinblick auf die neuen Technologien der kollektiven Erinnerung. Anschließend gehen wir ausführlicher auf einen weit verbreiteten heutigen Trend ein, nämlich die Nutzung digitaler Erinnerungstechnologien in der Überlieferung der Shoah. Beispiele hierfür sind interaktive Hologramme von Überlebenden, Selfies, die an Gedenkstätten gemacht werden, und deren anschließende Verbreitung, sowie Apps zum Aufspüren von Orten, an denen Opfer gelebt haben. Wir werden untersuchen, welches Verständnis der Shoah und der Rolle der Überlebenden/Zeugen diese Medientechnologien generieren. Am Ende werden wir kurz auf die Herausforderungen eingehen, die das digitale Zeitalter für das institutionelle Gedenken an die Shoah allgemein darstellt.

Israel/Palestine: Studies in Honor of the Intellectual Voyage of Baruch Kimmerling, 2017

Introduction The American Protestant gaze on the Holy Land has been influenced, not only by Bi... more Introduction

The American Protestant gaze on the Holy Land has been influenced, not only by Biblical paradigms, but by Orientalist world-views and the process of theming and disneyization. These processes shape the gaze both through the mass-culture industry, as well as within Evangelical churches. By analyzing the construction and narration of two fairly recent
Biblical sites, we demonstrate how new Holy Land sites are tailored to reflect changing American Protestant gazes and expectations. At the same time, local agents may strategically channel those gazes to legitimize their own interests and world-views.

Orientalism, according to Timothy Mitchell, has three salient features: essentialism, otherness, and absence. By organizing and producing the Orient as passive, static, emotional and chaotic, as opposed to an active, mobile, rational and orderly West, the colonial world can be mastered,
and that mastery will reinforce those defining features. At the
same time, the Orient was infused with romance, as a place of desire.

Furthermore, since the 19th century, the Orientalist view of the East – and the Holy Land in particular – has been produced and reified by the exhibitionary order: by the presentation of the East as spectacle. Whether as tableau vivant, miniature model or World’s Fair exhibit, such forms present themselves as controlled environments which can be visually consumed and comprehended by the Western spectator. The 19th century spectacles of the Orient also shaped American and British touring practices in the Middle East.

In the United States, additionally, the Holy Land and Zion have
served as an American cultural myth, which inspired numerous spectacular models and representations. These representations legitimized American Protestant visions of themselves and the world. Along with oil, visions and narratives of the ‘Holy Land’ as a site of mainly Christian
origins have forged cultural investments that allowed many Americans to become intimately involved in the Middle East. Here, we wish to focus on the way American Protestant values and images are being inscribed on the physical space of Christian sites in Israel/Palestine, shaping a Holy Land in the American Orientalist image.

Orientalism, however, is not uniform across cultures and time periods; it interacts with other interests and ways of seeing the world. American Protestant visitors’ images and expectations of the Holy Land are subject to changing forms of sensory experience of both geographical sites and religious truth at large. An important influence is that of Disneyworld and other theme parks. As part of the late 20th century
processes of globalization, Alan Bryman has identified disneyization as a process including four components: 1. themed environments, “material forms that are products of a cultural process aimed at investing constructed spaces with symbolic meaning and conveying that meaning to
inhabitants and users through symbolic motifs”; 2. hybrid consumption – the interlocking of different institutional spheres within forms of consumption; 3. merchandising – the sale of goods with copyright images and logos – and 4. performative labor – service work involving display of a certain mood as part of the labor involved. Disneyization has made
its way into religious worship as well, with a series of Christian theme parks that have popped up over the last twenty years, many, though not all, geared for Protestants and built in the United States.

For the purposes of this paper, we adapt John Urry’s understanding of the tourist gaze as a historically and socially constructed way of consuming landscape. The particular modes of the tourists’ search for the extraordinary, claims Urry, have consequences for the ‘places’ that are its object and, consequently, for the people building and running
those places. In recent years, scholars of tourism have noted how processes of McDonaldization and disneyization have extended the ‘environmental bubble’ typical of group tours to more and more touristic spaces throughout the world. We will demonstrate how forces of Orientalism and disneyization have generated a distinctly contemporary American Protestant pilgrim gaze, which, in recent years, has been accommodated
by new Holy Land sites which materialize that gaze and thus reproduce it.

We begin by providing a brief sketch of the processes of Christian sacralization of space in the Holy Land, particularly for Protestants. We then turn to two recent Biblical sites – Yardenit on the Jordan River and Nazareth Village – and demonstrate how the American Protestant gaze is objectified by local agents’ construction of sites to accommodate it. In
doing so, we will also show how local Israeli or Palestinian agents devise strategies to channel that gaze to serve needs of their own identity politics.

Trialogue on Peace in World Religions. Evnagelische Kirchentag, Dortmund

Updated to February 25, 2021.