Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance
Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance

Author: Judith Brin Ingber

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 0814333303

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A comprehensive survey of historical and contemporary Jewish dance. In Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance, choreographer, dancer, and dance scholar Judith Brin Ingber collects wide-ranging essays and many remarkable photographs to explore the evolution of Jewish dance through two thousand years of Diaspora, in communities of amazing variety and amid changing traditions. Ingber and other eminent scholars consider dancers individually and in community, defining Jewish dance broadly to encompass religious ritual, community folk dance, and choreographed performance. Taken together, this wide range of expression illustrates the vitality, necessity, and continuity of dance in Judaism. This volume combines dancers' own views of their art with scholarly examinations of Jewish dance conducted in Europe, Israel, other Middle East areas, Africa, and the Americas. In seven parts, Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance considers Jewish dance artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; the dance of different Jewish communities, including Hasidic, Yemenite, Kurdish, Ethiopian, and European Jews in many epochs; historical and current Israeli folk dance; and the contrast between Israeli and American modern and post-modern theater dance. Along the way, contributors see dance in ancient texts like the Song of Songs, the Talmud, and Renaissance-era illuminated manuscripts, and plumb oral histories, Holocaust sources, and their own unique views of the subject. A selection of 182 illustrations, including photos, paintings, and film stills, round out this lively volume. Many of the illustrations come from private collections and have never before been published, and they represent such varied sources as a program booklet from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and archival photos from the Israel Government Press Office. Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance threads together unique source material and scholarly examinations by authors from Europe, Israel, and America trained in sociology, anthropology, history, cultural studies, Jewish studies, dance studies, as well as art, theater, and dance criticism. Enthusiasts of dance and performance art and a wide range of university students will enjoy this significant volume.

On Jewish Folklore
On Jewish Folklore

Author: Raphael Patai

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2018-02-05

Total Pages: 530

ISBN-13: 0814344208

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The essays collected in this volume, some of which are presented for the first time in English translation, provide a rich harvest of Jewish customs and traditional beliefs, gathered from all over the world and from ancient to modern times. On Jewish Folklore spans a half-century of scholarly inquiry by the noted anthropologist and biblical scholar Raphael Patai. He essays collected in this volume, some of which are presented for the first time in English translation, provide a rich harvest of Jewish customs and traditional beliefs, gathered from all over the world and from ancient to modern times. Among the subjects Dr. Patai investigated and recorded are the history and oral traditions of the now-vanished Marrano community of Meshhed, Iran; cultural change among the so-called Jewish Indians of Mexico; beliefs and customs in connection with birth, the rainbow, and the color blue; Jewish variants of the widespread custom of earth-eating; and the remarkable parallels between the rituals connected with enthroning a new king as described in the Bible and as practiced among certain African tribes.

Dance Spreads Its Wings
Dance Spreads Its Wings

Author: Ruth Eshel

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-10-25

Total Pages: 679

ISBN-13: 3110749947

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Why did dance and dancing became important to the construction of a new, modern, Jewish/Israeli cultural identity in the newly formed nation of Israel? There were questions that covered almost all spheres of daily life, including “What do we dance?” because Hebrew or Eretz-Israeli dance had to be created out of none. How and why did dance develop in such a way? Dance Spreads Its Wings is the first and only book that looks at the whole picture of concert dance in Israel studying the growth of Israeli concert dance for 90 years—starting from 1920, when there was no concert dance to speak of during the Yishuv (pre-Israel Jewish settlements) period, until 2010, when concert dance in Israel had grown to become one of the country’s most prominent, original, artistic fields and globally recognized. What drives the book is the impulse to create and the need to dance in the midst of constant political change. It is the story of artists trying to be true to their art while also responding to the political, social, religious, and ethnic complexities of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

My Promised Land
My Promised Land

Author: Ari Shavit

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2013-11-19

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 0812984641

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “A deeply reported, deeply personal history of Zionism and Israel that does something few books even attempt: It balances the strength and weakness, the idealism and the brutality, the hope and the horror, that has always been at Zionism’s heart.”—Ezra Klein, The New York Times Winner of the Natan Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Ari Shavit’s riveting work, now updated with new material, draws on historical documents, interviews, and private diaries and letters, as well as his own family’s story, to create a narrative larger than the sum of its parts: both personal and of profound historical dimension. As he examines the complexities and contradictions of the Israeli condition, Shavit asks difficult but important questions: Why did Israel come to be? How did it come to be? Can it survive? Culminating with an analysis of the issues and threats that Israel is facing, My Promised Land uses the defining events of the past to shed new light on the present. Shavit’s analysis of Israeli history provides a landmark portrait of a small, vibrant country living on the edge, whose identity and presence play a crucial role in today’s global political landscape.

Dancing Arabs
Dancing Arabs

Author: Sayed Kashua

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1555846610

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In this “slyly subversive, semi-autobiographical” novel “of Arab Israeli life,” a Palestinian man struggles against the strict confines of identity (Publishers Weekly). In Sayed Kashua’s debut novel, a nameless anti-hero contends with the legacy of a grandfather who died fighting the Zionists in 1948, and a father who was jailed for blowing up a school cafeteria in the name of freedom. When the narrator is granted a scholarship to an elite Jewish boarding school, his family rejoices, dreaming that he will grow up to be the first Arab to build an atom bomb. But to their dismay, he turns out to be a coward devoid of any national pride; his only ambition is to fit in with his Jewish peers who reject him. He changes his clothes, his accent, his eating habits, and becomes an expert at faking identities, sliding between different cultures, schools, and languages, and eventually a Jewish lover and an Arab wife. With refreshing candor and self-deprecating wit, Dancing Arabs is a “chilling, convincing tale” of one man’s struggle to disentangle his personal and national identities, only to tragically and inevitably forfeit both (Publishers Weekly). “Rings out on every page with a compelling sense of human truth” —Kirkus Reviews “Despite its dark prognosis, there is a lightness and dry humor that lifts it with the kind of wings its protagonist once hoped for.” —Booklist

Screendance
Screendance

Author: Douglas Rosenberg

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-07-05

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0199772622

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The practice of dance and the technologies of representation has excited artists since the advent of film. This book weaves together theory from art and dance as well as appropriate historical reference material to propose a new theory of screendance, one that frames it within the discourse of post-modern art practice.

Walking Israel
Walking Israel

Author: Martin Fletcher

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2010-09-28

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1429946067

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From the much lauded author of Breaking News comes a version of Walking the Bible just for Israel. With its dense history of endless conflict and biblical events, Israel's coastline is by far the most interesting hundred miles in the world. As longtime chief of NBC's Tel Aviv news bureau, Martin Fletcher is in a unique position to interpret Israel, and he brings it off in a spectacular and novel manner. Last year he strolled along the entire coast, from Lebanon to Gaza, observing facets of the country that are ignored in news reports, yet tell a different and truer story. Walking Israel is packed with hilarious moments, historical insights, emotional, true-life tales, and, above all, great storytelling.

The Israelis
The Israelis

Author: Donna Rosenthal

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 9780684869728

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Rosenthal explores a people who, while consciously living in a war zone, contribute to one of the most vibrant civic societies anywhere. It is the story of ordinary people living in an extraordinary place.

The Wicked Son
The Wicked Son

Author: David Mamet

Publisher: Schocken

Published: 2009-09-15

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0805211578

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David Mamet's interest in anti-Semitism is not limited to the modern face of an ancient hatred but encompasses as well the ways in which many Jews have internalized that hatred. Using the metaphor of the Wicked Son at the Passover seder (the child who asks, "What does this story mean to you?") Mamet confronts what he sees as an insidious predilection among some Jews to exclude themselves from the equation and to seek truth and meaning anywhere--in other religions, political movements, mindless entertainment--but in Judaism itself. He also explores the ways in which the Jewish tradition has long been and still remains the Wicked Son in the eyes of the world. Written with the searing honesty and verbal brilliance that is the hallmark of Mamet's work, The Wicked Son is a powerfully thought-provoking look at one of the most destructive and tenacious forces in contemporary life.

The State of Israel vs. the Jews
The State of Israel vs. the Jews

Author: Sylvain Cypel

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2024-08-06

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 1635425344

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A PopMatters Best Book of the Year A perceptive study of how Israel’s actions, which run counter to the traditional historical values of Judaism, are putting Jewish people worldwide in an increasingly untenable position, now with a new introduction. More than a decade ago, the historian Tony Judt considered whether the behavior of Israel was becoming not only “bad for Israel itself” but also, on a wider scale, “bad for the Jews.” Under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, this issue has grown ever more urgent. In The State of Israel vs. the Jews, veteran journalist Sylvain Cypel addresses it in depth, exploring Israel’s rightward shift on the international scene and with regard to the diaspora. Cypel reviews the little-known details of the military occupation of Palestinian territory, the mindset of ethnic superiority that reigns throughout an Israeli “colonial camp” that is largely in the majority, and the adoption of new laws, the most serious of which establishes two-tier citizenship between Jews and non-Jews. He shows how Israel has aligned itself with authoritarian regimes and adopted the practices of a security state, including the use of technologies such as the software that enabled the tracking and, ultimately, the assassination of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Lastly, The State of Israel vs. the Jews examines the impact of Israel’s evolution in recent years on the two main communities of the Jewish diaspora, in France and the United States, considering how and why public figures in each differ in their approaches.