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This article offers a nuanced understanding of novelist Yoram Kaniuk’s national ideology as a representative of a generation, as well as unveils personal, untreated trauma as reflected in his writing. By way of doing so, it employs two research approaches: a literary speculative fiction interpretation examined through a lens of alternative history, and a cultural sociology perspective based on the concepts of ‘Imagined Communities’ and ‘Liquid Modernity’. On a broader level, his novel Scums portrays the deep disillusionment and disappointment experienced by veterans of Israel’s founding generation, who felt abandoned by their successors and betrayed by their values. On a personal level, Kaniuk’s writing reflects military flashbacks that significantly impacted his post-traumatic state of mind, which in turn influenced the way he perceived, described, and interpreted the historical fragments of his generation. Considering Kaniuk’s discomfort in discussing issues that deeply concerned him, he found solace and liberation through the medium of writing, which enabled him to express his thoughts and emotions, shouting them onto the page, unburdening himself, and making sense of his experiences. Thus, by writing in an unapologetic and candid manner, Kaniuk navigated the complexities of his inner world and external challenges, embracing his own truth and carving out a place for himself to be heard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to assess the way annual highschool field trips in Israel's State educational system is used to inculcate national narratives. Based on copious data, it shows that knowing and loving the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel) are significant motifs that recur with high intensity in all school field trip programmememes. Concurrently, however, in view of the high frequency of national motives in these trips, integrating the national aspect has apparently become a codeword for the 'right way' to plan out and carry out field trips. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adaptation to modernity generated among the Jews different amalgamations between European and Jewish concepts and brought about diverse and often opposed ideological trends and movements. One was Zionism, built on a concoction between Jewish tenets such as Shivat-Zion (Return-to-Zion) and European nationalism and secularisation. The result, Jewish statehood, failed to eradicate or diminish the tensions between non-Jews and Jews with the old Jew-hatred now transferred to Israel. This article examines the ideological background of the Zionist idea and the interaction among its components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for a common memory creates a link between personal stories and the shared values of the nation's citizens. Flamm's story reflects an attempt to create such a link. In 1943, a group of hikers in the Galilee came upon an Arab who attempted to rob them at gunpoint. Joseph Flamm, the group's guide and an amateur wrestler, fought the Arab, subdued him and killed him. A different version of the story of this incident came up every few years. Joseph Flamm, the story's hero, played a major role in the attempt to paint the incident in nationalistic colours. His own involvement in publicizing and shaping the story enables us to examine the encounter between a personal attempt to enter the national collective memory and the political use that was made of the story. This article discusses the attempt to turn this criminal event into a national heroic event in the context of the Arab Israeli conflict. The later versions presented it as a tangible expression of national myths, among them scouting and knowledge of Israel's geography, physical heroism and defending the homeland. The last version of the story was published in the 1970s, a period that signalled a change in the Zionist ethos. The Israeli public no longer showed interest in heroic stories such as Flamm's. Therefore, despite attempts to revive the story and efforts to affix it in the collective memory, it eventually disappeared from the public eye. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to contextualize the situation of the Jewish community recognized as a minority group in the Treaty of Lausanne within a wider framework of Turkish nationalism during the first decade of the Republic. It will claim that the ruling elite of the Republic concurrently defined 'Turkishness' on inclusive and exclusive terms. While in theory, Turkish nationalism was a 'civic' nationalism defining 'Turkishness' based on citizenship, when it came to practice, all citizens of the Republic were not privy to this identity; some of them, especially Jews, were expected to prove their loyalty in order to become equal members of the nation. This article claims that the contradictory attitude of the ruling elite – keeping the definition of 'Turkishness' ambiguous – had the purpose of constructing a cohesive and homogenous national community. In line with this ambiguous definition of 'Turkishness', the ruling elite developed an ambivalent attitude towards non-Muslim minorities and their place in the nation and the Jews of Turkey were affected the most by this precarious attitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bible's central position in the Zionist movement is well-known. Most previous studies on this topic have focused on Israeli society following the establishment of the State of Israel. By contrast, this article focuses on the role of the Hebrew Bible in Jewish nationalism and early Zionist thought from the 1880s to 1948. This article examines the connection between Zionism and the Bible in the context of modern nationalism research from a cultural approach. The focus on the Bible gave Zionism the components it lacked: territory and language. Unlike other ancient Jewish texts in which national aspects were marginalized, the Bible set a model for the creation of a modern nation-state. To the Zionists, the Bible was a guide to forming the 'New Jew'. This article shows that examining the relationship between Zionism and the Bible enables better understanding of the pre-modern cultural foundations of the Jewish national movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition from life under Ottoman rule to life under the Iraqi Kingdom established in 1921 marked a positive shift in the fortunes of the country's Jewish community. During the British mandate for Iraq (1921–32), the Jews enjoyed equal rights and were economically and socially integrated into Muslim society. However, with the end of the mandate and the acceptance of Iraq's independence, a process of restricting the Jews and physically harming them began, culminating in the pogrom (known as the Farhud) of June 1941. During the decade attending the Farhud, the Iraqi government linked the fate of the Jewish community to that of the Palestinian Arabs. The state pursued a policy of oppression and discrimination, which eventually led to the displacement of the country's Jewish community from a place it had called home for thousands of years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Jewish 'East' and its Restricted Agencies" is an article that examines the historical relationship between Jews and Muslims in Israel and the MENA region. It challenges the simplistic portrayal of Israel as a Western oppressor and Islamic entities as oppressed Easterners, arguing that this oversimplifies the complex dynamics at play. The article also discusses the treatment of Mizrahi Jews in Israel and their integration into a predominantly European-oriented Zionist society. It emphasizes the need to reclaim Jewish agencies and challenges the perception of Israel as a white-Ashkenazi presence in the Middle East. The article calls for a more nuanced exploration of Jewish history in Islamic contexts to give voice to Mizrahi Jewish experiences. [Extracted from the article]

"The Jewish 'East' and its Restricted Agencies" is an article that examines the historical relationship between Jews and Muslims in Israel and the MENA region. It challenges the simplistic portrayal of Israel as a Western oppressor and Islamic entities as oppressed Easterners, arguing that this oversimplifies the complex dynamics at play. The article also discusses the treatment of Mizrahi Jews in Israel and their integration into a predominantly European-oriented Zionist society. It emphasizes the need to reclaim Jewish agencies and challenges the perception of Israel as a white-Ashkenazi presence in the Middle East. The article calls for a more nuanced exploration of Jewish history in Islamic contexts to give voice to Mizrahi Jewish experiences. [Extracted from the article]

The article narrates the history of the Yiddish press and its role in the development of South African Jewish community and its political institutions from 1890 to 1914. Topics discussed include international networks as the focus of the approach of the Yiddish press to immigration historiography, Yiddish as metonym for Jewish rights, Zionist orientation of the Yiddish press, Jewish nationalism, libels and limits of Yiddish influence, and Yiddish press in a colonial British world.

Nakba denialism – that is, denying Zionist culpability for the mass expulsions of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland in 1948 – has long been a feature of US discourse on Palestine. Through a content analysis of Leon Uris' 1958 novel, Exodus, I argue that Nakba denialism rests on three anti-Arab racist tropes. The first trope presents Palestinian Arabs as lacking religious attachment to Palestine, the second trope claims they lack modern feelings of national identity, and the third trope claims they are easily induced to commit acts of violence by their ruthless leaders. Through the deployment of these tropes, the Exodus narrative popularized key elements of Nakba denialism in US discourse by blaming the victims of settler colonial violence for the expulsions they faced. More broadly, this article shows how the imbrication of race and settler colonialism functions to epistemologically erase the very acts of settler colonial violence that produce racialized Others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contends that the Zionist policies implemented by Israel had and continue to have a grave impact not only on the Palestinians in historic Palestine alone but also follows them in the diaspora, where some Palestinians have taken refuge. This article argues that Israel's apartheid regime, exposed by various international Human Rights Organizations, is not a recent discovery. Apartheid, the exclusion of the natives, and their racialization have accompanied the Zionist movement since its inception. Crucial questions raised in this paper include how Palestine and the Palestinians are conceived by Zionism, in and outside of Israel, and how they are perceived by the West, especially within the Canadian context. This paper pays special attention to comparing the experience of Palestinians with that of North America's Indigenous population, specifically concerning Israel's and Canada's colonial policies towards the Indigenous peoples. It also discusses the impact of Israel's policies of silencing and vilification that doggedly follow Palestinians into the diaspora: vilifications and silencing enacted by the Israel lobby through its various Zionist (Jewish) branches, whose primary role is to silence and vilify the Palestinians and curb criticism of Israel and Zionism. This policy, it is argued, is strongly supported by Canada, structurally, institutionally and through media propaganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers a first comparison and critical review of the social and political theories of German-Jewish political thinker Hannah Arendt and Russian-born Zionist thinker Aaron David (A. D.) Gordon. Bringing these two thinkers into conversation sheds light on their distinctive human ontologies and competing theories of labor that led them, in turn, to critically assess modern politics. Subsequently, the analysis identifies the two thinkers' opposing conceptual trajectories as underpinning their competing perspectives on the Jewish state. Whereas Arendt's commitment to upholding neutral political spaces led her to call for safeguarding the state from the Jewish nation, Gordon's view of nations as corporeal-organic entities led him to advocate securing the Jewish nation from statist institutions. In broader terms, the analysis seeks to add to the burgeoning literature in recent years that revisits the theoretical and ideological parameters conventionally understood as underlying the historical debate about the Jewish state. The analysis shows that whereas Gordon, as a Zionist thinker, set forth an antistatist doctrine, the non-Zionist Arendt assigned a key role to the state in securing Jewish national self-determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reexamines Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook's (1865–1935) approach to Zionism, by proposing a reading of Kook's Zionism through the lens of the Lebensphilosophie (The Philosophy of Life) of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). I show that we can clarify Kook's view of freedom, the self and creativity and its essential connection to Zionism, therefore, proposing a new understanding of the meaning that Jewish nationalism assumes in Kook's thought, thanks to the application of the model of freedom and creativity developed by Bergson to Kook's writings. Especially for Kook, I show that Jewish nationalism is seen as a means for the Jewish People to return to their true self and through this connection attain true freedom. Only when a nation realizes its freedom by a return to its own original self, it can be creative. This is how I explain the connection that Kook draws between a return to the Land of Israel and the ability of Israel as a people to finally be able to be creative. Finally, I argue that this understanding of nationalism adds a new layer to the essential place that the territory assumes in Kook's thought. A State of Israel outside its original land can attain the goal of autonomous self-governance but lacks the ability to inspire the reconnection of the nation to its own original self. The Jewish People as a collective cannot connect to their authentic self away from the Land of Israel, consequently, the Land of Israel is the only place in which they can be truly free. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the usage of the German term Handelsvolk (trading-people) by Karl Marx and other Marxists in relation to Jewish history. The question is: what can we learn from the different interpretations of this term on the evolution of the relationship between Marxism and the so-called Jewish question? This exploration sheds new light on shifts in the definition of the Jews, both by Marx in the mid-19th century and by Jewish Marxists of various political parties in the mid-20th century. These shifts reflect changing social and political circumstances. In Marx's case, it was mainly his own migration that exposed him to different social environments and thus influenced his theoretical understanding. In the case of the Jewish Marxists, active during the period of the Third Reich, the term served as a means to qualify Jewish nationalism vis-à-vis the persecution and destruction of European Jewry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how two central scholars based at the Hebrew University's Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Jonathan Frankel, and Ezra Mendelsohn, conceived, created, and codified the academic sub-field of modern Jewish politics. The article begins by discussing studies by earlier historians of the Jews like Salo W. Baron, Shmuel Ettinger, and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi whose work often touched upon the intersection between Jews and politics. While Mendelsohn and Frankel's research was based upon key concepts developed by these scholars, their focus on the centrality of Jewish agency, the role of the Jewish intelligentsia, and the turn to "the (Jewish) people" helped create a new scholarly framework for imagining, analyzing, and researching modern Jewish politics. Despite their many achievements, they both overlooked several important topics in modern Jewish history including the role of religion, the activities of Jewish women, the experiences of Jews in North Africa and the Middle East, and the impact of Jewish politics on the Palestinians. By examining how these topics are dealt with in more recent works, the penultimate section in this article points to both the continuing influence of Mendelsohn and Frankel's scholarly paradigm as well as some of its inherent limits. In doing so, this analysis of modern Jewish politics makes for an intriguing case study regarding the organization, construction, and production of a particular field of knowledge while simultaneously raising critical questions regarding the very nature, limits, and future of Jewish studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many observers argue that in its very beginning, Zionism was an instance of wrongful settler colonialism. Are they right? I will address this question by examining the vision of Egalitarian Zionism in light of various theories of the wrongfulness of colonialism. I will argue that no theory decisively supports a positive answer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mashhadi Jewish community spread from its origins in Mashhad, Iran, to different countries in Europe, Israel and the United States from the mid-twentieth century onward. This paper discusses how the Mashhadi diaspora reframed their religious and ethnic identification in order to meet modern demands of exclusive belonging. Having lived as crypto-Jews in Iran roughly from the 1840s until the 1920s, the Mashhadi Jews have developed a distinct social identity with sharp communal boundaries, but also a narrative of the past that reframes ambiguities and their immersion in the Persianate context anew, after the Persianate societies in which their identities were integrated, dissolved into modern nation states. Departing from an exclusive focus on conversion, the paper traces the development of these narratives and new traditions as a way to establish a Jewish identity outside of Iran, rendering religiosity the main venue for performing authenticity and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholarship on Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik's most canonical Hebrew poem, "In the City of Killing," persistently returns to its origin story in the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. This article turns to the poem's Yiddish translations—the first by Bialik's colleague, admirer, and ideological opponent Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, and the second by Bialik himself—and challenges notions of origins, originals, and unfaithful translations. It pays attention to a consistently suppressed fact: parts of the poem in the canonized form known to us today, particularly those that bring the poem's fascination with the gothic and grotesque to new heights, were introduced into the poem through Peretz's Yiddish rendition. Bialik then borrowed these images and tropes and incorporated them into his own Yiddish translation, ultimately translating them into Hebrew and integrating them into the final, canonized version only in 1923. Rather than contesting accusations of Peretz's "disloyal" translation or accusing Bialik in turn of plagiarism, this article grapples with the philological impetus to search for definitive originals and the desire for textual stability. An entangled web of bibliographical evidence, unfaithful renditions, and unacknowledged textual relatives exposes translation as a productive and unruly site of literary transfer, as a site of conflict. That conflict should be understood in political terms, as a conflict over the means, character, and grounds for a Jewish national revival. The poem's translational history reconstructed in this article summons, finally, a renewed evaluation not only of the ties between Hebrew and Yiddish and between original and translation, but also more broadly of Jewish textual culture in Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shaul Magid's Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (2021) has the potential to urge American and Israeli Jews to "own" Meir Kahane and hold him up as a mirror reflecting the toxic and tragic dimensions of modern Jewish history. Such a look in the mirror can only happen once Jews see Palestinian suffering as central to the building of the state of Israel and also how they are complicit and implicated in such suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reexamines Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook’s (1865–1935) approach to Zionism, by proposing a reading of Kook’s Zionism through the lens of the Lebensphilosophie (The Philosophy of Life) of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). I show that we can clarify Kook’s view of freedom, the self and creativity and its essential connection to Zionism, therefore, proposing a new understanding of the meaning that Jewish nationalism assumes in Kook’s thought, thanks to the application of the model of freedom and creativity developed by Bergson to Kook’s writings. Especially for Kook, I show that Jewish nationalism is seen as a means for the Jewish People to return to their true self and through this connection attain true freedom. Only when a nation realizes its freedom by a return to its own original self, it can be creative. This is how I explain the connection that Kook draws between a return to the Land of Israel and the ability of Israel as a people to finally be able to be creative. Finally, I argue that this understanding of nationalism adds a new layer to the essential place that the territory assumes in Kook’s thought. A State of Israel outside its original land can attain the goal of autonomous self-governance but lacks the ability to inspire the reconnection of the nation to its own original self. The Jewish People as a collective cannot connect to their authentic self away from the Land of Israel, consequently, the Land of Israel is the only place in which they can be truly free.

The article focuses on the transformation of Murrieta Hot Springs in Riverside County, California, from a health spa resort established by Fritz Guenther in 1902 to a predominantly Jewish haven by the 1930s. Topics discussed include the resort's unintentional Jewish symbolism, the influx of Jewish patrons, the contrast with nearby resorts, and the role of Guenther's openness in fostering its Jewish identity.

The journal Der Yid was the first Yiddish periodical officially tied to a Zionist body. This article follows the shared genealogy of early Zionism and diasporic nationalism as expressed in Der Yid, and offers a revision to common notions on Yiddish cultural and political revival around the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast with a tendency to highlight a sharp divide between these movements, this article emphasizes the points of intimacy and convergence between the ostensibly opposing ideological and lingual choices of Hebraism-Zionism and Yiddishism-diasporism. More specifically, it analyses a controversy between Yiddishists and Hebraists, particularly Ahad Ha'am, generated by the very title of the journal during its first year of publication: Who is Der Yid – the Jew? Who is the ultimate imagined national readership and national collective of a Yiddish-language journal? By probing the populist, sentimentalist discourse that the journal produced, this article argues for a renewed evaluation of the presumably dichotomous constructions of Hebrew versus Yiddish, or Zionism versus diasporic nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, the Knesset of Israel, led by its right-wing coalition, adopted the Nation-State Law, which affirmed that the State of Israel is the "nation-state of the Jewish people" and only the Jewish people. Many have contrasted this law with Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence, which promised "complete equality of social and political rights" to all citizens, "irrespective of religion, race, or sex," and expressed a commitment to the moral teachings of the biblical prophets. The Declaration was written by socialists and rabbis, while the Nation-State Law was written by right-wing nationalists. The Declaration focused on three prophetic values: freedom, justice, and peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barukh Mitrani was an Ottoman maskil who wandered between the Balkans, Istanbul and Palestine. While living in Edirne, Mitrani established his first periodical, Carmi (Pressburg 1881). Carmi 's issues were an ongoing maskilic sermon, drawing on a deep acquaintance with the Jewish bookshelf. This paper examines selections from the fifth article in Carmi , 'Our Nationhood.' Influenced by the moderate Haskalah, Mitrani idealized a 'Golden Mean,' which sought to balance the agendas of 'the two poles': insular Ultra-Orthodox Jews on the one hand, and secularized 'Westernizers' on the other. Mitrani also espoused a Jewish nationalism which had affinities with the Hebrew 'republic of letters' and the national resurgence in the Balkans. He perceived every Jew as part of three circles: the individual, the family, and the nation. Yet his nationalism was not separatist; he obliged Jews to remain loyal Ottoman citizens and promote the Sultanate while also settling in Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Jewish community of South-East Queensland, Australia, has always been in constant negotiation with the mainstream Queensland society around it regarding its relationship with dominant Australian national identity. This results in two different forms of identity—a compartmentalized identity, where Australianness and Jewishness are experienced and expressed separately within their own discrete situations, and a creolized identity, where elements of both Australianness and Jewishness are taken and blended into a distinctive new cultural form. Using ethnographic data, this article explores the negotiation between Jewishness and Australianness in group identity. Rather than compartmentalizing Jewishness away from Australianness, a creolized performative "Jewish Australian" identity is given collective expression by the community. This allows the community to showcase an identity that embraces an Australian identity which is predominant across the nation, but reframes this with Jewish values, behaviours and symbols to empower their minority Jewish identity which might otherwise be dismissed and subjugated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there have been numerous warnings in the press and in the social networks that Israel is about to convert its liberal democracy into a fascist regime. This Article argues that the occupation of the West Bank stands at the root of the most important processes that have been taking place in Israel in the past five decades. One of those processes is the erosion of Israel's liberalism. I claim that the prolongation of the occupation is the central, lasting threat to Israel's liberalism. In essence, the occupation breeds denunciations of and protests against the government and the Israel Defense Forces, and these, in turn, bring about measures on the part of the government and right-wing civil society organizations that undermine or threaten Israel's liberalism. In addition, the full-scale wars between Israel and Gaza, and the continuation of violence between the parties in the periods between the wars, undermine or threaten Israel's liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article offers a slightly different historical path toward understanding how Shas arrived on the Israeli political scene. This view highlights the ideological climate that prevailed among the Haredi elements of the Mizrahi religious leadership during the State of Israel's formative years. These elements constituted a small Mizrahi religious circle – the Ne'emanei Ha-Torah movement that was active in Jerusalem during 1962–1971. Ne'emanei Ha-Torah was the site that consolidated the national and ethnic – Haredi and Mizrahi – political climate that served as an ideological home for those figures who, when Shas was founded, assumed spiritual-leadership roles within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]