Omri Ben Yehuda

Critique of Elad Lapidot’s Jews Out of the Question. I argue that Lapidot’s specular gesture of the anti-anti, is in itself entrapped by the same circle it criticizes. That entrapment has colonial - or rather Eurocentric - implications as well.

In its first season, Israeli television thriller Fauda proclaimed an utter symmetry between Israel "proper" and its Occupied Territories, by humanizing Hamas militants and treating them as equals to the Israeli characters. Throughout the story the Jewish warrior's body becomes a site for the detonation of explosives and a potential vehicle for suicide bombings, in a false but intriguing reenactment of the trauma of the second intifada, which has been repressed in Israeli consciousness. In this unwitting manifestation of Jewish martyrdom, the façade of the rule of law in the State of Israel is dismantled in what seems like a religious battle between clans. The discourse of pain in the series suggests a stream of constant retribution in a vicious circle that can never histori-cize the allegedly eternal conflict and work through its traumatic residues. Nonetheless, this dynamic of retribution and martyrdom also informs a multilayered structure whereby the secular, modern Jew returns to his roots by engaging with Arabness in the theatre of mistaʿaravim: in becoming Arab he also becomes, finally, a Jew.

This article juxtaposes two very different poets who share Jewish literatures' gesture of facing trauma throughout the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Notwithstanding differences of sex, generation, language and canonization, Paul Celan’s maintenance of his mother tongue and Amira Hess's immersion in the Hebrew language as a young immigrant, the two poets function as mirror images of the challenges of Jewish identity and of the relations between poetical language and its references. This comparative study suggests similarities in the way poetic verses do not succumb to closure and unity but instead take the fluidity and additive speech literature offers into its extremes. The poetics of heteroglossia shared by both authors are bold confrontations with the process of annihilation, differences and understanding of the Shoah in the context of colonial oppression. The position of the witness of trauma is examined less as an essential paradigm and more as a meditation on whether every act of testimony is also an act of appropriation.

The resurgence of religion calls for careful analysis and constructive criticism of new forms of intolerance, as well as new approaches to tolerance, respect, mutual understanding , and accommodation. in order to promote serious scholarship and informed debate, the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life and Columbia University Press are sponsoring a book series devoted to the investigation of the role of religion in society and culture today. This series includes works by scholars in religious studies, political science, history, cultural anthropology, economics, social psychology, and other allied fields whose work sustains multidisciplinary and comparative as well as transnational analyses of historical and contemporary issues. The series focuses on issues related to questions of difference, identity, and practice within local, national, and international contexts. Special attention is paid to the ways in which religious traditions encourage conflict, violence, and intolerance and also support human rights, ecumenical values, and mutual understanding. By mediating alternative methodologies and different religious , social, and cultural traditions, books published in this series will open channels of communication that facilitate critical analysis. For the complete list of books in this series, see page 405 The Holocaust and the T1, Takba

Israeli television series have received remarkable international acclaim in recent years. In this article I examine the political implications of this success in
terms of the West’s suspicious and hostile imagining of Islam, and the way in
which the Jew – and the Israeli as the embodiment of a new Jew – performs
the role of a liminal figure of mediation. I seek to unravel these tensions while
arguing that during the last decade – a period defined by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rule – Israeli cultural representation experienced a significant
paradigmatic shift exemplified in its unflinching confrontation with the violent reality of Jewish sovereign existence in the Middle East. In relinquishing
the conventions of psychological-drama in its representations of the crises of
conscience and moral dilemmas plaguing the warrior, Israeli culture rejected
one of the symbols of its self-perception, that of “shooting and crying,” in
favor of a blunter confrontation with its own violence. In this article I suggest
an approach to reading classic literary texts (by S. Yizhar and Yehuda Amichai)
and current televisual representations of political conflict and warfare that focuses particularly on the way these texts justify violence: either by portraying
the warrior as a victim, or as an outcast possessing special sensitivities, or lastly,
as the one who finally acts out the traumatic violence between Arabs and Jews
by shooting, and this time, by shooting and killing.

Twenty years after his monumental Gate of the Sun, Elias Khoury returns to the Nakba in Children of the Ghetto, evoking it through a more powerful allusion to the Holocaust already apparent in its title. I argue that revisiting the Palestinian trauma, in a complex confrontation with literature, testimony and accountability, is the outcome of a protracted and exhausting failure to reach out and find a listener. Paradoxical as this may seem, it is the novel' s deficiencies of excessive speech and monologism

In this study I confront the work of Thomas Mann with the Jewish question in order to examine the relationship between literary (human) agency and the inferior margins that enable it: those creatures who do not share the language of (the European and civilized) man. Through a reading of several of Mann's narratives that concern the relationship between human beings and animals as well as texts by Jewish authors, Kafka in German and Agnon in Hebrew, I seek to shed light on the concept of 'animality,' a term that implies continuity between the human and the animal, thereby laying bare man's political precariousness and fragility and aligning the human with the creature by exposing the body. Based on my reading of Mann's figuration of the dog in the early story "Tobias Mindernickel" (1898), the novella Herr und Hund (1917), and his Jewish mythical depiction of the biblical Joseph as a dog in Joseph und seine Brüder (1933-1943), I argue that Mann's humanism is limited in that it guards against the mimetic alignment of man with other creatures by portraying the (often muted) creaturely object of the literary depiction as an inferioralbeit frequently admirablebeing. By contrasting Mann's treatment of this question with Jewish literature's complete immersion in the animal, I suggest how descriptive speech identifies orientalism as a form of descriptive knowledge, thus clarifying as well the process whereby the modern European nation-state was consolidated by its invisible margins. The article thus suggests that literary description is a means to differentiate and gain agency by adhering to language's elevated and hierarchical terms.

In this article, I offer a reading of Agnon's work, and especially his classic Zionist novel Tmol shilshom (Only Yesterday), from the perspective of cultural and historical analysis. It is my contention that cultural reading will significantly enhance the scholarship of racism and antisemitism that his works address. Reading Tmol shilshom in this fashion affords theoretical and cultural insight into the genealogy and assimilation experiences of the beast (the dog) and the Jew-two figures that challenge the idea of the modern nation by contesting the very possibility of abstraction and symbolism that the national and humanistic imagination enables. I offer a tentative look at the way in which discourse performs identity through violence, that is, differentiation and exclusion. I seek to show that the novel Tmol shilshom, written during the Holocaust, combines the colonial experience with the Jewish one, employing a signifier that never renders a coherent symbol and therefore always highlights difference, reluctant to be submerged by any worldview.

On 10 May 1994, a month-long stand-off in the Israeli town of Yehud ended when a police sniper shot and killed an armed man and the police stormed the barricaded compound. This was not the first time that Israeli security forces faced an armed group in a stand-off. However, this was the first time that the group was Jewish. However, the besieged compound was less of a garrison than it was a site of protest. It was the private home of Rabbi Uzi Meshulam, where he and several dozens of his followers barricaded themselves and refused to come out. The gates were adorned with posters and artful displays made for onlookers and for the media, which reported on the happenings daily. Provisions were brought inside

"In Quest of Du" is a literary comparative analysis of how dialogue in several Jewish literatures (in Hebrew, German and Aramaic) forms presence, concealment and attachments. By carefully reading the exchange between Abraham and Isaac in Genesis, the priest and Josef K. in The Trail, the rabbi and the tsaddiq in "The Hidden Tsaddiq" and several liturgical verses between the prayer and his addressee, God, the article suggests new theoretical insights for understanding performance in literature, and through that, the poetics and ideological deficiencies of Jewish literature. Alongside these dialogues, the article also explores literary and linguistics approaches to pronouns and their presence, German-Jewish philosophy of dialogism and its resonance in the work of Levinas and Derrida, delving again into literature's ability to forge links by way of dialogues, but also into dialogue's limits.