Imagined Israel S Representations Of The Jewish State In The Arts

Imagined Israel(s) presents a nuanced image of Israel by considering multiple artistic representations of the Jewish state, stretching beyond stereotypical representations of war and conflict, while also encompassing the experience and perspective of the Jewish diaspora and other communities.

A fascinating analysis of how Jews fit into scholarly debates about Orientalism.

Short-listed for the Art and Christian Enquiry/Mercers' International Book Award 2009: 'a book which makes an outstanding contribution to the dialogue between religious faith and the visual arts'. What does modern Jewish art look like? Where many scholars, critics, and curators have gone searching for the essence of Jewish art in Biblical illustrations and other traditional subjects, Rosen sets out to discover Jewishness in unlikely places. How, he asks, have modern Jewish painters explored their Jewish identity using an artistic past which is- by and large - non-Jewish? In this new book we encounter some of the great works of Western art history through Jewish eyes. We see Matthias Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece re-imagined by Marc Chagall (1887-1985), traces of Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca in Philip Guston (1913-1980), and images by Diego Velazquez and Paul Cezanne studiously reworked by R.B. Kitaj (1932-2007). This highly comparative study draws on theological, philosophical and literary sources from Franz Rosenzweig to Franz Kafka and Philip Roth. Rosen deepens our understanding not only of Chagall, Guston, and Kitaj but also of how art might serve as a key resource for rethinking such fundamental Jewish concepts as family, tradition, and homeland.

The American-Jewish philosopher Berel Lang has left an indelible impression on an unusually broad range of fields that few scholars can rival. From his earliest innovations in philosophy and meta-philosophy, to his ground-breaking work on representation, historical writing, and art after Auschwitz, he has contributed original and penetrating insights to the philosophical, literary, and historical debates on ethics, art, and the representation of the Nazi Genocide. In honor of Berel Lang’s five decades of scholarly and philosophical contributions, the editors of Ethics, Art and Representations of the Holocaust invited seventeen eminent scholars from around the world to discuss Lang’s impact on their own research and to reflect on how the Nazi genocide continues to resonate in contemporary debates about antisemitism, commemoration and poetic representations. Resisting what Alvin Rosenfeld warned as “the end of the Holocaust”, the essays in this collection signal the Holocaust as an event without closure, of enduring resonance to new generations of scholars of genocide, Jewish studies, and philosophy. Readers will find original and provocative essays on topics as diverse as Nietzsche’s reputed Nazi leanings, Jewish anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, wartime rescue in Poland, philosophical responses to the Holocaust, hidden diaries in the Kovno Ghetto, and analyses of reactions to trauma in classic literary works by Bernhard Schlink, Sylvia Plath, and Derek Walcott.

In Imagining the Kibbutz, Ranen Omer-Sherman explores the literary and cinematic representations of the socialist experiment that became history’s most successfully sustained communal enterprise. Inspired in part by the kibbutz movement’s recent commemoration of its centennial, this study responds to a significant gap in scholarship. Numerous sociological and economic studies have appeared, but no book-length study has ever addressed the tremendous range of critically imaginative portrayals of the kibbutz. This diachronic study addresses novels, short fiction, memoirs, and cinematic portrayals of the kibbutz by both kibbutz “insiders” (including those born and raised there, as well as those who joined the kibbutz as immigrants or migrants from the city) and “outsiders.” For these artists, the kibbutz is a crucial microcosm for understanding Israeli values and identity. The central drama explored in their works is the monumental tension between the individual and the collective, between individual aspiration and ideological rigor, between self-sacrifice and self-fulfillment. Portraying kibbutz life honestly demands retaining at least two oppositional things in mind at once—the absolute necessity of euphoric dreaming and the mellowing inevitability of disillusionment. As such, these artists’ imaginative witnessing of the fraught relation between the collective and the citizen-soldier is the story of Israel itself.

Although political culture is not sole explanatory factor in development of US policy toward Israel, it has played a key role in serving to shape and define American approach to foreign affairs. This book explains American commitment to Israel within a framework of political culture.

This collection revisits the complex subject of medieval visual representations of Jews and Judaism by themselves and by Christians. The topics range from questions of Jewish identity in Iberian illuminated Hebrew manuscripts (13th-14th centuries) to representations of Synagoga and Judas in the Bible Moralisée and cathedral sculpture, to early modern Jewish self-images. The essays are prefaced by a critical study of the discovery of medieval Jewish art among art historians and cultural activists ca. 1900-35. The volume will be of value to art historians, as well as medieval and early modern historians with an interest in Jewish culture and Jewish-Christian relations. Contributors include: Michael Batterman, Marc Michael Epstein, Eva Frojmovic, Thomas Hubka, Sara Lipton, Annette Weber, and Diane Wolfthal.

This landmark volume brings the rich legacy of Israeli art to a Western audience for the first time. Gideon Ofrat, Israel's preeminent curator, art critic, and art historian, traces the complete history of painting and sculpture in Israel, from nineteenth-century Jewish folk art in Ottoman Palestine to the kaleidoscopic postmodern patterns of Israeli art today. Contains over 350 illustrations, 185 in color.