Critics commonly hold that the modern Hebrew canon reveals a shared rhetoric, crucial for the eme... more Critics commonly hold that the modern Hebrew canon reveals a shared rhetoric, crucial for the emergence and formation of modern Jewish nationalism. Yet, does the Hebrew canon indeed demonstrate a shared logic? In Rhetoric and Nation, Ginsburg challenges the common conflation of modern Hebrew rhetoric and modern Jewish nationalism. Considering a wide range of texts of literature, criticism, and politics, Ginsburg explores the way each text manifests its own singular logic, which cannot be subsumed under any single ideology. Through close readings of key canonical texts, Rhetoric and Nation demonstrates that the Hebrew discourse of the nation should not be conceived as coherent and cohesive but, rather, as an assemblage of singular, disparate moments.
This dissertation is a study of the rhetorical interaction between Hebrew literature, Hebrew lite... more This dissertation is a study of the rhetorical interaction between Hebrew literature, Hebrew literary criticism, and Zionist political writings. Focusing on key terms of Zionist discourses, the dissertation explores formal contradictions within the Zionist subject through a close reading not only of literary but of critical and ideological texts as well. Rather than attempting to construct historical narratives of modern Hebrew literature, Hebrew criticism, and Zionist discourses, I sample three moments within the history of the Jewish national discourses. The first moment roughly corresponds with the earliest years of an organized Jewish national movement, from the writing of Ahad Ha-Am in the late 1890s to the literary criticism of Y. H. Brenner in the early 1910s, with Moshe Smilansky's short story Khawaja Nazar completing the triangle. The three terms at the focus of my discussion are territory, language, and truth. The second moment corresponds to the high point in the implementation of Zionist discourses in Palestine from the early 1920 to the establishment of the State of Israel in the late 1940s. In the second chapter I thus read Moshe Shamir's novel He Walked in the Fields alongside the ideological essays of David Ben-Gurion and Meir Ya'ari, and the literary criticism of such critics as David Kna'ani, Shelomo Zemach, and Gershon Shaked. In my readings, I focus on the articulation of history and myth as conflicting, yet complementary terms. The last moment corresponds to the decline of Social-Zionist discourses from the late 1960s on. Thus, in Chapter 3 I examine the ideological essays of A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz, in Chapter 4 Ya'akov Shabtai's novel Past Continuous, and in Chapter 5 the critical project of Dan Miron. In these chapters I examine the formation of identity as a site of anxiety that corresponds to the political decline of the Labor Movement as well as to the challenge of the Palestinian presence in the Occupied Territories. The juxtaposition of the three modes of discourse uncovers contradictory trends at the center of some of the seemingly strictest ideological expressions and further underscores the crucial role literary criticism plays in the construction of national space, culture and subject.Ph.D.Comparative literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsMiddle Eastern literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125312/2/3016850.pd
how Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian authors imagine their respective national collectives and how ... more how Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian authors imagine their respective national collectives and how they articulate the terms of participation in these collectives. Reading key prose texts of Israeli and Palestinian authors, both fiction and nonfiction, she comments not only on the cultural and intellectual life of Israel/Palestine but also on its place within Anglo-American academia as well as on the theoretical paradigms that frame its scholarly treatment. Lucid, nuanced, and theoretically sophisticated, Bernard's book is one of the very best with which I am familiar on literature and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and should become standard reading for all those interested in the region, its politics, and its culture. As suggested, Rhetorics of Belonging is as much a study of the literature of Israel/Palestine as an intervention in the current state of postcolonial studies. In fact, it is a plea for that lit-erature's centrality to the field. As such, it is one of the most serious and sustained endeavors to think theory in relation to the literature of Israel/Palestine. As Bernard points out, notwithstanding the centrality of the "Question of Palestine" to the political (and moral) mission of postcolonial studies, postcolonial scholars all but ignore the cultural production of the region. The question of theory is double. Current scholarship on Israel/Palestine is indeed often informed by theoretical discussions, mainly postcolonial studies, deconstruction, and fem-inism, but by and large it simply applies such theoretical concepts to the texts it examines and eschews the more difficult task of interrogating these in light of the particularity of the historical and geographic circumstances in Israel/Palestine. Simultaneously and similarly, postcolonial scholars tend to refrain from asking how the paradigms of the field are challenged by histories and geographies that lie beyond the pale of anglophone, francophone, and to a lesser extent hispanophone cultures. Bernard's interrogation of the theoretical terms of the postcolonial in the context of Israel/Palestine thus provides not only a timely and much-needed reevaluation of the scholarship of Israel/Palestine but also a case study in the way those histories and geographies that lie at the margins of the Anglo-American theoretical purview test its premises. Bernard suggests that the lack of interest in Israel/Palestine on the part of postcolonial studies is linked to the untimeliness of the political and theoretical framework that seems most suitable to the study of that region. Both the production and the reception, whether local or metropolitan, of Israeli and Palestinian literatures underscore the centrality of the question of the nation to these literatures. Yet from the mid-1990s on-after the heyday of "nation and narration"-postcolonial interest in that question dissipated, dismissing the investment of local literati in national narration as a belated attachment to a notion already proved illusory. Underscoring, on the contrary, the importance of national narration to one's understanding of current social, cultural, and political formations in Israel/Palestine, Ber-nard retrieves Fredric Jameson's "national allegory," even as she rejects the simplistic narrative model one tends to associate with that term. Her project in this book is to show in what
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2015
In this paper, I discuss Alon Hilu’s two historical novels, Death of a Monk (2004) and The Dejani... more In this paper, I discuss Alon Hilu’s two historical novels, Death of a Monk (2004) and The Dejani Estate (2008), as symptomatic of Israeli culture of the twenty-first century. I argue that the question of genre—historical fiction—is as central to the construction of the novels as it is to their reception. As the latter evinces, historical fiction is perceived as blurring the proper boundaries between the “objective” and the imaginary and thus feeds anxieties about the relationship of Jews to history, anxieties that have been haunting Zionist discourses from their inception. Hilu’s novels trace these anxieties to concerns about sexuality and desire and employ them to explore the relationship between two central foci of the Hebrew historical novel, namely, historical agency and historical writing. The novels construct numerous “scenes of writing,” in which writing seeks to retrieve historical agency, embodied in the two novels by desire and sexual potency. Simultaneously, writing is revealed as a mere substitute for desire and sex. Both novels consequently suggest that writing attests to the failure to produce historical agency.
Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, 2009
... In a reading of three of Ahad Ha-Am's major essays, “Emet me'erets yisra'el” (... more ... In a reading of three of Ahad Ha-Am's major essays, “Emet me'erets yisra'el” (1891), “Te'udat Ha-Shilo'aÿ” (1896), and “Mosheh” (1904), the essay probes how this struggle shapes his political vision, his literary vision, and his perception of the role of the historical leader (and ...
The opening scene of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man has baffled many. What does an unset... more The opening scene of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man has baffled many. What does an unsettling tale of an encounter with what may or may not be a dybbuk, set in the mid-nineteenth century in a Polish shtetl, and played out entirely in Yiddish, have to do with the story of a Jewish professor of physics and his family in suburban Minnesota in the summer of 1967, related in English? Is the scene to be viewed as a warm-up of sorts before the main attraction, akin, if you will, to the short-subject films—newsreels, animated cartoons, and live-action comedies and documentaries—that movie houses of old used to play before the main feature? If so, what is the significance of presenting an odd Yiddish scene to an American audience notorious for turning a cold shoulder to non-English-speaking cinema? Or is the scene to be viewed as a prologue to the movie? If so, in what sense could it be said to impart to the audience either the “state of suspense of the plot produced by the previous...
Critics commonly hold that the modern Hebrew canon reveals a shared rhetoric, crucial for the eme... more Critics commonly hold that the modern Hebrew canon reveals a shared rhetoric, crucial for the emergence and formation of modern Jewish nationalism. Yet, does the Hebrew canon indeed demonstrate a shared logic? In Rhetoric and Nation, Ginsburg challenges the common conflation of modern Hebrew rhetoric and modern Jewish nationalism. Considering a wide range of texts of literature, criticism, and politics, Ginsburg explores the way each text manifests its own singular logic, which cannot be subsumed under any single ideology. Through close readings of key canonical texts, Rhetoric and Nation demonstrates that the Hebrew discourse of the nation should not be conceived as coherent and cohesive but, rather, as an assemblage of singular, disparate moments.
This dissertation is a study of the rhetorical interaction between Hebrew literature, Hebrew lite... more This dissertation is a study of the rhetorical interaction between Hebrew literature, Hebrew literary criticism, and Zionist political writings. Focusing on key terms of Zionist discourses, the dissertation explores formal contradictions within the Zionist subject through a close reading not only of literary but of critical and ideological texts as well. Rather than attempting to construct historical narratives of modern Hebrew literature, Hebrew criticism, and Zionist discourses, I sample three moments within the history of the Jewish national discourses. The first moment roughly corresponds with the earliest years of an organized Jewish national movement, from the writing of Ahad Ha-Am in the late 1890s to the literary criticism of Y. H. Brenner in the early 1910s, with Moshe Smilansky's short story Khawaja Nazar completing the triangle. The three terms at the focus of my discussion are territory, language, and truth. The second moment corresponds to the high point in the implementation of Zionist discourses in Palestine from the early 1920 to the establishment of the State of Israel in the late 1940s. In the second chapter I thus read Moshe Shamir's novel He Walked in the Fields alongside the ideological essays of David Ben-Gurion and Meir Ya'ari, and the literary criticism of such critics as David Kna'ani, Shelomo Zemach, and Gershon Shaked. In my readings, I focus on the articulation of history and myth as conflicting, yet complementary terms. The last moment corresponds to the decline of Social-Zionist discourses from the late 1960s on. Thus, in Chapter 3 I examine the ideological essays of A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz, in Chapter 4 Ya'akov Shabtai's novel Past Continuous, and in Chapter 5 the critical project of Dan Miron. In these chapters I examine the formation of identity as a site of anxiety that corresponds to the political decline of the Labor Movement as well as to the challenge of the Palestinian presence in the Occupied Territories. The juxtaposition of the three modes of discourse uncovers contradictory trends at the center of some of the seemingly strictest ideological expressions and further underscores the crucial role literary criticism plays in the construction of national space, culture and subject.Ph.D.Comparative literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsMiddle Eastern literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125312/2/3016850.pd
how Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian authors imagine their respective national collectives and how ... more how Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian authors imagine their respective national collectives and how they articulate the terms of participation in these collectives. Reading key prose texts of Israeli and Palestinian authors, both fiction and nonfiction, she comments not only on the cultural and intellectual life of Israel/Palestine but also on its place within Anglo-American academia as well as on the theoretical paradigms that frame its scholarly treatment. Lucid, nuanced, and theoretically sophisticated, Bernard's book is one of the very best with which I am familiar on literature and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and should become standard reading for all those interested in the region, its politics, and its culture. As suggested, Rhetorics of Belonging is as much a study of the literature of Israel/Palestine as an intervention in the current state of postcolonial studies. In fact, it is a plea for that lit-erature's centrality to the field. As such, it is one of the most serious and sustained endeavors to think theory in relation to the literature of Israel/Palestine. As Bernard points out, notwithstanding the centrality of the "Question of Palestine" to the political (and moral) mission of postcolonial studies, postcolonial scholars all but ignore the cultural production of the region. The question of theory is double. Current scholarship on Israel/Palestine is indeed often informed by theoretical discussions, mainly postcolonial studies, deconstruction, and fem-inism, but by and large it simply applies such theoretical concepts to the texts it examines and eschews the more difficult task of interrogating these in light of the particularity of the historical and geographic circumstances in Israel/Palestine. Simultaneously and similarly, postcolonial scholars tend to refrain from asking how the paradigms of the field are challenged by histories and geographies that lie beyond the pale of anglophone, francophone, and to a lesser extent hispanophone cultures. Bernard's interrogation of the theoretical terms of the postcolonial in the context of Israel/Palestine thus provides not only a timely and much-needed reevaluation of the scholarship of Israel/Palestine but also a case study in the way those histories and geographies that lie at the margins of the Anglo-American theoretical purview test its premises. Bernard suggests that the lack of interest in Israel/Palestine on the part of postcolonial studies is linked to the untimeliness of the political and theoretical framework that seems most suitable to the study of that region. Both the production and the reception, whether local or metropolitan, of Israeli and Palestinian literatures underscore the centrality of the question of the nation to these literatures. Yet from the mid-1990s on-after the heyday of "nation and narration"-postcolonial interest in that question dissipated, dismissing the investment of local literati in national narration as a belated attachment to a notion already proved illusory. Underscoring, on the contrary, the importance of national narration to one's understanding of current social, cultural, and political formations in Israel/Palestine, Ber-nard retrieves Fredric Jameson's "national allegory," even as she rejects the simplistic narrative model one tends to associate with that term. Her project in this book is to show in what
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2015
In this paper, I discuss Alon Hilu’s two historical novels, Death of a Monk (2004) and The Dejani... more In this paper, I discuss Alon Hilu’s two historical novels, Death of a Monk (2004) and The Dejani Estate (2008), as symptomatic of Israeli culture of the twenty-first century. I argue that the question of genre—historical fiction—is as central to the construction of the novels as it is to their reception. As the latter evinces, historical fiction is perceived as blurring the proper boundaries between the “objective” and the imaginary and thus feeds anxieties about the relationship of Jews to history, anxieties that have been haunting Zionist discourses from their inception. Hilu’s novels trace these anxieties to concerns about sexuality and desire and employ them to explore the relationship between two central foci of the Hebrew historical novel, namely, historical agency and historical writing. The novels construct numerous “scenes of writing,” in which writing seeks to retrieve historical agency, embodied in the two novels by desire and sexual potency. Simultaneously, writing is revealed as a mere substitute for desire and sex. Both novels consequently suggest that writing attests to the failure to produce historical agency.
Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, 2009
... In a reading of three of Ahad Ha-Am's major essays, “Emet me'erets yisra'el” (... more ... In a reading of three of Ahad Ha-Am's major essays, “Emet me'erets yisra'el” (1891), “Te'udat Ha-Shilo'aÿ” (1896), and “Mosheh” (1904), the essay probes how this struggle shapes his political vision, his literary vision, and his perception of the role of the historical leader (and ...
The opening scene of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man has baffled many. What does an unset... more The opening scene of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man has baffled many. What does an unsettling tale of an encounter with what may or may not be a dybbuk, set in the mid-nineteenth century in a Polish shtetl, and played out entirely in Yiddish, have to do with the story of a Jewish professor of physics and his family in suburban Minnesota in the summer of 1967, related in English? Is the scene to be viewed as a warm-up of sorts before the main attraction, akin, if you will, to the short-subject films—newsreels, animated cartoons, and live-action comedies and documentaries—that movie houses of old used to play before the main feature? If so, what is the significance of presenting an odd Yiddish scene to an American audience notorious for turning a cold shoulder to non-English-speaking cinema? Or is the scene to be viewed as a prologue to the movie? If so, in what sense could it be said to impart to the audience either the “state of suspense of the plot produced by the previous...
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