Topics: Attitudes to Israel, Attitudes to Jews, Holocaust, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Israeli-Arab Conflict, Israel Criticism, Main Topic: Culture and Heritage, Memory, Books and Literature, Film, Television
Abstract: Examines an important relational shift in British and German cultural depictions of Palestine and Israel since 1987
Develops relationality as a critical tool to challenge mainstream ideas about Israeli and Palestinian narratives as separate and not connected to European histories of the Holocaust and colonialism
Argues that Israel and Palestine are used as geopolitical and imaginary spaces to discuss social and political concerns in the United Kingdom and in Germany
Examines works by authors and directors from outside of Israel and Palestine, including those with no direct link to the conflict, thus extending our understanding of Palestine and Israel as signifiers in the contemporary period
Offers a comparative analysis of British and German literature, TV drama, and film which focuses on country-specific case studies to identify common trends in imagining and reimaging Israel and Palestine since the first Palestinian Intifada
Discusses works published since 1987 which depict encounters between (Israeli) Jews and Palestinians since 1947 which depict encounters between (Israeli) Jews and Palestinians and their narratives since 1947
Isabelle Hesse identifies an important relational turn in British and German literature, TV drama, and film published and produced since the First Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993). This turn manifests itself on two levels: one, in representing Israeli and Palestinian histories and narratives as connected rather than separate, and two, by emphasising the links between the current situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the roles that the United Kingdom and Germany have played historically, and continue to play, in the region. This relational turn constitutes a significant shift in representations of Israel and Palestine in British and German culture as these depictions move beyond an engagement with the Holocaust and Jewish suffering at the expense of Palestinian suffering and indicate a willingness to represent and acknowledge British and German involvement in Israeli and Palestinian politics.
Abstract: Until the early 1990s, the close cohabitation in France of Jews and Muslims from formerly colonized North Africa was generally peaceful. During the first half of the twentieth century, most of the newcomers fulfilled the Republican vision of assimilation. However, events in the Middle East in the latter part of the twentieth century and early years of the twenty-first, and in particular the First and Second Intifada, together with the introduction of Arab satellite television, caused a sea-change in inter-ethnic relations. Angry Muslim youths, frustrated also by widespread discrimination in the broader French society and workplace, directed violence both toward the authorities and the establishment and particularly against Jews whom they accuse as being Zionists. For their part, the Jews of the banlieues (suburbs) and inner cities have felt increasingly insecure and have been progressively moving to “safer” bourgeois or gentile neighborhoods or to Israel. These new realities have been the subject of a considerable number of French movies by Jewish and Muslim directors (and in one instance the son of a pied noir family) and film writers. Some of these films merely attempt to record the situation, whereas others aim at fostering improved relationships. This article chronicles these cinematic efforts and analyzes their varying approaches to Jewish-Muslim relations in France.
Abstract: In Israeli director Yael Bartana’s 2007 film Mary Koszmary—meaning “Bad Dreams” or “Nightmares”—a young Polish politician delivers a resounding speech to an empty, crumbling, communist-era Stadion Dziesięciolecia in Warsaw. The speech, he says, is an appeal: “This is a call. . . . It is an appeal for life. We want three million Jews to return to Poland, to live with us again. We need you! Please come back!” This article considers the powerful and perhaps disturbing premise of these lines and explores their possible meanings in a contemporary Polish context. What can it mean for Poles and Polish culture to need Jews—and in particular, to need those Jews who can never return? The complex phenomenon of Jewish memory in Poland and Eastern Europe cannot be contained within specific, present-day borders—whether of geography or of academic discipline: similar dynamics to those Bartana has identified in Poland exist throughout the region. Thus, against the background of Bartana’s film, the article considers the growing phenomenon and importance of local Jewish festivals in Poland and present-day Ukraine, focusing in detail on two specific festivals: the annual festival “Encounters with Jewish Culture,” held in Chmielnik, Poland, and the biannual Bruno Schulz Festival in Drohobych, Ukraine. The analysis explores ways that the memory of Polish Jews—and more specifically the figure of the absent Polish Jew—can function as a central element in the construction of new, communal Polish and Ukrainian narratives since the fall of Communism.
Abstract: This article seeks to trace how visions of a “Jewish return to Europe” inform contemporary cultural production. I am particularly interested in asking how the presence of Israeli émigrés in Germany, a dramatic instance of such a “return,” challenges the country’s memorial culture due to the “exportation” of dispositions relating to the Holocaust construed in Israel. I view this dislocation of memo-rial practices, a new instance of Hebrew-German exchange, as embedded in a broader discourse on migration, integration and xenophobic violence. At the core of my argument is the 2007–2011 film trilogy
And Europe Will Be Stunned,
directed by Israeli artist Yael Bartana, who is based in Berlin and Amsterdam. The trilogy presents a fictional national movement that advocates the return of 3,300,000 Jews to Poland, with the claim that Poland’s ethnic and religious homogeneity is a deficiency that could be corrected with the renewal of Jewish life in the country. Wearing the form of an enthusiastic political manifesto, the trilogy mirrors early Zionist images and motifs in articulating the vision of the return to the homeland. The trilogy’s end reveals this endeavor as a failure, to which the assassination of the movement’s leader, Slawek, attests.
