Performing National Emotions

Israeli national identity is a widely debated topic, with existing studies emphasizing the significance of Zionism, Judaism, the Holocaust, liberal democracy, and Westernism as the primary components. However, the role of militarism and settler-colonialism in shaping Israeli national identity has been overlooked. This study aims to explore the influence of militarism and settler-colonialism on Israeli national identity. The research question is how these phenomena have contributed to the formation of Israeli national identity. The study initially discusses the position of Zionism, Judaism, the Holocaust, liberal democracy, and Westernism within the Israeli identity. Subsequently, it investigates the process of formation and manifestations of militarism and settler-colonialism within the Israeli identity. Secondary sources form the primary basis for this research.

Reviewed by: Parading Patriotism: Independence Day Celebrations in the Urban Midwest, 1826–1876 by Adam Criblez Dan Graff (bio) Parading Patriotism: Independence Day Celebrations in the Urban Midwest, 1826–1876. By Adam Criblez. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. Pp. 215. Paper, $28.95.) In Parading Patriotism, Adam Criblez explores how urban midwesterners commemorated Independence Day in the half century culminating in the U.S. centennial. Initially, Fourth of July celebrations centered on civic-sponsored gatherings featuring parades, speeches, and toasts looking to the past to honor the patriots of the American Revolution. By 1876, however, private pursuits such as picnic outings, professional baseball games, and the purchase of patriotic merchandise dominated the day, and celebrants dwelled less on the past than on the nation’s potential. Criblez’s book nicely narrates the twists and turns in patriotic practices as industrialization, immigration, and the Civil War fundamentally altered ideas about ethnicity, nationalism, and commemorative customs. Postbellum midwesterners still celebrated each Independence Day to affirm their patriotism, but their competing celebrations betrayed the republic’s fracturing by class, ethnicity, and religion. The book focuses on Fourth of July celebrations in five urbanizing areas of the Old Northwest (Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Chicago), but this is not a work of urban history per se. Instead, Criblez is more interested in the cultural history of regional and national identities, and he uses urban Independence Day commemorations to explore the emergence of what he sees as a distinctly midwestern strain of American nationalism. Parading Patriotism is a welcome addition to the historiography of American nationalism, raising important questions about the contested legacies of the American Revolution and the complex relationships between regional, racial, and national identities. Without a shared revolutionary past, midwesterners had to forge their patriotism from scratch, especially in cities increasingly populated by German and Irish immigrants as well as native-born migrants. But the absence of tradition proved no barrier to patriotic posturing. As Criblez puts it, “Midwesterners contended that they were, somewhat paradoxically, not only archetypal Americans but that their particular geography and history uniquely positioned them to represent the best aspects of the American nation” (iv). [End Page 599] The project of constructing patriotic citizens on the urban frontier, however, was fraught with conflict. The best parts of this book detail the efforts of competing groups to stake their claims to American patriotism through aggressive boundary-setting celebratory cultures. In the early 1840s, for example, local temperance advocates staged Fourth of July commemorations by redeploying rituals to novel purposes: revelers recited the “Temperance Declaration of Independence” and toasted their liberty from liquor by raising glasses of cold water. Part of a broader effort to use Independence Day as a platform for the performance of middle-class virtues, evangelical Protestants increasingly scolded those who continued to celebrate “in the antiquated method, with Rum and Gunpowder,” as one reformed Clevelander complained in 1845 (35). European immigrants countered by attempting to seize the mantle of patriotism. Criblez focuses in particular on Germans, who preferred to hold “our own celebrations . . . abandoning ourselves to the happiest of patriotic moods,” rather than participate in the sober civic processions “observed annually by the Americans in a mechanical and spiritless manner,” as one German immigrant insisted (58). By the 1850s, midwestern immigrants “monopolized all the sport, and parade, and patriotism of the day,” as one Columbus editor lamented (57). On the eve of the Civil War, then, Independence Day celebrations featured divided midwestern urban populations competing and sometimes violently clashing over ownership of American identity itself. Though the Civil War produced a revival in civic-sponsored Independence Day commemorations, by 1876 urban midwesterners rarely gathered or paraded together, preferring instead to celebrate via family picnics, railroad excursions, or horse race outings. While traditionalists complained about increasing commercialism and lack of historical memory, one Chicago editor in 1866 scoffed that “those who desire to hear orations can easily be gratified by joining any chance party around a lager beer table,” where “the spontaneous oratory which one hears . . . is often quite as instructive as the labored public harangues before the multitude” (112). In other words, Independence Day still deserved commemoration, but not elite direction. Parading Patriotism ably charts...

This article deals with one of the most dominant elements in Israeli national identity—the Shoah. The paper asks how the Mizrahim in Israel related to it, since for most of them it was a remote historical chapter. The answer is given through an analysis of three generations of Mizrahim—those who lived during the Second World War and immigrated to Israel during its formative years; their children, most of whom were born in the Jewish State and educated in the Israeli educational system; and their grand children. The first generation viewed the destruction of the European Jews with profound compassion, but felt that the Shoah was a chapter in the history of the European Jews. Their children attempted to connect, facing, to a large extent, resentment and alienation. Their grand-children already have the Shoah burnt in their souls—being an integral part of their self-definition as Israelis.

Book Reviews 147 Public Memory," Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 237-65; and Greg Dickinson, "Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of Identity in Old Pasadena," Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 1-27; Bryan Hubbard and Marouf Hasian, "Atomic Memories of the Enola Gay. Strategies of Remembrance at the National Air and Space Museum," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 1 (1998): 36385 ; Bryan C. Taylor, "Bodies of August: Photographic Realism and Controversy at the National Air and Space Museum," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 (1998): 331-61; and Barbie Zelizer, "Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 214-39. Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic. By Len Travers. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997; pp. χ + 278. $29.95. On Independence Day 1997, several enthusiastic residents of a small New Hampshire town engaged in a boisterous celebration of the national holiday by ringing the local church bells at midnight. The local police called them drunk and disorderly, and arrested them for disturbing the peace. The residents claimed they were merely continuing a long tradition of commemorating national independence , and were entitled to celebrate the Fourth with exuberance. No doubt there were many other residents of that town who felt the way Leverett Saltonstall did about the celebration of Independence Day 1816 in Boston: "Why did they not stop jingling the bells on Saty?" he asked. "I could never see the necessity of disturbing all sober people to celebrate the independence of the nation" (202). What we learn from Len Travers's book is that such conflicts over the meaning of the holiday, and the forms of its celebration, have existed since the earliest efforts to commemorate the Fourth of July. Travers undertakes a study of how Americans in three cities—Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston—marked the Fourth of July, from 1777 to the American Jubilee of 1826. He concludes that while initially, "the observance of Independence Day had to a significant degree succeeded in fostering national consciousness" and in "extending the 'community of allegiance' beyond state and regional boundaries," political tensions in later decades ensured that "the Fourth of July became instead a vigorous patriotic festival, in which Federalists and Republicans interpreted and reinterpreted America's past and tried to shape its future." Celebrating the Fourth, then, is about how "Americans quickly learned the power of Independence Day to communicate and to shape public opinion" (22627 ). Travers aims "not simply to trace the history of a holiday, but to understand the role of Independence Day in the formation and communication of national identity and national consciousness in the early republic" (4). In undertaking this study, the author draws mostly upon newspaper accounts of official holiday proceedings, and is especially sensitive to the ritual elements of commemoration and celebration. 148 Rhetoric & Public Affairs In the course of his study Travers examines how celebrations of the Fourth of July intersect with a range of social and political circumstances. The book is arranged chronologically, and covers successive periods of political uncertainty, confidence, dispute, and reconciliation. With each chapter, Travers investigates how the changing political context shapes the celebration of Independence Day, and how the holiday itself is exploited to fashion political statements fit to address disputes and anxieties of the moment. In the course of his study, Travers reviews the intersection of Fourth of July celebrations with issues such as slavery, working class politics, and the emancipation of women. Mostly, however, the book is about how the variety of Independence Day celebrations contributed to the maintenance of a national mythology, a fiction of national unity, and the construction of a national identity. In this sense, then, the book is a study in early ritual expressions of American nationalism. For scholars in rhetoric and public affairs, the book will be valuable for the detail it provides about the varieties of commemorative experience in the early republic. The author reviews a range of epideictic expression from the study of the traditional Fourth of July oration, to the analysis of the political dimensions of parade organization , to an entertaining look at the creative activity of toast drinking...

Judges in a Borderless State: Politics versus the Law in the State of IsraelProfessor Gideon Doron teaches in the Political Science Department, Tel Aviv University.

The theme and task of this theoretical study is the ethics and aesthetics of human existence in philosophy. The aim is to provide a brief insight into the issues of ethics and aesthetics of human existence in philosophy and to present the philosophical-pedagogical ideas of selected thinkers in the history of philosophy. We could document this aim using the historiographic method and the method of philosophising. Based on the established research question: RQ: What role did the aesthetics and ethics of human existence play in philosophy? We focused on the views of selected ancient philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who paid great attention to ethics and the associated aesthetics. Subsequently, we focused on a thinker of medieval scholasticism influenced by ancient philosophers—Thomas Aquinas, who addres-sed questions of existence concerning ethics and aesthetics. Furthermore, from the modern era, we selected philosopher Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. From contemporary thinkers, we present ideas chosen from Popelová (1962), Lomnický (2010), Páleš (2012), and Švihura (2014). Based on the research question, we investigate the development and shift in the per-ception of ethics and aesthetics from classical Greek philosophy to contemporary history. Classical Greek philosophy advocated universal truths and forms, medieval philosophy upheld a synthesis of reason and faith, and modern existentialist philosophy, including con-temporary history, emphasises individual experience and creativity. We present specific fin-dings that Socrates already sought harmony between aesthetic value and its ethical dimen-sion, linking the aesthetic concept of beauty with moral and ethical principles—the ideal of good reflected in it. Subsequently, Plato does not separate ethical action from the aesthetic value of good, based on the concept that the world of physical, transient reality, i.e., the sen-sory world, imitates a lasting, ideal world characterised by the supreme idea of good and is dependent on the ideal world. Aristotle perceives aesthetic disposition—artistic creation and ethical disposition manifesting through practical action as integrity, attributes of a balanced soul. Thomas Aquinas connects concrete existence and general essence—being through the act of God, in which both coincide. In the modern era, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard enriches the dimensions of ethics and aesthetics with a third religious dimension. In contemporary history, specifically concerning postmodernism, Lukáš Švihura points out the risks of an aestheticised society, particularly when ethical principles are absent in aestheticising areas of life. Sub-sequently, Jiřina Popelová offers a tool within ethics and aesthetic education—"higher" art, through which a cultivated being can manifest itself in aesthetic creation. At the same time, Lomnický Igor confirms the contribution of art as a catalyst for activating being towards change. Emil Páleš provides stimuli for the aesthetic, psychological personality type in the direction of virtuous activation.

This study focuses on the relationship between national identity and intractable conflict. Abdelal’s definition of collective identity that refers to the level of agreement regarding the purposes, practices, relational comparisons with other entities, and narratives that define collective identity was adapted to national identity during intractable conflict and was later applied to Israel’s national identity. A review of the Israeli 1969—2006 election platforms shows that in the 1980s and 1990s significant changes occurred in Israel’s national identity. The most significant changes included: changes regarding the territorial purpose of Israeli identity; changes in practices on who may become an Israeli citizen; changes of perception of the relationship between Israel and the Arabs; and a growing Israeli acceptance of Palestinian identity. Since 2000, following the failure of the Israeli—Palestinian peace process, some components of Israeli national identity have reverted to their original form. The study indicates that the Arab—Israeli conflict triggered changes in Israel’s national identity, but the conflict also seemed affected by changes in that identity. The article connects the changes in Israeli national identity to specific mechanisms and conditions of conflict resolution and reconciliation.

The 1999 Parliament of the World’s Religions Jim Kenney The Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions (CPWR) is delighted to announce the convening of the 1999 Parliament of the World’s Religions, December 1–8, 1999, in Cape Town, South Africa. Nestled against Table Mountain and overlooking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Cape Town is home to many races, religious traditions, and cultural varieties. Religious, spiritual, cultural, and civic leaders, groups, and communities there are working in partnership with CPWR to make the 1999 Parliament an unforgettable gift to the world. In the spring of 1988 the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions was formed with the commitment to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the first Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893. The 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions was one of the most extraordinary interreligious events of all time. Almost eight thousand participants came together to celebrate the commonalties and diversities of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions and to explore religious and spiritual responses to the critical issues that face the human community. Part of the legacy of the 1993 Parliament was a widespread conviction on the part of religious and spiritual leaders and participants from the grassroots that what had taken place in Chicago must continue. The parliament testified to a new spirit emerging around the world, characterized by new interreligious encounter, understanding, and cooperation. In the wake of the 1993 event, the council began to shape two initiatives designed to foster interreligious dialogue and shared action in metropolitan Chicago and around the globe. To highlight and punctuate these ongoing efforts, CPWR made a powerful commitment that, beginning in 1999 and every five years thereafter, a new parliament would be convened somewhere in the world. The diversity of the global community has never been more apparent. Today, metropolitan centers like Chicago exhibit an unprecedented variety of cultures. Advanced technology and communications have transformed the world into a global village. As a consequence, awareness of the richness of the human family in its racial, ethnic, cultural, social, religious, and spiritual dimensions is growing worldwide. The beauty and promise of this diversity is that we are mysteries and opportunities to one another. We are strangers who can become neighbors and friends. Simply in sharing who we are with each other, we all can broaden our horizons, deepen our [End Page 201] understandings, and get in touch with new sources of compassion and vision, courage and hope. At a Parliament of the World’s Religions, people from around the world—teachers, scholars, leaders, believers, and practitioners—come together to experience astonishing spiritual and cultural variety, to exchange insights, to share wisdom, to celebrate their unique religious identities; in short, to be amazed, delighted, and inspired. At the same time, participants wrestle with the critical issues facing the global community, learning about the world situation, and seeking the moral and ethical convergence that leads to shared commitment and action. The Parliament experience unfolds as a spectacular opening ceremony welcomes thousands of adherents of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions. In the days that follow, participants eagerly engage in interreligious encounter and education through lectures and workshops, plenary sessions, and performances. In shared observances, meditation, and prayer, persons from all walks of life find inspiration and renewal. And in chance meetings in corridors and on the street, each finds that the world is paradoxically both a smaller and a richer place than she or he ever imagined. In a period of heightened spiritual interest and renewal, the 1999 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Cape Town, South Africa, will offer countless opportunities for discovery and inquiry. Participants will be able to touch their own traditions at deeper levels. They can explore the origins, development, and perspectives of unfamiliar paths. They can compare and contrast beliefs and practices from widely separated places and times. Through lectures, workshops, and plenary sessions, through worship, prayer, or meditation, and through chance meetings with people from around the world, the parliament event will offer everything from occasions for personal spiritual growth and exposure to transformative approaches to social engagement to new friendships and an...

This article focuses on the extent to which participating in Independence Day practices influences people's national identity while taking into consideration the differences between public top‐down practices and private bottom‐up habits. It is a longitudinal study that uses a four‐wave panel survey to inspect levels of national identity across time as well as participation in various Independence Day practices over two successive years. There was an increase in the levels of some dimensions of national identity among those who participated in Independence Day practices – both top‐down and bottom‐up – while there were no changes in these levels among those who did not participate.

Independence Day and Land of Plenty are two tropes referring to the basis of American national identity: the Declaration of Independence with its guarantee of equal and inalienable rights and the promise of an inexhaustible abundance of resources. Independence Day and Land of Plenty are also two American feature films directed by German émigrés, the first being a science fiction blockbuster from 1996 by Roland Emmerich, the second an independent road movie from 2003 by Wim Wenders. Both films confront the issue of American patriotism albeit from different angles and at different times. Independence Day wholeheartedly embraces the American founding myths and translates them into a science fiction scenario. Wenders manoeuvres into an artistic space producing what I call patriotism of dissent. The films engage in a kind of dialectic dialogue on American patriotism. This article takes a close look at émigré perspectives on American patriotism before and after 9/11. By turning to the four patterns which political theorist Samuel P. Huntington identified as possible responses to the discrepancy between principles and practices of American democracy, I will analyse Independence Day as a filmic strategy to deny democratic gaps and Land of Plenty as a representative example of a moralistic reaction to democratic gaps. In the discourse of screening American patriotism from German émigré perspectives before and after 9/11, the work of Emmerich and Wenders exemplifies the spectrum of approaches to negotiate the fantasy of, desire for, and experience of American culture in the medium of film.

In the 1990s and 2000s a highly selective idea of multiculturalism became central to the imagining of American national identity in Hollywood cinema, one that was closely related to the political discourses of the nation surrounding the presidential election campaigns. Davies's focus here is on two significant films, Independence Day and Three Kings, which, despite their very different genres, registers and politics, typify the 1990s Hollywood trajectory of articulating what has been called ‘vulgar multiculturalism’ to exceptionalist and even, arguably, imperialist US nationalism. At the centre of both films is a quartet of male figures configured according to quite specific ideas about ethnic and racial difference: for example, in Independence Day Jewishness is associated with intelligence, blackness with verbal ‘smarts’ and physical strength. Through this composite but selective image the United States is portrayed as a site of ethnic and racial diversity, whose unique ability to cohere the qualities conferred by difference enables and legitimates its global military primacy. The latent meanings of Independence Day have been interpolated differently into American political discourse by President Bill Clinton, Senator Bob Dole and President George W. Bush. While Clinton responded explicitly to the film's evocation of a Eurocentric Second World War ideology, the film subsequently provided Bush with a more powerful, globalized legitimation for US power. If Independence Day utilized a highly selective version of multiculturalism in the service of American imperialism, Three Kings offers itself by contrast as an embedded critique of the aims and conduct of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Yet this critique is itself shaped by the contours of an exceptionalist discourse of the American national project, one in which, again, images of racial and ethnic difference play a crucial role. Three Kings decries the economic motivation of a war fought solely to protect oil supplies, while making a strong plea that military intervention should have included helping Iraqi rebels overthrow Saddam Hussein. This plea is made most powerfully in a crucial ‘recognition scene’ in which the central GI protagonists come to realize that Iraqi refugees, whom they have been taught to view as Other, share values and aspirations that are strongly coded as American. As such, Three Kings anticipates the Bush White House's rhetorical manoeuvre whereby the ‘war on terror’ is rendered as the bringing of liberation to oppressed peoples, but the film is also readable as portraying humanistic, cross-national obligations. These ideological tensions are unpacked by reference to a structured discussion of the film that took place in 2003 between students at universities in the United States, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Davies finally argues that the film ultimately contests the rhetoric of imperialism, and seeks instead to open up a space in which the desire to escape from oppression is not immediately coded as a wish to become American.

This article sets out to study the role that Palestine and the Arab-Palestinians have had on Israeli national identity through the examination of Israeli food culture. Food culture played an important part not only in the emancipation of European Zionist-Jews who immigrated to Palestine before 1948 but also in the creation of the Israeli national identity, including its collective memory, national psyche and desired political aspirations. However, it is impossible to understand Israeli food culture, and Israeli identity and popular culture, without taking into account the environment in which and the people among whom it developed. In that respect, and as argued hereafter, for political and ideological reasons the Palestinian direct contribution to Israeli food culture, and by extension national identity, has been expunged or overlooked. Early Zionist encounter with the Arab-Palestinian people and their culture contained a mixture of romanticisation, admiration and imitation. However, with the Zionist aim of substituting the Arab-Palestinian people by creating a separate political and economic society, the process of encounter changed to replacement, appropriation and deliberate forgetting and rewriting of the past. In relation to Israeli food culture, the Arab-Palestinian food element was marginalised, blurred and reinterpreted as belonging to the Zionist settlers, or as being brought to Israel by the Mizrahi-Jews. In other words, Israeli food culture ‘needed’ the Arab-Palestinian culture as a source of imitation and localisation, but at the same time desired its de-Palestinianisation, together with the general idea of a separate Jewish state.

Although the Mediterranean, as a geopolitical entity and as an ideological concept, has rested on a historical process of absorbing, hybridizing, and assimilating different people from diverse ethnic, religious, and national groups, its hegemonic culture imagines, views, and represents itself as the origin and cradle of “Western Civilization” at the expense of excluding its rich and diverse Arab, Muslim, Jewish, Levantine, African, and Semitic cultures.1 This article explores and reassesses how a particular example of women’s cinema produced in Israel, one of the so called Mediterranean countries, both veils and unveils the exclusionist practices of “Europeanization” and “Judaization” by struggling to give a voice and an image to repressed nationalities and cultures. In this article, I argue that Israel’s struggle to construct a “Mediterranean identity” epitomizes the contradictions endemic to the country’s formation of a national identity and is intimately linked to its continuing conflict with the Arab world in general and the Palestinians in particular. I analyze these contradictions by closely studying two documentary films, My Terrorist (Yulie Cohen-Gerstel, Israel, 2002) and My Land Zion (Yulie Cohen-Gerstel, Israel, 2004), both made by a politically engaged female Israeli director. Using the device of a personal/subjective journey, these films articulate the process of forming an identity by reflecting, projecting, and constructing debates around Israeli national identity. In particular the films focus around three major foundational sites of struggle over Israeli identity: the Holocaust versus the Nakba,2 the Orient, and the so-called (in an ironic historical twist of the “Jewish Question”) Palestinian Question.

Much of John Rawls' later work is concerned with the appli cation of his philosophical conceptions to the reality of liberal-democratic polities. I suggest that given the modern democratic reality of ethno national pluralism, Rawls' political conception of justice is insufficient to ensure democratic stability. Democratic states manage to contain ethnic pluralism while remaining compatible with liberal principles by promoting a corporate national identity. The key, I argue, lies in the particular member ship criteria devised and implemented by the state. Hence, the promotion of a corporate national identity negates state neutrality, but not necessarily political liberalism.

This article evaluates Israeli national identity and its core founding tenets of Zionism, democracy, and Judaism. For decades, demographic changes and associated cultural and ideological fluctuations have gradually pushed Israel into a national identity conflict, as multiple ethnic and sectarian identity groups have come to promote competing interpretations of the state’s purpose, political nature, and connection to territory. Continued demographic shifts, situated amid the sociopolitical dynamics of what this article will define as Israel’s “democratic tribalism,” will further test the compatibility of the constituent parts of Israeli national identity: the respective roles of Zionist ideology, democratic institutions, and the territory of the historic Jewish homeland.