Israeli Art Research Articles

Ethical Themes in Medieval Jewish Biblical Commentaries: An Opportunity in the University Classroom

AbstractThe aim of this article is twofold: to open a window on ethical themes in medieval Jewish biblical commentaries and to illustrate how such works can catalyze explorations of issues in Jewish ethics in the university classroom. The article takes its inspiration from a course taught at Bar-Ilan University in Israel bearing the title “Medieval Jewish Biblical Interpretation: Past and Present.” In addition to its investigation of the medieval commentaries, the article exemplifies one pedagogical strategy employed in the course that sees these texts put in dialogue with a range of post-medieval literary and artistic expressions from Caravaggio to John Lennon and, especially, works of Israeli art, poetry, and song. Apart from adding interest and surprise, this strategy underscores the enduring nature of the issues addressed by the medieval commentators, which include fratricide, peace, pluralism, martyrdom, military ethics, altruism, supererogation, and love of one's fellow human being.

Pursuing paradise: Jewish travel comics as feminist spiritual quests

Abstract Although much has been written about the impact of Jewish culture and identity on comics and graphic novels, to date, no culturally specific hermeneutic has been used to expand our understanding of the relationship between Jewish comics and the cultural matrix in which they are formed. The relationship between Kabbballah and Literary criticism has been explored by Bloom, Handelman, Wolffson and others. However, once again, it has never been applied to comics, despite the deeply visual nature of Kabbalistic imagery and symbolism. I will utilize the celebrated Kabbalistic ‘travel’ narrative of the Four Sages who enter the Pardes, the Orchard, or Paradise, which will serve as a paradigm for analysing the work of four female autobiographical comics artists. In the Rabbinic tradition, PaRDeS became an acronym for four layers or levels of interpretation – Peshat, the literal meaning of a text, Remez, its symbolic structure, Drash, its relationship to other texts, and Sod, its mystical meaning. Each of the four sages represents a model of a particular approach, and the fate they meet acts as a critique of the potential reductiveness of that approach, if used exclusive of the others. I explore the work of four female artists who mediate between personal and collective quests for meaning in their work, focalized through their own experiences. All of these artists were featured in the touring exhibition Graphic Details, curated by Sarah Lightman and Michael Kaminer. Sarah Glidden and Miriam Libicki visit Israel as outsiders, and write from Diasporic perspectives; Glidden struggles with received ideology on a Zionist Birthright tour, while Libicki seeks to embed herself in the army, and pass as ‘fully Israeli’. Sztokman argues that ‘the “Israel” that Diaspora Jews prefer to usher into their identities remains a powerfully and singularly male construct’. In addition to deconstructing this masculine construct from a Diasporic perspective, the inclusion of work by Israeli artists Racheli Rottner, and Illana Zeffren, reflecting on their relationship to the Diasporic vision of faith and identity, provides more nuanced and alternative models of cultural critique and religious dialogue from Israeli perspectives. I seek to initiate a mutually enriching dialogue between Kabbalah and comics, interweaving a feminist interpretation of the Kabbalistic story with a Kabbalistic reading of these feminist comics, which celebrate the power of Jewish narrative, symbolism and hermeneutics in subtle and surprising ways.

Silence during art therapy: The art therapist’s perspective

ABSTRACTThis study examines the perceptions and experiences of Israeli art therapists regarding the use of silence during art therapy, and its effects on the art therapist, the client and the therapeutic relationship. The researchers interviewed 15 art therapists using the Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR) analysis method (Hill, C. E. [2012]. Consensual qualitative research: A practical resource for investigating social science phenomena. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association). The interview covered five primary domains: (1) silence as an art therapy tool—the art therapist’s depiction of a therapist who uses silence in therapy; (2) reasons for using silence in art therapy—the rationale for using silence as an intervention tool and the therapist’s perceptions regarding the client’s use of silence; (3) the art therapist’s perceptions of the effects of silence on the client, the therapeutic relationship and the therapeutic dialogue; (4) the role of the art therapist during moments of silence in the therapy room; and (5) the art therapist’s perception of the uniqueness of the art medium during moments of silence in therapy. These findings can lead to a greater understanding of the importance and contribution of silence in art therapy.

Ghosts and habitus: The lasting hegemony in Israeli theatre

The article asks why the Israeli theatre’s ‘voicing hegemony’ practices endure despite a critical public debate that favors cultural pluralism. Ethnographies at two central repertory theatres elicit the meanings of the theatre’s ‘back-to-the past’ institutional habitus, as revealed in observations and in-depth interviews with actors, and disclose artistic dispositions that bolster veteran actors’ stature in the theatre and Israeli art generally. Analysis of the findings links professional capital with the twilight of an artist’s theatrical career. One conclusion connects the theatrical habitus with justification of Israel’s Zionist ideology. Theoretically, the article illuminates the historical component of the Bourdieuian concept of habitus. The duplication of this component in the back-to-the-past habitus inheres to mythification processes and makes the theatrical habitus relatively resilient to social changes.

Multiple Trespasses Female Israeli Artists Make Uncommissioned Street Art

Multiples transgressions. Le Street art des artistes israéliennes Cet article analyse la façon dont les Israéliennes s’adonnent aux arts de la rue. Elles transgressent non seulement l’évidence de l’appropriation capitaliste du contrôle de l’espace public, mais aussi les frontières normatives des activités interdites aux femmes. Leurs transgressions se fondent sur des stratégies historiquement définies comme féminines, mais aussi en détournant l’ordre masculine dominant.

The Performative Return: Israeli and Palestinian Site-Specific Re-enactments

In this article Daphna Ben-Shaul explores politically engaged Israeli and Palestinian site-specific re-enactments that pursue what she terms a ‘performative return’. This includes performed aesthetic and political re-enactments of real-life events, which bring about a re-conceptualization of reality. Three contemporary cases of return are discussed with regard to the historical precedent of Evreinov’s 1920 The Storming of the Winter Palace. The first is an activist, unauthorized return to the village of Iqrit in northern Israel by a group of young Palestinians, whose families were required to leave their homes temporarily in the 1948 war, and have since not been allowed to return. The second is Kibbutz, a project by the Empty House Group, which involved an unauthorized temporary settlement on an abandoned site in Jerusalem. The third is Civil Fast, a twenty-four-hour action by Public Movement, which was hosted mainly on a central public square in Jerusalem, integrated into the urban flow. The article draws attention to the fine line these actions straddle between political activism and aesthetic order, and explores their critical and performative effectiveness. Daphna Ben-Shaul is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University. Her current research on site-specific performance in Israel is funded by a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation. She is the editor of a book on the Israeli art and performance group Zik (Keter, 2005), and has published articles in major journals.

Under Dor Guez’s Bed: Scenes from the “Christian Palestinian Archive”

The impulse for artist Dor Guez’s ongoing Christian Palestinian Archive (CPA) project can be traced to 1948, the year in which Israel was founded as a state and annexed local Palestinian territories, deporting and displacing their residents. These events are regarded as Nakba (catastrophe) by the Arab population. By examining the formation of the CPA Project, the circulation of images in and out of this private archive and Guez’s photographic practices, this essay suggests the CPA does not construct a lost national identity, but rather narrates and maintains images of a private and personal disaster. By so doing, it exposes governmental and authorial mechanisms that excluded these communities and bodies, but have nonetheless failed to prevent their inevitable emergence into the public sphere. This essay also recognises Guez as part of a growing group of Israeli and Palestinian artists who return to the silenced moments of Nakba and undermine systems that preserved prevalent narratives, such as institutional photographic archives and national museums.

Abandoning Representations: Holocaust Imageries in Late Israeli Art Music

Discussing mechanisms of representation in modern Jewish art music in general and post-Holocaust commemoration music in particular, the article examines the dilution of musical signs in Holocaust-related works penned by Israeli composers Noam Sheriff, Ruben Seroussi, and Tzvi Avni. Written within the span of thirteen years, between 1985 and 1998, these works include Sherrif’s (b. 1935) Mechaye Hametim (He Who Revives the Dead, 1985); Seroussi’s (b. 1959) A Victim from Terezin (1995; based on excerpts from Gonda Redlich’s Terezin diary); Avni’s (b. 1927) Se questo è un oumo (1998; a setting of poems by Primo Levi); and Avni’s From There and Then (1994–1998). The compositions under discussion unfold a continuum of aesthetic approaches ranging from postromantic trajectories that stitch musical signs on nationalist teleological constellations (Sheriff), through conscious non-redemptive formulations (Seroussi), to compositional emphases on the migration and translocation of Jewish musics rather than affixed signs of otherness (Avni). The dilution of Jewish musical markers not only attests to the composers’ abandoning of representational apparatuses, but also necessitates a broader look at the dialectical movement of Jewish musics before, during, and after the Holocaust, lest these sounds become objectified or otherwise overshadowed by nationalist constellations.

DIY: How to (Not So) Safely Dismantle the Bomb of On-Screen Jewish-Israeli Identity: The Synergies with Art and Television in the Representation of Jewish-Israeli Identity and What Can Be Learned from Them

Looking at the intersections between Israeli art history and Israeli television series, as well as their recent increased visibility at the international level, this essay seeks to understand what makes contemporary Israeli art and media works accessible to an international audience, and how this recent success may reflect changes in Israeli and Jewish constructions of identity. Furthermore, it attempts to address the crisis of Jewish-Israeli identity as it is portrayed on Israeli television screens and to ask what can be learned about it from the perspective of Israeli art history.

Elastic Femininity: How Female Israeli Artists Appropriate a Gender-Endangered Practice

Elastic Femininity: How Female Israeli Artists Appropriate a Gender-Endangered Practice

Elastic Femininity: How Female Israeli Artists Appropriate a Gender-Endangered Practice

Elastic Femininity: How Female Israeli Artists Appropriate a Gender-Endangered Practice

Bringing Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948–1967 by Emily Alice Katz (review)

Reviewed by: Bringing Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948–1967 by Emily Alice Katz M. M. Silver (bio) Bringing Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948–1967. By Emily Alice Katz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. xiii + 215 pp. This is a valuable study that conveys a wealth of useful information about Israel’s presence in American Jewish life, and in the United States generally, in the period preceding the 1967 Six Day War. Claiming that American Jewish culture was “constructed” in the 1950s via the development of various performances and practices, Katz concentrates on topics [End Page 158] in performing and visual arts, non-fiction publication, and economics that have been mostly overlooked by historians whose work on early American-Israel connections focused overwhelmingly on diplomatic, military and political issues (13). Most of the book’s findings on subjects such as the mini-cult of Israeli folk dance, patterns of consumption of Israeli products, and exhibitions of Israeli fashion or art, derive from careful, original research. Future explorations of the Israeli-American Jewish relationship and its origins will need to take Katz’s findings into account because it is impossible to separate dynamics in realms of high culture or consumer choice from more overtly political or identity issues that have dominated discussions of American Zionist history. Katz analyzes ways in which American Jewish cultural or economic entrepreneurs utilized Israeli practices and products in this pre-1967 period due to a mix of motivations, some of them contradictory. They brought Israeli artistic or religious products into their own homes and sponsored Israeli art exhibitions or folk dancing events in public venues as a result of their own existential needs to express Jewish particularity, or to articulate ideas of compatibility between American and Israeli historical experience, or to identify themselves as patriotic Americans harnessed to various Cold War ideals and projects of cultural exchange. She is particularly insightful in the identification of cultural orientations, some of them gender-based, in areas of performing arts, fashion and consumerism, and publication, that ran counter to an evolving “muscular” narrative celebrating Israel as a fighting, victorious counterpoint to Jewish suffering in the Diaspora. As an important corrective to over-stated descriptions of American Jewish reticence about Israel in the 1950s, a Cold War period when Jews in the U.S. faced considerable pressure about political loyalty and relatively little official support from the Eisenhower administration to boost their emotional attachments to the newly founded Jewish state, Katz’s informative study will add nuance to considered discussions of how American Jewish-Israeli connections have evolved. Investigating ways to develop relationships with their Jewish somethings-or-other in Israel (co-religionists? compatriots?), American Jews after 1948 operated in uncharted territory, and Katz is entirely correct to assert that judgmental aspersions about the putatively paltry results of their explorations and efforts are unfair. No Jewish or American ethnic standard will ever avail itself as an objectively certain measure of what they were trying to do. On the other hand, this study’s assertive declarations about its value as a revision of long-standing historical judgments about the relative passivity of American Jews about Israel in the 1950s and 1960s before the Six Day War are often unpersuasive and distracting. Katz depicts [End Page 159] herself as revising generations of historical scholarship about American Jews and Israel. However, willfully or not, Katz overlooks a wide array of counter-arguments that could be made against such revisionist packaging of her findings. A partly or fully compelling counter-argument would contend that the various cultural performances and practices Katz has identified (American Zionist youth group fixation on the hora, or annual Hadassah exhibitions of fashion products designed by its Fashion and Design Institute in Jerusalem, or the purchase of Israel-made Judaica or other products) emerged in the 1950s precisely because they allowed American Jews to avoid other, emotionally inconvenient commitments or, potentially compromising political practices, much as Hadassah’s exceptional popularity in the inter-war American Zionist scene partly derived from its “non-political” character. Another counter-argument would point to issues of scale. These are evidenced by the quite modest sale figures...

Chana Orloff

Chana Orloff (1888–1968), a Ukrainian-born artist who emigrated to France in 1910 by way of Palestine, was one of the most important Jewish artists of the School of Paris and a pioneering woman in the early Israeli art world, yet her story has been marginalized in both the narratives of European modernism and the history of Israeli art. I propose that Orloff's biography and artistic production, particularly her sculpted portraits of Jewish friends and colleagues in Paris between the two World Wars, demonstrate how diaspora, gender, and displacement play a critical role in a revised narrative of twentieth-century modern art. I argue that Orloff's work offers a compelling visual counter-discourse to prevailing negative stereotypes of Jewish identity in European visual culture. During a time when many émigré artists wished to distance themselves from their Jewish identity in light of widespread anti-Semitic and xenophobic beliefs that their work contributed to the “decline” of French culture, Orloff proudly did just the opposite.

Visual occupations: violence and visibility in a conflict zone

In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists' creation of new ways of seeing—such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists' exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness —offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel's militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.

(Re)constructing Utopia

The union of art and politics has endured down the centuries, looking to the past, through memory, and to the future, through desire. The memory of what was or could have been provides a utopia to be celebrated or mourned, and since 1948 Palestinian and Israeli art has reflected on loss and gain, sacrifice and security, and presence and absence in the land. Contemporary Palestinian and Israeli art has converged, seeking peace, critical reflection and an acknowledgement of the impact of the years of unrest that has been borne by both sides, while technology has afforded a means to trace heterotopias in the spaces between possession and dispossession. Drawing on Luisa Passerini, Michel Foucault and Maurice Halbwachs, this article maps the land, utopia and heterotopias in Israeli and Palestinian artistic practices, and explores the performativity of silence, loss and remembrance through the works of Sliman Mansour, Reuven Rubin, Tamam al-Akhal and Yael Bartana.

The 2015 Jerusalem Biennale for Contemporary Jewish Art

The Jerusalem Biennale is a platform for professional artists whose current work relates, in one way or another, to the world of Jewish content within the conceptual framework of contemporary Jewish art. It does not attempt to answer the questions of what contemporary Jewish art is, or whether there is such a thing at all. The Biennale endeavors to create spaces where the discussion can take place and develop. Many people view the fields of “Jewish art” and “contemporary art” as mutually exclusive. Jewish art is often associated with Judaica—traditional objects used in religious rituals— while contemporary art is characterized by the use of modern media such as video, sound, installation and performance, and by themes relevant to the present. The main challenge of the Jerusalem Biennale is to promote art that is both Jewish and contemporary. This focus offers a promising alternative to the conventional boundaries of Israeli art and opens the event up to the Jewish world at large.

Divine Love: The Reception of Leda and the Swan Myth in Works by Jewish and Arab Israeli Artists - Contexts and Meanings

The motif of the abduction of a woman is one of the most frequent in Ancient Greek and Roman art. Abductions in mythology are generally portrayed as carried out by a god disguised as a human or an animal, such as Zeus who, in the form of a bull, golden rain or a swan, seduces a beautiful young maiden. These myths have been interpreted from different viewpoints, such as gender, social, political and philosophical. One of the most frequent myths of abduction is that of Leda and the Swan, which appears in both Greek and Roman painting and sculpture. This theme has found many echoes in contemporary Israeli art, and constitutes the case study for this discussion, which belongs to the field of Classical Reception studies. The interpretations of this myth are diverse, ranging from a socio-gender context, to post-colonialism and its relevance to the local situation; to subversives, concerning tradition versus contemporary culture; to emotionality and romantic suffering; and to love as phantasmagoria. These varied interpretations will be examined in the following analysis in light of both ancient concepts and contemporary outlooks, based on literary and philosophical sources.

A century of Israeli art

Framing artistic developments in the context of successive periods, author Yigal Zalmona describes the many ways in which Israel’s art has been influenced by its social and political history. This look at the wider picture goes hand-in-hand with detailed, enlightening analyses of seminal artworks from every period. Zalmona surveys the early days of the Bezalel School, founded in 1906 in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement; Land-of-Israel art during an era of nation-building; the pre-eminence of international modernism and Lyrical Abstraction after 1948; social-activist and conceptual art in the 1970s; and the recent embrace of photography and video. Throughout its evolution, Israeli art has reflected a complex cultural discourse revolving around questions of identity - Western versus Eastern, local versus universal, national and ethnic, collective and personal. Drawing on the author’s decades of accumulated knowledge and activity in the field of Israeli art - as historian, critic, teacher, and curator - and aimed at a broad audience, this book will be fascinating reading for art-lovers and for all those with an interest in Israel’s cultural history, offering a compelling example of the interaction between visual art and a dynamic, multifaceted society. Contents Director's Foreword; Preface; 1 Zionist Aesthetics: Jewish Artists in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe; 2 The Bezalel School: Early Arts and Crafts in the Land of Israel; 3 Modernists and the Fascination with the East; 4 A Decade of Conflict: Localism and Universalism; 5 Nimrod - A Case Study in Art, History and Identity; 6 Art in the Service of Nation-Building; 7 New Horizons; 8 The Birth of Now; 9 The Seventies: Exploring the Boundaries of Art; 10 The Eighties: Back to Painting; 11 The Return of the Real? 12 The Beatuy of Weakness; Artists' Index.

The Dilution of National Onomatopoeias in Post-Statehood Israeli Art Music: Precursors, Contiguities, Shifts

Israeli art music penned from the late 1930s to the early 1960s unfolds early serial practices in Mandatory (British) Palestine that had come to the fore during the early post-statehood years, when growing disillusionment with romanticist nationalism loomed large. Abandoning peripheral native masks, composers responded to the post-statehood shift by either adapting the linear properties of non-Western Jewish music, which they aligned with local readings of serial devices, or through the destabilization of folk-like dances and exotic musical markers. Shifts in Israeli poetry parallel the emerging attitudes of the first cohort of native Israeli composers and the gradual fading of the nation’s unisonality from their music.

The P6 Group and critical landscape photography in Israel

In the past two decades, landscape photography has become the most common genre of photography in Israel, and part of the comprehensive discourse in Israeli art focusing on questions of landscape-p...