Books by Eitan Bar-Yosef
![Research paper thumbnail of [A Villa in the Jungle: Africa in Israeli Culture] וילה בג'ונגל: אפריקה בתרבות הישראלית](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/32607606/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Building on the recent scholarly interest in constructions of “Black Africa” in the West, and dra... more Building on the recent scholarly interest in constructions of “Black Africa” in the West, and drawing on a broad array of episodes and sources — literary texts and theatrical productions, diplomatic projects and military schemes, educational enterprises and political debates — the book demonstrates how Israel’s involvement with and in Africa (“our ‘African Adventure’”, in Golda Meir’s words) can shed light on the ideological components of the Zionist ethos, and particularly on the vexed question of Zionism’s position in relation to three historical and ideological phases or foci - colonialism, anti-colonialism, and postcolonialism.
While the analogy between Israel and Apartheid South-Africa has become increasingly prevalent in recent years among Israel’s critics, it is often forgotten that in the 1950s and early 1960s Israel made zealous attempts to distance itself from the Apartheid regime by offering assistance to, and identifying with, the emerging Black nations in Africa. That this affinity with Black Africa — already anticipated in Theodor Herzl’s Zionist writings — “whitens” the Jews by associating them with a civilizing mission demonstrates how these multi-faceted representations of Africa were central to the ways in which Zionist hegemonic narratives and institutions have defined themselves. At the same time, developments within Israeli society since the 1980s — especially the immigration of Ethiopian Jews and the growing visibility of African migrant workers and later refugees — have meant that whereas in the past, these “Artificial Africas” were often employed figuratively to depict the relationship between Zionist hegemony and its internal “Others” (Israeli Palestinians or Sephardic Jews), in present-day Israeli culture these racialized images of Africa have gained a new, unprecedented currency.
The dream of building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land has long been a quintessenti... more The dream of building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land has long been a quintessential part of English identity and culture: but how did this vision shape the Victorian encounter with the actual Jerusalem in the Middle East?
The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 offers a new cultural history of the English fascination with Palestine in the long nineteenth century, from Napoleon's failed Mediterranean campaign of 1799, which marked a new era in the British involvement in the land, to Allenby's conquest of Jerusalem in 1917. Bar-Yosef argues that the Protestant tradition of internalizing Biblical vocabulary - 'Promised Land', 'Chosen People', 'Jerusalem' - and applying it to different, often contesting, visions of England and Englishness evoked a unique sense of ambivalence towards the imperial desire to possess the Holy Land. Popular religious culture, in other words, was crucial to the construction of the orientalist discourse: so crucial, in fact, that metaphorical appropriations of the 'Holy Land' played a much more dominant role in the English cultural imagination than the actual Holy Land itself.
As it traces the diversity of 'Holy Lands' in the Victorian cultural landscape - literal and metaphorical, secular and sacred, radical and patriotic, visual and textual - this study joins the ongoing debate about the dissemination of imperial ideology. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from Sunday-school textbooks and popular exhibitions to penny magazines and soldiers' diaries, the book demonstrates how the Orientalist discourse functions - or, to be more precise, malfunctions - in those popular cultural spheres that are so markedly absent from Edward Said's work: it is only by exploring sources that go beyond the highbrow, the academic, or the official, that we can begin to grasp the limited currency of the orientalist discourse in the metropolitan centre, and the different meanings it could hold for different social groups. As such, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 provides a significant contribution to both postcolonial studies and English social history.
"The Jew", widely recognized in recent scholarship as a potent symbol of debates about modernity,... more "The Jew", widely recognized in recent scholarship as a potent symbol of debates about modernity, became a particularly charged figure during the late-Victorian and Edwardian years, a period that witnessed the mass migration of East European Jews to Britain, the South African War (1899-1902), the proposal to establish a Jewish colony in East Africa (1903), and the introduction of the Aliens Act (1905). In these turbulent years, 'the Jew' was imagined as both black and white, infinitely wealthy and yet abjectly poor, refusing to assimilate and yet assuming a 'false' English identity, ideal colonizer and undesirable immigrant, 'alien' and yet almost overly familiar.
While recent attempts to account for these contradictions have all but ignored the crucial reference point of the Empire, this innovative and interdisciplinary volume considers the projection of the figure of 'the Jew' onto a vast geographical grid - not only the East/West divide within the British metropolitan centre, but also the much wider colonial context, shifting between Britain, Africa, and Palestine. Exploring links between Zionist culture and the British imperial experience, essays in this collection suggest how the methods of postcolonial criticism may be applied both to modern Jewish perceptions of territory and nation and to the image of 'the Jew' in the British political imagination.
Articles by Eitan Bar-Yosef
European Judaism, 2024
This article explores Israel Zangwill's posthumous presence in Israeli culture, as reflected in v... more This article explores Israel Zangwill's posthumous presence in Israeli culture, as reflected in various media and discursive arenas: press coverage of his death and Yahrzeits; trends in the translation, publication and staging of his works; the inauguration of streets bearing his name; and references to his views and legacy in various political debates. Demonstrating how the tensions and contradictions so typical of Zangwill's persona were interpreted by cultural commentators or appropriated by opposing political camps, the first part of the article traces and contextualises Zangwill's gradual disappearance from the Israeli cultural mainstream. The second part then moves on to consider Zangwill's unexpected comeback in 2021, when a musical production of The King of Schnorrers, adapted by Nati Brooks, was staged in Tel Aviv. While the renewed interest in Zangwill's work is rooted specifically in the playwright's Anglo-Jewish background, the production employs Zangwill's 1790s Jewish London to consider ethnic tensions in present-day Israel.
Contemporary Levant, 2024
While scholarship on Anglophone Palestinian literature has burgeoned in recent years, there has b... more While scholarship on Anglophone Palestinian literature has burgeoned in recent years, there has been no attempt to retrieve and assess the work of Soraya Antonius (1932–2017), author of two remarkable English-language novels depicting British-ruled Palestine from the 1910s to 1948, The Lord (1986) and Where the Jinn Consult (1987). Exploring and contextualising Antonius’s contribution to this literary corpus, this article examines the cultural, political and linguistic forces shaping her writings. It begins by tracing the fusion of Anglophile mimicry and anti-colonial resistance typical of her parents – George Antonius, author of The Arab Awakening (1938) and Katy Antonius, Mandatory Jerusalem’s leading socialite. While her parents funnelled their Levantine-cosmopolitan options into a distinctive Palestinian identity, the Nakba compelled their daughter to take the opposite trajectory, leaving Palestine to pursue cosmopolitan possibilities elsewhere. The article’s second section thus considers her work in 1960s and 1970s Beirut, first as a journalist and editor, committed to developing a critical discourse on Western Orientalism, and subsequently as an activist and spokesperson, advocating the Palestinian cause. Probing how these biographical and professional strands shaped her fiction, the final section demonstrates how the first novel’s Anglophile fascination with the coloniser’s mindset is replaced, in the second novel, with a decided focus on Palestinians’ perspectives. Echoing Albert Hourani’s critique of the ‘Politics of Notables’, Where the Jinn Consult thus offers a loving yet bitter account of her parents’ generation, complacent and ineffectual in the face of looming catastrophe.
Journal of Jewish Identities, 2022
Building on the work of scholars who have examined how Benjamin Disraeli's Jewish roots affected ... more Building on the work of scholars who have examined how Benjamin Disraeli's Jewish roots affected his life, career, and public reception in Britain, the present article considers how these Jewish elements were understood and represented in the Hebrew culture emerging in Eretz Yisrael—from early Zionist settlement in the 1880s, through the Mandate period, to the founding of Israel in 1948 and beyond. Exploring a broad range of cultural arenas, the article traces intricate responses to Disraeli's political style and imperial vision, to his conversion and myth of Jewish racial superiority, and to his art, both as novelist and political performer. While Disraeli's proto-Zionism was celebrated in Israel, at least up to the 1950s, other elements of Disraeli's persona and thought were suppressed or treated ambivalently—often the result of ideological fault-lines. Attempting to explain these reactions, the article concludes by demonstrating how performances of "Dizzy" still echo in contemporary Israeli political culture.
The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2022
Established in Jerusalem in 1921 by a group of British officials, the Jerusalem Dramatic Society ... more Established in Jerusalem in 1921 by a group of British officials, the Jerusalem Dramatic Society (JDS) was the most prolific amateur theatrical association in Mandatory Palestine; operating continuously until 1947, it played a key role in the cultural life of Palestine's British community. Its unique features-a compressed timeline on the one hand, a surprisingly rich repertoire on the other-make it an ideal case-study, exposing subtle social and cultural mechanisms that made amateur theatre such a pivotal colonial institution across the British Empire. Examining the JDS's development, organisation, and spectatorship, the article demonstrates that while early plans envisioned a society that would bring together Britons, Arabs, and Jews, the JDS soon became exclusively British, employing a specific repertoire to enhance this Britishness further. It was this insularity, combined with the creative and recreational aspects of amateur theatre, which generated a convivial intimacy so instrumental to Britons' communal bonding. Yet the conviviality always went hand in hand with an acute awareness of the productions' amateurishness, generating avid debates concerning cultural hierarches and the objectives of amateur theatre in the colonial sphere. Exploring these concerns, the article ultimately suggests that the historical and historiographical significance of the JDS and similar societies stems from the affinity between amateur theatre and the colonial periphery, both removed from the professional/metropolitan centre.
פעמים, 164-163, 2021
This article reconstructs the production history of the television series "The Children of Haim N... more This article reconstructs the production history of the television series "The Children of Haim Neighborhood" (Israeli Educational Television, 1976-1978) and offers a pioneering analysis of its contents. The encounter between the series’ pronounced pedagogical aim – to cultivate cognitive skills among ‘culturally-deprived’ (namely, Mizrahi) students – and the makers’ radical agenda created a landmark representation of Mizrahi culture on Israeli television – which was nevertheless tainted by an ambivalence regarding the value and status of Mizrahi culture.
The Explicator, 2021
This paper traces and considers the intriguing (and hitherto unnoticed) parallels between two lat... more This paper traces and considers the intriguing (and hitherto unnoticed) parallels between two late-Victorian "babies in bags": the "half-smothered child" that Jonathan Harker perceives in Dracula's "terrible bag" and baby Jack in *The Importance of Being Earnest*, occupying Miss Prism's hand-bag, left in Victoria Station. Adding yet another facet to the complex relationship between Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, the juxtaposition of the two receptacles sheds new light on each of these masterpieces.
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2023
Raju’s performance as (and supposed transformation into) a holy man is only one of numerous other... more Raju’s performance as (and supposed transformation into) a holy man is only one of numerous other performances depicted in R. K. Narayan’s The Guide (1958). These range from self-reflexive role-playing to direct engagements with theatrical and cinematic practices. Tracing the thematic significance of The Guide’s various performances, this article then turns to consider how Narayan develops the theme in a later and mostly neglected text, My Dateless Diary: An American Journey (1960), an autobiographical narrative depicting Narayan’s sojourn in the US in 1956–1957, during which he wrote The Guide. Reading My Dateless Diary alongside The Guide exposes an array of subtle links between the two texts. The article demonstrates that Narayan’s travels in the US allow him to refine his playful awareness of the performance of the self, both as a component of the plot (in the novel) and as a characteristic of the authorial persona (in the travel account) who is gradually transformed into a reluctant guru, just like the fictional Raju.
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 2020
In its climatic scene, towards the end of a Sabbath packed with events, Ian McEwan’s novel Saturd... more In its climatic scene, towards the end of a Sabbath packed with events, Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) offers a direct allusion to a Victorian masterpiece: Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” (1867). While scholars have explored the rich ideological, ethical and aesthetical dimensions of Saturday’s reference to Arnold, very little has been said about the novel’s more subtle allusions to another great Victorian work: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Adding an unexpected Gothic quality to the relationship between the novel’s protagonist and antagonist, Perowne and Baxter, these allusions invite readers to recognize a deep affinity between the two men, much deeper than Prowone seems willing to acknowledge. At the same time, these Gothic reverberations challenge Perowne’s unequivocal belief in progress and rationality and thus problematize the novel’s allegedly realist mode. As such, they add an intriguing dimension to Christina Root’s assertion that “Saturday becomes a much richer embodiment of the way we live now if we recognize the interplay of voices supplied by the novel’s intertextuality”.
Jewish Social Studies, Volume 22, Number 3, Spring/Summer 2017, pp. 1-37
ABSTRACT: Since the fou... more Jewish Social Studies, Volume 22, Number 3, Spring/Summer 2017, pp. 1-37
ABSTRACT: Since the founding of Israel in 1948, the Yishuv's campaign against British rule has been idealized as a period of bygone heroism and commitment. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, this nostalgia for the pre-state, anticolonial struggle was complemented, even challenged, by a divergent nostalgic force—one that celebrates the romance of the Mandate's colonial features, yearns for the social and political opportunities made possible by the presence of the imperial regime, and ultimately laments its demise. Tracing and contextualizing expressions of this longing in Israeli literature, cinema, and theater, this article argues that "colonial" nostalgia for the Mandate is rooted in the geopolitical effects of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War: driven by a growing sense of guilt over Israel's occupation, Israeli authors have depicted Mandatory Palestine as a cosmopolitan haven in which the Israelis, restored to the status of colonial subjects, are freed from the burden of sovereignty.
עיונים בתקומת ישראל (סדרת נושא, כרך 11 ): ישראל 1967-1977, עמ' 307-276
Representations of Israel... more עיונים בתקומת ישראל (סדרת נושא, כרך 11 ): ישראל 1967-1977, עמ' 307-276
Representations of Israel’s Territory, Society and Culture in the Educational Television Series Ivrit be-Siman Tov (1975)
Israel’s “Channel One” television station was founded in 1968, as a direct response to the 1967 War. While scholarship has examined the political and regulatory tensions that typified Channel One’s first decade, very little attention has been given to the Israeli Educational Television (IET), established in March 1966. Scholars have thus overlooked the huge impact that IET’s programming had on Israeli children in the 1970s, the result of the station’s exceptional creativity but also its practice of endless reruns.
This article considers one of IET’s flagship programs in that decade: Ivrit be-Siman Tov (“Hebrew, Auspiciously”). A televised course in spoken Hebrew, aimed primarily at new immigrants and veteran Israelis, the series followed the adventures of Simantov - a congenial tour-guide in his late-forties whose travels were meant to introduce viewers to the land’s geographical, cultural and human landscapes. Nevertheless, rather than portray the dramatic changes reshaping Israel after 1967, the series depicted the spatial and political reality of the previous decade. It virtually ignored the new territories conquered in the War; presented an all-Ashkenazi society, with some token Mizrahi figures; and looked back to more innocent times. Often explored self-reflexively, this nostalgia was problematized by the fact that the series’ most avid viewers were not the new immigrants but rather the children of “Greater Israel”, growing up in a reality increasingly distant from Simantov’s lost world.
ישראל: כתב עת לחקר הציונות ומדינת ישראל, גיליון 24 (2016), 37-62
Eitan Bar-Yosef
Promises, Promi... more ישראל: כתב עת לחקר הציונות ומדינת ישראל, גיליון 24 (2016), 37-62
Eitan Bar-Yosef
Promises, Promises: Representations of Mandatory Palestine in British Culture after 1948
Following the end of the British Mandate in 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel, Britons have been reluctant to acknowledge the direct role played by their country in the making of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And when attempts have been made, in recent years, to address the bloody legacy of Britain’s imperial involvement in Palestine, these artistic depictions of the Mandate often serve to critique what many on the British left see as Israel’s own colonial practices.
Building on recent scholarship which examines the impact of decolonization on the British metropole, and moving chronologically from the late 1940s to the present-day, this article considers how British culture has remembered—or, to be more precise, forgotten—Britain’s Mandate in Palestine. Focusing on Peter Kosminsky’s television mini-series, The Promise (Channel 4, 2011), and reading it alongside other theatrical and literary representations, the article suggests how, rather than being read in a broad imperial and postcolonial context, the legacy of the Mandate is often relegated and approached as a specific Anglo-Jewish affair.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
Published online: 14 September 2015
... more Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
Published online: 14 September 2015
Tracing the intricate presence of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in Israeli culture, this essay explores how elements of the novella (the journey to Africa, the iconic Kurtz, and the nature of ‘darkness’) have been repeatedly evoked, both implicitly and explicitly, in various cultural contexts. Focusing on three major episodes – the emergence of political Zionism in the 1890s; young Israel's intensive involvement in Black Africa in the 1960s; and the pessimism that engulfed Israeli society after the 1973 war – the essay suggests that the novella's relevance to Israeli culture is rooted in the work's fluid allegorical mode, which parallels tensions and contradictions that have characterized the Zionist project from its inception. This mirroring reached a climax in the journalistic work of Adam Baruch, who offered a highly stylized postcolonial reworking of Heart of Darkness in his influential account of a journey undertaken to find a disgraced Israeli general, self-exiled in Africa. The search for the Israeli ‘Kurtz’ thus continues to function as a powerful emblem of Israel's colonial violence.
TDR: The Drama Review, 58.2 (Summer 2014): 51-71
"Having fought in Palestine in WWI, the British actor Vivian Gilbert went on to narrate his warti... more "Having fought in Palestine in WWI, the British actor Vivian Gilbert went on to narrate his wartime experiences — first in a series of lectures, then in a best-selling book. Rooted in his thespian career, Gilbert’s self-fashioning as an officer/crusader builds on an array of performances — on and off the stage — which reflect gender and class anxieties, typical of WWI British culture.
""
Representations 123 (Summer 2013): 117-153
Numerous theatrical productions in 1950s Israel employed blackface to simulate
negritude on the ... more Numerous theatrical productions in 1950s Israel employed blackface to simulate
negritude on the stage. Focusing on Habima’s 1953 production of Lost in the Stars—the musical drama based on Alan Paton’s best-selling novel Cry, the Beloved Country—and reading it in the context of Israel’s involvement in postcolonial black Africa, this essay demonstrates how, by reflecting the slippery nature of Jewish whiteness, blackface performances on the Hebrew stage captured the complex
relationship between Zionism and apartheid.
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 12.2 (2013)
This essay explores the representation of the modern Jewish city in Palestine, envisioned in two ... more This essay explores the representation of the modern Jewish city in Palestine, envisioned in two fin-de-siècle futuristic tales: Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (1902) and Violet Guttenberg’s A Modern Exodus (1904). Focusing on the northern port-city of Haifa, transformed by the Jews from a poor Oriental town into a thriving Europeanized metropolis, both novelists employ the city’s spatial, cultural, and human features to present radically different views concerning the national Jewish rejuvenation: for Herzl, it becomes a utopian triumph; for Guttenberg, a deplorable failure. Notwithstanding their different assessments of the Zionist vision, both authors share certain anti-Semitic assumptions about the nature of “the Jew” (greedy, intolerant, vulgar), which are inscribed into the urban space. Herzl’s ideal Haifa is designed precisely to reform the diasporic Jew by introducing such modern urban measures that would render these detestable Jewish traits obsolete. Guttenberg’s disordered city, in comparison, reflects an inability to alter the Jewish character: no wonder that London, not Haifa, becomes the final destination of her “Modern Exodus”. Read alongside Herzl’s classic work, then, Guttenberg’s dystopia is revealed as a significant literary intervention, shedding light on the ambivalent meanings attributed to “the Jew”, especially the “desirable dosage” of Jewishness required for the future of Europe’s own cities.
Theatre Journal, Jan 1, 2007
In November 1997, after many hesitations, the acclaimed British playwright David Hare toured Isra... more In November 1997, after many hesitations, the acclaimed British playwright David Hare toured Israel and Palestine for the first time. The resulting play, Via Dolorosa (1998), was written for a solo performer: Hare himself, making his debut on the professional stage. Hare’s success in London’s West End led him, in turn, to another sort of pilgrimage, this time to New York, where he performed his monologue in a flashy Broadway theatre. His dramatic experiences on the stage in both sides of the Atlantic, meticulously recorded in a diary he kept from August 1998 to June 1999, were eventually published as Acting Up (1999) - a travel diary of Hare’s performance of his “travel diary of Israel and Palestine”.
Drawing on these two interconnected travel accounts, Acting Up and Via Dolorosa, this paper explores the array of affinities between Hare’s three journeys: to the Middle East; to North America; and to the limelight. On one level, Hare’s narrative is examined in the context of English travel-writing about the Middle East. Like one of those Victorian itinerant lecturers who traveled with their magic-lantern slides, bringing news from the Holy Land to parishioners across England, Hare insists that the spectators “could only trust the witness if [they] could see who the witness was”: little wonder, then, that his own first-hand account is teeming with Orientalist clichés that are reminiscent of nineteenth-century travel writing. I demonstrate, moreover, how Hare’s journey to the New Zion in North America is already encapsulated, anticipated, in the imagery and vocabulary he employs to describe the old Zion in the East.
On a more fundamental level, this paper asks what Hare’s histrionic experience tells us about the complex relationship between travel, theatre, and the production of texts. When Hare notes in Acting Up that he was “speeding through from [his] arrival in Tel-Aviv” or “shaky for a while through the settlements”, he draws on the analogy between travel and performance, constructing the theatrical journey as a miniature re-enactment of his original Middle-Eastern tour. And since the theatre itself is often constructed in Hare’s work as a modern-day sanctuary—consider, for example, the ending of his 1998 play Amy’s view—Hare’s ‘Theatre of Pilgrimage’ (Ernest Ferlita’s term) becomes, literally, a theatre of pilgrimage.
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Books by Eitan Bar-Yosef
While the analogy between Israel and Apartheid South-Africa has become increasingly prevalent in recent years among Israel’s critics, it is often forgotten that in the 1950s and early 1960s Israel made zealous attempts to distance itself from the Apartheid regime by offering assistance to, and identifying with, the emerging Black nations in Africa. That this affinity with Black Africa — already anticipated in Theodor Herzl’s Zionist writings — “whitens” the Jews by associating them with a civilizing mission demonstrates how these multi-faceted representations of Africa were central to the ways in which Zionist hegemonic narratives and institutions have defined themselves. At the same time, developments within Israeli society since the 1980s — especially the immigration of Ethiopian Jews and the growing visibility of African migrant workers and later refugees — have meant that whereas in the past, these “Artificial Africas” were often employed figuratively to depict the relationship between Zionist hegemony and its internal “Others” (Israeli Palestinians or Sephardic Jews), in present-day Israeli culture these racialized images of Africa have gained a new, unprecedented currency.
The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 offers a new cultural history of the English fascination with Palestine in the long nineteenth century, from Napoleon's failed Mediterranean campaign of 1799, which marked a new era in the British involvement in the land, to Allenby's conquest of Jerusalem in 1917. Bar-Yosef argues that the Protestant tradition of internalizing Biblical vocabulary - 'Promised Land', 'Chosen People', 'Jerusalem' - and applying it to different, often contesting, visions of England and Englishness evoked a unique sense of ambivalence towards the imperial desire to possess the Holy Land. Popular religious culture, in other words, was crucial to the construction of the orientalist discourse: so crucial, in fact, that metaphorical appropriations of the 'Holy Land' played a much more dominant role in the English cultural imagination than the actual Holy Land itself.
As it traces the diversity of 'Holy Lands' in the Victorian cultural landscape - literal and metaphorical, secular and sacred, radical and patriotic, visual and textual - this study joins the ongoing debate about the dissemination of imperial ideology. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from Sunday-school textbooks and popular exhibitions to penny magazines and soldiers' diaries, the book demonstrates how the Orientalist discourse functions - or, to be more precise, malfunctions - in those popular cultural spheres that are so markedly absent from Edward Said's work: it is only by exploring sources that go beyond the highbrow, the academic, or the official, that we can begin to grasp the limited currency of the orientalist discourse in the metropolitan centre, and the different meanings it could hold for different social groups. As such, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 provides a significant contribution to both postcolonial studies and English social history.
While recent attempts to account for these contradictions have all but ignored the crucial reference point of the Empire, this innovative and interdisciplinary volume considers the projection of the figure of 'the Jew' onto a vast geographical grid - not only the East/West divide within the British metropolitan centre, but also the much wider colonial context, shifting between Britain, Africa, and Palestine. Exploring links between Zionist culture and the British imperial experience, essays in this collection suggest how the methods of postcolonial criticism may be applied both to modern Jewish perceptions of territory and nation and to the image of 'the Jew' in the British political imagination.
Articles by Eitan Bar-Yosef
ABSTRACT: Since the founding of Israel in 1948, the Yishuv's campaign against British rule has been idealized as a period of bygone heroism and commitment. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, this nostalgia for the pre-state, anticolonial struggle was complemented, even challenged, by a divergent nostalgic force—one that celebrates the romance of the Mandate's colonial features, yearns for the social and political opportunities made possible by the presence of the imperial regime, and ultimately laments its demise. Tracing and contextualizing expressions of this longing in Israeli literature, cinema, and theater, this article argues that "colonial" nostalgia for the Mandate is rooted in the geopolitical effects of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War: driven by a growing sense of guilt over Israel's occupation, Israeli authors have depicted Mandatory Palestine as a cosmopolitan haven in which the Israelis, restored to the status of colonial subjects, are freed from the burden of sovereignty.
Representations of Israel’s Territory, Society and Culture in the Educational Television Series Ivrit be-Siman Tov (1975)
Israel’s “Channel One” television station was founded in 1968, as a direct response to the 1967 War. While scholarship has examined the political and regulatory tensions that typified Channel One’s first decade, very little attention has been given to the Israeli Educational Television (IET), established in March 1966. Scholars have thus overlooked the huge impact that IET’s programming had on Israeli children in the 1970s, the result of the station’s exceptional creativity but also its practice of endless reruns.
This article considers one of IET’s flagship programs in that decade: Ivrit be-Siman Tov (“Hebrew, Auspiciously”). A televised course in spoken Hebrew, aimed primarily at new immigrants and veteran Israelis, the series followed the adventures of Simantov - a congenial tour-guide in his late-forties whose travels were meant to introduce viewers to the land’s geographical, cultural and human landscapes. Nevertheless, rather than portray the dramatic changes reshaping Israel after 1967, the series depicted the spatial and political reality of the previous decade. It virtually ignored the new territories conquered in the War; presented an all-Ashkenazi society, with some token Mizrahi figures; and looked back to more innocent times. Often explored self-reflexively, this nostalgia was problematized by the fact that the series’ most avid viewers were not the new immigrants but rather the children of “Greater Israel”, growing up in a reality increasingly distant from Simantov’s lost world.
Eitan Bar-Yosef
Promises, Promises: Representations of Mandatory Palestine in British Culture after 1948
Following the end of the British Mandate in 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel, Britons have been reluctant to acknowledge the direct role played by their country in the making of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And when attempts have been made, in recent years, to address the bloody legacy of Britain’s imperial involvement in Palestine, these artistic depictions of the Mandate often serve to critique what many on the British left see as Israel’s own colonial practices.
Building on recent scholarship which examines the impact of decolonization on the British metropole, and moving chronologically from the late 1940s to the present-day, this article considers how British culture has remembered—or, to be more precise, forgotten—Britain’s Mandate in Palestine. Focusing on Peter Kosminsky’s television mini-series, The Promise (Channel 4, 2011), and reading it alongside other theatrical and literary representations, the article suggests how, rather than being read in a broad imperial and postcolonial context, the legacy of the Mandate is often relegated and approached as a specific Anglo-Jewish affair.
Published online: 14 September 2015
Tracing the intricate presence of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in Israeli culture, this essay explores how elements of the novella (the journey to Africa, the iconic Kurtz, and the nature of ‘darkness’) have been repeatedly evoked, both implicitly and explicitly, in various cultural contexts. Focusing on three major episodes – the emergence of political Zionism in the 1890s; young Israel's intensive involvement in Black Africa in the 1960s; and the pessimism that engulfed Israeli society after the 1973 war – the essay suggests that the novella's relevance to Israeli culture is rooted in the work's fluid allegorical mode, which parallels tensions and contradictions that have characterized the Zionist project from its inception. This mirroring reached a climax in the journalistic work of Adam Baruch, who offered a highly stylized postcolonial reworking of Heart of Darkness in his influential account of a journey undertaken to find a disgraced Israeli general, self-exiled in Africa. The search for the Israeli ‘Kurtz’ thus continues to function as a powerful emblem of Israel's colonial violence.
""
negritude on the stage. Focusing on Habima’s 1953 production of Lost in the Stars—the musical drama based on Alan Paton’s best-selling novel Cry, the Beloved Country—and reading it in the context of Israel’s involvement in postcolonial black Africa, this essay demonstrates how, by reflecting the slippery nature of Jewish whiteness, blackface performances on the Hebrew stage captured the complex
relationship between Zionism and apartheid.
Drawing on these two interconnected travel accounts, Acting Up and Via Dolorosa, this paper explores the array of affinities between Hare’s three journeys: to the Middle East; to North America; and to the limelight. On one level, Hare’s narrative is examined in the context of English travel-writing about the Middle East. Like one of those Victorian itinerant lecturers who traveled with their magic-lantern slides, bringing news from the Holy Land to parishioners across England, Hare insists that the spectators “could only trust the witness if [they] could see who the witness was”: little wonder, then, that his own first-hand account is teeming with Orientalist clichés that are reminiscent of nineteenth-century travel writing. I demonstrate, moreover, how Hare’s journey to the New Zion in North America is already encapsulated, anticipated, in the imagery and vocabulary he employs to describe the old Zion in the East.
On a more fundamental level, this paper asks what Hare’s histrionic experience tells us about the complex relationship between travel, theatre, and the production of texts. When Hare notes in Acting Up that he was “speeding through from [his] arrival in Tel-Aviv” or “shaky for a while through the settlements”, he draws on the analogy between travel and performance, constructing the theatrical journey as a miniature re-enactment of his original Middle-Eastern tour. And since the theatre itself is often constructed in Hare’s work as a modern-day sanctuary—consider, for example, the ending of his 1998 play Amy’s view—Hare’s ‘Theatre of Pilgrimage’ (Ernest Ferlita’s term) becomes, literally, a theatre of pilgrimage.
While the analogy between Israel and Apartheid South-Africa has become increasingly prevalent in recent years among Israel’s critics, it is often forgotten that in the 1950s and early 1960s Israel made zealous attempts to distance itself from the Apartheid regime by offering assistance to, and identifying with, the emerging Black nations in Africa. That this affinity with Black Africa — already anticipated in Theodor Herzl’s Zionist writings — “whitens” the Jews by associating them with a civilizing mission demonstrates how these multi-faceted representations of Africa were central to the ways in which Zionist hegemonic narratives and institutions have defined themselves. At the same time, developments within Israeli society since the 1980s — especially the immigration of Ethiopian Jews and the growing visibility of African migrant workers and later refugees — have meant that whereas in the past, these “Artificial Africas” were often employed figuratively to depict the relationship between Zionist hegemony and its internal “Others” (Israeli Palestinians or Sephardic Jews), in present-day Israeli culture these racialized images of Africa have gained a new, unprecedented currency.
The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 offers a new cultural history of the English fascination with Palestine in the long nineteenth century, from Napoleon's failed Mediterranean campaign of 1799, which marked a new era in the British involvement in the land, to Allenby's conquest of Jerusalem in 1917. Bar-Yosef argues that the Protestant tradition of internalizing Biblical vocabulary - 'Promised Land', 'Chosen People', 'Jerusalem' - and applying it to different, often contesting, visions of England and Englishness evoked a unique sense of ambivalence towards the imperial desire to possess the Holy Land. Popular religious culture, in other words, was crucial to the construction of the orientalist discourse: so crucial, in fact, that metaphorical appropriations of the 'Holy Land' played a much more dominant role in the English cultural imagination than the actual Holy Land itself.
As it traces the diversity of 'Holy Lands' in the Victorian cultural landscape - literal and metaphorical, secular and sacred, radical and patriotic, visual and textual - this study joins the ongoing debate about the dissemination of imperial ideology. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from Sunday-school textbooks and popular exhibitions to penny magazines and soldiers' diaries, the book demonstrates how the Orientalist discourse functions - or, to be more precise, malfunctions - in those popular cultural spheres that are so markedly absent from Edward Said's work: it is only by exploring sources that go beyond the highbrow, the academic, or the official, that we can begin to grasp the limited currency of the orientalist discourse in the metropolitan centre, and the different meanings it could hold for different social groups. As such, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 provides a significant contribution to both postcolonial studies and English social history.
While recent attempts to account for these contradictions have all but ignored the crucial reference point of the Empire, this innovative and interdisciplinary volume considers the projection of the figure of 'the Jew' onto a vast geographical grid - not only the East/West divide within the British metropolitan centre, but also the much wider colonial context, shifting between Britain, Africa, and Palestine. Exploring links between Zionist culture and the British imperial experience, essays in this collection suggest how the methods of postcolonial criticism may be applied both to modern Jewish perceptions of territory and nation and to the image of 'the Jew' in the British political imagination.
ABSTRACT: Since the founding of Israel in 1948, the Yishuv's campaign against British rule has been idealized as a period of bygone heroism and commitment. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, this nostalgia for the pre-state, anticolonial struggle was complemented, even challenged, by a divergent nostalgic force—one that celebrates the romance of the Mandate's colonial features, yearns for the social and political opportunities made possible by the presence of the imperial regime, and ultimately laments its demise. Tracing and contextualizing expressions of this longing in Israeli literature, cinema, and theater, this article argues that "colonial" nostalgia for the Mandate is rooted in the geopolitical effects of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War: driven by a growing sense of guilt over Israel's occupation, Israeli authors have depicted Mandatory Palestine as a cosmopolitan haven in which the Israelis, restored to the status of colonial subjects, are freed from the burden of sovereignty.
Representations of Israel’s Territory, Society and Culture in the Educational Television Series Ivrit be-Siman Tov (1975)
Israel’s “Channel One” television station was founded in 1968, as a direct response to the 1967 War. While scholarship has examined the political and regulatory tensions that typified Channel One’s first decade, very little attention has been given to the Israeli Educational Television (IET), established in March 1966. Scholars have thus overlooked the huge impact that IET’s programming had on Israeli children in the 1970s, the result of the station’s exceptional creativity but also its practice of endless reruns.
This article considers one of IET’s flagship programs in that decade: Ivrit be-Siman Tov (“Hebrew, Auspiciously”). A televised course in spoken Hebrew, aimed primarily at new immigrants and veteran Israelis, the series followed the adventures of Simantov - a congenial tour-guide in his late-forties whose travels were meant to introduce viewers to the land’s geographical, cultural and human landscapes. Nevertheless, rather than portray the dramatic changes reshaping Israel after 1967, the series depicted the spatial and political reality of the previous decade. It virtually ignored the new territories conquered in the War; presented an all-Ashkenazi society, with some token Mizrahi figures; and looked back to more innocent times. Often explored self-reflexively, this nostalgia was problematized by the fact that the series’ most avid viewers were not the new immigrants but rather the children of “Greater Israel”, growing up in a reality increasingly distant from Simantov’s lost world.
Eitan Bar-Yosef
Promises, Promises: Representations of Mandatory Palestine in British Culture after 1948
Following the end of the British Mandate in 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel, Britons have been reluctant to acknowledge the direct role played by their country in the making of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And when attempts have been made, in recent years, to address the bloody legacy of Britain’s imperial involvement in Palestine, these artistic depictions of the Mandate often serve to critique what many on the British left see as Israel’s own colonial practices.
Building on recent scholarship which examines the impact of decolonization on the British metropole, and moving chronologically from the late 1940s to the present-day, this article considers how British culture has remembered—or, to be more precise, forgotten—Britain’s Mandate in Palestine. Focusing on Peter Kosminsky’s television mini-series, The Promise (Channel 4, 2011), and reading it alongside other theatrical and literary representations, the article suggests how, rather than being read in a broad imperial and postcolonial context, the legacy of the Mandate is often relegated and approached as a specific Anglo-Jewish affair.
Published online: 14 September 2015
Tracing the intricate presence of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in Israeli culture, this essay explores how elements of the novella (the journey to Africa, the iconic Kurtz, and the nature of ‘darkness’) have been repeatedly evoked, both implicitly and explicitly, in various cultural contexts. Focusing on three major episodes – the emergence of political Zionism in the 1890s; young Israel's intensive involvement in Black Africa in the 1960s; and the pessimism that engulfed Israeli society after the 1973 war – the essay suggests that the novella's relevance to Israeli culture is rooted in the work's fluid allegorical mode, which parallels tensions and contradictions that have characterized the Zionist project from its inception. This mirroring reached a climax in the journalistic work of Adam Baruch, who offered a highly stylized postcolonial reworking of Heart of Darkness in his influential account of a journey undertaken to find a disgraced Israeli general, self-exiled in Africa. The search for the Israeli ‘Kurtz’ thus continues to function as a powerful emblem of Israel's colonial violence.
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negritude on the stage. Focusing on Habima’s 1953 production of Lost in the Stars—the musical drama based on Alan Paton’s best-selling novel Cry, the Beloved Country—and reading it in the context of Israel’s involvement in postcolonial black Africa, this essay demonstrates how, by reflecting the slippery nature of Jewish whiteness, blackface performances on the Hebrew stage captured the complex
relationship between Zionism and apartheid.
Drawing on these two interconnected travel accounts, Acting Up and Via Dolorosa, this paper explores the array of affinities between Hare’s three journeys: to the Middle East; to North America; and to the limelight. On one level, Hare’s narrative is examined in the context of English travel-writing about the Middle East. Like one of those Victorian itinerant lecturers who traveled with their magic-lantern slides, bringing news from the Holy Land to parishioners across England, Hare insists that the spectators “could only trust the witness if [they] could see who the witness was”: little wonder, then, that his own first-hand account is teeming with Orientalist clichés that are reminiscent of nineteenth-century travel writing. I demonstrate, moreover, how Hare’s journey to the New Zion in North America is already encapsulated, anticipated, in the imagery and vocabulary he employs to describe the old Zion in the East.
On a more fundamental level, this paper asks what Hare’s histrionic experience tells us about the complex relationship between travel, theatre, and the production of texts. When Hare notes in Acting Up that he was “speeding through from [his] arrival in Tel-Aviv” or “shaky for a while through the settlements”, he draws on the analogy between travel and performance, constructing the theatrical journey as a miniature re-enactment of his original Middle-Eastern tour. And since the theatre itself is often constructed in Hare’s work as a modern-day sanctuary—consider, for example, the ending of his 1998 play Amy’s view—Hare’s ‘Theatre of Pilgrimage’ (Ernest Ferlita’s term) becomes, literally, a theatre of pilgrimage.
הספר 'וילה בג'ונגל: אפריקה בתרבות הישראלית' מתמקד בשנות "תור הזהב" ביחסי ישראל-אפריקה (1973-1957) ובהשתקפותן בתיאטרון, בספרות ובתרבות הפופולרית בישראל; בתוך כך הוא בוחן את כינונה של "היבשת השחורה" כמרחב תודעתי וגיאוגרפי שאפשר להטיל עליו, או לממש בו, פנטזיות ציוניות, טריטוריאליות וגזעיות. בהפניית מבט לאפריקה, הספר מציע זווית ראייה מקורית לבחינת הכמיהות והחרדות המעצבות את פני החברה בישראל מאז ועד עתה.