Ofra Amihay

This book offers a pioneering study of the unique nexus between literature and photography in the works of Hebrew authors. Exploring the use of photography—both as a textual element and through the inclusion of actual images— Amihay shows how the presence of visual elements in a textual work of fiction has a powerful subversive function. Contemporary Hebrew authors have turned to photography as a tool to disrupt narratives and give voice to marginalized sectors in Israel, including women, immigrants, Mizrahi Israelis, LGBTQ+ individuals, second-generation Holocaust survivors, and traumatized army veterans.

Amihay discusses standard novels alongside graphic novels, challenging the dominance of the written word in literature. In addition to providing a poetic analysis of imagetext pages, Amihay addresses the social and political issues authors are responding to, including gender roles, Zionism, the ethnic divide in Israel, and its Palestinian minority. In exploring these avant-garde novels and their authors, Amihay elevates their significance and calls for a more expansive definition of canonical Hebrew literature.

This dissertation examines the effect of twentieth-century “new media” models on literature, in the form of the late twentieth-century wave of literary works in which visual images play a central poetic role. Demarcating this body of works as an independent cultural turn, I label this “the imagetext turn” thus following two groundbreaking terms coined by W. J. T. Mitchell, “the pictorial turn” and “imagetext.” Based on philosophical discussions regarding the egalitarianism behind text and image hybrids (Benjamin, Rancière, Mitchell), and theories of the democratic nature of the novel (Auerbach, Lukács, Bakhtin) and photography (Sontag, Barthes, Azoulay), I focus on the marriage of novels and photographs.

The case study for this exploration is three contemporary Israeli novelists: Yoel Hoffmann, Ronit Matalon, and Michal Govrin. Following a survey of the approach towards the visual image in Modern Hebrew literature, I identify their works as comprising the “imagetext turn” in Hebrew literature while marking their importance within a general literary development, primarily through a comparison to W. G. Sebald’s novels. My study of Hoffmann analyzes the web of Others in his novels through the photographic mechanism of the negative, suggesting the juxtaposition of text and photographs in How Do You Do Dolores echoes the Other behind text, place, and language in all his work. In my analysis of Matalon I discuss the double role photographs play in Matalon’s pursuit of postcolonial ideas in The One Facing Us, operating both as “portable roots” and as “poetic immigrants,” thus offering a subversive reading of reality that undermines nostalgia. Finally I show how through an intricate combination of narrative and visual images Govrin creates in Snapshots a literary representation of both the ideals and the blind spots of the 1990s left-wing movement of secular return to Jewish sources in Israel.

This essay explores the work of San Francisco-based artist Paul Madonna, his unique use of the tropes of imagetext and its implications concerning authority, readership and meaning in a post-modern, post-secular world. In reading through the absences in Madonna’s work – the absence of people in the landscape, the absence of an observing entity, the absence of a clear symbol and reference, this essay argues for a philosophical approach that underlies this work, one that can be dubbed “Durkheimian Existentialism.” In analyzing the ‘space’ Madonna creates in his work between an empty city landscape and human communication through the French thinker, Émile Durkheim, this essay argues for meaning behind the visual absence of people in Madonna’s comics: a celebration of people’s centrality and importance in a reality with no external meaning, to the extent that they themselves can become a revelation.

Abstract: In this essay, I analyze the function of color photography in autobiographical comics through a comparative analysis of confessional works of comics by two Jewish women artists, Jewish-American cartoonist Dianne Noomin’s 2003 comics spread “I Was a Red Diaper Baby” and Israeli cartoonist Ilana Zeffren’s Pink Story (written in Hebrew). While exploring the tensions evoked in these works between comics and photography and between black-and-white and color representations, I highlight an important difference in the nature of the images used in each work, evoking yet another tension: that between private and public. I demonstrate that these works by Noomin and Zeffren represent the array of private and public photographs available to any autobiographer, ranging from public images taken from posters, magazines, and video screenshots to intimate family snapshots. I argue that the choice between personal and public photographs in these works poetically determines the path of self-...

"This dissertation examines the effect of twentieth-century “new media” models on literature, in the form of the late twentieth-century wave of literary works in which visual images play a central poetic role. Demarcating this body of works as an independent cultural turn, I label this “the imagetext turn” thus following two groundbreaking terms coined by W. J. T. Mitchell, “the pictorial turn” and “imagetext.” Based on philosophical discussions regarding the egalitarianism behind text and image hybrids (Benjamin, Rancière, Mitchell), and theories of the democratic nature of the novel (Auerbach, Lukács, Bakhtin) and photography (Sontag, Barthes, Azoulay), I focus on the marriage of novels and photographs. The case study for this exploration is three contemporary Israeli novelists: Yoel Hoffmann, Ronit Matalon, and Michal Govrin. Following a survey of the approach towards the visual image in Modern Hebrew literature, I identify their works as comprising the “imagetext turn” in Hebrew literature while marking their importance within a general literary development, primarily through a comparison to W. G. Sebald’s novels. My study of Hoffmann analyzes the web of Others in his novels through the photographic mechanism of the negative, suggesting the juxtaposition of text and photographs in How Do You Do Dolores echoes the Other behind text, place, and language in all his work. In my analysis of Matalon I discuss the double role photographs play in Matalon’s pursuit of postcolonial ideas in The One Facing Us, operating both as “portable roots” and as “poetic immigrants,” thus offering a subversive reading of reality that undermines nostalgia. Finally I show how through an intricate combination of narrative and visual images Govrin creates in Snapshots a literary representation of both the ideals and the blind spots of the 1990s left-wing movement of secular return to Jewish sources in Israel."

nist Orthodoxies, queer approaches to Jewish life, and alternative perspectives to the spectrum of races within Judaism, Meyers astutely argues that American Judaism will be strengthened by an embrace of difference and a letting go of rigid, normative notions of authentic Jewishness. Her specifically unique intervention is to use American Jewish literature as a source for articulating the problems with narrow understandings of how to be Jewish, as well as for locating and framing possible solutions to this quandary. Her analyses of these texts offer ways of queering American Jewish hegemonies, and readers from Jewish Studies, American Jewish Literature, Gender Studies, and Queer Studies will all find material within Meyers’s book that contributes to their respective fields.

ABSTRACT:This article analyzes the representation of Holocaust memory and its influences on present-day reality in Israel in three graphic novels: Ari Folman and David Polonsky's 2009 Waltz with Bashir, Michel Kichka's 2013 The Second Generation: Things I Did Not Tell My Father, and Rutu Modan's 2013 The Property. It shows that, through the employment of private snapshots alongside references to famous photographic images, these texts invoke the duality at the heart of Holocaust memory in Israel, comprised of private and collective memory and postmemory and their clashing points. As a major point of reference, this study explores the specific allusion in all three texts to the iconic photograph of the surrendering child in the Warsaw Ghetto, highlighting its symbolic function in Israeli discussions of intergenerational trauma transmission. At the same time it argues that Bashir's employment of this image reveals its potential to also garner sympathy toward Israel's Others. Finally, it explores the unique combination of reproduced photographs and drawn ones, especially in Bashir, which simultaneously educes and questions photography as a path to memory. By referring to both private and public photographs, these texts also explore the place of public images in that process, thus touching on a tension inherent to Israeli culture from its earliest days—that between the individual and the collective.

Amihay, Ofra. "Take This Waltz, Take This Photo: Photography and Holocaust Memory in Israeli Graphic Novels." Jewish Film and New Media 5.2 (2017): 161-98.
This article analyzes the representation of Holocaust memory and its influences on present-day reality in Israel in three graphic novels: Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s 2009 Waltz with Bashir, Michel Kichka’s 2013 The Second Generation: Things I Did Not Tell My Father, and Rutu Modan’s 2013 The Property. It shows that, through the employment of private snapshots alongside references to famous photographic images, these texts invoke the duality at the heart of Holocaust memory in Israel, comprised of private and collective memory and postmemory and their clashing points. As a major point of reference, this study explores the specific allusion in all three texts to the iconic photograph of the surrendering child in the Warsaw Ghetto, highlighting its symbolic function in Israeli discussions of intergenerational trauma transmission. At the same time it argues that Bashir’s employment of this image reveals its potential to also garner sympathy toward Israel’s Others. Finally, it explores the unique combination of reproduced photographs and drawn ones, especially in Bashir, which simultaneously educes and questions photography as a path to memory. By referring to both private and public photographs, these texts also explore the place of public images in that process, thus touching on a tension inherent to Israeli culture from its earliest days—that between the individual and the collective.

Amihay, Ofra. "Urban Revelation in Paul Madonna's Postsecular Comics." In Comics and Sacred Texts: Reimagining Religion and Graphic Narratives, edited by Assaf Gamzou and Ken Koltun-Fromm, 215-31. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2018.

Since 2004 San Francisco-based artist Paul Madonna has been publishing his comic strip All Over Coffee in the San Francisco Chronicle. His work has been collected in two volumes, All over Coffee (Madonna 2007) and Everything Is Its Own Reward (Madonna 2010). Madonna's comic strips are characterized by sepia drawings of urban landscapes, mostly of San Francisco, and by scenes that are predominantly void of human presence. The visual style is contrasted by a narrative which often describes a poignant human interaction, or an existential meditation, presented in an understated manner, through some mundane activity.

The One Facing Us marks a climactic point in the entry of photography into Hebrew literature. In this sense, together with a few other authors, Matalon contributes to the “normalization” of Hebrew literature by taking part in the completion of the Zionist effort to reembrace the visual. Yet in doing so, Matalon at the same time questions some of the most fundamental aspects of the Zionist project, namely the return to the Land of Israel and the revival of the Hebrew language. In turning actual photographs into a prominent poetic tool in a literary meditation on the subject of immigration as a desirable state of mind, Matalon breaks the land/body/language/image Zionist paradigm. Instead of reinforcing Zionist discourse, the visual image becomes a resisting tool subverting it. The photographs assist Matalon in constructing “a third world, an obscure twilight zone.” By doing so, she challenges the limited boundaries particularly set forth by Zionism, based on a fixed contrast between here and there, the Land of Israel and the Diaspora.

In this essay, I analyze the function of color photography in autobiographical comics through a comparative analysis of confessional works of comics by two Jewish women artists, Jewish-American cartoonist Dianne Noomin’s 2003 comics spread “I Was a Red Diaper Baby” and Israeli cartoonist Ilana Zeffren’s Pink Story (written in Hebrew). While exploring the tensions evoked in these works between comics and photography and between black-and-white and color representations, I highlight an important difference in the nature of the images used in each work, evoking yet another tension: that between private and public. I demonstrate that these works by Noomin and Zeffren represent the array of private and public photographs available to any autobiographer, ranging from public images taken from posters, magazines, and video screenshots to intimate family snapshots. I argue that the choice between personal and public photographs in these works poetically determines the path of self-outing in each work, thus representing the two key options for such an act of self-outing, namely, using the personal sphere as a path to the public one or vice-versa. Finally, I address the role of Jewish identity in these two self-outing comics. I posit that while Jewish heritage is not a major factor in either work, the fact that in both cases the community of reference is a minority group within a Jewish community plays a significant role, introducing specific dilemmas into the already complicated identity struggle. By shedding light on the unique function of color photography in autobiographical comics about ethnographically charged self- outing experiences, the analysis of these specific works introduces to a wider audience two important yet insufficiently explored voices of women cartoonists.

This article analyses two comics works – Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Flix’s Da war Mal was – and their employment of the comics form in portraying the horror behind cultural separationalism at the heart of two of the most extreme separational regimes in history: the Nazi regime and the GDR. This is demonstrated through a focus on scenes depicting attempts to defy imposed separation mainly through what is defined, following the Fanonean term, as different acts of ‘passing’. The juxtaposition of these works through this prism shows that while both differ from the medium’s comical genesis and from the sex-drugs-violence satirical approach of underground comix, they nevertheless remain loyal to the comics traditions in their depiction of the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall era. Hence, they explore separationalism at its extreme through a literary form that defies the fundamental dichotomy between the textual and the visual. By doing so they allow a discussion that examines the human experience under any separating ideological system thus echoing Arendt’s historical approach, termed here as a ‘counter-oblivion’ approach, applied in her study of totalitarianism.

דווקא הכפילות הבלתי אפשרית שבתוכה גרוסמן ממקם את הגיבורה אורה – בין תפיסת עולם פציפיסטית ללקיחת חלק פעיל בעקדת הבן למזבח המולדת – היא הייצוג הנאמן ביותר לאחריות הנשית לעקדה. הרומן אשה בורחת מבשורה נושא בחובו בשורה פשוטה ועם זאת מאתגרת שממנה לא ניתן לברוח עוד: עם "תאוות הלב לבטל קורבנו של אברהם אבינו" יהיה אפשר להתחיל ולהתמודד רק כאשר תהיה הכרה שזהו גם קורבנה של שרה אמנו.