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Customer Reviews (3)

An excellent book on Israel/Palestine
rather than focus oh names & dates and the usual fare, this book is a great resource on Israel/Palestine and gives you information hard to find elsewhere, whether it is an analysis of Joe Sacco's artwork, Palestinian films, or a look back in time to the old city of Jerusalem pre-Brittish mandate. A must read!

A terrifically thought-provoking collection of essays!
Thisbook contains some of the very best scholarship currently available on the cultural politics of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Carol Bardenstein's essay on the implications of cross-casting and "passing" in Israeli and Palestinian films alone is worth the price of admission!

Disgusting
Sure, there's plenty of fascinating material on Levantine popular culture in this book.But I think that too much of it is simply a disgusting paean to racist attacks on human rights, with sneering taunts directed at any attempts by Israelis to protect their rights.

Yes, there are discussions of Israelis being thrilled by the prospect of finally being allowed to visit nearby Petra, on the Jordanian side of the border.And there is even an admission that it is "preposterous" for an Egyptian video to imply that European Jews "deserved to suffer genocide" and that Arab suffering is the result "of Jewish existence."

Yes, there's quite a bit of material that a scholar could find useful.And there has to be a place even for books that support racism and attack human rights.But the place for my copy of this one is my trash can. ... Read more

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For outside observers, current events in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are seldom related to the collective memory of ordinary Palestinians. But for Palestinians themselves, the iniquities of the present are experienced as a continuous replay of the injustice of the past.

By focusing on memories of the Nakba or "catastrophe" of 1948, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed to create the state of Israel, the contributors to this volume illuminate the contemporary Palestinian experience and clarify the moral claims they make for justice and redress.

The book's essays consider the ways in which Palestinians have remembered and organized themselves around the Nakba, a central trauma that continues to be refracted through Palestinian personal and collective memory. Analyzing oral histories and written narratives, poetry and cinema, personal testimony and courtroom evidence, the authors show how the continuing experience of violence, displacement, and occupation have transformed the pre-Nakba past and the land of Palestine into symbols of what has been and continues to be lost.

Nakba brings to light the different ways in which Palestinians experienced and retain in memory the events of 1948. It is the first book to examine in detail how memories of Palestine's cataclysmic past are shaped by differences of class, gender, generation, and geographical location. In exploring the power of the past, the authors show the urgency of the question of memory for understanding the contested history of the present.

Contributors: Lila Abu Lughod, Columbia University; Diana Keown Allan, Harvard University; Haim Bresheeth, University of East London; Rochelle Davis, Georgetown University; Samera Esmeir, University of California, Berkeley; Isabelle Humphries, University of Surrey; Lena Jayyusi, Zayed University; Laleh Khalili, SOAS, University of London; Omar Al-Qattan, filmmaker; Ahmad H. Sa'di, Ben-Gurion University; Rosemary Sayigh, Lebanon-based anthropologist; Susan Slyomovics, University of California, Los Angeles

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Articles on the religious, political, and social lives of the Jews, Christians, and pagans living in Palestine during the early centuries of the first millennium. ... Read more

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Examines gender, women's involvement, and sexuality in the ideologies and strategies of a transnational Palestinian political movement.

This book focuses on the central party apparatus of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the Democratic Front (DF) branches established in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Jordan in the 1970s, and the most influential and innovative of the DF women's organizations: the Palestinian Federation of Women's Action Committees in the occupied territories. Until now, no study of a Palestinian political organization has so thoroughly engaged with internal gender histories. In addition, no other work attempts to systematically compare branches in different regional locations to explain those differences.

Students of gender and Middle East studies, especially those with a specialty in Palestinian studies, will find this work to be of critical importance. This book will also be of great interest to those working on political protest movements and factional ties. ... Read more

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In opposition to the PA, liberal as well as Islamic social forces promote policies of protest and resistance, through media tools, against the authoritarian policies of the PA. The media is viewed as a public sphere in which these forces compete. Media institutions play an important role in setting the parameters of communication in processes of state building: promoting public debate and forming public spheres influence the modes of state civil society relations. Combining concepts of political communication with social movement theory, the author examines the extent to which public opinion plays a role in determining the character of the political regime. The rising tension between the Palestinian Authority's attempts to deepen its control over society and the reaction to this development by opposition groups informs the analysis of each civil institution: the role of NGOs, the Islamic movement, the women's movement and Palestinian feminism, and the liberal-democratic intellectual elite, are all assessed through their media institutions and communication policies, to reveal the character of the emerging Palestinian public sphere. ... Read more

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The dream of building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land has long been a quintessential part of English identity and culture: but how did this vision shape the Victorian encounter with the actual Jerusalem in the Middle East? The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917offers a new cultural history of the English fascination with Palestine in the long nineteenth century, from Napoleon's failed Mediterranean campaign of 1799, which marked a new era in the British involvement in the land, to Allenby's conquest of Jerusalem in 1917. Bar-Yosef argues that the Protestant tradition of internalizing Biblical vocabulary--"Promised Land," "Chosen People," "Jerusalem"--and applying it to different, often contesting, visions of England and Englishness evoked a unique sense of ambivalence towards the imperial desire to possess the Holy Land. Popular religious culture, in other words, was crucial to the construction of the orientalist discourse: so crucial, in fact, that metaphorical appropriations of the "Holy Land" played a much more dominant role in the English cultural imagination than the actual Holy Land itself. As it traces the diversity of "Holy Lands" in the Victorian cultural landscape--literal and metaphorical, secular and sacred, radical and patriotic, visual and textual--this study joins the ongoing debate about the dissemination of imperial ideology. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from Sunday-school textbooks and popular exhibitions to penny magazines and soldiers' diaries, the book demonstrates how the orientalist discourse functions--or, to be more precise, malfunctions--in those popular cultural spheres that are so markedly absent from Edward Said's work: it is only by exploring sources that go beyond the highbrow, the academic, or the official, that we can begin to grasp the limited currency of the orientalist discourse in the metropolitan center, and the different meanings it could hold for different social groups. As such, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 provides a significant contribution to both postcolonial studies and English social history. ... Read more

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Albert Glock, Director of Birzeit Univeristy's Institute of Archaeology, was one of the first archaeologists to promote and foster research into the archaeological record of Palestinian Arabs. This volume commemorates his contribution to archaeology and education in Palestine and the Near East and includes studies by his colleagues and articles by Glock himself that were previously unpublished. Papers discuss: oral history, ethnoarchaeology, cultural traditions, ceramic studies, site abandonment and site formation processes, Early Bronze Age seals, mortuary customs, the future of archaeology in the Near East and much more besides. ... Read more

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By analyzing key aspects of Hebrew culture, this book adds new dimension to the anthropological, sociological, and historical studies dealing with folklore, rituals, and festivals. ... Read more

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Challenges prevailing assumptions about family, courts of law, and the nature of modernity in Muslim societies against the backdrop of Haifa and Jaffa during " the long nineteenth century."

The popular image of the family and the court of law in Muslim societies is one of traditional, unchanging social frameworks. Iris Agmon suggests an entirely different view, grounded in a detailed study of nineteenth-century Ottoman court records from the flourishing Palestinian port cities of Haifa and Jaffa. She depicts the shari'a Muslim court of law as a dynamic institution, capable of adapting to rapid and profound social changes - indeed, of playing an active role in generating these changes. Court and family interact and transform themselves, each other, and the society of which they form part.

Agmon's book is a significant contribution to scholarship on both family history and legal culture in the social history of the Middle East. ... Read more

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Music is an essential component of all cultures. It conveys instruction, expresses emotion, and is used for teaching and recreational purposes. Without a doubt, music functioned in these capacities in ancient Israel. Although scholars rarely discuss the role of music in Israel's history and culture, recent studies have demonstrated that understanding Israel's music greatly contributes to our knowledge of the culture of ancient Israel/Palestine. Do You Hear What I Hear? examines the use of music and musical instruments in the ancient Israel and Palestine. By taking a close look at some of the enigmatic and under-researched subjects of ancient music, Burgh discusses ways in which the study of music can help us understand daily life in ancient Israel better.

Presently, the available collection of musical artifacts from Israel/Palestine dates from 10,000 BCE-4th century CE and numbers over 300 items. While focusing on Iron Age Israel/Palestine (1200-586 BCE), Do You Hear What I Hear? uses many of these artifacts, which come from various regions, and draws on examples from surrounding Near Eastern cultures. Burgh uses plaque figurines, figurines in the round, and instrumental remains as well as line drawings of musical activity found on ceramic vessels and walls of buildings to examine music in the ancient Near East.

Burgh takes the available musical data and explores how, where, and why music played a part in the lives of those living in ancient Israel/Palestine. His book clearly demonstrates that for the people of this region and time music was an organic, evolving mode of communication that often reflected how they understood life and navigated the world around them. Do You Hear What I Hear? suggests that we listen closely and unassumingly to the artifacts and texts in order to hear what they may tell us about past lifeways. ... Read more

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A strong Egyptian presence and governance of 13th and 12th centuries BC Palestine has since long become clear from both textual and archaeological evidence. How this Egyptianization came about in Ramesside Palestine forms the focus on the present study. Carolyn Higginbotham convincingly attends to internal factors affecting the region's cultural and political development. Two models are carefully considered. The prevailling theory, that Egyptian policy shifted from economic and political domination to military occupation, is contrasted with a new, convincing model, elite emulation, derived from modern core-periphery studies. The author's conclusion is that Egyptian policy remained largely unchanged, and that the increased Egyptianization of the material culture represents voluntary adoption of the overpowering Egyptian culture by the Palestinian ruling class. The appendices are especially important for scholars interested in ancient international connections in Palestine; they catalogue all Egyptian and Egyptian-style material from LB IIB - Iron 1A Palestine. ... Read more

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Offering a new perspective on Zionism, Exiled in the Homeland draws on memoirs, newspaper accounts, and archival material to examine closely the lives of the men and women who immigrated to Palestine in the early twentieth century. Rather than reducing these historic settlements to a single, unified theme, Donna Robinson Divine's research reveals an extraordinary spectrum of motivations and experiences among these populations. Though British rule and the yearning for a Jewish national home contributed to a foundation of solidarity, Exiled in the Homeland presents the many ways in which the message of emigration settled into the consciousness of the settlers. Considering the benefits and costs of their Zionist commitments, Divine explores a variety of motivations and outcomes, ranging from those newly arrived immigrants who harnessed their ambition for the goal of radical transformation to those who simply dreamed of living a better life. Also capturing the day-to-day experiences in families that faced scarce resources, as well as the British policies that shaped a variety of personal decisions on the part of the newcomers, Exiled in the Homeland provides new keys to understanding this pivotal chapter in Jewish history. ... Read more

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Examines processes of social reproduction, survival, and social mobility amid Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

This groundbreaking volume takes a deliberate look at how entire households, families, and individuals "cope," negotiate their lives, and achieve personal and collective goals in Occupied Palestine. Contributors raise critical questions about tradition vs. modernity and the sociocultural consequences of emigration. Living Palestine establishes that household dynamics (i.e., kin-based marriage, fertility decisions, children's education, and living arrangements) cannot be fully grasped unless linked to the traumas of the past and worries of the present.

Likewise, family strategies for survival and social mobility under occupation are swept up in the tide of history that engulfs the world in which Palestinians live and struggle as individuals, households, and as a society. Living Palestine is drawn from an expansive 1999 research project of the Institute for Women's Studies at Birzeit University in which two thousand households in nineteen communities were surveyed with an aim to examining the Palestinian household from multiple perspectives. ... Read more

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These papers on "Byeways in Palestine" are compiled from notes of certain journeys made during many years' residence in that country; omitting the journeys made upon beaten roads, and through the principal towns, for the mere reason that they were such.
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"If the Jews wish to become a nation of 'Jewish Culture,'" Eliezer Ben-Yehuda wrote in 1904, "they must first become truly a nation." Throughout the subsequent decade, Ben-Yehuda and other Zionist activists in Palestine attempted to transform the small, divided, economically depressed, and demographically declining Yishuv -- the pre-state Jewish community -- into the foundation of a modern nation. In this book, Arieh Bruce Saposnik tells the story of this transformation.

As Saposnik shows, these activists did not attempt to rewrite Jewish culture simply by uprooting and transplanting themselves, but sought to affect a dramatic revolution in all aspects of Jewish life. They endeavored not only to revise Judaism, but to revise the very definition of culture, and the expanse with which they viewed the word was, in part, what made this group so revolutionary. The new "Hebrew" culture they sought to create encompassed everything from the way in which Yishuv Zionists dressed to the art they created and the literature they read, to the holidays they celebrated, to the language they spoke and the accent with which they spoke it. Politics, economics, and even medicine were mobilized to become dynamic parts of a new Jewish identity.

Saposnik attempts to recapture their comprehensive view of culture and to show how these activists translated images and ideas into concrete cultural institutions, new art, rituals, and language. But, he also argues that this new culture, while expansive, was highly precarious and intensely contested. The Zionists struggled to maintain a complex relationship with traditional Jewish discourses, practices, and liturgy and to forge a delicate balance between the traditional and the novel, "occident" and "orient," and shifting national centers and peripheries. Through his examination of the Zionist cultural project, Saposnik sheds new light on the origins of Israel and Israeli culture, and on the fundamental building blocks from which modern nations and nationalisms are erected. ... Read more

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Becomng Hebrew
Saposnik provides scholars, lay readers and policy makers an insightful, engaging and comprehensive synthesis of early competing and complimentary ideas and actions integral to the formation of contemporary Israeli national culture.BECOMING HEBREW provides a historical view of the cultural foundations of Israel as a Jewish nation that is a must read for persons seriously interested in a political solution which will support a just and lasting peace in the Mid East. ... Read more

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In 1948, British troops withdrew from the Palestinian lands, ending over 30 years of the British Mandate of Palestine. What followed in the area now known as Israel, Palestine, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, has been well-documented and is perhaps one of the most intractable problems of the post-imperial age. However, relatively little has been written about the years of the British mandate and the long-standing connection between Britain and Palestine in the years up to May 1948. This volume takes a fresh look at the years of the British mandate; its politics, economics, and culture. Contributors address themes such as religion, mandatory administration, economic development, policing and counter-insurgency, violence, art and culture, and decolonization, in the context of imperial power and a highly complex Palestinian society. The book will be valuable to scholars of the British mandate, but also more broadly to those interested in imperial history and the history of the West's involvement in the Middle East. ... Read more

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Scholarship performance!
Redford's treatment of the wars of Thutmose III in the Levant comprise (to my knowledge) one of the first systematic studies to such a difficult subject.The material and composition is rendered in such a way that its very useful to all academics but I would generally sugest the interested public steer away from this one for awhile.Get the basics and see how Redford draws connections and lays out historical studies at their best! ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies, published by Irish University Review on March 22, 2003. The length of the article is 1117 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine. (Book Reviews).(Book Review)
Author: Conor McCarthy
Publication: Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2003
Publisher: Irish University Review
Volume: 33Issue: 1Page: 225(3)

Article Type: Book Review

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This work centres on one central question: should the passage from the Late Bronze II to the Iron I Age in Palestine, from the 13th to the 11th centuries BCE, be viewed, as is classically accepted, simply as a period of transition characterised by occasionally disrupted continuities? And yet the process of territorial division characteristic of Palestine, and of the entire Levant during this period, engendered the development of new cultural entities, initially introverted (13th century), but subsequently in contact with each other through political conflict (11th century). This process of territorial division in Palestine was accompanied by a profound redefinition of the demographic landscape, directly inherited, from the Canaanite people of the Late Bronze Age. In spite of these factors, a return to political and economic autonomy is one of the major characteristics of these periods. Based on the typological and technological analysis of formally unstudied ceramic materials from the acropolis of Tel Yarmouth, the authors research contributes to a more precise perception of this period, in particular in terms of its chronological evolution. Firmly anchored in chronological continuity, the pottery of this period testifies to the existence of a new codification of the relationships existing between the different regions of Palestine. Despite intrinsic political instability between the region of Palestine, a state of relative equilibrium was maintained during the Iron Age I. Consequently, the author proposes that the term mutation could be used in the place of the more general term transition to define this period, during which socio-political parcelling of territory resulted in the accentuation of local particularities, and which preceded, after a period of slow political gestation, the emergence of the new state of the first millennium BCE. ... Read more