Eco-feminism, cultural study and the environment coalesce in the form of poetic cultural commentary, originally field notes. I draw exclusively from my years in the Alaskan Arctic among the Iñupiaq Eskimo, who call themselves “the People... more
Eco-feminism, cultural study and the environment coalesce in the form of poetic cultural commentary, originally field notes. I draw exclusively from my years in the Alaskan Arctic among the Iñupiaq Eskimo, who call themselves “the People of the Whale.” The striking and severe natural environment, a landscape of endless ice, is central to the poetry, which richly portrays a vision of the Arctic absent from tourist travel guides, National Geographic and anthropological volumes. These magazines vend the Far North’s beautiful austerity, including at times the physical beauty of its animal inhabitants, including humans, while disregarding human specificity and violence in the Arctic—aspects inherent to every culture. This article remarks on the cultural tourism and ethnographic subjectivity employed in commercial travel writing, and endeavours to present a more comprehensive view of today’s Arctic environment.
Field notes area a form of environmental writing which underly ethnographic writing but are rarely published. Typically, ethnographic “write-up” takes place when research concludes—sometimes years after the study was conducted—developed from, or written as, fieldwork journals; it therefore sustains immediacy and integrity of intention. Such writing participates in symbolic anthropology but additionally acknowledges fieldworkers’ sense of self and play. Instead of censoring data in order to extirpate subjectivity, singularity and/or sexuality, the ethnographer voices thoughts, feelings, and images evoked in the field as expressive writing.
Field notes area a form of environmental writing which underly ethnographic writing but are rarely published. Typically, ethnographic “write-up” takes place when research concludes—sometimes years after the study was conducted—developed from, or written as, fieldwork journals; it therefore sustains immediacy and integrity of intention. Such writing participates in symbolic anthropology but additionally acknowledges fieldworkers’ sense of self and play. Instead of censoring data in order to extirpate subjectivity, singularity and/or sexuality, the ethnographer voices thoughts, feelings, and images evoked in the field as expressive writing.
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Viktor Klemperer & The Language of the Third Reich. Philological Quarterly (Spring 2007): 129-133.
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Book review of Charlotte Salomon: Life or Theatre? (eds. Michael Steinberg and Monica Bohm-Duchen). Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2008): 2136-240.
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Expressive voice article combining autobiographical poetry and prose narrative about life and politics in the Arctic
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Peer reviewed review of the new book Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? by Michael Berenbaum. One of my earlier reviews, for which I currently lack citation. I include it here because the book... more
Peer reviewed review of the new book Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? by Michael Berenbaum. One of my earlier reviews, for which I currently lack citation. I include it here because the book is still well worth reading, and of course because there is still Holocaust denial and revisionism.
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Peer reviewed book review of “On Interpretation in the Arts” (ed. Nurit Yaari). Theatre Research International. Vol. 26, No. 2 (July 2001): 217-8. This review has frequently been requested over the years, and an original version of the... more
Peer reviewed book review of “On Interpretation in the Arts” (ed. Nurit Yaari). Theatre Research International. Vol. 26, No. 2 (July 2001): 217-8.
This review has frequently been requested over the years, and an original version of the short article has just been located. My apologies to all those who asked for it over the years.
This review has frequently been requested over the years, and an original version of the short article has just been located. My apologies to all those who asked for it over the years.
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“Painting a New Picture of American Jewry.” A Portrait of the American Jewish Community. (Norman Linzer, et al.) Reconstruction (Fall 2003): Vol. 3, No. 4. http://reconstruction.eserver.org/BReviews/revPortaitAm.html. [site no longer... more
“Painting a New Picture of American Jewry.” A Portrait of the American Jewish Community. (Norman Linzer, et al.) Reconstruction (Fall 2003): Vol. 3, No. 4. http://reconstruction.eserver.org/BReviews/revPortaitAm.html. [site no longer functional]
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Peer reviewed book review of The Meeting: An Auschwitz Survivor Confronts an SS Physician (by Bernhard Frankfurter, trans. Susan E. Cernyak-Spatz). Journal of Genocide Research. Vol. 3, No. 3 (2001): 478-481.
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Peer reviewed book review of Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People (by Max Weinreich). Journal of Genocide Research. Vol. 4, No. 2 (2002): 286-288. (This is a reprint of my earlier... more
Peer reviewed book review of Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People (by Max Weinreich). Journal of Genocide Research. Vol. 4, No. 2 (2002): 286-288.
(This is a reprint of my earlier published review)
(This is a reprint of my earlier published review)
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Peer reviewed book review of Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People (by Max Weinreich). Journal of Genocide Research. Vol.4, No.3 (2002): 465-467.
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Peer reviewed book review of Resisting the Holocaust. (ed. Ruby Rohrlich). Journal of Genocide Research Vol. 4, No. 3 (2002): 468-471.
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(Probably my first) peer reviewed book review of The Holocaust in American Life. (by Peter Novick). Journal of Genocide Research Vol. 5, No. 1 (2003): 167-170.
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Peer reviewed book review of Visual Culture and the Holocaust (ed. Barbie Zelizer). Journal of Genocide Research Vol. 8, No. 3 (2006): 364-366.
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Book review of The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? (eds. Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum). Journal of Genocide Research Vol. 8, No. 3 (2006): 367-370.
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Book review of Charlotte Salomon: Life or Theatre? (eds. Michael Steinberg and Monica Bohm-Duchen). Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2008): 2136-240.
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This short article reviews the newly released book Integrated Care for the Traumatized: A Whole-Person Approach (2019). The volume defines and advocates integrated care for traumatized individuals and communities, emphasizing war-related... more
This short article reviews the newly released book Integrated Care for the Traumatized: A Whole-Person Approach (2019). The volume defines and advocates integrated care for traumatized individuals and communities,
emphasizing war-related trauma. It is not a traditional trauma textbook but an exploration of trauma in cultural and social contexts, informed by deep practice. Philosophical and methodological approaches offer research insights to trauma experts and experienced practitioners.
emphasizing war-related trauma. It is not a traditional trauma textbook but an exploration of trauma in cultural and social contexts, informed by deep practice. Philosophical and methodological approaches offer research insights to trauma experts and experienced practitioners.
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... Brit milah's positioning in the penis decrees the masculine construct of the Abramic covenant; by custom ... in embodied events, even as women adopt and re-gender Jewish enactments,performing as Gd ... of the Command to Abraham... more
... Brit milah's positioning in the penis decrees the masculine construct of the Abramic covenant; by custom ... in embodied events, even as women adopt and re-gender Jewish enactments,performing as Gd ... of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice: The Akedah, trans ...
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Sophocles’ Sphinx fortuitously re-designs Oedipus’ path, prefiguring marriage and siring of step-siblings, ironically questioning Oedipus’ sudden appearance in Thebes. This riddle Oedipus answers generically. Conflating female and... more
Sophocles’ Sphinx fortuitously re-designs Oedipus’ path, prefiguring marriage and siring of step-siblings, ironically questioning Oedipus’ sudden appearance in Thebes. This riddle Oedipus answers generically. Conflating female and monster, the nameless Sphinx represents classical femaleness reviled as social disease. Hunted from the narrative, she symbolises the seminal absence of Woman in Western mythos. Were we to block the Riddle scene, we would be confronted with an un(for)seen problem: the female monster, featured prominently as proof of Oedipus’ heroism and the successful cracking of a monstrous code, is never seen. Not having seen the essential encounter between man and monster, perhaps we have misunderstood the point. Past Oedipal study concentrates upon sexuality to the exclusion of Oedipus’ pre-sexual adolescence, the crucial marking that named him. I suggest exhumation of Oedipus’ wounded body and the restoring of a lost tradition of mythic storytelling: Oedipus moves us by moving. Modern performance analysis now “points” towards ancient revelations. The meaning in Oedipus’ body, and how it particularly responds to the Riddle, is the crux of our missing scene.
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Jameson couples the genres of science fiction and utopian novels, describing their joint historical emergence in the 19th century. It is true that conventional science fiction narratives, like conventional utopian narratives, feature... more
Jameson couples the genres of science fiction and utopian novels, describing their joint historical emergence in the 19th century. It is true that conventional science fiction narratives, like conventional utopian narratives, feature nations of men, politically and psychologically in charge of nonexistent realms. The difference between the genres is that in utopias the men of the future tend to look philosophically at the stars, whereas in science fiction men raid them for consumer capital. I recognize this as a simplistic interpretation, but feel it may resonate with feminist readers who experience wonder at the stories' imaginative plots and settings, but not at their politics. For in this regard science fiction novels do not depart from life on Earth, where male governance is taken for granted. In these fictions male control is presented as the desirable option given the alternative of extraterrestrial beings (male in construction if not countenance, and ever eager to take over the Western world) who must invariably be subjugated, like their earthly counterparts, women included.
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This is about metaphor, which is to say, about nothing, but nothing which is like something, or rather is something, “like” signalling a simile. Metaphor is the evocation of something, a step which makes us stumble towards something else,... more
This is about metaphor, which is to say, about nothing, but nothing which is like something, or rather is something, “like” signalling a simile. Metaphor is the evocation of something, a step which makes us stumble towards something else, something which had not previously existed. A figure of speech, science fiction. The generation of “as” in the absence of “like,” conception in the death of meaning.
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< 1> A Portrait of the American Jewish Community seems at first a contemporary, informed attempt to answer the old-and, for Jews, imperative-question," What is a Jew?" And in the leading chapter Norman Linzer does project... more
< 1> A Portrait of the American Jewish Community seems at first a contemporary, informed attempt to answer the old-and, for Jews, imperative-question," What is a Jew?" And in the leading chapter Norman Linzer does project the" changing nature of Jewish identity," with ...
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Research Interests: Psychology and Forgetting
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The present investigation of gender dystopia in the traditional kibbutz draws from the available socio-political and philosophical scholarship, journalistic accounts of kibbutz events, and these novels. This is an attempt to fairly... more
The present investigation of gender dystopia in the traditional kibbutz draws from the available socio-political and philosophical scholarship, journalistic accounts of kibbutz events, and these novels. This is an attempt to fairly illustrate the intellectual ambitions and achievements of the Israeli kibbutz without ignoring its ultimate failure to bring about gender equity. In support of this take on gender hierarchy, Meir Shalev’s The Blue Mountain (2001) and Batya Gur’s police detective novel Murder on a Kibbutz: A Communal Case (1994) reflect a lost world—founded, like Plato’s Republic, on a myth of innocence—in which a seedier view of the kibbutz family presents itself.
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Faced with student hostility to the idea of writing, and lack of basic compositional skills, the instructor collaboratively re-designed a first-year course in (reading) literature. The result was a highly successful course that integrated... more
Faced with student hostility to the idea of writing, and lack of basic compositional skills, the instructor collaboratively re-designed a first-year course in (reading) literature. The result was a highly successful course that integrated writing with reading, and a radical shift in teaching philosophy to accommodate new understandings of learning. The paper offers strategies, assignments, assessments and results. Staff developers occupy uncertain ground in relation to the curriculum content designed by academic teachers, at times little more than helpless observers, sometimes constructive critics and occasionally co-creators. Much depends on the attitude of the academic teacher because there are no sharply defined boundaries in this relationship and the character of the partnership must be negotiated individually. New Zealand, however, Emerson (2006) has demonstrated the benefits for students of collaboration between an external writing developer and teachers in an academic discipline. This paper documents the collaboration in teaching and learning literature that evolved from discussions between an academic teacher and a staff developer in New Zealand. The initial focus is on the process that prompted course changes in a first-year literature course. The material involved was dramatic literature, but the teacher’s approach might be appropriated to other materials (including non-literary disciplines). The paper outlines the course re-design, foregrounding the development of student writing, and considers issues in its implementation. Finally, the paper evaluates the course changes, assessing the course impact on development of student thinking and writing, and fidelity to key theoretical principles. The collaborative endeavour is also critically scrutinised. Published as “The Singular Project of Reading and Writing.” In collaboration with Dorothy Spiller. Academic Exchange Quarterly. Summer 2012, Vol. 16, No. 2. 1-8.
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The eponymous Eve of Eve's Tattoo acquires a tattoo based on a photograph of an anonymous woman from Auschwitz. New York writer Eve Flick seeks to memorialize all victims of Nazi genocide by performing their death stories, but instead... more
The eponymous Eve of Eve's Tattoo acquires a tattoo based on a photograph of an anonymous woman from Auschwitz. New York writer Eve Flick seeks to memorialize all victims of Nazi genocide by performing their death stories, but instead plays out her own personal and political dramas before a backdrop of contemporary U.S. concerns, urban chic, and German reunification. Emily Prager's contemporary novel interrogates the Judeophobia prevalent in the most artistic and educated of milieux. The novel exemplifies a postmodern malaise I call the " Holocaust reader." The " Holocaust reader" actively pursues an empathic obsession with victims (and sometimes survivors) of the Shoah. The syndrome is ontologically "postmodern" in its pathology, as the "Holocaust reader" reads the Shoah as a secondary or tertiary text, and projects herself into the literature of torture and gratuitous death. Let your absence be the latest shape of your being felt forever. -Rilke When Eve Flick acquires a tattoo at die age of forty, she does not choose a butterfly, rose, or dragon to curl around her shoulder. Eve's tattoo resembles that of an unknown woman murdered at Auschwitz, matched to a photograph found hidden in the recesses of her boyfriend's closet; the tattoo is placed on her left forearm, six small numbers from a dead stranger. Why was this photograph in the closet, and what does Eve mean by transferring a dead woman's Ka-Tzetnik number onto her own limb? Eve intends to memorialize Hitler's female victims, to create archetypal death narratives, postmodern performances of memory. Around the imagined name "Eva," Eve invents myriad fictional selves, fragments of horrible truth. The brave, stupid gesture of emblazoning Auschwitz on her arm initiates a spiritual journey as Eve hunts for the nameless woman she desires to embody. But she does not glimpse the decadent Gentile European body she has actually conjured from silence - a body that gives voice to racist and homophobic hatred in the name of a "living," loving god. Content in North American privilege and a generation away from war, Eve's painful dramas of private alienation, public betrayal, and self-denial testify to the contemporary allure of Nazism. Nazism exerts a dangerous fascination in these times, not least because of its association with the erotic. Nazi symbolism elides in the simplistic shapes of monster and maiden, discolours Jewish lives, whitens Gentile lives. In the twenty-first century, Nazism inspires the decor of Asian restaurants, fashions on Milanese catwalks, costumes of famous rock stars, national prize-winning novels, tags of Polish gangs.1 The resonance of Nazism with postmodernism governs a brisk market in secret photos, Judenstern crisp with age, Nazi china, shrivels of Torah scrolls reduced to swastikas. Fifteen years ago I handled a silver soupspoon with an incised lightning bolt of the SS, touched the dim dent made in its bowl by SS teeth. Hate memorabilia is very good business. You can buy it on the internet if you can't make it to the conferences, meetings, trade fairs, and club dinners where such goods are brokered, along with concentration camp uniforms, prisoners' tools, Jewish talismans, soap, flesh, and other Nazi family heirlooms. The Jewish Holocaust, the Shoah,2 has become a commodity, something to consume, to want, to want to possess. Emily Prager's novel Eve's Tattoo3 forms the basis of my exploration of Holocaust consumption, the visitation of a neo-trauma on the Jewish body. This insightful novel shapes my discussion of performance and embodiment, the iconography of the Ka-Tzetnik (concentration camp) tattoo, the Nazi erotic and the dangers of Holocaust consumption. Performing the Jewish Woman The central character of Eve's Tattoo is Eve Flick, a tony New York magazine writer known for her witty, acerbic pen. In Eve's mind, "memorialization" is not die same thing as "immortalization"; the dead live in, rather than apart from, Eve, who incorporates the narrative. …
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Under the Third Reich, concepts of Geopolitik and Lebensraum were redefined. The Nazi Party developed Nazisprache, a coded, convoluted vocabulary used to describe, delimit and eventually destroy undesirable populations (primarily Jews,... more
Under the Third Reich, concepts of Geopolitik and Lebensraum were redefined. The Nazi Party developed Nazisprache, a coded, convoluted vocabulary used to describe, delimit and eventually destroy undesirable populations (primarily Jews, Gypsies, mentally ill, disabled ...
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... The most vivid and inspiring contribution comes from Deb Margolin, co-founder of the company Split Britches and the only non-teacher ... Hadassah Shani brings a fresh cinematic perspective to Euripidean reflexivity; eclectic Gabriel... more
... The most vivid and inspiring contribution comes from Deb Margolin, co-founder of the company Split Britches and the only non-teacher ... Hadassah Shani brings a fresh cinematic perspective to Euripidean reflexivity; eclectic Gabriel Ben Simhon studies the circus in Fellini&amp;amp;amp;#x27;s films. ...
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Performance review of Peña Flamenca, presented by La Rosa, South Africa&#39;s premier professional Spanish dance and theatre company. This magnificent choreography was conceived by the famous Spanish flamenca Eliezer Truco (La Truco)... more
Performance review of Peña Flamenca, presented by La Rosa, South Africa&#39;s premier professional Spanish dance and theatre company. This magnificent choreography was conceived by the famous Spanish flamenca Eliezer Truco (La Truco) and South African flamenca Carolyn Holden.
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Research Interests: Gender Studies and Dance
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Research Interests: Psychology and Pearson
Research Interests: History and Psychology
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ABSTRACT Authentic Movement can transport practitioners to altered states of consciousness, known in dance/movement therapy as the quantum realm (Leventhal 1997). Quantum is directly accessed through Authentic Movement (AM), an... more
ABSTRACT Authentic Movement can transport practitioners to altered states of consciousness, known in dance/movement therapy as the quantum realm (Leventhal 1997). Quantum is directly accessed through Authentic Movement (AM), an experiential “fact” validated but not satisfactorily explained: a relationship between AM and quantum physics was previously suggested (Plevin 1999) in terms of probability. Despite Jung’s known interest in quantum physics, Jungian synchronicity has not been connected through literature or practice with the quantum or Authentic Movement. AM is itself based in Jung’s active imagination, a development of dance/movement pioneer Mary Whitehouse. This case study consists of a carefully witnessed, reflective session of AM; the experiential writing it evoked; and the serendipitous, separate events enchained. This experience generates synchronicity. Acausal synchronicity (Jung 1960) is a naturally occurring phenomenon in the quantum universe. Jungian synchronicity is also shown to be an occurrence that is continuous rather than unitary, and multiple rather than singular. It could, therefore, be argued that synchronicity in the quantum realm generates other synchronous events, in essence reproducing itself. Implications for Jungian analytic theory as well as quantum mechanics suggest causal associations.
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Abstract The first poem explored involves ‘you’: the you who has written ‘you’ and the ‘you’ who reads. In this simple pronoun the possibilities of Auden's numbered poem multiply, reflecting the experience of reading and the drama of... more
Abstract The first poem explored involves ‘you’: the you who has written ‘you’ and the ‘you’ who reads. In this simple pronoun the possibilities of Auden's numbered poem multiply, reflecting the experience of reading and the drama of writing. The phenomenology of Self/creation is intimately bound to the phenomenology of Journey – a story of origins, a creative route and end to the Self – as this article creatively demonstrates through investigation of two of Auden's poems. Poetry, the hidden self of language, provides the entryway to understanding self and other. Using the metaphor of the kidney, this article strives playfully to explain the message of human experience.
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The article presents some factors, risks and challenges associated with dance movement therapy (DMT), from the perspective of a dance/movement therapist on a therapeutic team. Empirical observations are drawn from work in a... more
The article presents some factors, risks and challenges associated with dance movement therapy (DMT), from the perspective of a dance/movement therapist on a therapeutic team. Empirical observations are drawn from work in a state-subsidized day-care programme for infants and children in Australia; these DMT sessions are comprised of developmentally delayed children and their daily caregivers, often mothers with post-natal depression or psychosis. Sessions are directed at both populations simultaneously, compounding issues of treatment as well as the physical, psychological and emotional responses of clients (child and adult). Problematizing the difficulties of somatic work with children, the therapist critiques the theory of the “good enough mother” in a disability context, acknowledging the effect of caregivers’ own pathologies of grief.
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How did women appear onstage? When? How do women feel about the presence - or absence - of the female actor? The subject of this book is female absence and the writing, reading, and making of dramatic worlds that construct woman as a... more
How did women appear onstage? When? How do women feel about the presence - or absence - of the female actor? The subject of this book is female absence and the writing, reading, and making of dramatic worlds that construct woman as a metaphor. The works discussed and analysed are not the texts of women, but exemplify the male gaze on what it means to be a woman. Approved and canonical, these works from the long tradition of Western theatre have defined female identity since the times of Aristotle and Socrates; they say what is required to be a woman and how women have been historically viewed, and therefore created, by the works of men. In the metaphorical superstructure of theatre, women have become metaphors, by means of real and experienced processes. But female disempowerment and metaphorisation have not been conclusively identified or investigated with respect to the operations of the theatrical metaphor. This work enables the reader to see and experience these mechanisms of language and action.
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... the novel promotes love of language and writing and displays the possibility of genuine love between unrelated women: the beautiful entertainer Shug Avery, Mr. ___&#x27;s long-term mistress, falls in love with Celie and eventually... more
... the novel promotes love of language and writing and displays the possibility of genuine love between unrelated women: the beautiful entertainer Shug Avery, Mr. ___&#x27;s long-term mistress, falls in love with Celie and eventually rescues ... (Even Margaret Mitchell&#x27;s inclusion affirms ...