The Question of Others: Reflections on Anthropology and the "Jewish Question" (original) (raw)
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Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 2015
In this interview with Professors Dan Rabinowitz and Khaled Furani we reflect on the article regarding 'The ethnographic arrival of Palestine' that was published in the Annual Review of Anthropology in 2011. The aim of this interview is to open a debate regarding how Palestine has become an anthropological subject of inquiry in the last few decades. It is also interesting to reflect on which events have given relevance to the interpretation of the two authors. Both have different approaches in their views of the study of Palestine with regards to the ethnographical methods. In Italian universities these issues are hardly studied, except for a few collaborations between young PhD students and Israeli scholars, so this interview will be the first step in a larger process of translation and collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian scholars. The two authors start their reflections by explaining the four modalities that they have individualised: Biblical Palestine, Oriental Palestine, Absent Palestine and Post-structural Palestine. Their survey yielded 420 relevant articles, chapters and books by anthropologists, written in English. Their interview also takes into consideration the evolving perspectives of future collaborations and the role that anthropology can play in describing emergent fields of knowledge and power regarding Palestine and Israel.
I approach the task of writing this epilogue with gratification and humility: gratification because this book makes it clear that cross-fertilization between anthropology and Jewish studies is taking place; and humility in the face of the quality of work that historians and scholars of religion who look beyond texts and anthropologists who incorporate textual analyses and diachronic perspectives into their ethnographic work have begun to produce. In this epilogue, I reflect more generally on the challenges of linking anthropology to the study of Jewish history and texts. That link has, until recently, proved particularly elusive, since the discipline of history and the field of Jewish studies take as their primary methods the study of written texts, an approach that does not always share much with the ethnographic methods at the heart of anthropology.
Introduction: Anthropology, History, and the Remaking of Jewish Studies (2011)
Prillled in the United Siaies of America 011 acid~free paper 10987654}2I Library of Congress Cataloging~in~Pllblication Data Jewish studies at the crossroads of anthropology and history: authority, diaspora, tradition I edited by Ra'anan S. Boustan, Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rlistow. -1st cd. p. em. -(Jewish culture and contexts) A collection of essays written by scholars invited to the Herbert D. Kat1. Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 200}-2004. Includes bibliographical rdefences :tnd index.
2017
This collection of essays will explore the possibility of applying perspectives developed in the context of Gender and Postcolonial Studies to Jewish Cultural Studies and Studies in Antisemitism. The volume is the third multidisciplinary research output of the international research network "Gender in Antisemitism, Orientalism, and Occidentalism" (ReNGOO). The network's collaborative research addresses imaginative and aesthetic rather than sociological questions, with particular focus on the function of gender and sexuality in literary, scholarly and artistic transformations as well as in constructions of orientalist images both from without and from within. The focus is on research concerning the orientalization and self-orientalization of Jews. Both processes are strongly intertwined and interact in various ways. Self-orientalization as a way of response to quests of selfidentification in an age of antisemitisms based on nationalist exclusion was made possible because orientalism in itself is a very ambiguous concept. While orientalist discourse often relied on heavy stereotyping and negatively connoted representations of the oriental "Other," it also sometimes took on positive connotations which referred to notions of exoticism, rendering the imagined East a mysterious and interesting place. Orientalism can thus be seen as a rather fluid concept which underwent many changes in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The present collection of essays explores the ways in which stereotypes of the external and internal other intertwine in modern national discourse since the nineteenth century and examines the ways in which these borders are demarcated and transgressed by means of Orientalist self-fashioning in Jewish cultural production. In so doing, orientalizing discourse was used in order to Judaize the East, a process that became more important with the rise of Zionism and the question of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Moreover, the very idea of selforientalization poses a challenge to the Saidian paradigm of orientalism, in which orientalism is conceived of as a "strange secret sharer of Western Antisemitism." The general theme is approached in a truly interdisciplinary manner, and the book is thus divided into several chapters that cover, amongst others topics, the interaction of colonialism, Zionism and orientalism, the Jew as a literary oriental trope, and the entanglement of orientalizing identities with gender and queer identities. Although it takes its cue from highly topical debates and current research projects, the collection is nevertheless primarily concerned with the intricate genealogies of contemporary discourses. Reflections on the (Hobsbawmian) long nineteenth century and the fin de siècle are therefore at the center of the book. The two longer opening chapters of Aschheim and Brunotte, which are both re-PRELIMINARY REMARKS 8 publications, offer a kind of introduction to the broad field of study, first the longue durée of the intertwinement of the figure of the Jews and indigenous or "foreign people" in Western colonial discourse and colonial enterprises, and secondly an introduction to the many varieties of orientalizations and the "Oriental web" (Aschheim) within European thinking.
The Other as Brother: Nation- Building and Ethnic Ambivalence in Early Jewish-Israeli Anthropology
Most depictions of "peripheral," nation-states' anthropologies assume that the anthropology's Other is a given, pre-defined subordinated group. Using the beginnings of Israeli anthropology (1960s-1970s) as our case study, we explore instead how while appropriating academic dominant paradigms of the time and aspiring to national unity, Israeli anthropologists were articulating through their choices of research subjects and research topics, and through their interpretations of the field an ethnic difference between themselves, European Jews and their "brothers," Oriental Jews. We follow the ambivalent discursive strategies through which this research project was created, and explore its implications for understanding other nation-building anthropologies. [
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.
Introduction: Jewish Studies and Postcolonialism
The introduction to this special issue makes the case for seeing Jewish studies and postcolonialism as part of a historical constellation that has mutual filiations and genealogies in the two fields. It calls for the imperative to see the world’s problems historically but also through the mutually illuminating perspectives of the two fields. Keywords: critical constellation, Jewish studies, postcolonial studies, refugees, slavery, pedagogy, colonialism