"Defying the binary and Eurocentric view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ella Shohat's work, as a whole, dares to engage the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism, and nationalism. Spanning several decades, Shohat's work has introduced conceptual frameworks that have fundamentally challenged the conventional understandings of Arabs and Jews, Palestine, Zionism, and the Middle East. Collected now in a single volume, this book gathers together some of her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies, and memoirs for the first time"--

"Defying the binary and Eurocentric view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ella Shohat's work, as a whole, dares to engage the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism, and nationalism. Spanning several decades, Shohat's work has introduced conceptual frameworks that have fundamentally challenged the conventional understandings of Arabs and Jews, Palestine, Zionism, and the Middle East. Collected now in a single volume, this book gathers together some of her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies, and memoirs for the first time"--

Asserts that Zionism modified the self-image of the Jewish people, associating the national ethos with activism and power and abolishing its traditional emphasis on defense. Follows and interprets the impact of the modification from the end of the 19th century and up to 1948, mainly of the Zionists in Palestine. Pp. 433-462, "Holocaust and Power" (appeared also in "Massuah" 20, 1992), relate to the changes in the national ethos as observed in the reactions of the Yishuv to the Holocaust.

"The year is 1895, Jaffa. Salah Rajani, a troubled Muslim boy living in a dilapidated mansion surrounded by orange groves, suffers from peculiar visions about a disaster which is set to befall his people. His life is changed by the arrival of a handsome young man, a dynamic Jewish settler, new to the city, by the name of Isaac Luminsky. Luminsky covets both the fertile lands of the Rajani estate and Salah's beautiful mother Afifa, and his friendship with the boy is destined to lead to violence and tragedy." "This rich and colourful novel is made up of the two opposing journals of Hilu's intriguing and extraordinary protagonists as they negotiate love, honour and betrayal in the changing world of nineteenth-century Palestine." --Book Jacket.

Product Description Despite a historical record that shows sustained involvement of American Jewish women with early Zionism and Palestine, this topic has received scant scholarly attention. A major contribution to Zionist history, women’s history, and American history, American Jewish Women and Zionism offers a much needed clarification to the historical record. Divided thematically, American Jewish Women deals with representative figures, events, and themes of the pre-state era. The essays in the book have three different foci: Several are concerned with significant personalities, such as Golda Meir, Marie Syrkin, Emma Lazarus, and Henrietta Szold, while others are concerned with the pivotal role played by American Zionist women’s organizations including Hadassah, the Pioneer Women’s Organization (later Naamat), the Mizrachi Women’s Organization (later Amit Women), and others. The remaining essays address broad themes and reveal the multidimensionality of the relationship of American Jewish women and Zionism, which includes agricultural and vocational training, religion, ideology, geography, and feminism and femininity. American Jewish Women and Zionism also includes several eyewitness documents and personal testimonies. No less significant than the corpus of memoirs and literature produced by male Zionist leaders, such data throws light on hitherto neglected facets of American Jewish and Zionist history, including the variety of roles played by Zionist women and their self-awareness as participants in one of the most dramatic and consequential episodes in the history of Jewish civilization. The volume includes a glossary of terms, a map of the principal locations referred to in the text, illustrations, and a timeline of American Jewish women and their relationship to Zionism. Each section opens with a prefactory note that places the essays in historical context. It concludes with a bibliographic note and suggestions for further readings. Review "Anyone interested in the significant role of women and Zionism should definitely find this book a must read."--The National Jewish Post & Opinion "Shulamit Reinharz and Mark Raider's magnificent study... challenges us to understand how faith in Zionism and in the American dream nourished and changed both projects. This is a story not of ideologies or, for the most part, of ideologues, but rather of the creators of a new tradition. The essays in this collection bring some of the leaders of Hadassah, Pioneer Women, and of Mizrahi beautifully to life and show how a dedication to the Zionist cause deepened a commitment to American values, and enlarged the Zionist perspective, to preserve a set of liberal principles reaching across the ethnic and national divide in Palestine...In this book Reinharz and Raider assemble essays that chart the rich profusion of movements, institutions, and activities - including aliyah - that Zionism inspired in Jewish women living in the United States."--Israel Studies "The organizations that women created as an expression of their goal are deftly analyzed. There is valuable and intriguing material here which calls for the attention of scholars in the fields of American history, women's history, feminism, and Zionism."--Jewish Book World From the Publisher 6 x 9 trim. 12 illus, 1 map, 3 tables About the Author Mark A. Raider is professor of modern Jewish history in the Department of History and director of the Center for Studies in Jewish Education and Culture at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author, most recently, of The Essential Hayim Greenberg: Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism, and Zionism.

In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists' creation of new ways of seeing—such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists' exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness —offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel's militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.

Text: English, Hebrew (translation)

Partition--the idea of separating Jews and Arabs along ethnic or national lines--is a legacy at least as old as the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. Challenging the widespread "separatist imagination" behind partition, Gil Hochberg demonstrates the ways in which works of contemporary Jewish and Arab literature reject simple notions of separatism and instead display complex configurations of identity that emphasize the presence of alterity within the self--the Jew within the Arab, and the Arab within the Jew. In Spite of Partition examines Hebrew, Arabic, and French works that are largely unknown to English readers to reveal how, far from being independent, the signifiers "Jew" and "Arab" are inseparable.In a series of original close readings, Hochberg analyzes fascinating examples of such inseparability. In the Palestinian writer Anton Shammas's Hebrew novel Arabesques, the Israeli and Palestinian protagonists are a "schizophrenic pair" who "have not yet decided who is the ventriloquist of whom." And in the Moroccan Jewish writer Albert Swissa's Hebrew novel Aqud, the Moroccan-Israeli main character's identity is uneasily located between the "Moroccan Muslim boy he could have been" and the "Jewish Israeli boy he has become." Other examples draw attention to the intricate linguistic proximity of Hebrew and Arabic, the historical link between the traumatic memories of the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakbah, and the libidinal ties that bind Jews and Arabs despite, or even because of, their current animosity.

Taking a fresh look at the past hundred years of shared Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli history, Baruch Kimmerling reveals surprising relations of influence between a stateless indigenous society and the settler-immigrants who would later form the state of Israel. Shattering our assumptions about these two seemingly irreconcilable cultures, Kimmerling composes a sophisticated portrait of one sides behavior and characteristics and the way in which they irrevocably shaped those of the other." "By merging Israeli and Jewish studies with a wealth of scholarship on Palestinians and the Middle East, Kimmerling introduces a unique conceptual framework for analyzing the cultural, political, and material overlap of both societies. A must-read for those concerned with Israel and the relations between Jews and Arabs, Clash of Identities is an exploration of the ever-evolving, always-contending identities available to Israelis and Palestinians and the fascinating contexts in which they take form.

This is the first comprehensive history of Palestine from the Muslim conquest in 634 to that of the Crusaders in 1099. It is a translation and revised version of volume I of Palestine during the first Muslim period which was published in Hebrew in 1983 and presents an authoritative survey of the early mediaeval Islamic and Jewish worlds. Professor Gil begins by reviewing the political and military events in Palestine before and after the Arab invasion. Later chapters explore the Abbasid, Tulunid, Ikhshidid and Fatimid periods, during which time Palestine was an almost perpetual battlefield for states, armies and factions. Against this backdrop of conflict and administrative changes, the author portrays the everyday life of Palestine and its inhabitants. He looks at the economic history of Palestine--its agriculture, transport facilities, exports and systems of taxation--as well as the religious status of Jerusalem, the nature of Islam's tolerance towards Jews and Christians and the status, leadership and customs of the Christian populace. Specific attention is paid to the history of Palestinian Jews under Muslim rule. Professor Gil details their topography, economic activities and religious life; he explores the Karaite and Samaritan communities and discusses the role of the most prominent Jewish institution, the yeshiva. A history of Palestine, 634-1099 is based on an impressive array of sources. Professor Gil has put to use more than one thousand documents of the Cairo Geniza collection and these are paralleled by Arabic, Syriac, Latin and Greek material. This monumental study will be an essential resource for students and specialists of mediaeval Islamic and Jewish history andreligious studies and for anyone interested in the history of the Holy Land.

This provocative new history of Palestinian Jewish society in antiquity marks the first comprehensive effort to gauge the effects of imperial domination on this people. Probing more than eight centuries of Persian, Greek, and Roman rule, Seth Schwartz reaches some startling conclusions--foremost among them that the Christianization of the Roman Empire generated the most fundamental features of medieval and modern Jewish life. Schwartz begins by arguing that the distinctiveness of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and early Roman periods was the product of generally prevailing imperial tolerance. From around 70 C.E. to the mid-fourth century, with failed revolts and the alluring cultural norms of the High Roman Empire, Judaism all but disintegrated. However, late in the Roman Empire, the Christianized state played a decisive role in ''re-Judaizing'' the Jews. The state gradually excluded them from society while supporting their leaders and recognizing their local communities. It was thus in Late Antiquity that the synagogue-centered community became prevalent among the Jews, that there re-emerged a distinctively Jewish art and literature--laying the foundations for Judaism as we know it today. Through masterful scholarship set in rich detail, this book challenges traditional views rooted in romantic notions about Jewish fortitude. Integrating material relics and literature while setting the Jews in their eastern Mediterranean context, it addresses the complex and varied consequences of imperialism on this vast period of Jewish history more ambitiously than ever before. Imperialism in Jewish Society will be widely read and much debated.

This study explores the real - as against the ideal - social, political, and religious status of women in Palestinian Judaism of Hellenistic and Roman periods. This investigation concludes that extreme religious groups in Judaism of the period influences other groups, classes, and factions to tighten their control of women. They also encouraged an understanding of ideal relationships between men and women, represented in the literature and the legal codes of the time that required increasing chastity. Despite this, the lives of real women and their relationships to men continued to be varied and nuances. This book integrates both Jewish and Early Christian sources together with a feminist critique. It is the most comprehensive work of this sort published thus far and offers a vast repository of relevant material, as well as a fresh interpretation.

This book brings together an inter-disciplinary group of Palestinian, Israeli, American, British and Irish scholars who theorise 'the question of Palestine'. Critically committed to supporting the Palestinian quest for self determination, they present new theoretical ways of thinking about Palestine. These include the 'Palestinization' of ethnic and racial conflicts, the theorization of Palestine as camp, ghetto and prison, the tourist/activist gaze, the role of gendered resistance, the centrality of the memory of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) to the contemporary understanding of the conflict, and the historic roots of the contemporary discourse on Palestine. The book offers a novel examination of how the Palestinian experience of being governed under what Giorgio Agamben names a 'state of exception' may be theorised as paradigmatic for new forms of global governance. An indispensable read for any serious scholar.

This is the first study of the Zionist movement in Germany, England and the United States that recognizes "Western Zionism" as a distinctive force. It focuses on images of Zionist leaders and Palestine, on tours of Palestine, youth and women's organizations, the First World War, and the rise of the Keren Hayesod (Palestine Foundation Fund).

A generous selection of poems by Hans Arp, Bertolt Brecht, Gunter Grass, Wilhelm Lehmann, Gottfried Benn, Yvan Goll, Nelly Sachs, Peter Huchel, Gunter Eich, Christine Lavant, Joannes Bobrowski, Paul Celan, Helmut Heissenbuttel, Ernst Jandl, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Gunter Kunert, printed in German, with an Introduction in English.

Living in Palestine as the wife of the British Attorney-General, Helen Bentwich was immersed in the politics and society of the early years of the British Mandate. Despite her connections she remained in some ways an outsider - a critical observer, writing candid weekly letters to her mother that give insight into the cauldron of races and traditions, the intolerance and the idealism, that lie behind the history of 20th-century Palestine and the foundation of the state of Israel. The selection of her letters in this book mixes political comment with details of personal life and gossip. The gossip reveals a society that has gone, but the political and religious problems are familiar today. Her family were well aware of the situation in Palestine, and she wanted to amuse rather than alarm them, but the frustrations and worries break through the letters' superficial cheerfulness to provide a picture of the period.

How well integrated were Jews in the Mediterranean society controlled by ancient Rome? The Torah's laws seem to constitute a rejection of the reciprocity-based social dependency and emphasis on honor that were customary in the ancient Mediterranean world. But were Jews really a people apart, and outside of this broadly shared culture? Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? argues that Jewish social relations in antiquity were animated by a core tension between biblical solidarity and exchange-based social values such as patronage, vassalage, formal friendship, and debt slavery. Seth Schwartz's examinations of the Wisdom of Ben Sira, the writings of Josephus, and the Palestinian Talmud reveal that Jews were more deeply implicated in Roman and Mediterranean bonds of reciprocity and honor than is commonly assumed. Schwartz demonstrates how Ben Sira juxtaposes exhortations to biblical piety with hard-headed and seemingly contradictory advice about coping with the dangers of social relations with non-Jews; how Josephus describes Jews as essentially countercultural; yet how the Talmudic rabbis assume Jews have completely internalized Roman norms at the same time as the rabbis seek to arouse resistance to those norms, even if it is only symbolic. Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? is the first comprehensive exploration of Jewish social integration in the Roman world, one that poses challenging new questions about the very nature of Mediterranean culture.

"This is a work of genuine discovery that uses both the methods and sources of first-rate scholarship. It is a valuable addition to the 'new thinking' about the Middle East, [although] there are many who will refute its contribution without so much as a glance at its first page because it was written by Elmer Berger. The loss is theirs. Who will gain are those, like Berger himself, with an open mind and a willingness to become familiar with new perspectives on an ancient controversy."--From the Foreword by Don Peretz, professor of political science, SUNY-Binghamton At the outset of the 1949 armistice negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, acting UN mediator Ralph Bunche expressed his hope that the talks would "chart the road to a peace for Palestine," an outcome apparently as elusive today as when he spoke those words more than forty years ago. Perhaps the most significant aspect of this meticulously documented analysis of those negotiations is its relevance for today's headlines. Relating the proposals and counterproposals, the conspiracies and power plays to present-day Israeli and Middle East policies, Berger suggests that the basic negotiating strategies of the main players have persisted almost unchanged into the present, a "near rigidity" that has defeated all efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East's central conflict. Berger is a controversial rabbi, an avowed anti-Zionist who proves himself capable of examining highly flammable issues and events with objectivity, insight, and rigorous scholarship. Drawing upon newly released material from official Israeli and U.S. archives, Berger manages to paint both the large picture and the telling detail--the frustrations of the conscientious and highly respected Bunche, the pathetically unprepared Arab negotiators, the well-informed Israeli diplomats, the intrigue of the Israel-Transjordan alliance. The work will serve serious observers of the prolonged conflict over Palestine as a guide to applicable international law and to the attitudes and negotiating policies of the countries involved. Elmer Berger has for twenty-five years been president of American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism, Inc., and has written and edited a number of books on Judaism and Jewish nationalism. At the outset of the 1949 armistice negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, acting UN mediator Ralph Bunche expressed his hope that the talks would "chart the road to a peace for Palestine," an outcome apparently as elusive today as when he spoke those words more than forty years ago. Perhaps the most significant aspect of this meticulously documented analysis of those negotiations is its relevance for today's headlines. Relating the proposals and counterproposals, the conspiracies and power plays to present-day Israeli and Middle East policies, Berger suggests that the basic negotiating strategies of the main players have persisted almost unchanged into the present, a "near rigidity" that has defeated all efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East's central conflict. Berger is a controversial rabbi, an avowed anti-Zionist who proves himself capable of examining highly flammable issues and events with objectivity, insight, and rigorous scholarship. Drawing upon newly released material from official Israeli and U.S. archives, Berger manages to paint both the large picture and the telling detail--the frustrations of the conscientious and highly respected Bunche, the pathetically unprepared Arab negotiators, the well-informed Israeli diplomats, the intrigue of the Israel-Transjordan alliance. The work will serve serious observers of the prolonged conflict over Palestine as a guide to applicable international law and to the attitudes and negotiating policies of the countries involved. Elmer Berger has for twenty-five years been president of American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism, Inc., and has written and edited a number of books on Judaism and Jewish nationalism.