Alan Dowty

Michael Brenner

Yaakov Ariel

Gil Troy

Ranen Omer-Sherman

Rachel S. Harris

Maoz Azaryahu

Steven Bayme

David Ellenson

Donna Robinson Divine

David Makovsky

Norman Stillman

Arnon Golan

Yedidia Stern

"An excellent tool in Middle Eastern politics classes [and] an intellectual resource for experts who want to learn more about the complexities of Israel."— Reading Religion Americans debate constantly about Israel, its place in the Middle East, and its relations with the United States. Essential Israel examines a wide variety of complex issues and current concerns in historical and contemporary contexts to provide readers with an intimate sense of the dynamic society and culture that is Israel today, providing a broader and deeper understanding to inform the conversation. The expert contributors to this volume address the Arab-Israeli conflict, the state of diplomatic efforts to bring about peace, Zionism and the impact of the Holocaust, the status of the Jewish state and Israeli democracy, foreign relations, immigration and Israeli identity, as well as literature, film, and the other arts. This unique and innovative volume provides solid grounding to understandings of Israel's history, politics, culture, and possibilities for the future.

Essays for the 21st Century

Essential Israel

Founded in 1909 as a "garden suburb" of the Mediterranean port of Jaffa, Tel Aviv soon became a model of Jewish self-rule and was celebrated as a jewel in the crown of Hebrew revival. Over time the city has transformed into a lively metropolis, renowned for its architecture and culture, openness and vitality. A young city, Tel Aviv continues to represent a fundamental idea that transcends the physical texture of the city and the everyday experiences of its residents. Combining historical research and cultural analysis, Maoz Azaryahu explores the different myths that have been part of the vernacular and perception of the city. He relates Tel Aviv’s mythology to its physicality through buildings, streets, personal experiences, and municipal policies. With critical insight, he evaluates specific myths and their propagation in the spheres of both official and popular culture. Azaryahu explores three distinct stages in the history of the mythic Tel Aviv: "The First Hebrew City" assesses Tel Aviv as Zionist vision and seed of the actual city; "Non-Stop City" depicts trendy, global post-Zionist Tel Aviv; and "The White City" describes Tel Aviv’s architectural landscape, created in the 1930s and imbued with nostalgia and local prestige. Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City will appeal to urban geographers, cultural historians, scholars of myth, and students of Israeli society and culture.

Mythography of a City

Tel Aviv

Richard Coates

Luisa Caiazzo

Names weave the texture of our daily lives in ways that are self-evident. However, behind their taken-for-granted threads, they conceal a considerable meaning potential that may turn them into malleable vehicles of human goals and agendas. The novelty of this volume lies in the special focus it places on the intersections of naming, identity and tourism, pointing to how names may play a role in the multifaceted process of identity-formation by shaping and promoting tourist attractions, be they topographical or metaphorical locations. The volume collects original contributions on this emerging field of enquiry that foster an eclectic approach to the study of names. The thematic focus and the several approaches adopted here will make the text appealing to postgraduate students and researchers from several disciplinary fields ranging across onomastics, linguistics, cultural and social geography, history, archaeology, heritage, literature, postcolonial studies, and media studies.

Naming, Identity and Tourism

S. Ilan Troen

Selwyn Ilan Troen

Tel-Aviv, the First Century brings together a broad range of disciplinary approaches and cutting-edge research to trace the development and paradoxes of Tel-Aviv as an urban center and a national symbol. Through the lenses of history, literature, urban planning, gender studies, architecture, art, and other fields, these essays reveal the place of Tel-Aviv in the life and imagination of its diverse inhabitants. The careful and insightful tracing of the development of the city's urban landscape, the relationship of its varied architecture to its competing social cultures, and its evolving place in Israel's literary imagination come together to offer a vivid and complex picture of Tel-Aviv as a microcosm of Israeli life and a vibrant modern global city.

Visions, Designs, Actualities

Tel-Aviv, the First Century

Jacques Picard

Ulrike Gehring

Fabienne Meyer

Christina Späti

Das Holocaust- und Zweit-Weltkriegs-Gedenken und die daraus erwachsenen Erzählungen haben auch in der Schweiz ihre Spuren hinterlassen. Die vorhandenen "Denkmäler" sind jedoch nicht allein materieller oder monumentaler Natur. Das jeweils Sagbare und Unsagbare zeigt sich auch im musikalischen und literarischen Schaffen, in Biografien und Selbstzeugnissen, in Spiel- und Dokumentarfilmen, in Ortsbildern, Lehrmitteln und Schulstunden sowie in Debatten über Restitutions- oder Rehabilitierungsforderungen. In diesem Buch werden unterschiedliche Aspekte und Modi der kulturellen Erinnerung versammelt, und gleichzeitig stellen die darin zur Sprache kommenden Erzählweisen ein Plädoyer der transnationalen Lesart von Holocaust-Gedenken dar. Aus dem semantische wie territoriale Grenzen überschreitenden Wissen lässt sich einiges für die eigene Disposition lernen. Deswegen geht dieser Sammelband von der Schweiz aus, trägt aber ebenso Beispiele vor, die dänische, deutsche, israelische, österreichische, schwedische oder ungarische Belange berühren. The way in which the Holocaust and the Second World War are remembered and the many forms and debates that have emerged from this contemporary field have also left their mark on Switzerland. However, the "monuments" that exist in that non-occupied country are not only material ones. What may be discovered is also evident in musical and literary works, biographies and self-testimonies, feature films and documentaries, landscapes, teaching materials and school lessons, as well as in debates about demands for restitution, recognition or rehabilitation. This book presents different aspects and modes of cultural remembrance, and at the same time it addresses a plea for a transnational reading of Holocaust remembrance. From the knowledge that crosses semantic and territorial borders, there is much to be learned for one's own purposes. For this reason, this anthology takes its lift-off from Switzerland, but also presents insights and examples that touch many of Danish, German, Israeli, Austrian, Swedish or Hungarian concerns.

Formen des Holocaust-Gedenkens in Schweizerischen und Transnationalen Perspektiven / Forms of Holocaust Remembrance in Swiss and Transnational Perspectives

Erzählweisen des Sagbaren und Unsagbaren / Between Commemoration and Amnesia

The ever-growing interest in cultural memory has generated an impressive body of academic literature on public commemoration, but not enough attention has been paid until now to the power and appeal of names to transcend death. This book is the first to investigates onymic commemoration as a technology of immortality. Bringing together issues as diverse as casualty lists on public display and honorific street-names, the inquiry expands on the commemorative capacity of an “everlasting name” as a site of remembrance. It explores how notions about names, being, fame and an afterlife have coalesced into prestigious and time-honored commemorative practices and traditions that demonstrate the cultural power of an “everlasting name” to confer immortality through remembrance. By linking ancient traditions and modern practices, this book offers a cross-cultural analysis of onymic commemoration that is broad in scope and covers a wide time frame, encompassing diverse historical periods, cultural contexts and geopolitical settings.

Cultural Remembrance and Traditions of Onymic Commemoration

An Everlasting Name

Reuben Rose-Redwood

Derek Alderman

Streetscapes are part of the taken-for-granted spaces of everyday urban life, yet they are also contested arenas in which struggles over identity, memory, and place shape the social production of urban space. This book examines the role that street naming has played in the political life of urban streetscapes in both historical and contemporary cities. The renaming of streets and remaking of urban commemorative landscapes have long been key strategies that different political regimes have employed to legitimize spatial assertions of sovereign authority, ideological hegemony, and symbolic power. Over the past few decades, a rich body of critical scholarship has explored the politics of urban toponymy, and the present collection brings together the works of geographers, anthropologists, historians, linguists, planners, and political scientists to examine the power of street naming as an urban place-making practice. Covering a wide range of case studies from cities in Europe, North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia, the contributions to this volume illustrate how the naming of streets has been instrumental to the reshaping of urban spatial imaginaries and the cultural politics of place.

Naming, Politics, and Place

The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes

Marie-Laure Ryan

Kenneth E. Foote

Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding how space works in narrative and narrative theory and how narratives work in real space.

Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet

Narrating Space/spatializing Narrative

Maoz Azaryahu

Books

Your next favorite book is out there