Navigating Mythical Time: Israeli Jewish Migrants and the Identity Play of Mirrors (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Germans: Cultural trauma and the Israeli habitus
This article reports results from a qualitative study of Israelis living in Germany, focusing on their traumatized national habitus. The study is based on 80 in-depth interviews and on replies of more than 100 respondents to an online questionnaire. The present article focuses on one specific aspect of the Israeli traumatized habitus: 'the wounded eye and the scratched ear'. Specifically, it explores the ways by which the trauma of the Holocaust is inscribed in Israeli senses. It details how respondents' eyes, ears and thoughts are activated by German mundane episodes, linking day-today experiences to the trauma of the Holocaust. Trains, suspect on-boarding Israelis, might end up in Auschwitz; snow brings up associations of the death marches; old people are perceived as Gestapo officers; and contemporary child-rearing practices 'explain' to Israelis the obedience and collaboration of ordinary Germans with the Third Reich. Using thick description from the interviews I expose the suspicious Israeli habitus – which always looks for 'signs' that might explain what happened in Germany 80 years ago.
Yehushua Sobol’s 1984 play, Ghetto (directed by Gedalya Besser for the Haifa Municipal Theater), is in many ways the “return of the repressed,” as the stereotypes of Eastern European Jewry, the reminders of an uneasy past, are brought back to the Israeli stage and made uncomfortably relevant to contemporary Israeli culture. The play offers an opportunity to explore the development in literature from traditional Jewish European Life in the diaspora/exile to contemporary Israeli culture, and the remnants of European history that are still – and in contradiction to Zionist ideology – an important part of Jewish and Israeli identity. In Ghetto, Sobol presents a Shylock-like caricature of a Jew, who, under the Nazi regime, tries to benefit from the special power relations that are formed in the Jewish Ghetto. The relationship between Ghetto and The Merchant of Venice is not obvious, as both plays follow very different story lines. Moreover, some qualities that are traditionally associated with Shylock’s character are divided among a number of characters in Ghetto: A nationalistic librarian, the cruel head of the Jewish Ghetto, and an unscrupulous merchant. In reading this work, I explore the “Ghetto” as a psychological phenomenon that is ingrained and perpetuated in Modern Jewish Culture long after the physical walls of the Jewish Ghetto have been dismantled. In the same way that the character of Shylock, who takes his first steps out of the Jewish Ghetto, evokes concern both on the part of Jews and non-Jews, contemporary Israeli culture still seems to take uncertain steps – never completely confident that one is on safe grounds, equal footing, or putting one’s best foot forward. For better or worse, the Ghetto is an essential part of Modern Israeli History.
Memory of the Holocaust and the Shaping of Jewish Identity in Israel
2012
This paper examines the general trends and turning points in the construction of Jewish memory and identity in Israel as influenced by and based on the events of the Holocaust. The chapter will show the importance, as a factor in identity formation, of the slow and gradual evolution from the often rejected traumatic post-Holocaust memory, through the process of the social internalization and integration of this memory, to the current institutionalized memory. This process in Israel is connected with generation change from the first generation of eyewitnesses of the Holocaust, through the second generation of new Zionist citizens, to the third and fourth generations looking for its identity in the globalized world.
Israel: A Diaspora of Memories. Introduction
Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, 2019
Since the late nineteenth century and the emergence of the Zionist idea, the Land of Israel – after 1948, the State of Israel – has been presented as a shelter where Jews would build a state of their own and put aside their past life and experience in the diaspora. The return of the Jews to the Land of Israel would bring about the emergence of a new “Hebrew” man and woman, of a unified and rejuvenated people, speaking a common language and sharing one ethno-national identity. In fact, Zionism viewed the diaspora (think of the idea of shlilat ha-galut) as a set of negative parentheses in Jewish history, something to be forgotten and substituted with other (national) memories. So the ideology and policies built on that basis before and especially after the founding of the State of Israel intended to erase the diasporic origin of the (Israeli) Jew and support this Jew’s feeling of having grown up in a void and of originating as a tabula rasa of sorts in Israel. Socialist Zionism and an originally European (Ashkenazi) identity became the hegemonic models to which Jewish migrants would need to conform. However, despite efforts to gather all the Jews from the diaspora in Israel and fuse them as part of the so-called mizug galuyiot (“ingathering of exiles”), since its beginnings and especially in the last few decades the country has paradoxically experienced the emergence of new, Israeli, diasporas.
Studia Liturgica, 2020
Memory is not only a biological capability but also a social practice of constructing the past, which is carried out by social communities (e.g., the nation state, the family, and the church). Since the 1980s, memory studies has intertwined the concept of cultural memory with national narratives of the past that are to legitimize the connection between state, territory, and people. In the present time of growing migratory movements, memory studies has abandoned this “methodological nationalism” and turned its attention towards dynamic constructions of cultural memory. Indeed, memories cross national and cultural borderlines in various ways. The cultural memory of the Jewish people, ever since its beginning, has been defined by mobility. As the exile and forty years of wandering in the wilderness preceded the Conquest of Canaan and the building of the temple, the cultural memory of the Jewish people has always been based on the principle of extraterritoriality. The caesura of the Hol...
Intersections of Jewish Studies and Israel Studies in the 21st Century (, 2019
Modern Jewish history is an essentially interdisciplinary field. This series aspires to transcend disciplinary and methodological boundaries, welcoming original scholarship that advances our understanding of the modern Jewish experience. The series will cover all geographical areas and all periods in modern Jewish history by welcoming scholarly contributions including cultural history, intellectual history, transnational Jewish history, global Jewish history, and memory studies. We welcome original monographs and edited volumes as well as English-language translations of manuscripts originally written in other languages.