Israeli Culture Research Articles

Ronny Someck and the Politics of Popular Poetry

Ronny Someck's poetry is unique in that it translates canonical Hebrew poetry into popular poetry. It is especially visible in the intertextual relations that Someck's poetry constructs with Yehuda Amichai's canonic poetry. Following Marx, the article analyses Someck's poetry as commodity structure as fetish. Someck brilliantly—and broadly—utilizes the figure of the stereotype; but in contrast with the accepted norm, he relies on the contradiction at the basis of the fetish to write subversive political poetry. Avoiding the binarism existing between resistance and affirmation, in his poems Someck develops a dialectic discourse that keeps rewriting the popular text as commodity existing in the circular rotation of selling and buying. This dialectic is manifested in the mode in which the fluid, hyphenated Arab-Jewish identity is represented in his poems. Through his poetry, Someck constitutes an inexhaustible space that allows the poems to develop subversiveness, which operates under the false appearance of total, coherent spaces. As part of Israeli culture, it could have been expected that this poetry would be stereotypical, adopting an Orientalist outlook. But Someck's poems develop, instead, an unstable gaze that undermines Orientalism's binarism. The lack of binarism is expressed in Someck's poems through a dual-layered structure; the two layers, one figurative and one literal, are separate and continuous and carry out complex interrelations. Within this relational frame the literal, violent layer punctures the figurative layer, and then materializes via political violence. But instead of relating to the Israeli occupation as an arena of a binary confrontation between the Israeli army and the Palestinians, it relies on its Mizrahi identity to destroy this binarism, and thus develops a flexible moral and political stance. Through writing his poetry as a "minor literature," Someck can maneuver between its two linguistic options—deterritorialization on one hand and reterritorialization on the other. A very impressive example is the poem about the Israeli Arab-Druze poet Samih El Kasem, in which he highlights the poet's guitar-playing in Hebrew as a major language. The deterritorialization in Samih El Kasem's poetry is expressed in the subversive deterritorialization of Someck's poem. The linguistic deterritorialization is visible when Someck defines his poetry as a stammer and thus gives voice to the oppressed and the rebels.

A local mimesis: meanings and metaphors in Aram Gershuni’s still life painting

ABSTRACT Aram Gershuni is an Israeli artist specialising in realistic and hyper-realistic painting, whose work differs radically from the mainstream of Israeli art and can most distinctly be characterised as ‘mimesis’, a term that is generally associated with traditional western art. Though Gershuni’s still life images may seem at first sight trivial and banal, it is their very banality and mimetic appearance that are significant, reflecting profound and disputed issues in Israeli culture. This article explores Gershuni’s still life paintings and offers several perspectives for their interpretation. The analysis is based on textual sources, mostly Classical, that reflect Gershuni’s approach and affinity.

Improving compliance with physical distancing across religious cultures in Israel

BackgroundPhysical distancing contains the corona virus, but compliance with physical distancing across religious minorities in Israel has been shown to be relatively poorer than in the majority population. This study tests the power of messages as drivers of willingness to comply with physical distancing across religious minorities in Israel during the first wave of the COVID-19 from March till June 2020.Methods896 Israeli Muslims, Druze, Bedouins, Jewish Orthodox, Christians, and Jewish Seculars participated in this conjoint-based experimental design. The size of the total sample and of the subgroups is consistent with the suggested size in conjoint analysis studies, particularly when aiming at stability of coefficients rather than stability of means. The dependent variable was ‘willingness to comply’. Independent variables were known contributors to compliance: perceived risk, practices of physical distancing, ways to assure compliance, and the agent communicating the policy.ResultsA regression analysis indicated minor differences in the power of messages across groups despite dramatic cultural differences amongst them. We identified three distinct mindsets that transcend religious cultures from the responses of the study subjects to various messages and named them “pandemic observers,” “obedient followers,” and “sensitive interpreters.” Compliance of "Pandemic Observers" (n = 306) may be improved by messages such as, “Dangerous virus spreading wildly” and “Health experts suggest what to do but the government is reactive rather than proactive” (β = 14, p < .005). Compliance of "Obedient Followers" (n = 242) may be driven by the messages “Socialize and work only from home, using the internet, e.g. zoom/Skype” and “Everyone should stay 2 m. (6 ft.) apart” (β = 16, p < .0050). Compliance of "Sensitive Interpreters" (n = 249) may be improved by messages such as, “Only people who are 60 and over are to be allowed to buy groceries during first 2 h from opening” and by using the media to publicize the official health policy (β = 8; p < .005).ConclusionsMindset-assignment reflects how people think rather than their religious affiliation. A personal viewpoint identifier was developed to predict mindset-assignment and enable health authorities to enhance compliance through mindset-tailored messages for members of each mindset segment. We recommend that health authorities and policy makers consider these different personality types, which range across religious minorities and emphasize the messages that each type responds to in developing and implementing a communication plan to improve physical distancing as an important public health measure.

Армянское наследие в еврейской культуре

This article dwells upon the Armenian influence on the formation of the Is-raeli culture in the period from 1915 to the early 70s of the XX century.

KORELASI KONSEP SUNAT DALAM PERJANJIAN LAMA DENGAN BUDAYA SUNAT DI MASYARAKAT NIAS

In the Old Testament, circumcision was seen as a major part of establishing oneself as part of God's people. In the adoption of Israel as God's people at Sinai, every Israelite must be circumcised. It is based on God's command to Abraham, as a sign of the covenant. But actually the culture of circumcision is not a typical Israeli culture, but is a culture that is common in the Middle East, the only thing that distinguishes the culture of Israeli circumcision from the Middle East is in God's decree in the covenant that raised Israel (a descendant of Abraham) as God's people. So there is a spiritual meaning in the cultural content of circumcision in the Old Testament for the Israelites. It turns out that the spiritual understanding of circumcision is not only owned by Israel, because this is also owned by the Nias Tribe. By using qualitative research methods, which are complemented by a literature study approach, this research results in an understanding that the culture of circumcision for the Nias tribe is a culture that signifies them as God's people. So that circumcision is an absolute for every Nias community.

The Pedagogy of Song

Drawing upon the author’s “Settlement in Israeli History” course, this essay argues that song can play a valuable and pedagogically economical role in Israel Studies and general humanities teaching, in both conveying meaning and initiating students in the art of close textual analysis. In particular, it showcases how the Israeli classics “Anu banu artzah” (We have come to the land), “The Ballad of Yoel Moshe Salomon,” and “Shir ha-‘emek” (Song of the Valley) can be deployed to stimulate vibrant and critical class discussions. In doing so, it also offers detailed readings of these songs and their place in Israeli culture.

From Schlemiel to Sabra: Zionist Masculinity and Palestinian Hebrew Literature by Philip Hollander

Reviewed by: From Schlemiel to Sabra: Zionist Masculinity and Palestinian Hebrew Literature by Philip Hollander Lina Tuschling Hollander, Philip. From Schlemiel to Sabra: Zionist Masculinity and Palestinian Hebrew Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. In From Schlemiel to Sabra, Philip Hollander offers a nuanced and well-researched view on the emergence of Zionist masculinity in the years prior to statehood. A scholar of Israeli literature and culture, Hollander shows that a counter to the dominant narrative of the emergence of Zionist Israeli masculinity, the sabra identity, was developing concurrently: self-evaluative masculinity. With Jewish communities facing existential threats in Europe and Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, the need arrived for reenvisioning Jewish [End Page 435] identity that was consistent with Zionist ideals of establishing Israeli statehood and active self-defense. Gender played a crucial role in this attempted transformation in the literary works, as Hollander shows: "Agnon was employing gendered representations to communicate his belief that the Jewish people were in crisis. Portrayed as feminized, the Jewish people needed to undergo change to survive and thrive" (63). The "new Jew" was defined in contrast to the diasporic Jew and focused largely on redefining the Jewish man. The Yiddish word schlemiel describes the diasporic Jew as "an awkward, clumsy person, a blunderer; a 'born loser'; a 'dope' or 'drip'" (3). While there was consensus in the Jewish communities about the need to transform perceptions and, importantly, self-perceptions of the Jewish man in Palestine, little research has investigated the lesser-known strands of the cultural transformation attempts. The dominant perception of Jewish (Israeli) masculinity rests on the sabra identity, at the core the body centered ideal image of a stereotypically masculine fighter willing to fight and die for his country and nation. Focusing on self-evaluative masculinity, Hollander presents a form of Zionist masculinity that "did not achieve a hegemonic cultural position within the New Yishuv" (19). Shaped by homosocial relations and the willingness to include aspects of diasporic life into the new identity, self-evaluative masculinity stood in stark contrast to the sabra identity that sought a clear cut from life and identity in the diaspora. In the introduction, Hollander shares his own journey toward his keen interest in Hebrew literature in Palestine before Israeli statehood was realized. Together with the afterword, these two sections' focus on Jewish life and identity in contemporary Israel frame the discussion of the emergence of Jewish identity in Palestine. The five chapters in between examine the literary works of four influential authors: Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Yosef Hayyim Brenner, Levi Aryeh Arieli, and Aharon Reuveni. A brief biographical summary introduces these authors and puts their lives and works in the political and historical context, which is particularly useful for readers new to the realm of Hebrew Palestinian literature. Chapter titles reveal the different stages of the development of Zionist masculinity. The first chapter for example is titled "Holding Out for a Hero" and describes the existential threat to Jewish communities in the diaspora, the role gender and stereotypes played, and the need for the "new Jew." In the afterword Hollander examines the extent to which self-evaluative masculinity had a lasting impact on Israeli culture. Contrasting it to the popular sabra ideal, Hollander shines at showing the legacies of both. [End Page 436] The use of jargon makes parts of the book difficult to follow, particularly for readers less familiar with Israeli history. The few pictures of historical newspaper ads and articles are well chosen and complement the discussion extremely well but are used sparingly. While this book seems to be targeted at a niche audience, scholars of different disciplines would benefit from it. Foremost, those interested in understanding Israeli culture and how Israel's pre-statehood times and diasporic identity developments still influence society today will find this book very informative. Scholars of collective identities and cultural transformation processes will find Hollander's analysis enriching as well. Overall, the book is an informative, critical, and deep-diving account of gendered representation and shows that cultural transformation is not a single line but in fact a multi-stranded composite of different forces, narratives, and processes which can occur simultaneously. With the sabra...

Review: Israel as a Modern Architectural Experimental Lab, 1948–1978

Review: <i>Israel as a Modern Architectural Experimental Lab, 1948–1978</i>

Differences in the Factor Structure of the Eating Attitude Test-26 (EAT-26) in Different Cultures in Israel: Jews, Muslims, and Christians.

Background: In recent years, there has been a shift in the clinical presentation and, hence, diagnostic definitions of eating disorders (EDs), reflected in a dramatic change in the diagnostic criteria of EDs in the DSM-5. The Eating Attitudes Test-26 (EAT-26) is currently considered an accepted instrument for community studies of EDs, although it features an inconsistent factorial structure in different cultures. Therefore, it is essential to investigate whether the EAT-26 can still be considered an adequate instrument for identifying the risk of developing EDs in different cultures. The aim of the present study was to examine the construct validity and internal consistency of the EAT-26. Method: The study used exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) among different cultural populations in Israel. Results: Findings indicated different factors in different ethnic groups, most of which do not correspond with the original EAT-26 three-factor structure. Results: The analysis yielded two main factors among Israeli Jews, four main factors among Israeli Muslim Arabs, and three main factors among Israeli Christian Arabs. Conclusion: These findings shed light on cultural factors affecting perceptions of the EAT-26 items. This calls for a reconsideration of the generalization of the original three-factor structure of the questionnaire in different cultures.

People-to-People Sports Diplomacy: “Israel Start-Up Nation” in the 2020 Tour de France

In 2020 Israeli-based cycling team “Israel Start-Up Nation” (ISN) participated in the Tour de France for the first time. In recent years, Sylvan Adams, the co-owner of ISN, has been investing in Israeli sports, innovation, and culture for nation branding, and diplomacy purposes. The research question this study tries to answer is how do Sylvan Adams’s cycling initiatives shape the projected image of Israel through the participation of ISN in the 23 days of the 2020 Tour de France? The study used content analysis of 324 articles; 295 published by The Guardian, the BBC and Eurosport, and 29 identified through Google searches. After three coding cycles, four themes emerged from the data: (a) representation, (b) performance, (c) Brand Israel, and (d) the Israeli-Arab dispute. The study is significant as it adds to literature on people-to-people sports diplomacy, on diplomacy and philanthropy, and on the branding of Israel as a sport-tech nation.

Connecting Ethnicity and Space: the New Russian-Mediterranean Pop Culture in Israel’s Periphery

This ethnographic study explores the co-influences between urban spaces and ethnic hierarchies in the pop-cultural creations of Russian-speaking immigrants of Generation 1.5 in Israel. The theoretical analysis draws on the concepts of orientalism, ethnicity and spatiality in the context of migration. The findings suggest that physical place influences intergroup/ethnic relations that in turn reshape the symbolic meaning of urban spaces. Young immigrant ethnic entrepreneurs have invented the new cultural trope of Mizrahi or Mediterranean Russianness, expressed in various venues of pop culture, in which they are involved as cultural producers: video clips, festivals, music and dance performances. It is a symbolic expression of Hitmazrehut — the Easternization process experienced by them in Israel’s geographic and social periphery.

School staff perceptions on education for sustainability and sense of community as reflected in an elementary school culture in Israel

Promoting education for sustainability (EfS) within schools requires adopting a whole-school approach for organizational change. In this study, we adopted Schein’s (1985) organizational culture model in school context, which includes three levels: artifacts, espoused values and basic underlying assumptions. Since sense of community is an important component in school culture, we explored the relationships between EfS, school culture and sense of community. Our findings indicated that the elementary-school staff felt committed to EfS and to their school community at all levels of school culture and every level served as a stable platform for the development of the next level. Furthermore, interconnections between artifacts, teachers’ values and underlying assumptions indicated a deep connection between EfS and school culture, which is not common in schools. The study concludes that schools’ investment in their staff’s sense of community is necessary for creating teachers’ commitment to promoting EfS as part of a whole-school approach.

Israel on the Screen: Between Reality and Fantasy

Israel on the Screen:Between Reality and Fantasy Yaron Peleg and Eran Kaplan Arguably more than any other artform, cinema can combine realism and fantasy, mimic the world as we see and experience it, and create images of our inner worlds, our imagination. The tension between realism and fantasy is one of cinema's most alluring aspects, and it is commonly acknowledged by what we call film styles or genres. By and large, and with some notable exceptions, Israeli cinema is immersed in reality. Rather than escape realism, it seems eager to explore, again and again, the nature of the traumatic core of the Israeli experience and force the viewers to face it. Israeli cinema and visual culture are almost obsessed with political, historical, and social issues, which are woven into narratives that sometimes take the form of social or national allegory. At the same time, a strong concern with reality does not necessarily lead to realistic cinema and television in Israel, especially when commercial considerations and the potential distribution in the global media market come into play. In this special issue, our contributors explore the relationship between realism and fantasy in Israeli cinema and TV and look at Israeli visual realism and the tensions therein. Our exploration begins with Ohad Landesman's article on the work of Claude Lanzmann and his documentary trilogy, Israel, Why? (1973), Shoah (1985), and Tzahal (1994), in which the celebrated documentarist reflects on the Zionist triumphalist narrative known as "from Shoah to t'kuma [revival]." Landesman explores Lanzmann's complex attitude toward this narrative, especially his contribution to exposing some of the realities behind it while [End Page 1] perpetuating some of its myths. Eran Kaplan describes how the harsh political realities of the Middle East in the TV series Fauda lose political signification as they become part of a tech or cyber universe. Kaplan shows how the hyperreality of the show is not concerned with the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as fighters do not do battle for their nations but in what amounts to a globalized corporate tech race powered by the neoliberal world order. Oded Nir looks at Israeli films and television programs that use allegory as a formal means of exposing socioeconomic antagonisms that often remain hidden. Nir uses Jameson's term "world reduction" to show the tensions between neoliberal logic and the welfare state in Fauda, The Band's Visit (2007), and In Between (2016). Yaron Peleg looks at how cinema handles various religious realities in Israeli culture in three distinct films, Ushpizin (2003), The Wedding Plan (2016), and Tikkun (2015). The first two films adopt popular generic conventions to translate unique Israeli religious realities, and the third film articulates a new language that tries to give visual form to Jewish religiosity. Vered Weiss concludes the issue with an article about the Israeli adaptation of the vampire genre in the television series Juda (2017). Weiss looks at the genre's local brew, into which antisemitic tropes and more unique Israeli ethnic tensions have been mixed to create a telling fantasy. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2022 Wayne State University Press

Three Short Case Studies of Non?Religious Spiritual Care

Unlike Western countries with a majority of Protestant citizens, initiatives in the field of spiritual care provision in Israel have involved mostly lay leadership and secular individuals from their very inception, rather than clergy and religious adherents. This religiously neutral position made it easier for spiritual care to be accepted across the varied sub-populations that compose the unique mosaic of Israeli culture. Adhering to a religiously neutral approach led to the use of a broader set of tools in order to reach people in their time of distress. Currently, there are about 130 certified spiritual caregivers in Israel who graduated from four accredited training programs. This article describes three short case studies, in which we can see the benefits of three such neutral approaches – connecting with nature, gentle touch, and non-theistic personal prayer.

JPS “Hidden Gems” and “Greatest Hits”: Colonial History; Invoked, Denied, Embodied

Tasked with selecting two documents specifically related to Israel and the Israeli settler-colonial enterprise from the fifty-year JPS archive, author Gadi Algazi settles on “History’s Verdict: The Cherokee Case” (1995) by Norman Finkelstein and “The Palestinians Seen through the Israeli Cultural Paradigm” (1987) coauthored by Aziz Haidar and Elia Zreik. While the former points to the historical affinities between the Zionist colonization of Palestine and the settlement of North America (including early Zionists’ unabashed identification with the “white” colonizers of the continent), the latter elucidates Israel’s “culturalist account” of Palestinians, which views the main problem with Palestinians in Israel as their “culture,” and not the colonization, repression, and exclusion they experienced historically and continue to endure.

Nano-poetics and a nano-representation of the Israeli milieu in Yossel Birstein’s short-short bus-stories

ABSTRACT This article discusses the unique nano-poetics and its nano-representation of the Israeli milieu, as found in Yossel Birstein’s short-short bus-stories. While these stories demonstrate the author’s poetics, they also constitute a miniature replica of Israeli society, emphasising the following four major aspects of this society: (1) the tension between the Jewish past and the Israeli present; (2) the complex dynamics between private and public life; (3) the gap between newcomers and veteran immigrants; and (4) a mentality dominated by nervous tension combined with the unique form of audacity known as chutzpah. Birstein presents the bus both as the inspiration for and as the object of his writing, and this narrative framework showcases the many variants in Israeli culture.

Kafka After Kafka: Dialogical Engagement with His Works from the Holocaust to Postmodernism ed. by Iris Bruce and Mark H. Gelber

Reviewed by: Kafka After Kafka: Dialogical Engagement with His Works from the Holocaust to Postmodernism ed. by Iris Bruce and Mark H. Gelber Abigail Gillman Iris Bruce and Mark H. Gelber, eds., Kafka After Kafka: Dialogical Engagement with His Works fr om the Holocaust to Postmodernism. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester: Camden House, 2019. 231 pp. Kafka After Kafka contains eleven remarkably productive and thoughtful essays by a mix of well-known and younger Kafka scholars. The introduction opens by cataloguing the global artistic reception of Kafka, from the Japanese Kōbō Abe, to South Africa's Achmat Dangor, to dramatic works by Alan Bennett (Kafka's Dick) and Sally Clark (The Trial of Judith K.). The editors claim that much recent art inspired by Kafka is about "violence and humiliation" at the expense of the "modest, elegant, playful, ironic Kafka of real life" (3). Not so in these pages, where the "dialogical engagement" promised in the title prevails. The chapters open up fruitful new connections and perspectives, which yield original interpretations of works we thought we already knew. The volume began as a conference at Ben-Gurion University, and the section devoted to "Kafka in the Israeli Cultural Space"—an exciting new avenue of Kafka research—is a highlight. Like all the excellent volumes in this Camden House series, the book is carefully researched and well ommitted, with detailed footnotes and an index. A strength of the collection is the authors' recounting of postwar cultural and intellectual history. Caroline Jessen's essay on Werner Kraft's 1968 Franz Kafka: Durchdringung und Geheimnis recounts the career of this German Jewish man of letters. Like Scholem and Benjamin (whom he knew), Kraft viewed Kafka as a writer of parables, and so he sought to "wrest Kafka away from literature." Jessen calls the book "an itinerary of reading" (19) that takes the form of "interweaving of literary text and commentary" (20)—a style evocative of rabbinical writing but also of great works of retrieval motivated by loss, such as Benjamin's Passagenwerk. Amir Engel analyzes Hannah Arendt's lesser-known Kafka essay ("Franz Kafka: A Revaluation," in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954)—one of the first she published in German after World War II. Arendt finds in Kafka a source of optimism: Even as The Trial and The Castle depict totalitarian societies, worlds of "made-up necessity," the two protagonists are "truth-tellers," who resist simply by asserting their humanity. [End Page 133] Two chapters make critical contributions to Kafka's contemporary reception in Israel. As an Israeli Arab writer, journalist, and television writer who writes in Hebrew (now living in the United States), Sayed Kashua is the quintessential insider/outsider. As Iris Bruce demonstrates, Kashua incorporates many of Kafka's themes, both in the novel Second Person Singular (the basis of the film A Borrowed Identity) and in "Herzl Disappears at Midnight," which features an Arab-Israeli, Gregor Samsa. Bruce proposes, "Kashua's postmodern metamorphoses are fluid, predictable, humorous, and ultimately have a didactic function" (126). Mark H. Gelber offers a new perspective on the trial to determine the fate of newly discovered Max Brod's Nachlass. Moving beyond the question of whether the Israeli Supreme Court's decision to award the collection to the Israeli National Library is just, Gelber wonders whether there is also "poetic justice" in retaining Kafka's manuscripts in the Jewish State rather than in Marbach. The question becomes an occasion to reassess Kafka's Zionism or, more exactly, the numerous aspects of Zionism with which Kafka did connect. Two chapters break new ground by opening up Kafka's influence on lyric poetry. Poet Tali Latowicki examines the Kafkan sensibilities of two challenging Hebrew poets, the modernist Ya'akov Steinberg and the postmodern Hezy Leskly, neither of whom is well known in translation. In this series of powerful close readings, Latowicki finds that the three writers "share the same suspicion toward 'natural' symbolic expression. They also share the same wish [ … ] to create an antilanguage, a language that is united with the concrete. As part of this utopian project, the writer himself must undergo a metamorphosis of some sort. He has to die in...

A tale of two cultures: an outline for a comparative cultural analysis of Israeli and North American Jewry

ABSTRACT The article develops a theoretical outline for a comparative analysis of the North American and Israeli Jewish cultures as two systems of meanings. Relying theoretically on the “strong program” of cultural sociology and on Ephraim Shmueli's Seven Jewish Cultures paradigm, it suggests that the American-Jewish and Israeli cultures be understood as two different meaning-systems: that of emancipation, whose main thrust is hyphenation with non-Jewish cultures; and the nationalist culture, whose main corollary is Jewish demographic and symbolic dominance of the public space. This cultural difference can determine political, sociological, and intellectual differences no less than the other way around. To exemplify the “Two Cultures” approach, the article offers a short comparative anthropological history of the bat mitzvah in the North American and Israeli Jewish mainstream (i.e. the non-Orthodox) from the end of the Second World War through the present, to serve as a methodological window onto the meanings that the two communities attribute to “Jewishness” – that is, the nature of membership in the Jewish people. By taking a step back from the tumult of politics and the media, the Two Cultures framework may be able to uncover unspoken cultural gaps between the two largest Jewish centres in the twenty-first century, as well as find potential points of understanding between them.

Эмигранты-субботники из Астраханской губернии в исторической памяти современного Израиля и России: восприятие и интерпретация

В статье определены особенности восприятия и интерпретации наследия эмигрантов-субботников из Астраханской губернии в исторической памяти наших современников, проживающих в Израиле и России. Применены идеографический, сравнительно-исторический и ретроспективный методы, а также метод опроса. Материалами явились статьи православных миссионеров XIX в., современные научные исследования, записи и комментарии в сетевых дневниках и результаты проведенного автором интернет-опроса. Реконструирована биография одного из пионеров движения халуцим, Йоава Дубровина, выявлены различные аспекты восприятия его личности нашими современниками, охарактеризована степень известности И. Дубровина в современном Израиле и среди членов еврейской общины Астрахани, определено его значение в создании образа первопроходцев и в современном культурном наследии страны. Автор заключает, что имя Дубровина и других иудействующих не известно большинству респондентов, однако отмечен интерес к «халуцим с русским лицом». The aim of the article is to determine the peculiarities of the perception and interpretation of the heritage of the Subbotnik emigrants from Astrakhan Province in the historical memory of our contemporaries living in Israel and Russia. The author used the ideographic (descriptive-narrative), comparative-historical, and retrospective methods, as well as the survey method in the study. The materials were articles by 19th-century Orthodox missionaries; research by historians, religious scholars, and culturologists; the content of online blogs on the livejournal.com platform; and the results of an Internet survey that the author conducted. The author examines the factual record of the emergence and data on the settlement of sectarians in Astrakhan Province and analyzes the attitude of provincial officials and eparchy missionaries towards them. She does a detailed analysis of the manifestations of religious identity among the Judaizers, pointing out the generally calm attitude of the latter towards the professed teaching. The author also determines the circumstances of the spread of eschatological and émigré aspirations among them in the 1880s against the background of the nascent Zionist movement and notes the emergence of individuals who were active conductors of these ideas. In modern Israeli culture, the carriers of such sentiments (“grassroot Zionism”) appear to be outstanding people who stand out from among their contemporaries by the very fact of their involvement in Judaism. The author reconstructs the biography of one of such people, Yoav Dubrovin. He became one of the first participants in the movement of Halutzim, pioneers of the development and settlement of the future territory of the State of Israel. Already in old age, he emigrated to the Promised Land with his family. The author describes the difficulties the migrants encountered, which led to the death of many family members, as well as to the subsequent resettlement of the remaining Dubrovins to a new place of residence. At present, a museum is located in the former estate of the Dubrovins. The author reveals the various aspects of the perception of Dubrovin by today’s contemporaries, characterizes the degree of his popularity in modern Israel and among members of the Jewish community of Astrakhan, determines his role in creating the image of pioneers and in the modern cultural heritage of Israel. The author concludes that the majority of the respondents do not know the names of Dubrovin and of other Judaizers, but they show interest in “Halutzim with a Russian face”.

Cultura judaica, diplomacia cultural e as crônicas de viagem de José Lins do Rego em O Globo (1944-1956)

Resumo&#x0D; O artigo debruça-se sobre um segmento da produção de crônicas de viagem de José Lins do Rego, publicadas no jornal O Globo, procurando mostrar como estes escritos jornalísticos foram elevados à condição de livro em meados dos anos 1950, na esteira da visita do escritor ao recém-criado Estado de Israel e do prestígio literário angariado por um romancista recém-eleito à Academia Brasileira de Letras. Ao circunscrever o campo de atuação e circulação de literatos nos periódicos impressos do Rio de Janeiro de meados do século XX, o texto salienta de início os escritos de Lins do Rego nos anos 1940, quando inicia sua colaboração no jornal do amigo Roberto Marinho, em plena Segunda Guerra Mundial, posicionando-se contra os horrores do nazifascismo e manifestando sua solidariedade ao povo judeu, posição reiterada nos anos seguintes, ante a criação do Estado de Israel. Procura-se, em seguida, dar evidências de que tais crônicas estão na base do convite para a viagem ao novo país em 1955, documentada nas páginas do mesmo jornal e transformada em livro bilíngue – português-inglês – no ano seguinte, sob os auspícios do Centro Cultural Brasil-Israel. Para além de um caso isolado, restrito ao paraibano, mobilizamos outros exemplos de intelectuais – Silva Melo, Guilherme de Figueiredo, Câmara Cascudo e Érico Veríssimo – com a defesa do argumento de que o referido Centro Cultural foi o pivô deste trânsito entre as duas nações, ao adotar a estratégia, entre os anos 1950 e 1960, da promoção de viagens de escritores brasileiros ao Oriente Médio, com vistas à projeção da cultura judaica e israelense no país.