McGill-Queen’s Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies Series – serie

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, gender scholars and activists have asked whether a reconcilliation between Zionism and feminism is possible in the current political landscape. Fictions of Gender explores the contemporary controversies surrounding both Zionism and feminism, and how they are prefigured in the experiences and legacies of early Zionist women.Drawing on extensive archival research and the rarely studied corpus of published and unpublished creative, biographic, and essayistic writings by Zionist women throughout the intense first eighty years of the Zionist project (1880s–1950s), Orian Zakai situates Zionist women within the larger histories of colonization and the politics of ethnicity in Israel/Palestine. At the core of this study lie contemporary debates about the relationship between feminism, nationalism, and colonialism. Shifting long-standing paradigms in the scholarship on modern Hebrew literature and culture, Zakai confronts the study of gender and Zionism with the critical sensibilities of contemporary global feminism. Read both critically and compassionately, the writings of women authors and activists not only reveal lives full of contradictions but also point to cultural structures that shape the politics of Israel/Palestine to this very day.Fictions of Gender rethinks Israeli feminism through the lens of contemporary feminism, intersectionality, and post-colonialism.

Since Israel conquered the West Bank, formerly held by Jordan, in 1967, over 400,000 settlers have moved into the territory. In recent years, Israeli settler organizations and allied American-Jewish lobbyists have responded to international condemnation of the occupation by mobilizing narratives of indigeneity, claiming sovereign and divine rights to the land.Settler-Indigeneity in the West Bank asks what Israeli settlers mean when they say they are indigenous; how settler indigeneity is felt, performed, and mediated; and what the implications of indigeneity claims are on the international stage. Building on foundational scholarship that has come out of post-colonial and indigeneity studies, the volume theorizes settler-indigeneity as a cultural phenomenon and product of transnational settler-colonial histories, while also interrogating the dialectic of "settler" and "indigenous" to illustrate their co-constitution. Considering agriculture, clothing, food, language, and religious practices, the chapters explore how feelings of indigeneity are fashioned and how these feelings continue to transform the landscape of the West Bank.Offering a series of original ethnographic accounts of these cultures and communities, Settler-Indigeneity in the West Bank intimately documents and discusses the processes of settler-nativization in conversation with a variety of related literature in anthropology, cultural studies, Israel studies, religious studies, and settler-colonial studies.

The turn of the twenty-first century saw the rise of a brand of fiction that centres the experience and perspective of the perpetrator, thereby humanizing this character and granting it the capability to evoke our empathy. The vast scholarship published on this phenomenon, however, fails to consider Israeli writing, and with it some of the most complex characterizations of Holocaust perpetrators, imagined from the unparalleled position of a nation that was shaped from its very birth by the legacy of Holocaust victimhood and survival.In Created in the Image? Or Rogovin situates Israeli literary responses to the Holocaust in the canon of perpetrator fiction for the first time. Since the state's establishment in 1948, perpetrator characterization in Israeli fiction has demonstrated a remarkable development that corresponds to changing circumstances, from the Eichmann trial to the First Intifada. While early examples depicted perpetrators stereotypically and minimally - as seen in Ka-Tzetnik's demonic and bestial Nazis in Salamandra and in the amorphous persecutor figures in Aharon Appelfeld's stories - since the mid-1980s these characters have been created in the human image, as nuanced and multidimensional individuals. The turning point came with Herr Neigel, the sensitive and self-contradictory commandant in David Grossman's See Under: Love (1986), followed by likewise multifaceted and humanized perpetrators in fiction by A.B. Yehoshua, Savyon Liebrecht, and Amir Gutfreund.Anchored in theoretical and comparative perspectives, Created in the Image? presents a groundbreaking analysis of the poetic mechanisms, moral implications, and historical contexts of this paradigm shift in the Israeli literary response to the Shoah.

Israeli art from the turn of the millennium is the work of movers: artists who have relocated from one country to another, more by choice than by force, and who have thus beheld and refabricated an alternative image of Israel from a perspective tied to wider transnational concerns.The Movers invites readers to a series of engagements with contemporary Israeli artworks that have grown their international presence in recent years: among them, the complex video-art productions of Yael Bartana; the ambitious sculptural installations of Gal Weinstein; the socially critical paintings of Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi; the surrealist, fabricated archives of Roee Rosen; the mystical sound drawings of Yehudit Sasportas; and the subversive home movies of Guy Ben-Ner. Noam Gal explores the roots of these pieces in the cultural and social histories of Israel, British Mandate Palestine, and the early days of the Zionist movement in Europe and North Africa to show how artists from Israel visualize their relationship to one of the most troubled landscapes in the world. Viewers can expand their perspectives on Israel, Gal suggests, by critically observing the artworks made by its inhabitants, rather than by observing the inhabitants themselves. The Movers opens a portal to appreciate these artworks as continuations of material, visual, and literary Jewish cultures before and after the founding of Zionism.Across cultural phenomena, the artistic practices Gal examines characterize a generation of artists critical of their national identity. Illustrated throughout, The Movers provides a unique lens to observe the dynamics of identification in expressions of art.