Hanoch Levin

The article attempts to depict the experience of melancholy in family dramas by an Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin. With regard to their themes Levin’s domestic comedies can be divided into dramas of ‘lonely hearts’, ‘family relationships’, and ‘neighborhood’. What is common to these three groups of dramas is the gallery of the same personae – melancholy men: depressed, detached subjects, deprived of any possibility of symbolization.
Firstly, melancholy appears to be a general condition of the depicted world; secondly, it is deeply related to the inner dramas of personae of the drama – their embodiment and their perception of the world. The condition of male and female characters in Levin’s domestic comedies is determined by the longing for the past and the sadness of passive existence.
The basic purpose of the article is to provide an analysis of the selected issues in the context of psychoanalytical readings of melancholy, especially Sigmund Freud’s as well Julia Kristeva’s works. This perspective allows to elucidate the melancholic condition of dramatis personae, and also to describe some complicated relationships between them (especially the relation between mother-figure and the son).

What is the relationship between Mizrahi feminism and Israeli ultranationalism? What is the relevance of gender justice activism to the 2014 Gaza War and Israel’s foreign policy?

Wrapped in the Flag of Israel Second Edition examines neoliberal bureaucracy in the Global South using feminist critical race theories. It interrogates the relationship between the State of Israel and its Mizrahi single mothers who are at the forefront of Mizrahi feminism. It also presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology that preempts the agency of disenfranchised Mizrahim who are Israel’s demographic majority. Mizrahi protests fall flat when the Israel-Palestine conflict dominates the headlines. While most studies of neoliberal bureaucracy employ a Foucauldian or Marxian lens, this book illustrates how Israeli bureaucracy draws on a theological essence that fuses religion, gender, and race into the foundations of citizenship. It sets out to understand why Mizrahi mothers remain loyal to a state that injures them though its bureaucratic system.

The extensive Afterword to the Second Edition connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War. It tracks sequences that began with social protest and ended with elections that bolstered Israel’s political right. In between came bloodletting between the IDF, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel’s neighboring Arab states. The 2014 Gaza War was a watershed, but not only in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Under the smokescreen of war, Israel accelerated neoliberal economic reform. The first victims of this restructuring were Mizrahi single mothers. Palestinians, however, would pay the highest price for Israel’s Mizrahi-Ashkenazi rift.

I propose a philosophical reading of Hanoch Levin’s *A Man Standing Behind a Seated Woman*. Philosophizing is forced on Levin’s protagonists, who find themselves entangled by a central question: Which is more hurtful, scorn or indifference? When one is scorned it hurts; but at least someone pays attention. When one is met with indifference it hurts too; but at least one isn’t scorned. Levin thus describes and expresses a chronicle of radical helplessness—not just inability to shape one’s reality, but mainly inability to even consolidate a conception of that reality: to act, communicate effectively, and even have coherent desires. Unlike other readers, who identify the breakdown of meaning in Levin’s prose, I argue that Levin’s protagonist seeks to understand his life in absolute terms, or at least tie himself to something exalted, and thereby grace his reality with value. This, even though he knows his existence is relative and temporal. Levin’s protagonist’s struggle is thus not a class-struggle. It is rather a struggle against the very fact that he is situated in class-relationships—a pointless struggle, with religious aspects, to surpass the conditions of his existence.

http://utv.unistra.fr/index.php?id_video=564#
Reportage sur la semaine israélienne en ligne sur Utv Strasbourg.
La semaine israélienne a eu lieu à Strasbourg du 22 au 28 mars 2015, un projet organisé par la Ville de Strasbourg, l'Ambassade d'Israël en France en coopération avec l'Université de Strasbourg et du département d'études hébraïques et juives pour célébrer l'anniversaire des 65 ans des relations diplomatiques entre Israël et la France.
Ce reportage nous montre les activités qui ont eu lieu sur le campus de l'Université et inclut une interview avec moi sur le festival de court-métrages israéliens (00:54).

Feature about Israel Week on Utv (Strasbourg University Television).
Israel Culture Week was held in  Strasbourg between march 22-28, organised by the City of Strasbourg and the Embassy of Israel in France in cooperation with the University of Strasbourg and the Jewish and Hebrew Studies department.
The feature includes an interview with me on the short film festival (00:54).