Tel Aviv Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

- by Joe Lockard
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- Hebrew Literature, Translation Studies, Refugee Studies, Egypt

Članak govori o Bijelom gradu, četvrti Tel Aviva s brojnim reprezentativnim primjerima građevina podignutih u stilu internacionalne moderne arhitekture u razdoblju između dva svjetska rata, a u povodu izložbe održane u... more

- by Dragan Damjanovic
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- Art History, Architecture, History (Architecture), Modern Art

... In order to surround their newly established settlements with huge walls like those of the EarlyBronze Age (see eg, de Miroschedji 1990 ... gains strength from the many studies on megalithic structures and Neolithic monuments in Great... more

- by Shlomo Bunimovitz
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- Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Tel Aviv

מאמר זה דן בדפוסים שונים של פוליטיקה מרחבית ואקטיביזם במרכז העירוני לקהילה הגאה בגן מאיר שבתל־אביב. המאמר מתמקד בשתי אוכלוסיות שוליות בקהילת הלהט"ב (לסביות, הומואים, טרנסג'נדרים, ביסקסואלים) הפועלות ומקבלות שירותים במרכז הגאה — גברים הומואים מבוגרים וחברי הקהילה הטרנסג'נדרית/קווירית/פמיניסטית. בהתבסס על מחקר איכותני שכלל ראיונות עומק ותצפיות משתתפות בפעילויות שונות, בוחן המאמר באופן השוואתי כיצד יוצרת לעצמה כל אחת מהקהילות מרחב פעילות בתוך המרכז הגאה ומחוצה לו. פוליטיקה מרחבית זו נעה על ציר חמקמק בין קרבה לממסד העירוני ולהגמוניה הקהילתית והפניית המבט פנימה לתוך הקהילה לבין ניסיונות לחתור תחת הסדר הקהילתי הקיים, לאתגר אותו, ולהפנות את המבט החוצה אל החברה הסובבת. עם זאת, שתי הקבוצות פועלות מלב ִלבו של הממסד העירוני והקהילתי ההגמוני, ואף ממומנות על ידו, מה שיוצר מציאות מורכבת שאינה דיכוטומית המאפשרת
לקהילות שונות לפעול במסגרתו

- by Chen Misgav
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- Social Theory, Organizational Theory, Transgender Studies, Queer Theory
- by Omri Lernau
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- Religion, Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Near Eastern Archaeology

Balconies have an important role in the social life of Tel-Aviv. The article explores different aspects of urban politics and the cultural history of balconies, and in particular sheds light on façade balconies in Tel-Aviv as liminal places between the private sphere and the public arena. Focusing on socio-cultural and architectural characteristics, the study presents, from an historical perspective, changes of style and use of the balconies of Tel-Aviv and examines them as sites of dispute between residents and authorities.

- by Carolin Aronis
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- Architecture, Israel Studies, Urban History, Urban Studies

During the first decades of its existence, Tel Aviv was characterized by rapid urban and demographic development. This growth resulted in a sharp rise of urban by-products, including vast increase in the volume of sewage that was mainly disposed of in the Mediterranean. The constructing of a municipal sewage system, which started at the late 1920s, increased the relative volume of sewage which was poured directly into the sea. In 1949 Tel Aviv's sea shore was declared polluted and bathing was prohibited. This situation lasted alternately for three decades. The deterioration of the beach area from its previous status as "Tel Aviv's Riviera" during the early 1940s into a malodorous urban back yard only a decade later, resulted in a project aiming at sea purification and reuse of the sewage for agriculture purposes. This article examines the ways in which Tel Aviv municipality dealt with the need of sewage disposal, including the environmental influence of the sewage on sea pollution, as well as the spatial development of the city's sewage system.

The spirit of a place
Architecture is the central focus of the social and the political structure of urban space. It plays a leading role in the analysis of the many forces which sustain the built area, from architects and financiers to politicians, municipal promoters and property owners, but first and foremost it lays the underlying foundation of our perception of our everyday landscape.

- by Gilad Ophir
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- Visual Studies, Visual Anthropology, Architecture, Art Theory
- by Michael (Micha) Levin
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- Modernism, Bauhaus, Tel Aviv, The International Style

During the past nine years (1972-1980) the North Sinai Expedition of Ben Gurion University of the Negev has conducted, under the direction of the co-author, ED: Oren, a systematic archaeological survey and excavations along the... more

- by Eliezer Oren
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- Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Tel Aviv

Which is the relationship between the urban element, the city’s fabric, with its collective aspect? An historiographical reading of the early years of the city, from its legendary foundation up to the proclamation of the State of Israel,... more

- by Giovanni Giulioni
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- Architecture, Modernism, Public Space, Tel Aviv
- by Yael Allweil
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- Urban History, Urban Planning, Feminism, Tel Aviv

The purpose of this paper is to offer new perspectives on the effect of global and local interactions on cities today. We suggest looking at two opposing modes of integrating into global processes and tie it with the local status of cities. The first mode relates to a city representing unique local significance that is recognized and valued on the global scale. This globality is not economic but it affects the global interactions of individuals, institutions and businesses in these cities. We coin this type of city global locality. The second is a city that serves as the local cultural and economic gateway to its surrounding. Whether located higher or lower on the World Cities rosters, on the local and regional scale it serves as a business center and a cultural hub. Thus, we coin this type of city local globality. In this paper, we demonstrate these new notions using Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Jerusalem as examples.

- by Nurit Alfasi and +1
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- Globalization, Urban Studies, Creative City, Jerusalem
- by Shira Wilkof
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- Urban Geography, Urban History, Israel/Palestine, Architectural History
- by Michael (Micha) Levin
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- Architecture, Jerusalem, Eclecticism, Tel Aviv

The imminent threat of destruction and the latent wish for it are both present in the story of the Herzliya Gymnasium’s building from its very beginning. The building was targeted by bold projects which regarded its removal a first, necessary step in the ultimate revolution of Tel Aviv's cityscape, or at least or at least for "breaking out" of its early planners’ shortsightedness. At the same time, the Gymnasium’s founders and senior teachers turned their backs on the building. They offered a variety of reasons for this choice, all aimed at concealing the embarrassing gap between the grandiose phraseology that had surrounded the construction of the building and its everyday decrepit reality. Thus, the physical destruction of the building—a structure that had been overburdened with symbolic meaning, before it had even been built—was not the result of momentary lapse of reason, but the culmination of long and deliberate process that was accompanied by an apologetic tragicomedy of excuse-mongering. As a result, the Gymnasium building lapsed into a moribund state of death-in-life already in the early stages of its existence.
The Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium building was built in the course of 1909-10, at the height of a wave of messianism that had swept Zionists in Eretz-Israel. This general mood was the combined result of the powerful impact of Political Zionism’s early nationalist rhetoric and the momentary sense of euphoria which the Young Turk Revolution had inspired across Ottoman Palestine. Since it was intended to serve the propagandist aim of securing the spiritual status of Ahuzat Bait (later to become Tel Aviv) as the center of a revivalist Zionist Hebraism, it is not surprising that the building was situated at the focal point of the new neighborhood’s main street. Equally significant was the style that informed the building’s facades, which had been conceived by Bezalel Art Academy founder Boris Schatz and architect Yosef Barsky. The result of their efforts—especially in the building’s monumental portal—incorporated motifs copied almost exactly from French architect Charles Chipiez’s imaginative reconstructions of the Temple in Jerusalem. As with other religious symbols and concepts which Zionism had converted for its own needs and aims, here too the sacred images used to construct a secular shrine to Hebraism imbued the entire building with a messianic tension that went far beyond its earthly functions and purposes.
As architectural taste changed, the same visual elements that were used to attract attention to the building, as well as its deliberate positioning at the center of the world’s first Hebrew city, started to come under criticism. From the 1930s onwards, the Yishuv’s wholehearted embrace of architectural modernism with its ahistorical state of mind went in complete opposition to the architectural approach of the previous generation, which had tried to make use of the past in order to design the language of the present. The Gymnasium building—a dominant representative of the Hebraic style in Eretz-Israeli architecture—now began to be perceived either as an abomination, or at least as a grotesque expression of the architectural eccentricities of the past. This devaluation on the part of the arbiters of architectural taste made the work of the city’s municipality and the Gymnasium’s administration much easier, as both bodies sought to dispose of the building.
The suggestion to get rid of the “obstruction” on Herzl Street was proposed already in 1913. The idea was to extend the street through the Gymnasium’s grounds and thus to correct what was regarded as a grave design flaw—caused by an early lack of faith in the potential fast expansion of the city northwards. This plan did not materialize, for the development of the area north of the Gymnasium meant that the full implementation of the plan would have entailed tearing down numerous buildings. Twenty years later, Tel Aviv municipality's City Engineer Yaakov Shifman (Ben-Sira) and its planning corps, possessed by the modernist obsession with traffic flow, revived the wish to extend Herzl Street north through the area then occupied by the Gymnasium building. This time, the reasoning behind the proposal was that the change would ease the congestion of traffic in the commercial heart of the city. This “objective” argument became the standard justification for the demolition of the building for years to come, despite the fact that the reality on the ground has shown that there was no real infrastructural reason to extend the street, and that the tower, which eventually replaced the Gymnasium building, had in fact caused the increase of traffic in the area, thus only aggravating the existing problem.
Regardless of their exact content, Tel Aviv municipality’s plans would never have materialized without the enthusiastic cooperation of the Gymnasium’s administration. The latter sought to escape what had become the business center of the city, an area whose manifestly urban, non-pastoral landscape they deemed an inappropriate setting for a progressive educational institution (as if the founders—many of whom were also the city’s first inhabitants—believed that the suburban atmosphere of the neighborhood in which they had built the school would persist for long). In the beginning of the 1930s it became evident that the allegedly bazaar-like character of the area from which the administration wished to escape dramatically raised the financial value of the Gymnasium-owned real estate. This discovery spurred the administration to realize their asset, as though it were simply another commodity, while consciously denying the fact that by doing so they were also signing the building’s death warrant. Though an actual deal for the selling of the old building took many years to realize due to ups and downs in Tel Aviv’s real estate market, at the beginning of July 1959 the contract for its purchase by a private group of investors was finally signed; several days later, and with hardly any public opposition, it was demolished. The building, which came into being as a national-messianic symbol, ended its days as a real estate corpse with soaring financial prospects.
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- by Or Aleksandrowicz
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- Heritage Conservation, - Architecture history, Tel Aviv
- by Lily Singer-Avitz
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- Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Tel Aviv
- by Lily Singer-Avitz
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- Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Tel Aviv

This compilation is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather Aaron Adolph Rothenberg who was a partner in the Comrades Club café. The cafe existed in the late forties and was located at the Tel Aviv boardwalk facing the sea, at the... more

- by Shlomo Guil
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- Photography, Israel/Palestine, Modern Middle East History, Israel
- by Yael Allweil
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- Urban Planning, Housing, Tel Aviv, Patrick Geddes
- by Daniel Monterescu
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- Sociology, Music, Anthropology, Identity (Culture)

In 2007 the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project (JCHP) was established as a joint research endeavor of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among the project’s diverse aims is the publication of numerous excavations conducted in Jaffa since 1948 under the auspices of various governmental and research institutions such as the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums and its successor the Israel Antiquities Authority, as well as the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project. This, the first volume in the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project series, lays the groundwork for this initiative. Part I provides the historical, economic, and legal context for the JCHP’s development, while outlining its objectives and the unique opportunities that Jaffa offers researchers. The history of Jaffa and its region, and the major episodes of cultural change that affected the site and region are explored through a series of articles in Part II, including an illustrated discussion of historical maps of Jaffa from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recent archaeological discoveries from Jaffa are included in Part III, while Part IV provides a first glimpse of the JCHP’s efforts to publish the Jacob Kaplan and Haya Ritter-Kaplan legacy from Jaffa. Together the twenty-five contributions to this work constitute the first major book-length publication to address the archaeology of Jaffa in more than sixty years since excavations were initiated at the site.

- by Aaron A Burke and +1
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- Cartography, Archaeology, Near Eastern Archaeology, Historical Archaeology

... 2 The review of data was compiled with the assistance of Linda Meiberg and Rachel Nahumi. The computer program was developed by Chen Herzog. 5 Page 4. Published by Maney Publishing (c) Friends of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel... more

- by Ze'ev Herzog
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- Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Tel Aviv
- by Omer Sergi and +1
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- Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Near Eastern Archaeology, Palestine
- by Oded Lipschits
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- Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Near Eastern Archaeology, Palestine
- by Lily Singer-Avitz
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- Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Tel Aviv
- by Eric H Cline
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- Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Tel Aviv

The paper maintains that the adoption of egyptianized language, administrative titles and religious traits by the rulers of Byblos in the Middle Bronze Age should be seen as an elite emulation practice. it proposes that the underlying... more

- by Roxana Flammini
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- Religion, Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Egyptology

... Israel Finkelstein Lily Singer-Avitz Tel A,iv University Ze&amp;amp;amp;#x27;ev Herzog David Ussishkin ... It was dated between the Chalcolithic period (the cupmarks below it) and the MiddleBronze Age (the earliest pottery in... more

- by Ze'ev Herzog
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- Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Tel Aviv
- by Omer Sergi
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- Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Tel Aviv
- by Sebastian Schipper
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- Social Movements, Housing, Urban Social Movements, Social Housing

The sixth Levant Fair, which opened in Tel-Aviv on the 26 of April 1934, was an international exhibition whose official purpose was to generate commercial ties from the world over with countries of the Middle East, in particular with the Yishuv. Thirty countries exhibited in pavilions planned and built in a rapid and well-organized operation. Much knowledge and thought were put into the buildings' design and there was a great desire to achieve innovative engineering and architecture. It was an important event, the first of its kind and scale in the country. In this article I will discuss the planning of the site and the pavilions as well as the various visual images at the 1934 Levant Fair. I shall examine how modern architecture served as a new and significant component of the fair's attempt to promote a Western and modern cultural perspective in the service of the Zionist vision.

Tel Aviv is becoming a hotspot for gay tourism through the support of municipal and national forces. The city is marketed as a Middle Eastern gay utopia, drawing tourists due to its location, LGBT nightlife, and Oriental flavor. Meanwhile, local Israeli LGBT individuals strive to produce themselves as Western, both performatively and politically. This paper discusses how the Tel Aviv Municipality, the state, commercial actors, and LGBT individuals utilize Israeli ethnicities. We argue that the dissonance between Orientalist images and Westernization processes, which are particularly noticeable in the marketing of gay tourism to Tel Aviv, maintains a twofold construction of Tel Aviv as a Middle Eastern global city, which we term the Progressive Orient. Reinforcing the differentiation from the Middle East and other Arab countries, while embracing Orientalist images and tastes under the guise of authenticity, this particular kind of pinkwashing also differentiates the city as other than the rest of Israel. This in turn creates new nuances of ethnic Israeli gayness illustrated by an emerging gay Mizrahi culture.

- by Orna Sasson-Levy and +1
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- Ethnicity, Tel Aviv, Gay tourism, Ashkenazim and Mizrachim in Israel

For over a century and a half, excavations in Jerusalem have been uncovering segments of the city’s Early Roman period network of streets, particularly the street that wended its way from the southernmost gate of the city, alongside the Siloam Pool and towards the Temple Mount. The importance of this street is evident from its dimensions as well as from the quality of its construction, which undoubtedly required an expansive workforce that included skilled labourers and craftsmen. Based on archaeological and historical data,
the creation of the street has variously been attributed to sometime in the Herodian period, to the reign of Herod and to the days of Herod Agrippa II.
Here, based on numismatic evidence, we propose a more precise time frame. We suggest that the street was constructed in the 1st century CE, in the middle of the first period of direct Roman rule, specifically during Pontius Pilate’s tenure as governor of the newly named province of Judea. We bolster this claim with a discussion of Pilate’s mandate and goals as provincial governor.

- by Moran Hagbi
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- Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Urban Planning, Early Christianity
- by Eric H Cline
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- Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Bronze Age, Tel Aviv
- by Zvi Lederman
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- Cultural Studies, Archaeology, Tel Aviv

The remnant of the eastern European Jews that arrived in Israel after the Holocaust established a vibrant center of Yiddish culture in Tel Aviv. This paper tells its story. It spotlights the uniqueness of the Tel Aviv center in comparison with similar cultural centers established by eastern European Jews in other cities around the world, both before and after the Holocaust. It portrays the Jewish cultural activists and leaders that composed the Tel Aviv Yiddish center, the special conditions that awaited them in Israel, the institutions that they established , and their aftermath. Finally, it considers the Tel Aviv Yiddish cultural center as a test case for examining the social role of the Jewish cultural center after the Holocaust. Avrom Sutzkever, 1 widely considered the last giant of modern Yiddish poetry, was the founder and editor of Di goldene keyt, the celebrated Yiddish literary journal published in Tel Aviv (from 1949 to 1995). The journal was widely read in centers of Yiddish culture throughout the world. In 1959, during a visit to Montreal, a vibrant center of Yiddish culture at the time, Sutzkever wrote a report to his colleague Mordkhe Tsanin, 2 the founder and editor of the Tel Aviv–based

- by Gali Drucker Bar-Am
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- Yiddish Literature, Jewish Studies, Israel Studies, Space and Place
- by Anat Cohen-Weinberger
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- Tel Aviv

This article studies Sir Patrick Geddes' housing-based urban planning, pointing to a less-explored aspect of his groundbreaking work, while proposing ways to rethink the history and theory of modern urban planning towards a "housing builds cities" planning agenda. Focusing on Geddes' modern urban planning for Tel Aviv in 1925 as housing-based urban-ism, this article conceives urban structure and urban housing as one single problem rather than disconnected realms of planning. Based on new findings and revised study of available sources, we look into three planning processes by which policy makers, planners, and dwellers in Tel Aviv engaged in this housing-based urban vision: (1) The city as a housing problem; (2) the city as social utility for reform and reconstruction; and (3) housing-based urbanization as self-help. We show how Geddes' modern urban plan for Tel Aviv employed the city's pressing housing needs for urban workers to provoke planning by way of cooperative neighborhoods based on self-help dwellings. This approach was grounded on Geddes' survey of Tel Aviv's early premise on housing and extends beyond Geddes' period to the brutalist housing estates of the 1950s and 1960s. The result is a new historiographic perspective on Tel Aviv's UNESCO-declared modern urbanism vis-à-vis housing as the cell unit for urban living. Further, insights regarding Tel Aviv's housing-based planning are relevant beyond this city to other examples of the town planning movement. It proposes rethinking modern urban planning before the consolidation of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) principles, namely when planned settlements were explicitly experimental and involved diverse processes, scales, methods, practices and agents. Housing-a key arena for the modernization of the discipline of architecture, as well as for the consolidation of the discipline of urban planning-is studied here as the intersection of sociopolitical, formal, aesthetic, and structural elements of the city.

- by Yael Allweil
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- Israel Studies, Urban Planning, Urban Studies, Housing