{"title":"Land, water and the changing Dead Sea environment: A microhistory of Kibbutz Ein Gedi","authors":"Nir Arielli","doi":"10.1080/13531042.2022.2186311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2022.2186311","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article examines the changing relationship Kibbutz Ein Gedi has developed with its environment over a period of more than 60 years. It focuses on two interrelated themes: the considerations that influenced decisions on how best to use the land around the kibbutz, the freshwater at its disposal and the labor of its members; and the community’s changing self-image and “environmental imaginary.” Initially, the space in which the community lived was shaped by agriculture and a pioneering ethos. Then, because of the growth of consumerism and the development of tourism, Ein Gedi began to brand itself as a unique holiday destination. However, since the 1990s, the fast-retreating Dead Sea shoreline and the appearance of sinkholes have reshaped Ein Gedi’s environmental imaginary and altered its decision-making priorities.","PeriodicalId":43363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Israeli History","volume":"40 1","pages":"235 - 256"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45399563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A history of the administration of courts in Israel","authors":"Yair Sagy, G. Lurie, Amnon Reichman","doi":"10.1080/13531042.2023.2235784","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2023.2235784","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article presents the history of the administration of courts in Israel, from 1948 to circa 1995, unearthing a series of tensions that undergirded the management of Israeli courts throughout their history. It illustrates that judiciary-executive tensions, as well as intra-judiciary and other extra-judiciary tensions, informed the trajectory of Israeli court administration. Furthermore, the article singles out two outstanding figures in the history of the Israeli judiciary, chief justices Yitzhak Olshan and Meir Shamgar, whose lesser-known preoccupation with the administration of courts – alongside the work of even lesser-known Israeli jurists who “managed” Israeli courts for decades – is revealed in the article.","PeriodicalId":43363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Israeli History","volume":"40 1","pages":"355 - 379"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42679125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jews and Palestinians in the late Ottoman era, 1908-1914: claiming the homeland","authors":"Or Pitusi","doi":"10.1080/13531042.2023.2213846","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2023.2213846","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Israeli History","volume":"40 1","pages":"385 - 387"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42190837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The rock musical and the beginnings of rock music in Israel in the early 70s","authors":"Alon Schab, E. Shalev","doi":"10.1080/13531042.2022.2210351","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2022.2210351","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article uncovers an untold story of how rock music came to the big stages and national broadcasting studios of a country transitioning from the European sphere and a socialist ethos to the American sphere and a market-oriented culture. In demonstrating how the rock musical preceded, anticipated, and likely enabled rock music in Israel, this article will focus on five rock musicals from the early 1970s. We argue that the rock musical introduced a friendly and commercially oriented version of rock and rock’n’roll music and its antics, and thus enabled wide crowds to adopt a foreign-born culture such as rock. By the end of that process in the mid-1970s, the broad acceptance of American rock music and particularly a socially involved rock aesthetic had emerged through the overlooked and unlikely genre of the rock musical.","PeriodicalId":43363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Israeli History","volume":"40 1","pages":"257 - 281"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43662670","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Finding Work in Israeli Fiction","authors":"O. Nir","doi":"10.1080/13531042.2022.2144119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2022.2144119","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that contemporary Israeli literary criticism posits the nation as its horizon of interpretation, which has eroded Israeli literary criticism’s ability to detect newness in its objects of inquiry, and to present Israeli literary history as advancing through engagement with new social problems. I examine three literary works: A.B. Yehoshua’s 1963 novella “Facing the Forests,” Etgar Keret’s Missing Kissinger (1994), and Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds (2007). For each, I show how critical commentary puts the nation as the center of interpretation. I then elaborate a critical position that sees the nation not as the point of critique’s termination,but as means toward trying to solve, in imagination, real social contradictions of its time. Thus, I argue that the fire in “Facing the Forests” is a figure for the threat of proletarian revolution under welfare-state capitalism; and that the fusion of realist narrative and its interpretive code in Keret’s Missing Kissinger signals a crisis of historicity whose origin is the proletarianization of Palestinians after the 1967; and lastly that Exit Wounds reestablishes Israeli historicity, using events of national significance – such as Palestinian suicide bombings – to represent the experience of precarious labor under neoliberal capitalism.","PeriodicalId":43363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Israeli History","volume":"40 1","pages":"213 - 234"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43817542","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Work and idleness in Hanokh Bartov’s prose","authors":"Yoav Ronel","doi":"10.1080/13531042.2022.2156047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2022.2156047","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper addresses representations of idleness in the fiction of Hanokh Bartov while describing the historical privatization process that Israel went through as its idea of freedom radically changed. Following recent Marxist critiques of modern Hebrew literature, it shows that in Bartov’s prose, idleness functions as the image of unattainable freedom – an image that changes as Israel moves on from the statist decades of the 1950s to the neoliberal era beginning around the 1980s. Accordingly, the article demonstrates how the image of idleness reveals contradictions inhabiting each era’s ideological structure. It does so by engaging “idleness” not as ahistorical and abject nonwork, but as an ahistorical, ideological concept that both derives from social relations and reflects them. Starting with Sesh knafayim le-ehad [Each Had Six Wings] (1954), this article will show how the Israeli prose of each period of time dealt with the disappearance of a utopic imagination of freedom in favor of the project of a heteronomous political making of capitalist forms of production. Here, Idleness functions as the image of the inevitable future of capitalism without a national project. Moving onto the almost unexplored “Tikuney Itzhak” [Isaac’s Corrections] (1980), the article will explore the culmination of this process and the total privatization and moralization of the once-political Zionist subject.","PeriodicalId":43363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Israeli History","volume":"40 1","pages":"113 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47913328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Since the mid-1980s: a value shift in work in Israel - from labor to employment","authors":"Y. Barak","doi":"10.1080/13531042.2022.2158529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2022.2158529","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT During the first two decades of statehood, Israeli labor policy advocated for full employment by creating new workplaces or work relief in order to absorb the mass waves of immigration. The dominant ideology was that of work ethos – work was perceived as a human and social value; therefore, Israelis believed that money should be paid for work and not for unemployment. In the beginning of the 1960s, the government related to labor as an economic instrument that was supposed to serve the meta-economic goal of economic independence. The political and social relations that existed between 1967 and 1985 were based on human capital and material reward. This was a liminal period. Since 1985, the government has led a revolution that transformed work into employment. This converted the workers into employees who serve economic and business ends. Labor became employment. Led by the Israeli government, this transformation ran counter to workers’ attitudes that preferred job security and collective stability. The fundamental change was dictated from above and was not a consensual shift.","PeriodicalId":43363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Israeli History","volume":"40 1","pages":"61 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42658795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Labor in Israeli culture","authors":"Yaron Peleg, Eran Kaplan, O. Nir","doi":"10.1080/13531042.2022.2157967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2022.2157967","url":null,"abstract":"This issue seeks to bring into focus a perspective not often considered in the study of Israel: that of labor and class. The post-Zionist turn of the late 1980s saw the rise of critiques of Israeli national ideology and modes of inquiry that adhered to its precepts. The critique of national ideology was accompanied by growing scholarly interest in perspectives that were until then marginalized – centrally, the Palestinian one. Yet the perspective of labor and class did not fare well in this transformation, as a result of the prevalence of class discourse in early Zionism. Some scholars maintain that socialist aspirations were systematically made secondary to those of nation-building; or that class discourse was deployed simply to serve the ends of the national project. Thus, the perspective of labor has come to occupy an ambivalent place in the postZionist transformation. Perhaps for this reason, studies that did put front and center the perspective of labor by itself – such as Tamar Gozansky’s Hitpathut ha-kapitalism befalestina or Amir Ben Porat’s The State and Capitalism in Israel – received comparatively less attention, even when they share the critique of Israeli national ideology. In comparison, post-Zionist works for which labor considerations are means toward demonstrating a different form of marginalization, as in Gershon Shafir’s work on exclusionary earlyZionist labor practices, occupied the center of academic discussion. The perspective of labor by itself, in other words, seems to not count as a marginalized perspective for most scholars of Israel, even when they themselves argue for its secondary or subservient status under Zionism. This issue seeks to bring labor and class perspectives into the center of the inquiry. Any questions can be raised about these perspectives. For example, can – and should – the perspective of labor be disentangled from its older articulation with labor Zionism? Can that perspective be distinct from both Zionist and Post-Zionist approaches? Or does it necessarily belong in one of these camps? What kind of questions would one ask in exploring Israeli history, society, and culture, if one approached it from the perspective of labor? Each of the contributions to this issue reflects on at least some of these questions, in its own way. The article “Constructing a Classed Community,” by Dani Filc and Rami Adut examines the intriguing question of class formation, which the writers try to make less illusive by localizing their research and focusing on a suburban neighborhood in the Israeli city of Holon as a case study. The main question the writers ask is whether the","PeriodicalId":43363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Israeli History","volume":"40 1","pages":"1 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45869619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Constructing a Classed Community in Kiryat Eilon (H-300) in Holon: A \"Popular-Class\" Community on Mizrahi \"Building Blocks\"","authors":"Rami Adut, D. Filc","doi":"10.1080/13531042.2022.2136272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2022.2136272","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper examines H-300 or Kiryat Eilon: a neighborhood in the city of Holon that exemplifies Mizrahi mobility into the new middle class. Following Cohen and Leon’s seminal insights on the Mizrahi middle class, the paper analyses life stories and other daily practices of H-300 residents in order to assess their (ethno-)class identities. The picture seems to be far more complex than the one described by Leon and Cohen. Mobile Mizrahi personal experience and collective memory are indeed dominant but what they construct is not a “Mizrahi” ethno-class space but a more open and integrated “popular middle class” community. Mizrahi collective and individual experience serve as a “quarry” from which cultural building blocks are produced. The findings suggest the emergence of an all-Israeli “popular middle class” subject, distinct from the upper-middle-class layers, leading the popular classes echelons.","PeriodicalId":43363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Israeli History","volume":"40 1","pages":"7 - 41"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47866641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gates of justice and exchange rates: speculative labor in the book of men","authors":"Tahel Frosh","doi":"10.1080/13531042.2022.2160549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2022.2160549","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Since the beginning of the twenty-first century in Israel – and with growing intensity since the outbreak of the 2011 social protests – a new neoliberal economical subject has appeared in Hebrew literature. In this new subjectivity, self-identity is formed and understood by its relations to work. In this article I will follow the new working subject as it is revealed in Nano Shabtai’s novel Book of Men and present an interpretive paradigm, grounded in the critique of neoliberalism. While much of the critique of Book of Men revolves around gender identity and power relations, I will offer a new interpretation. Shabtai’s protagonist reveals the mechanism underlying a subjectivity immersed in work and economics. As I will demonstrate, this mechanism negates the conventional dichotomy between exploiter and exploited – indeed, between the concept of coerciveness and choice – offering a reading that accounts for the slippage between these categories within the text. Under such a reading, complex networks of power dynamics weave Shabtai’s novel, and are deciphered by employing different languages of meaning. In addition, I will show that Shabtai’s literary form is influenced by the neoliberal nature of work and can be read as a stock portfolio.","PeriodicalId":43363,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Israeli History","volume":"40 1","pages":"161 - 185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42765765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}