In this essay, I examine Richard Miller’s exposition of political solidarity as one of the key contributions of his multifaceted argument in Friends and Other Strangers to the study of religion, ethics, and culture. Miller’s focus on culture broadens the landscape of ethical analysis in ways that illuminate how culture and cultural productions mediate and construct norms and virtues, and the complex relations between self and society. I challenge Miller’s inclination, however, to focus scholarly attention more on habituated forms (...) of civic identity and communal solidarity rather than on disruptive potentialities and critical practices. I suggest that an engagement with social movement theory and the sociology of emotions, with their focus on semiotic analysis and social change processes and mechanisms, can greatly enrich Miller’s account of religion and ethical solidarity. (shrink)

The intersection of ethics, religion, theology, and peace studies is intensifying through increasingly multi‐disciplinary, contextual, explicitly normative scholarship. This book discussion demonstrates this claim through its profiles of an introduction to Christian ethics by Ellen Ott Marshall, a case study of the School of the Americas Watch by Kyle B. T. Lambelet, a case study of the American Jewish Palestine solidarity movement by Atalia Omer, and a global, historical study of Christian ethics by Cecilia Lynch. Though their (...) methods and subjects vary, these authors are collectively renewing a history of mutual enrichment between religious ethics and peace studies, employing theories of lived, ambivalent religion. To begin, this essay provides introductory remarks about the field of peace studies, highlighting the evolving involvement of religious actors. To conclude, it makes a plea for greater use of conflict theory and peace practice in religious ethics. (shrink)

Antisemitism is an increasingly prevalent aspect of public life in the West, both as a consequence of the growth of the far right across the board and through its mobilisation against Palestinian liberation and Palestine solidarity activism. While synagogues are targeted and far-right politicians revive ideas of Jewish global power, it is the left, Muslims, and Palestinians that are continuously constructed as the source of the current rise in hatred and violence against Jews. If historically the Marxist (...) tradition engaged actively with the so-called Jewish question, in recent decades the subject has receded from focus. This shift took place as other forms of racism – directed at Muslims, Black populations, or migrants – became the basis for reactionary politics in the West. This article argues that while some of the assumptions that underwrote classical Marxist texts on the issue have been found wanting – perhaps most notably the inevitable (or desirable) character of the trend towards assimilation – they remain important starting points for making sense of our present, both by their method and their political commitment to liberation. (shrink)

When social work emerged as a profession in the first decades of the 20th century, it was strongly influenced by emancipatory motives introduced by various sociocultural and religious movements, and at the same time devoted itself to the construction and maintenance of a powerful welfare and nation state. Transnational agents and social movements promoted these processes and played a crucial role in establishing and developing national welfare systems and relevant professional discourses. This article examines the gendered construction of the social (...) work profession through the transnational history of early social work between Germany and the Jewish community in Palestine in the first half of the 20th century. By adopting a biographical approach to the specific paths of Jewish women practitioners who had been educated in German-speaking countries, immigrated to mandatory Palestine, and engaged themselves in the emerging field of social work, we will trace the construction of the profession as deeply embedded in social power relations. At the same time, we will trace its (re)construction as led mainly by female pioneers, who were concerned with emancipation, discrimination and migration. (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This article explores the contemporary politics of global violence through an examination of the particular challenges and possibilities facing Palestinians who seek to defend their communities against an ongoing settler-colonial project (Zionism) that is approaching a crisis point. As the colonial dynamic in Israel/Palestine returns to its most elemental level – land, trees, homes – it also continues to be a laboratory for new forms of accelerated violence whose global impact (...) is hard to overestimate. In such a context, Palestinians and international solidarity activists find themselves confronting a quintessential 21 st century activist dilemma: how to craft a strategy of what Paul Virilio calls “popular defense” at a time when everyone seems to be implicated in the machinery of global violence? I argue that while this dilemma represents a formidable challenge for Palestinians, it also helps explain why the Palestinian struggle is increasingly able to build bridges with wider struggles for global justice, ecological sustainability, and indigenous rights. (shrink)

À partir de la fin des années 1880, des femmes juives participent à l’émergence d’une « conscience féministe », en Europe, aux États-Unis, puis en Palestine. Certaines d’entre elles militent au sein de mouvements généraux, d’autres contribuent à la création d’organisations ayant pour point commun de rassembler des Juives, mais par ailleurs d’une grande diversité dans leurs revendications et ses positionnements. Quelque peu négligées par l’historiographie, ces femmes juives de la fin du xixe siècle tissent des liens, par-delà les (...) frontières, et proposent un nouveau regard sur la place des femmes dans les communautés juives. Un peu en retrait à partir de la fin des années 1920, elles ouvrent néanmoins la voie à celles qui, dans les années 1960, entament un nouveau chapitre des luttes féministes, et contribuent à éclipser leurs aînées. (shrink)

_Beyond Solidarity_ is an impassioned argument for a sharable morality in a world increasingly fractured along lines of difference. Giles Gunn asks how human solidarity can be reconceived when its expressions have become increasingly exceptionalist and outmoded, and when the pressures of globalization divide as much as they unify. He finds the terms for answering these questions in a more inclusive, cosmopolitan pragmatism—one willing to explore fundamental values without recourse to absolutist arguments. Drawing on the work of William and (...) Henry James, John Dewey, Primo Levi, Richard Rorty, and many others, as well as postcolonial writing, Jewish literature of the Holocaust, and the cultural and religious experience of African Americans in slavery, Gunn points pragmatism in a transnational direction and shows how it can better account for the consequences of diversity. _Beyond Solidarity_, then, is a study of the difference that difference makes in a globalized world. (shrink)

This article expands on anthropological understandings of affect and emotion to include certain theological and religious concepts that structure and give meaning to the daily lives of religious nationalists in areas of ethnic and political conflict. In doing so, it will ethnographically explore the relationship between theological notions of sanctity and the way those notions manifest themselves in the context of contemporary Jewish religious Zionism in both Israel and the Occupied West Bank. I will argue that analyzing mystical conceptions (...) of sanctity as a distinct affect opens new areas of human experience, which anthropologists may use to better grapple with the dilemmas posed by nationalism and religious extremism in an increasingly politically fraught world. (shrink)

Scholars see Israel as a settler state, comparable with North American, South African and Oceanian cases. But how was Jewish settlement-colonization in pre-Israel Palestine even possible? In the North American, Oceanian and South African cases, European settlers did not encounter diseases like malaria that scholars argue impede settlement. Palestine, however, had high malaria morbidity rates. The disease incapacitated and killed settlers and was one of the most serious threats to Jewish settlement and political economic development. I (...) argue that the exigencies caused by malaria are exactly what fostered Jewish settlement-colonization in Palestine because they prompted the formation of socio-technical arrangements in order to combat the disease. These arrangements included, among other things, people, organizations, scientific knowledge, procedures and larvicides as well as considering the agency of mosquitos and other elements in the environment in disrupting settlement. These arrangements were marshalled by medical-national and political institutions that developed to combat malaria. Only then were Jewish settlers able to effectively colonize Palestine, make their colonies economically viable and make Palestine habitable for future Jewish immigrants. I demonstrate this argument by drawing on archival and library materials that describe the work of an important Zionist Malaria Research Unit (MRU) as well as malaria control efforts in Hefer Valley in the 1930s–1940s, after the unit’s disbandment. Then, I discuss the theoretical implications of this paper to settler-colonial and state-building literatures that, for the most part, neglected the socio-technical nature of state-building and settlement. (shrink)

This reflection on Palestine’s political impasses in relation to the experiences of other colonized places and peoples was inspired by the current ferment in critical indigenous and native studies, and now Palestinian studies, about settler colonialism. Tracing the promises and pitfalls of new imaginations of sovereignty and self-determination emerging through indigenous activism, the essay reflects on museums and contested rituals of liberal recognition in North America and Australia to highlight both the stark differences in the situations of Palestinians under (...) Israeli rule and the radical significance of the recent efflorescence of Palestinian cultural projects. Focusing particularly on the history of the Palestinian Museum (that opened in Birzeit in 2016), the article argues that the productivity of the settler-colonial framework lies less in the way it maps directly onto the situation on the ground than in the new solidarities it engenders and its potential to burst open the Palestinian political imagination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal CommunityPaul HendricksonThe University of South Carolina. Hauke Brunkhorst. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Pp. xxv + 262. $42.50, hardcover.Public appeals to solidarity have been pervasive throughout the storied history of political dissent and democratic politics. From the French Revolution and the European revolutions of 1848 to decolonization, Polish Solidarność, and the antiglobalization movement, solidarity has been invoked as (...) a means of reinventing citizenship, rights, and community. Yet political theorists have not generally accorded the concept of solidarity a degree of attention comparable to that afforded other core political concepts, such as freedom, equality, and deliberation. In Solidarity, Hauke Brunkhorst seeks to remedy this neglect, arguing that the concept of solidarity should be deemed fundamental to democratic theory and practice: "In modern societies, solidarity coincides with the concept of democracy" (xxiii). Brunkhorst presents this thesis as a corrective to current theory, but he also develops it—in the spirit of much Frankfurt School theorizing—as a Zeitdiagnose, as a timely diagnosis, regarding the threats globalization poses to democratic self-governance: "Power, law, and money are globalized [today] at the expense of democratic solidarity" (7).Solidarity, as Brunkhorst understands it, is a thoroughly modern concept. The "ideas of 1789"—in particular, the fraternité of the French Revolution—provided the historical foundation for an egalitarian and democratic model of solidarity. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the concept of solidarity [End Page 343] gradually replaced that of fraternity in the wake of industrialization. Drawing on Marx, Brunkhorst argues that what promoted working-class solidarity was "not the local sympathy of communal relations or the friendly affection... of a tightly structured polis," but rather the railway, the steamship, and the telegraph (60). Brunkhorst's historiography is woven into a broad social-theoretic framework. Following Durkheim, he reasons that the modern division of labor is not founded on the mechanical solidarity of Gemeinschaft, on a shared sense of affinity, ritual, and communal belonging, but on the organic solidarity of Gesellschaft, on the integration of an individualized, pluralist, and functionally differentiated society.To readers acquainted with contemporary German appropriations of the sociological tradition, many of Brunkhorst's conceptual moves will seem familiar. But his unique fusion of social-theoretic and historical argumentation yields a fascinating and novel characterization of solidarity. For Brunkhorst, solidarity is not a form of sentiment or emotional bond; it is not premised on compassion for "tormentable bodies" (Brecht) or on a "flexible feeling of sympathy" (Rorty); rather, "it is nothing but the democratic realization of individual freedom" (3). This normative model of solidarity is guided by the regulative ideal of a political association without domination; it envisages a polity in which the individual is neither servant nor master to her compatriots. As modes of governance become increasingly globalized, democratic forms of solidarity must reach beyond the rights traditions of particular nation-states to include a "human-rights patriotism."Brunkhorst traces this ideal back to Greco-Roman antiquity and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Drawing principally on the writings of Greek and Roman philosophers, he argues that civic friendship (philia) provided a space for mutual freedom, emancipated individuals from the bonds of kinship, generalized friendship into a form of patriotism (philia politike), and realized the universal essence of man as a political being. But this civic-republican model remained profoundly elitist, excluding the many on the basis of gender, class, and citizenship status. More suggestive and original is Brunkhorst's treatment of Jewish and Christian thought. The intersection between rhetoric and philosophy is central to his interpretation of the Exodus story and covenant theology as a form of collective countermemory and as a prophetic practice of critique. Through his reading of the Jotham fable and other biblical narratives, he argues that the Jewish prophets and the Christian New Testament avowed "the equal proximity of all humans to God" and contributed to a "prophetic project of egalitarian solidarity" (33, 36). [End Page 344]Brunkhorst's historical reconstructions culminate in the French Revolution. On his view, the otherworldly universalism of the Judeo-Christian tradition was secularized and institutionalized in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) and the first French... (shrink)

The paper represents a consideration of the influence of G.W.F. Hegel’s dialectical method on Marx’s analysis of the debate over Jewish political rights in 19th Century Germany. As a follow on, I will consider how Marx’s analytical insights and perversions on “The Jewish Ques- tion” may provide us with guidance towards an enriched understanding of the currently confounded standoff be- tween the State of Israel and the Palestinian indepen- dence movement.

WHAT COULD BE WRONG WITH SEEKING TO RESHAPE OURSELVES IN WAYS that we genuinely value? Jewish textual and cultural perspectives may add clarity and substance to the wider secular discussion of using genetic technologies for human enhancement. Judaism does not share the naturalism of Anglo-American bioethics; instead, it emphasizes covenantal responsibility for co-creation and stewardship of the body. Judaism tends to be more permissive about social uses of technology but more restrictive about personal aspirations and behavior. Enhancement technologies threaten (...) the moral universals of humility, personal responsibility, and social solidarity, which are embodied in Jewish tradition as duties to God, self, and others. The tradition demands that we seek self-perfection while humbly and cautiously acknowledging that we can never arrive at it nor even know exactly what we seek. (shrink)

What caused the eventual decline in later Jewish history of the vibrant historiographical tradition of the biblical period? In contrast to the plethora of historical writings composed during the biblical period, the rabbis of the early common era apparently were not interested in writing history, and when they did relate to historical events they often introduced mythical and unrealistic elements into their writings. Scholars have offered various explanations for this phenomenon; a central goal of this article is to locate (...) these explanations within both the immediate historical setting of Roman Palestine and the overarching cultural atmosphere of the Greco-Roman Near East. In particular, I suggest that the largely ahistorical approach of the rabbis functioned as a local Jewish counterpart to the widespread classicizing tendencies of a contemporary Greek intellectual movement, the Second Sophistic. In both cases, eastern communities, whose political aspirations were stifled under Roman rule, sought to express their cognitive and spiritual identities by focusing on a glorious and idealized past rather than on contemporary history. Interestingly, the apparent lack of rabbinic interest in historiography is not limited to the early rabbinic period. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, Jews essentially did not write their political, diplomatic, or military history. Instead, Jews composed “traditional historiography” which included various types of literary genres among which the rabbinic “chain of transmission” was the most important. The chain of transmission reconstructs the links that connect later rabbinic sages with their predecessors. Robert Bonfil has noted the similarity between this rabbinic project and contemporary church histories. Adding a diachronic dimension to Bonfil’s comparison, I suggest that rabbinic chains of transmission and church histories are not similar though entirely independent phenomena, but rather their shared project actually derives from a common origin, the Hellenistic succession list. The succession list literary genre, which sketches the history of an intellectual discipline, apparently thrived during the Second Sophistic and diffused then into both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. Thus, even though historiography was not terribly important to the early rabbis or to most Second Sophistic intellectuals, the succession list schematic, or the history of an intellectual discipline, was evaluated differently. Rabbis and early Christians absorbed the succession list from Second Sophistic culture and then continued to employ this historiographical genre for many centuries to come. (shrink)

The "surrogate colonization" of Palestine had a foreign power giving to a nonnative group rights over land occupied by an indigenous people. It thus brought into play the complementary and conflicting agendas of three culturally distinguishable parties: British, Jews and Arabs. Each party had both "externalist" [those with no sustained practical experience of day to day life in Palestine] and "internalist" representatives. The surrogate idea was based on a "strategic consensus" involving each party's externalist camp: the British ruling (...) elite, the leadership of the World Zionist Organization and the Hashemite Dynasty of Arabia. The collapse of this triangular consensus, which put an end to the policy but not the process of surrogate colonization, resulted from irreconcilable antagonisms within and between the major currents of each internalist camp. A focus on the land problem in Palestine highlights contradictions in each party's internalist agenda, which forestalled a rift between the Jewish and British sides of the consensus long enough for the Zionist settlement in Palestine to acquire territory and to develop a largely self-sufficient economic, cultural, political and military infrastructure. (shrink)

In contrast to anti-Jewish campaigns at German universities in the 19th century, which met with opposition from liberal scholars, among them prominent chemists, there was no public reaction to the dismissals in 1933. Germany had been an international leader in chemistry until the 1930s. Due to a high proportion of Jewish physicists, chemistry was strongly affected by the expulsion of scientists. Organic and inorganic chemistry were least affected, while biochemistry suffered most. Polymer chemistry and quantum chemistry, of minor (...) importance among the majority of academic chemists was further weakened by the expulsion of renowned scientists. However, a look at the research carried out in Nazi Germany shows that no field of research "emigrated" as such, except research into molecular beams. The reception of emigré chemists differed with respect to their field of research and the degree of competition in the host countries. Thus biochemists and physical chemists were accepted at American universities, whereas organic chemists were not. In contrast, they received high positions in Turkey, Palestine/Israel, and Egypt. After WWII, few emigrés were asked to come back. The delay of the resumption of international contacts by German chemists contributed to the delay in rebuilding in particular German biochemistry, the physical chemistry of polymers, and physical organic chemistry. (shrink)

This article considers the theological influences on the Balfour Declaration which was made on the 2 November 1917 and for the first time gave British governmental support to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It explores the principal personalities and political workings behind the Declaration before going on to argue the statement cannot be entirely divested from the religious sympathies of those involved, especially Lord Balfour. Thereafter, the paper explores the rise of Christian Restorationism in the (...) context of Scottish Presbyterianism, charting how the influence of Jonathan Edwards shaped the thought of Thomas Chalmers on the role of the Jews in salvation history which in turn influenced the premillennialism of Edward Irving and his Judeo-centric eschatology. The paper then considers the way this eschatology became the basis of John Darby’s premillennial dispensationalism and how in an American context this theology began to shape the thinking of Christian evangelicals and through the work of William Blackstone provide the basis of popular and political support for Zionism. However, it also argues the political expressions of premillennial dispensationalism only occurred in America because the Chicago evangelist Dwight L. Moody was exposed to the evolving thinking of Scottish Presbyterians regarding Jewish restoration. This thinking had emerged from a Church of Scotland ‘Mission of Inquiry’ to Palestine in 1839 and been advanced by Alexander Keith, Horatius Bonar and David Brown. Finally, the paper explores how this Scottish Presbyterian heritage influenced the rise of Zionism and Balfour and his political judgements. (shrink)

Rebb Binyamin (pseudonym of Yehoshua Radler-Feldman; 1880–1957) was a leading figure in movements that called for the establishment of a joint Jewish-Arab political framework in Palestine and that sharply criticized the Zionist cooperation with the British colonial authorities. In the early 1920s, he began exploring the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) as the basis for his critical approach toward the hegemonic Zionist discourse. In his writings Rebb Binyamin emphasized Gandhi’s refusal to reconcile himself to the British colonial (...) “divide and rule” policies by creating divisions between Hindus and Muslims, the Indian anticolonial struggle that he led, and the way this struggle inspired the development of anticolonial movements in the Middle East. These aspects of Gandhi’s political repertoire were considered by Rebb Binyamin as a framework for the critical discussion of the ways in which the British colonial authorities perceived the Zionist movement as their representative and pointed to the fact that the Zionist-colonial partnership was an obstacle to the crystallization of Jewish-Arab cooperation. This article focuses on the ways in which Rebb Binyamin’s reading of Gandhi served as the basis for his critique of hegemonic Zionist discourse and practices. (shrink)

This article probes the politics of the migrant caregiver/citizen-employer relationship in Palestine/israel as it unfolds within the Jewish-Israeli home. Based on interviews with migrants from the Philippines, Nepal, India and Sri Lanka and their Jewish-Israeli employers, I examine how Israel’s ethno-racially hierarchical citizenship regime and the transnational gendering and racialisation of carework manifest in this relationship. I begin by situating migrant women working as caregivers within the legal and political context of Palestine/israel, delineating how gendered constructions (...) of the Jewish-Israeli woman uphold the borders of the nation and paint non-Jewish migrant women as reproductively threatening. I then analyse two common tropes among citizen-employers in describing migrant caregivers. The first, what I term the ‘kinship trope’, characterizes them as ‘one of the family’, obscuring the ethno-racial basis of the state. I show how this trope contrasts sharply with Zionist settler colonial rhetoric portraying Jewish-Israelis as ‘one big family’. The second trope represents migrant women as individual agents of economic development and Israel as a market-driven, neoliberal society that is equally a state for all its citizens. By depicting Israel as a ‘modern’, ‘progressive’ state that is an exemplar of gender equality, this trope again masks the ethno-racial basis of citizenship, as well as gender disparities. Finally, I argue for a feminist approach to migrant carework that accounts for the ways neoliberal labour formations are mediated by gendered racisms specific to a particular state’s racial nation-building project. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's work inspires many to stand in solidarity against authoritarianism, racial or gender-based violence, climate change, and right-wing populism. But what if a careful analysis of her oeuvre reveals a darker side to this intellectual legacy? What if solidarity, as she conceives of it, is not oriented toward equality, freedom, or justice for all, but creates a barrier to intersectional coalition building? In Arendt's Solidarity, David D. Kim illuminates Arendt's lifelong struggle with this deceptively straightforward yet (...) divisive concept. Drawing upon her publications, unpublished documents, private letters, radio and television interviews, newspaper clippings, and archival marginalia, Kim examines how Arendt refutes solidarity as an effective political force against anti-Semitism, racial injustice, or social inequality. As Kim reveals, this conceptual conundrum follows the arc of Arendt's forced migration across the Atlantic and is directly related to every major concern of hers: Christian neighborly love, friendship, Jewish assimilation, Zionism, National Socialism, the American republic, Black Power, revolution, violence, and the human world. Kim places these thoughts in dialogue with dissenting voices, such as Thomas Mann, Gershom Scholem, Jean-Paul Sartre, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, James Forman, and Ralph Ellison. The result is a full-scale reinterpretation of Arendt's oeuvre. (shrink)

The topic of Hannah Arendt's Jewish identity can be approached from many directions. This chapter considers Arendt in the context of the vision of world history articulated by her teacher and mentor Karl Jaspers, in which her people, the Jews of Palestine, were considered as one of the “Axial Age” peoples. It argues that it is Arendt's Jewish identity—not just the identity she asserted in defending herself as a Jew when attacked as one, but more deeply her (...) connection to the Axial Age prophetic tradition—that made her the cosmopolitan she was, while Jaspers's cosmopolitanism was more learned than inherited and reinforced by group experience. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article focuses on the specific ways in which Zionist scientists studying malaria in Mandatory Palestine presented their work to international scientific circles, moving between the transnational aspects and the local aspects of their work on malaria while suffusing that work with nationalist meanings. This slippery yet seemingly unproblematic movement between the general and the specific, between the colonial world and Palestine, was a necessary mechanism of scientific exchange. In the Zionist case the work on malaria for these (...) scientists was both a marker of their belief in progress and also a sign of their devotion to a specific political and social project. The knowledge imparted by Zionist malariologists and the international reception it received lent scientific legitimacy to the Zionist project while it advanced the goals of settling the land and defining the communal borders within Palestine between the Arab population and the Jewish one. In this way, the Zionist anti-malaria project in Palestine holds a unique place in malaria research of the time. (shrink)

This chapter evaluates the use of rabbinic literature in the study of the history of Christianity in Roman Palestine. It explains that this issue goes back to medieval Jewish-Christian controversy and intertwines with the whole history of the reception of the Talmud in Europe and the western world. It suggests that the view that Christians are most often envisaged in the rabbinic references to minim is consistent with the likelihood that Christianity is envisaged in a number of rabbinic (...) and targumic passages which do not mention minim. (shrink)

This article focuses on land rights, land law, and land administration within a multilayered colonial setting by examining a major land dispute in British-ruled Palestine. Our research reveals that the Mandate legal system extinguished indigenous rights to much land in the Zor al-Zarqa and Barrat Qisarya regions through its use of "colonial law"--the interpretation of Ottoman law by colonial officials, the use of foreign legal concepts, and the transformation of Ottoman law through supplementary legislation. However, the colonial legal system (...) was also the site of local resistance by some Palestinian Arabs attempting to remain on their land in the face of the pressure of the Mandate authorities and Jewish colonization officials. This article sheds light on the dynamics of the Mandate legal system and colonial law in the realm of land tenure relations. It also suggests that the joint efforts of Mandate and Jewish colonization officials to appropriate land and undertake "development" operations in the area were fueled by neither the interests of colonial rule nor those of Jewish colonization alone, but, rather, by the integrated impact of both forces. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 26, Issue 1, pp 118 - 147 This paper challenges the widespread emphasis on the absence of God in post- Holocaust historiography, theology, and art by suggesting that Barnett Newman’s _Stations of the Cross_ may have been conceived under the theological category of the apophatic rather than the aesthetic category of the sublime. This paper focuses on the “anti-realist” position of Newman and other artists for whom the Holocaust necessitated a renewed aniconic tendency in Jewish aesthetics. (...) His work, I suggest, holds out a tension between absolute absence and redemptive presence that at once resists and affirms a negative aesthetic of God’s solidarity with suffering. (shrink)

The prevailing discourse in Israeli academia on justifying the values of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” takes the form of a debate involving questions of group rights of a national minority, as in any liberal democracy. The framework of this discourse relies on three interconnected, hegemonic assertions. These assertions assume the applicability of equal individual rights, put aside the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as irrelevant for the “Jewishness” of the state as it belongs to (...) a different rule of recognition, and conceptualize the Green Line based on majority-minority relations with Jewish group rights, including the Law of Return, as not leading to discrimination against individuals. I contend that these assertions are invalid and that colonialism is the relevant framework of Israel’s constitutional identity in Palestine (the Green Line, the West Bank including Jerusalem and Gaza). I argue there is one Constitution in Palestine based on one conception of sovereignty, regardless of any rules of recognition where the Law of Return, together with the value of “preserving a Jewish majority,” constitutes its very essence that targets the Palestinians as such. The Article presents a case-law study regarding family life between spouses and their children in Palestine. This case-law reveals an unfamiliar phenomenon. Unlike the plurality of written laws that characterize colonial regimes, the Israeli legal system introduces a unique model in which racial domination is created mostly by decisionism of the Court, out of the written laws and regardless of any rule of recognition. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 26, Issue 1, pp 118 - 147 This paper challenges the widespread emphasis on the absence of God in post- Holocaust historiography, theology, and art by suggesting that Barnett Newman’s _Stations of the Cross_ may have been conceived under the theological category of the apophatic rather than the aesthetic category of the sublime. This paper focuses on the “anti-realist” position of Newman and other artists for whom the Holocaust necessitated a renewed aniconic tendency in Jewish aesthetics. (...) His work, I suggest, holds out a tension between absolute absence and redemptive presence that at once resists and affirms a negative aesthetic of God’s solidarity with suffering. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars of Jewish politics have invested political hopes in the revival of “political imagination.” If only we could recapture some of the imaginativeness that early Zionists displayed when wrestling with questions of regime design, it is argued, we might be able to advance more compelling “solutions” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet how does one cultivate political imagination? Curiously, scholars who rehearse the catalogue of regimes that Jews have historically entertained seldom pose this question. In this Article, (...) I revisit a historical episode—the appropriation of diasporic historical narratives by Zionists in mandatory Palestine—in an effort to cultivate a richer political imaginary. I analyze the labor Zionist deployment of Simon Dubnow’s influential master narrative, focusing on a 1926 speech in which David Ben Gurion depicts the autonomist regime that he advocates as a variation upon diasporic political practices. On my reading, this episode illustrates the dilemmas that confront thinkers who invest political hopes in regime design. To realize the promise that new political configurations may emerge from reflections upon Jewish history, I argue, we must develop a new account of political agency, once foundational assumptions of the nation-state have been suspended. (shrink)

Globalization, in its earlier stages, was expected to erode national and ethnic identities. In contrast, ethnicity and ethnic affiliations persisted, growing socially and politically. This paper examines the role of the globalizing new communications technologies on this process, focusing on Diasporas. The study of trans-state networks based on ethnic solidarity, connections and affinities in the framework of social and political science is quite recent. Following a clarification of the distinction between classical and modern Diasporas we analyse a particular case (...) study, that of the Jewish Diaspora. This diaspora was an early adopter of computer-based communications and the Internet for a wide range of purposes. Early events are described including the diffusion of the Internet to Israel, the planning of a Global Jewish Information Network, Israel 2020 macro scenarios for Israel and the Jewish People and the decision on Jewish Peoplehood through communication technologies. A survey of historical systems follows by a description of the Jewish population and the wide variety of Jewish Web based activities today. These include the Institutional landscape; Jewish media — press, radio, video and blogs; the impact on Jewish religious observance; Jewish genealogy; Online dating; Social networks; Jewish education; Online learning; Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities; Jewish memory. Judaica Europeana supports the activities previously described by aggregating and facilitating the access and the re-use of Jewish digital culture. Europeana is the leading global digital library for cultural heritage as well as a lively eco-system for relevant stakeholders. (shrink)

SummaryJudith Montefiore's life has attracted attention principally by association with that of her husband Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885), the pre-eminent Jewish figure of his age. This article emphasises instead Judith's pioneering role as a Jewish woman travel-writer and influential female voice in the world of Jewish letters and international Jewish politics. To Jews in the Holy Cities of Palestine and the ghettos and shtetls of Eastern Europe, Judith was—like her husband—a beacon of hope, an example (...) to follow and an instrument of change. Her activities drew on a rich vein of Jewish tradition and a series of profound encounters with Middle Eastern and, to a lesser extent, Eastern European Jewries, which shaped her spiritual world. These paradoxes are easily conceptualised by the contrast between Judith's different worlds: the Jewish world that underpinned her marriage, structured her spirituality and infused her life with meaning, and the world of the English gentry and dissenting middle classes, with whom she mixed socially, and whose spiritual style, values, expectations, and mode of life shaped her in other, equally profound ways. This article argues, however, that it was the interaction and cross-fertilisation between these different worlds that enabled Judith to carve her distinctive path in life. (shrink)

The question of the use of force and its relation to political power has resurfaced in an era of terror attacks and wars against terror. The liberal conceptualization of this relation is limited by the bipolar understanding of force as either legitimate or illegitimate. Turning to the history of the Irgun, a Jewish underground movement, and its struggle against the British Empire in 1947 Palestine, this article seeks to expand the understanding of force beyond the liberal paradigm. The (...) article offers a new model for understanding the use of force by the liberal nation-state and distinguishes between four different modes of force: violence, legality, terror, and empire. Whereas the liberal paradigm is limited to a conception of force as either justified and, hence, just, or unjustified and, hence, unjust, one may think of two additional forms of force, which, at first, may seem paradoxical: the unjust but justified force of terror and the force of empire, which is just but not in need of justification. Rather than using these forms as stable categories, the article seeks to understand the ways in which the uses of force became destabilized in times of political contestation. The article concludes by pointing out the broader implications of this model for the political analysis of the liberal nation-state and its use of force. (shrink)

In this article, I consider a set of contextual questions related to the social and economic influences on the construction and use of Capernaum’s great limestone synagogue, and ask what these influences might tell us about Jewish–Christian relations in this village during the fifth and sixth centuries CE. After a survey of current scholarship, I address issues of method and engage in the interpretation of the relevant primary sources, some of which have only very recently been discov­ered, while others (...) have been overlooked in discussion of the question, or are deserving of reinterpret­ation. Building upon previous proposals, and in places revising them, I argue that we should see a dynamic interplay at work between local and non-local sources of funding for the synagogue and an intensely interactive and relational setting for the town’s Jews and Christians. (shrink)

A recently published collection of articles focuses upon a relatively small group of texts dealing mainly with astronomical calculations and omens as well as physiognomic omens, attempting to use these as a basis for reconstructing ancient Jewish science in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. The present review raises questions regarding the aims and methods employed, offering an alternative suggestion for the transfer of technical knowledge from Babylonia to ancient Palestine.

ABSTRACTPart of a comprehensive study to analyse British broadsheets’ coverage of the First Gaza War, this paper examines the moral arguments presented in editorials. Doing so, it showcases a non-dualist, relational inquiry of the representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead of focusing on what is empirically ‘true’, morally ‘right’, and ethnically ‘Israeli/jewish’ or ‘Palestinian/arab’ as extra-discursive categories, it approaches them as discursive constructions and asks what relations, what forms of lives the editorials cultivate in representing them. The analysis demonstrates (...) that whilst newspapers overwhelmingly imagine isolated and ahistorical essences to clash in Palestine-Israel, they do not exclusively do so. Traces of a discourse of relations, where ‘I’ is partly constituted by the ‘Other’ can also be found in the editorials. It is with the vicissitudes of such relational accounts that the article concludes. (shrink)

Modern universities have largely been portrayed in the literature as an extension of nation building projects, focusing on the state as primary actor. This article challenges such presuppositions by separating ‘nation’ and ‘state’ and with a critical appropriation of diasporic subjectivity and institutions from a comparative historical perspective. The article has four themes: ‘diaspora’, ‘ethnic internationalism’, ‘stateless nations’ and ‘internationalisation’ in higher education (IHE). It illustrates these themes and their interrelationships by considering Koreans in the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945) and (...) Jews during the British Mandate for Palestine (1920–1948) and construing them as stateless nations. These two historical cases illustrate how higher education was linked to ethnonational diasporas and internationalisation in the absence of a supportive state apparatus. The paradox is that ethnic nationalism was not only compatible but often overlapped with ethnic internationalism in higher education. The conclusion of this comparative study suggests the implications for the twenty-first century and the important role of diaspora in processes of IHE then and now. (shrink)

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt actively engaged in the problem of a Jewish homeland and the politics of Zionism in the years 1941–1948. She advocated a Binational solution to Palestine – a single political commonwealth with two national identities, Jewish and Arab, integrated in a federation with other countries in the region. In the crucial period leading up to the establishment of the State of Israel, Arendt became increasingly disillusioned with the Jewish Agency and the Zionist (...) movement for failing to organize a Jewish response to Nazism (a Jewish Army) and rejecting the Palestinian right to a homeland. (shrink)

The curious name of Golgotha, and its translations provided by the evangelists, became a focal point for interpretation, opening the door for new Christological concepts to become affixed to it. As these novel Christological interpretations accrued around Golgotha, they would eventually crystallise, and become a fixed part of the commemoration of Jesus in Palestine. Starting with Origen, third and fourth century Christian authors strongly associate the place of Jesus’s crucifixion with the burial place of Adam.

The legitimacy of the Zionist project--establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine--has been questioned since its inception. In recent years, the voices challenging the legitimacy of the State of Israel have become even louder. Chaim Gans examines these doubts and presents an in-depth, evenhanded philosophical analysis of the justice of Zionism.