Through a Distorted Lens: Belonging and Ethical Representation of Jewish Identity and Zionism in Selected Palestinian Advocacy Picture Books

This article examines the impact of 19th-century Jewish emancipation on architecture through the example of the Yüksek Kaldırım Ashkenazi Synagogue in Istanbul. The emancipation process enhanced the public visibility of Jews, and synagogue architecture emerged as a medium reflecting this new search for identity. The adoption of Orientalist architectural trends—which became widespread in 19th-century Europe—as an expression of Jewish identity led to the incorporation of Eastern styles, particularly those influenced by Islamic and Andalusian esthetics, in synagogue design. Within this framework, the article analyzes the architectural design of the Yüksek Kaldırım Ashkenazi Synagogue, commissioned by an Ashkenazi congregation that had migrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and explores the intellectual and historical context behind its Orientalist style. Identity representation is assessed through architectural elements such as arch forms, ornamentation, and structural arrangements inspired by Islamic architecture. The architect, construction process, and the social position of the Ashkenazi community within the Ottoman Empire are also examined through historical documentation. In conclusion, the synagogue constructed in Istanbul is interpreted as a reflection of the Orientalist architectural approach embraced by Jewish communities in Europe, as manifested within the Ottoman context, drawing attention to the relationship between identity, belonging, and architectural representation.

This article examines how the award winning film Salt of This Sea (2008) responds to dominant gendered representations of Arab and Palestinian identity. The choice of this film is based on its significance as a contemporary cinematic text that aims to present alternative portrayals to those prevalent in the media. Furthermore, Annemarie Jacir is the first Palestinian female filmmaker to make a full-length feature film. The film puts a courageous female character (Soraya—played by Suheir Hammad) at the center of its narrative. It refreshingly departs from inflicting a male gaze on the lead female actor. Salt of This Sea responds to the dominant construction of Arab and Muslim women as passive with the portrayal of a determined heroine. In regard to portrayals of masculinity, the film attempts to challenge the core stereotype of Palestinian men as violent. Overall, the film is part of a movement to re-write a collective history, but it depicts dimensions of Palestinian history that are seldom shown in the mainstream media.

Missions and Missionaries - The Worlds of Junípero Serra: Historical Contexts and Cultural Representations. Edited by Steven W. Hackel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. 312. $70.00 cloth. - Volume 76 Issue 3

This research aims to analyze how Jewish identity is constructed in the West and the East, as represented in the graphic novels Fagin the Jew by Will Eisner and The Last Jew in Penang by Zayn Gregory and Arif Rafhan , using Halliday's multimodal approach. This approach focuses on various modes of communication, such as verbal, visual, gestural, and spatial, in constructing the narrative of Jewish identity in both novels. Fagin the Jew portrays Jewish identity in the Western context, specifically in 19th-century London, emphasizing antisemitic stereotypes and social marginalization. In contrast, The Last Jew in Penang depicts Jewish identity in the multicultural environment of Southeast Asia, where Jewish identity is more accepted and assimilated into the local community. The findings reveal that cultural differences significantly influence the representation of Jewish identity in these two novels. Through an analysis of verbal, visual, gestural, and spatial modes, it is found that Western graphic novels tend to depict Jewish identity in narratives of prejudice and alienation, while Eastern graphic novels highlight narratives of coexistence and adaptation. This research concludes that multimodality plays a crucial role in reflecting the complexity of Jewish identity shaped by differing historical, social, and cultural contexts in the West and the East.

Classical diaspora scholars have constructed diasporic identities in essentialistic and unitary fashion, with phrases like the “Jewish identity,” “Palestinian identity,” and “Irish identity” denoting migrants as homogeneous ethnic communities. Using the author's multisited ethnographic research among Zimbabweans in Britain, the article explores the diverse ways in which diasporic identities are performed, expressed, and contested in Britain. On the basis of data from a pub, a gochi-gochi (barbecue) and the Zimbabwe Vigil, this article argues that the concept of diaspora, by emphasizing a static and singular conception of group identity, removes the particular ways in which diasporic life is experienced. The ethnographic “sites” were chosen to highlight different geographic settings to show the contrast between multicultural global cities and how different spaces of association attracted distinctive diasporic communities of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and legal status. The article identifies a pattern of diasporic identity development that largely uses the homeland as a frame of reference, and this is contrasted with alternative, hyphenated identities that challenge the fixation of identities to a specific place. It can be suggested that these diasporic identities are bottom-up forms of resistance to the institutionally ascribed refugee identity, perceptions of blocked social mobility, racism, and discrimination in the hostland.

Reviewed by: Red, Black and Jew: New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature Rachel Rubinstein Red, Black and Jew: New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature. By Stephen Katz. University of Texas Press. 2009. In the story of Jewish literature in the United States, Hebrew writers generally earn barely a mention. When Americanists do turn their attention to non-English language writing by immigrant Jews, it is often to Yiddish. But as Stephen Katz demonstrates in this study, dozens of Hebrew poets and prose writers produced a lively, if rarefied, literary culture in America in the first half of the twentieth century, characterized in many ways by its preoccupation with archetypically American landscapes and themes. In chronicling Hebrew literary production in America, Katz, along with Michael Weingrad in American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States, expands upon Alan Mintz's groundbreaking 1993 edited volume Hebrew in America: Perspectives and Prospects. These studies participate in an ever-growing body of critical scholarship on multilingual Jewish representations of and engagements with ethnic and racial difference in the United States. Writing about Native Americans and African Americans was a means of reflecting on Jewish history and identity, but also a way of participating imaginatively in a new pluralistic and ethnically complex society. Not surprisingly, these efforts at cross-representation and cross-identification could be as problematic as they were well intended. Katz characterizes this duality as a paradoxical gesture of simultaneous separatism and acculturation, and observes that this fascination with the plight [End Page 158] of "other Others" was a unique development in modern Hebrew letters, anticipating contemporary Israeli texts that take up questions of Arab and Palestinian identity and history. For his readers who approach this study from the perspective of Hebrew literary scholarship, Katz makes the argument that America deserves attention in literary historical accounts of modern Hebrew writing. But this study makes a special contribution as well to the increasingly transnational, multilingual study of American culture, recently transformed by the challenges issued by diaspora studies to longstanding disciplinary linguistic, cultural, racial and ethnic boundaries. The writers of Katz's study worked at the nexus between their Eastern European geographical and linguistic origins (Hebrew was not a native vernacular for any of them), the arduous project of Jewish state-building in Palestine, where Hebrew was to be the national language, and the United States, where Jews enjoyed unprecedented freedoms but where Hebrew as a living literary language was doomed to disappear. Many of them would eventually leave the United States for Israel, but some of them would then return. Exile, nationhood, and homeland become charged, ambivalent, and unstable terms, often negotiated through the very texts that Katz examines in this study. Significantly, Katz's careful analyses of Hebrew representations of Indians and Blacks are followed by two concluding chapters on language and the land of Israel in the Hebrew American imagination, thus linking the imagined "frontiers" of America with those of Zion. Following significant chapters on three major Hebrew epics on Native American themes published in the first half of the twentieth century by Benjamin Silkiner, Israel Efros, and Ephraim Lisitzky, Katz continues with careful close readings of poems and stories featuring Native and African-American characters by Simon Ginzburg, Abraham Regelson, Gavriel Preil, Hillel Bavli, Simon Ginzburg, and more. I venture to say that none of these texts will be familiar to students of American literature; few have been translated into English. Katz's study thus offers unprecedented access to a neglected field within America's literary landscape. Indeed, Katz positions these writers as "giving rise to the Bellows, Malamuds, Ozicks, Potoks and Roths of later years," as well as to "George Gershwin, Mel Brooks, and Leonard Bernstein" (76). By thus enlarging the body of work scholars usually associate with Jewish-American cultural production, Katz pushes the ever-expanding boundaries of American literary scholarship. Rachel Rubinstein Hampshire College Copyright © 2011 Mid-America American Studies Association

This study examined the reception of the novel Habibie & Ainun (2010) using Jauss' literary reception theory, focusing on how readers from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds interpret biographical prose fiction. Employing a mixed-method approach, this research involved 145 students from universities in Indonesia, including Manado State University, Makassar State University, Republic of Indonesia Teachers Association Wiranegara University, and Timor University. Data were collected through surveys with both qualitative and quantitative elements and analyzed using Jamovi and NVivo software. Findings revealed that factors such as personal experience, historical context, and generational differences shape how readers interpret the novel. The majority of readers (58%) brought preset expectations, aligning with the concept of the readers' horizon of expectations. While most readers felt emotionally connected to the characters, younger readers struggled to personally identify with them due to a lack of direct experience with the historical context. Nonetheless, universal themes like love and sacrifice resonated strongly. This research supports the SDGs by enriching literary literacy studies in historical and cultural contexts and promoting literary accessibility for diverse reader groups.

ABSTRACT“Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” is a question often asked in relation to the nature of Palestinian resistance. The question reflects a lack of accurate knowledge about Palestinian society and history, as well as a misrepresentation of the forms in which Palestinian resistance has taken place over the past few decades. Throughout their struggle for independence, Palestinians have predominantly adopted nonviolent forms of resistance. Focusing on the determinants of Palestinian support for nonviolent resistance against Israeli occupation two decades after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, this paper lays out the historical context of nonviolence in the Palestinian political landscape. Through the use of survey data this study provides an alternative theoretical conceptualization of Palestinian popular resistance, and community resilience. The findings of this empirical study highlight the impact of self-reported identities on support for nonviolent tactics in resisting Israeli occupation.

The present study applies the concept of identity negotiations, used in the field of psychology to describe the processes of self-representations and social interactions, in the sphere of cultural and historical studies, applied in the research of the American war correspondent Leigh White’s reports about Romania between 1939–1940, more exactly about the partition of North-West Transylvania. The attention will be focused on the negotiations between the identity representations of this correspondent about Romanians and minorities in this space and how social interactions satisfy or contradict self-representations and the objective goals of these interactions. The historical contexts in which these identity negotiations take place between the self and the other (the others, in the multi-ethnic and multicultural space of Transylvania) will be those with an extreme identity charge, proving how negotiations and communication can be suppressed in conditions of war. The study focuses on the dramatic event represented by the cession of North-West Transylvania in favor of Hungary as a result of the Vienna Award in August 1940, with references to the Bucharest Pogrom of January 21–23, 1941, with the crimes and atrocities committed against the Jews, a subject that will be treated in a separate study. Journalists such as Leigh White and his colleagues Cyrus L. Sulzberger, Robert Parker, Robert St. John, Leland Stowe, Countess Rosa Goldschmidt Waldeck, or Ray Brock will try to understand the identity traits of the others, knowing their historical and cultural context and, at the same time, trying to negotiate with their own baggage of stereotypes, or with the propagandistic directions of the official American or Romanian discourses, or, in extreme cases, with local censorship. American war correspondents proved to be not only over-qualified and over-professional, but also cosmopolitan, tolerant, experienced professionals or young novices, full of energy and enthusiasm, struggling to get at any valuable information, regardless of distance and dangers in war zones. They were sharp observers, checking the news and comparing it with other sources before sending their reports to American publications. In this way, Romanian-American identity and cultural negotiations took place above local human interactions.

The Movie Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) offers a powerful lens through which to examine the Osage Nation's postcolonial experiences. This analysis explores the film's depiction of colonialism's historical impact on the Osage, focusing on identity representation and oppressive power dynamics through the lens of postcolonial theory, drawing on the works of Said and Fanon. It reveals how colonial narratives perpetuate stereotypes and economic exploitation while highlighting Osage resilience and their fight for justice and cultural recognition. This research emphasizes the need to amplify marginalized voices and address the enduring legacy of colonialism, particularly exploring the intersectionality of gender and its impact on Osage women within patriarchal and colonial systems. Through a qualitative analysis of the film's narrative and cinematic elements, this study aims to illuminate the complexities of identity, power, and representation in a postcolonial context, ultimately contributing to a greater understanding of the challenges the Osage continue to face in their pursuit of equity. By shedding light on these issues, the study contributes to a deeper appreciation of the challenges that the Osage people continue to face in their pursuit of justice and equity.

The paper presents security platform based on agents as an efficient and robust solution for high-performance intrusion detection system designed for deployment on highspeed network links. The proposed detection algorithm is based on extension of trust modeling techniques with representation of uncertain identities, context representation and implicit assumption that significant traffic anomalies are a result of potentially malicious action. The heterogeneous anomaly detection methods are used by cooperating agents and then correlated using a reputation mechanism. To satisfy the performance requirements, wire-speed data acquisition layer is based on hardware-accelerated Net-Flow probes that provide overview of current network traffic. The output of multi-agent detection layer is presented to operator by a dedicated analyst interface agent, which retrieves additional information to facilitate incident analysis. Our performance results illustrate the potential of combination of high-speed hardware with agents-based detection and advanced analyst interface.

We present a multi-agent system designed to detect malicious traffic in high-speed networks. In order to match the performance requirements related to the traffic volume, the network traffic data is acquired by hardware accelerated probes in NetFlow format and preprocessed before processing by the detection agent. The proposed detection algorithm is based on extension of trust modeling techniques with representation of uncertain identities, context representation and implicit assumption that significant traffic anomalies are a result of potentially malicious action. In order to model the traffic, each of the cooperating agents uses an existing anomaly detection method, that are then correlated using a reputation mechanism. The output of the detection layer is presented to operator by a dedicated analyst interface agent, which retrieves additional information to facilitate incident analysis. Our performance results illustrate the potential of the combination of high-speed hardware with cooperative detection algorithms and advanced analyst interface.KeywordsTrust ModelIntrusion DetectionAnomaly DetectionIntrusion Detection SystemDetection AgentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture, edited by Vincent Brook. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006. 337 pp. $24.95. In 1993 Samuel C. Heilman, the chair of Jewish Studies at Queen's College of the City University of New York, pointed out that are those who argue that . . . a real desire remains to a Jewish identity and continuity. . . . [I]t is not a very strong desire, however, and it adapts itself to the needs of integration in the United States. More than a decade later, it seems as if there is a real desire to maintain Jewish identity and culture, but in the plural not the singular. Jewish American artistic and cultural production has expanded so much that the National Foundation for Jewish Culture has recently proclaimed that: We are in the midst of a Jewish cultural renaissance in America . . . a Golden Age of Jewish Culture unlike any in the 4,000 year history of the Jewish people (http://www2.jewishculture.org/about/). Out of this Renaissance, Jewish identity and culture have taken on many new forms that have simply never been seen before in Jewish history. You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture, edited by Vincent Brook, is a timely collection of essays. The essayists in this book approach several new hybrid representations of Jewish-American identity from a diversity of viewpoints. The spaces of Jewish identity they address, delimited by nine different sections in the book, include literature, theater, music, dance, painting, photography, film, stand-up comedy, and television. By and large, the essayists deal with the question of what Jewishness means in a American culture which thrives on the endless creation and recreation of new cultural identities. In addition, these essays are interested in how Jewish culture lives on in the arts and entertainment. What types of Jewish identity have been created in film, photography, dance, music, literature and theater, and what do these identities retain or reject from previous representations of Jewishness in America? These questions are prominent throughout this collection. In his introduction to this collection, Vincent Brook points out that since Jewish American identity, representation, and culture have radically changed over the last two decades, the traditional approach of Jewish Studies to Jewish culture and identity must follow. For it is the fundamental, if not obligatory, task of the postmodern age (p. 4) to challenge previous, monocausal, notions of Jewish culture and representation which include Irving Howe's late 1970s immigrant based criterion and a religious based criterion (p. 4). By challenging such criteria, through the introduction of many other forms of Jewish identity and affirming them as Jewish, an approach to Jewish identity can be augmented. To be sure, Brook and many of the essayists in this volume belong to a new group of Jewish Studies scholars whose work echoes the notion of Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, that new Jews claim their Jewishness by dissent rather than descent. Nonetheless, the issue of where Jewish identity descends from is central to the novelty of this claim. The essayists in this volume are acutely aware of this. Indeed, the creation of an anti-essentialist interpretation of Jewish culture may be a concern for most of these essays, but it is certainly not the only concern; the question of how Jewish-American identity lives on, or, as Hommi Bhabha says, translates into a plurality of Jewish identities, is also of great interest. Of these essays, there are several that stand out in their analysis of how Jewish representation creates new identities and/or maintains some form of continuity between past and the present notions of Jewish identity. By way of analyzing Jewish comic book representations, Andrea Most's essay points out that one of the crucial points of continuity between the past and present forms of Jewish identity is the representation of the Jewish body. …

The research relevance is determined by the need to understand how the historical evolution of sports periodicals influenced the perception of martial arts in different periods of martial arts in the digital age, the growth of global mobility and cultural hybridisation. The study aimed to analyse the peculiarities of kickboxing representation in Ukrainian and international sports periodicals, incorporating the historical and cultural context and the transformation of the media image of this sport. The research addressed sports journalism as a source of socio-cultural information that traced the evolution of public perception of martial arts in the media space. A set of methods was used: historical and cultural analysis, source studies, content analysis of media texts, critical discourse analysis, and linguistic and stylistic reading of texts. The materials were based on eight publications in sports periodicals in Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom and international platforms published from 1997 to 2024. All texts were analysed by format, genre, style, audience and content focus. The study determined that Ukrainian sports periodicals focused mainly on institutional and applied aspects of kickboxing functioning – the activities of sections, the role of coaches, organisational conditions and the achievements of athletes. The international media, on the other hand, demonstrated a personalised and narrative approach, emphasising stories of personal transformation, social context and cultural symbolism. The study determined that the media image of kickboxing in the global discourse was shifting from a technical discipline to a means of self-expression, representation of identity and an element of pop culture. The study also noted a tendency towards genre hybridisation, in which traditional forms of sports journalism were combined with elements of cultural storytelling, entertainment content and symbolic interpretation, which led to the complication of the information code of martial arts in the media space. The practical significance of the results is determined by an outline of the mechanisms of influence of sports journalism on the formation of ideas about martial arts, which can be used in the training of specialists in sports communication, media education and cultural analysis

Questions concerning truth, authenticity and memory are increasingly crucial as we progress through the twenty-first century, drawing further away from the lived memory of the National Socialist era (1933-1945) and its terrible impact on society. This includes the displacement of thousands of Jewish children through the Kindertransport rescue operation (1938-1939). For many children, fictional narratives continue to be their first meaningful encounter with historical events. This underlines the importance of writing narratives for child readers that depict historical events accurately and striking a balance between instruction and delight. Such considerations will be discussed, focussing on two children’s novels by Irish writers Marilyn Taylor and Claire Mulligan as case studies. In this analysis, we will discuss these authors’ motives for writing stories depicting the experiences of Kindertransportees, their representations of this particular historical context and the experiences of child exiles in their works for current and future generations of young readers.