The Place Of The Mediterranean In Modern Israeli Identity Paperback

This book offers new perspectives on Israel’s evolving Mediterranean identity, which centers around the longing to find a "natural" place in the region. It explores Mediterraneanism as reflected in popular music, literature, architecture, and daily life, and analyzes ways in which the notion comprises cultural identity and polical realities.

This book offers new perspectives on Israel’s evolving Mediterranean identity, which centers around the longing to find a "natural" place in the region. It explores Mediterraneanism as reflected in popular music, literature, architecture, and daily life, and analyzes ways in which the notion comprises cultural identity and polical realities.

This book is a detailed and comprehensive work which reviews the origins of Israel's Mediterranean identity, starting with its Zionist ideological origins and tracing the path up to the present, as Israel struggles with what it means to be a post-ideological Mediterranean country.

This book is a detailed and comprehensive work which reviews the origins of Israel's Mediterranean identity, starting with its Zionist ideological origins and tracing the path up to the present, as Israel struggles with what it means to be a post-ideological Mediterranean country.

A Sephardi Sea tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, migrated from their country of birth for Europe, Israel, and beyond. It is a story that explores their contrasting memories of and feelings for a Sephardi Jewish world in North Africa and Egypt that is lost forever but whose echoes many still hear. Surely, some of these Jewish migrants were already familiar with their new countries of residence because of colonial ties or of Zionism, and often spoke the language. Why, then, was the act of leaving so painful and why, more than fifty years afterward, is its memory still so tangible? Dario Miccoli examines how the memories of a bygone Sephardi Mediterranean world became preserved in three national contexts—Israel, France, and Italy—where the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa and their descendants migrated and nowadays live. A Sephardi Sea exploreshow practices of memory- and heritage-making—from the writing of novels and memoirs to the opening of museums and memorials, the activities of heritage associations and state-led celebrations—has filled an identity vacuum in the three countries and helps the Jews from North Africa and Egypt to define their Jewishness in Europe and Israel today but also reinforce their connection to a vanished world now remembered with nostalgia, affection, and sadness.

The Mediterranean space, defined by a major sea, a large number of littoral countries and to some extent their hinterlands, is at the same time an interface between Europe, Africa and Asia. This brings complex challenges in terms of achieving peace and stability. Recently it has received intense international attention through the internal destructiveness and spill-over from conflicts, primarily those waged in Libya, Syria and, more remotely, Iraq. This Handbook provides an overview of the political processes that shape the Mediterranean region in the contemporary context. It explores the issues of crucial importance to Mediterranean dynamics through a series of analytical sections that guide the reader towards a comprehensive understanding of the main regional interactions and trends. The Handbook explores: the complex historical formation of the contemporary Mediterranean geopolitical perspectives issues around peace and conflict the political economy of the region the role of non-state actors and social movements societal and cultural trends. The wide range of contributions from many of the leading academic experts on the region offers not only insights into the debates and processes that structure each theme, but also key pointers for a more general understanding of how distinct political, economic, social and cultural dynamics interact across the region. It will therefore be a key resource for policy-makers and students and scholars of Mediterranean politics and international relations.

Jacqueline Kahanoff: A Levantine Woman is the first intellectual biography of this remarkable Egyptian-Jewish intellectual, whose work has secured her place in literary pantheon as a herald of Levantine, Mediterranean, and transnational culture. Growing up Jewish in cosmopolitan Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s, Jacqueline Kahanoff experienced a bustling Middle East enriched by diverse languages, religions, and peoples who nonetheless were deeply connected to each other through history, business, daily practices, and shared landscape. At the age of twenty-four, Kahanoff immigrated to the United States. Her stories, essays, and short autobiographical novel attest to her penchant to cross boundaries, generations, social classes, sexes, and Western and Eastern constructs. After immigrating to Israel in the early 1950s, she critically addressed the country's "provinciality" and "ethnic nationalism" as seen through her conception of a transnational Levantine culture. Through many writings, Kahanoff set forth her distinctive vision of Israel as a Mediterranean country with a broad, multicultural Levantine identity. Drawing on an extensive array of sources, ranging from interviews with Jacqueline Kahanoff's acquaintances and contemporaries to unpublished writings, David Ohana explores her fascinating life and intellectual journey from Cairo to Tel Aviv. The encompassing vision of a Levantine Israel made Kahanoff the initiator of a different cultural possibility, more extensive than that offered in her time, and also, perhaps, than is offered today.

Recounts a Jewish-born Catholic priest's effort to prove he was Catholic to anyone who doubted him, including himself.