LGBTQ Communities

Issues of intolerance and discrimination against the LGBTQ community are an international phenomenon. If anything, I felt a connection with the people working for LGBTQ rights in Israel in the ways that this struggle parallels the one here in the US in some ways. However, I was also left with many questions that were not answered by the websites that I hope will become part of the discussion tomorrow that pertain more to the ways in which perhaps the LGBTQ rights struggle in Israel differs in some ways, what challenges are unique to the Israeli context? I was also left wondering what the LGBTQ rights struggle in Israel can teach us in the US?

Jerusalem, Gender and the Nature/Culture Binary

In "Not the Mother of All Cities" Galit Hasan-Roken begins, "It has been called mother, sister, daughter." As she accounts, Jerusalem has repeatedly been gendered feminine. In reading her discussion of this association and critical analysis of it, I was reminded of the way in which nature/culture is itself so often gendered along a female/male binary. This raises the question for me as to whether the feminization of Jerusalem is also a linking of Jerusalem to Nature, and as has been the case in much of our class reading, to God as the origin of Nature, rather than "Man" and humankind.

From Beethoven to Klezmer

Discuss the role of music in your life. How does music help define who you are as a person? How is music used as a method of communication, and what do you see as the role of music in conflict? Feel free to share significant tunes on your blog, or in class.


When I think of the role of music in my life, I am very aware of the way that the role of music has changed for me over time. As a child and young adult my primary focus was on being a classical pianist. There was incredible passion and devotion to my craft and also a lot of long hours of hard work and practice. As a teenager I was very interested in the alternative music scene and that was perhaps where I located my more rebellious teenager angst-ridden self. I was also very taken with music of generations that came before me like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Lou Reed.

In my contemporary life, music plays a deeply spiritual role. Once a month my synagogue holds a Shabbat Chai service that is entirely musical with a variety of instruments including a Klezmer violinist. I use Shabbat music to set the mood for Shabbat in my home weekly. I also listen to Klezmer and Yiddish-language music that connects me with a broader Jewish community. Now in addition to playing the classical music I was taught to play, I am learning to play Klezmer tunes on the piano.

Essay Selection for Thursday

This is the essay I selected for Thursday:

The violin player, the soccer game and the wall-graffiti: rhetorical strategies in the border-regions between Israel and Palestine

Author(s):Freddie Rokem

Source:Arcadia - International Journal for Literary Studies. 45.2 (Feb. 2011): p326.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG

http://dx.doi.org.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/10.1515/arca

Abstract: 

This contribution examines an incident at a roadblock which took place in November 2004, documented in a short video and was also reproduced as a still in Israeli media. This image immediately became broadly discussed and contested. It shows a young Palestinian man playing a violin at a check point while a group of Israeli soldiers are standing and guarding the place. This image was drawn into larger clusters of signification where the rhetorical strategies employed become both quite complex and ambiguous. The image became contextualized within discourses of conflict, creating what Walter Benjamin in his Passagenwerk termed "constellations."--Besides presenting this notion and its hermeneuticpotentials my article examines the historical associations of the image, arguing that the associations with the Holocaust are actually a way to minimize the pain and suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation rather than highlighting them in a broader universal context.--Another aspect of this image is connected to the technologies of creating and disseminating images of conflict/occupation and how they affect the ethical discussions surrounding this incident. I will argue that historical constellations tend to obscure rather than sharpen the ethical dimensions of images like the Palestinian violin player at the check point.--A number of graffiti paintings on the separation wall, in particular by the British graffiti artist Bansky, as well as a cellphone advertisement featuring the separation wall will be examined in order to contextualize the discourses of conflict and occupation.

Full Text: 

On November 25, 2004 the Israeli daily, liberal newspaper Ha'aretz, accompanied by a photograph (fig. 1) published the following report by Akiva Eldar, one of its senior journalists and political analysts:

   An Israel Defense Forces officer and soldiers at the Beit Iba
   checkpoint near Nablus forced a young Palestinian on November 9 to
   open a violin case he was carrying and play the instrument, while
   local residents waited behind him in a long line. The incident was
   filmed by Horit Herman-Peled, a volunteer for the women's human
   rights organization Machsom Watch, and a complaint was reviewed by
   the regional brigade commander who conveyed to his troops the
   severity of the matter. [...] The IDF Spokesman's Office said in
   response that an inquiry showed the incident was the result of
   "insensitive conduct on the part of the soldiers at the checkpoint,
   who contend with a complex and dangerous reality. The IDF does and
   continues to do all it can to improve the situation at checkpoints.
   As part of this, the IDF makes efforts to enhance sensitivity
   toward humanitarian and humane issues. The IDF continuously employs
   educational, command and disciplinary tools to emphasize to the
   soldiers and officers at checkpoints both the importance of the
   mission and the need to show sensitivity and consideration in the
   execution of the mission." An IDF source said yesterday that the
   officer in charge of the Beit Iba checkpoint on the day of the
   incident acted in an insensitive manner, but not maliciously, and
   not with any intent to humiliate the violinist.

The photograph accompanying this news-item had been extracted from a short video sequence filmed by Horit Herman-Peled, a professional photographer and artist. The publication raised numerous discussions about the moral dimensions of the check-points through which the Israeli army monitors and controls the movement of Palestinians within the West Bank, as well as between Israel and the occupied territories; but also about art within the larger context of ethical debates, in particular how the complex historical echoes of an image like this become an integral aspect of its rhetoric force as well as its reception within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

What happens when images like these are there for everyone to see on the internet ? Or to formulate the issue as directly as possible: How do the images of the Nazi genocide of the Jews during World War II affect the way we perceive the photograph of the violin player at the Israeli checkpoint?

The photograph serves as a testimony of a certain event which we can now watch on the internet (http ://www.horit.com/violin.htm), where the image itself and a short video-sequence documenting the event can still be found; five years after it occurred. (1) It happened - and this is what it looked like. We have no reason to doubt this, though we do not know what the exact reasons were leading up to this particular scene. The newspaper article I quoted above tries to contextualize the incident by naming and presenting the explanations of the IDF spokesman. But there are also films, theatre performances, cartoons and other artistic expressions relating to this incident and its likes. And then there are the different pasts: Jewish history; Palestinian history, both before and after 1948 as well as before and after 1967, and the ways in which its images have formed a public national consciousness of these complex pasts - as well as the violence on both sides, carried out and affecting the mind-sets of everyone involved as we read about it in the newspapers, listen to the news on the radio or watch the TV reports.

The photographer who took this snapshot is a member of the group of women calling themselves "Machsom Watch" (where the word machsom means checkpoint or barrier). They protest against the roadblocks of the Israeli army preventing the free movement of the Palestinians by monitoring them and serving as witnesses, while the soldiers, at least according to the IDF source Eldar quotes in his article, "acted in an insensitive manner, but not maliciously, and not with any intent to humiliate the violinist."

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

But the whole system of checkpoints is malicious and humiliating, so why does this particular photograph receive so much attention? What is it we are supposed to see - and what are we made to overlook as a result of what we are supposedly seeing? The 2003 documentary film Checkpoint by the Israeli director Yoav Shamir is only one of many examples showing the erratic nature of the monitoring that Israeli soldiers are carrying out of the Palestinian population in the checkpoints between the State of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, but frequently also within these occupied areas, preventing Palestinians to visit family in another town or village, to see a doctor when necessary or to live what we consider to be a normal life. Shamir's film presents the everyday practices at the roadblocks, and shows that Israeli soldiers, who hardly speak any Arabic and can therefore not communicate with the Palestinians through more than simple commandments, behave without any clear logic or empathy, except that they are supposed to interrupt the daily life of the Palestinians. It is even possible to claim that in many cases the fear these soldiers experience determines their actions.

Taking a closer look at the photograph of the violin player at the roadblock and after examining the violin player himself carefully, the next thing we notice are the helmeted long-sleeved Israeli soldiers with their backs to the camera, situated closer to it. The photograph is obviously taken from the "Israeli" side, even if the checkpoint is located in the heart of Palestinian territory. Unless we consider every Palestinian to be an a priori dangerous enemy, this photograph shows that the roadblocks are a tool to monitor the movement of Palestinians, disrupting their everyday lives. Only afterwards do we notice the young Palestinians with light shirts standing in line behind the violin-player. The soldier standing closest to us is talking on his cellphone, reporting something to someone.

The basic juxtaposition of the photograph is between the short-sleeved violin player and the fully equipped soldier talking on his cellphone, both with an instrument to hold on to. The violin, and the cellphone; the traditional musical instrument with which Paganini as well as imaginary water-spirits have spellbound their listeners, on the one hand; and the modern technological invention for instant communication, on the other. This is obviously not a concert where we are asked to turn off our cellphones before it begins. I even get the impression that nobody is listening to the music; if there even was music.

On December 5, 2004, two weeks after the violinist incident at the checkpoint, Oz Shelach, writer and Israeli peace activist, distributed the photo montage, entitled 'The Third Generation' printed in the well-known logo-design of the cellphone company called 'Orange' to his Listserv belonging to oznik.com (fig. 2). According to Google 'oznik.com' is a "free news service and art gallery on the Israeli Palestinian conflict." In the mail containing the image of a hand holding a cellphone on which we can see a section of the photograph of the violin-player at the check-point, Shelach added that it is created by an "artist who asked to remain anonymous but would be happy to see it used for all good purposes."

The notion of 'The Third Generation' has an uncanny double meaning. First, it is the generation coming after 'The Second Generation,' the expression used to designate the children of Holocaust survivors, who obviously are 'The First Generation' - the immediate victims of Nazi persecution. The photo of the violinist at the check-point immediately created associations to this traumatic chapter of Jewish history from which there are many stories of victims being accompanied by music on their way to extinction, played by musicians who were forced to play for them. For those who played or sang, this gave them additional time to live. And there are stories of Jewish partisans in the Second World War who smuggled dynamite in empty violin cases.

Several newspaper articles and editorials reacting to the photograph of the violin player explored this historical comparison, which still so strongly haunts the Israeli imagination. The explanation of the IDF spokesman, that "the IDF continuously employs educational, command and disciplinary tools to emphasize to the soldiers and officers at checkpoints both the importance of the mission and the need to show sensitivity and consideration in the execution of the mission" is obviously a 'coded' formulation, actually saying that the Israeli Army tries to prevent or avoid creating situations that trigger associations like these.

There are also many examples in the theatre and in films depicting musicians threatened by Nazi cruelty who are given additional time to live because they play or sing for their perpetrators. In Israeli theatre it is worth mentioning Joshua Sobol's play Ghetto from 1984, depicting the establishment of a theatre of the Vilna ghetto during the Second World War, under Nazi occupation. The theatre is allowed to continue its activities as long as the singer Chaya is a part of the group. The moment she escapes to the forests, joining the partisans, the Nazi officer Kittel, an ardent lover of music, executes all the other members of the theatre, except for Srulik who has survived to bear witness to this event. Sobol's play is about the ability of the theatre to bring temporary survival.

Also in Hanoch Levin's The Child Dreams, published in 1991 and first performed in 1993, the young boy escaping with his mother from an unidentified army threatening them believes that by singing he can prevent the inevitable disaster from happening. In this allegorical play, which presents occupation and the threat of war on a more general, unspecified level than Sobol's play, the father of the child is threatened with death and the boy is singing in order to prolong his life. And after the father is killed by the woman accompanying the cruel commander, in spite of the singing, the commander triumphantly says:

   That was good. That was right.
   After you sucked all the dread
   from that man, you had to give him back
   the belief that he would live, and then, when he believed
   boom! In the face! All the filth! He won't have
   time to digest that he will live, and again - he won't live!
   How right! How cunning! Female! (137)

Another Israeli performance exploring the ambivalent collocation of art and survival is Adam Ben Kelev (Adam Resurrected), a performance based on a novel by the Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk performed by the Gesher theatre. This theatre was founded by the director Evgeny Arje and the performance from 1993 depicts a situation of survival by playing a violin. The fabula begins in Berlin during the Weimar period, and via the victimization and survival of the Shoah it ends up in an Israeli mental hospital, telling the story of Adam Stein, a Shoah survivor and former circus owner and artist who was forced by the concentration camp commander to serve as his 'dog,' playing the violin outside the gas chambers. The performance, taking place in a circus tent, shows in a nightmare form how Adam Stein after arriving in Israel was confined to a mental institution, as were many of the actual survivors.

Already a little over a decade earlier, in 1981, the short-lived experimental Neveh Zedek theatre led by Oded Kotler and Nola Chilton had dramatized Kaniuk's novel for the stage. Their performance was set in an imagined mental hospital in Israel, with the audience being "cast" as relatives and visitors to this hospital and where the inmates, led by the survivor and mental patient Adam Stein, were celebrating Purim, presenting a Purim-spiel based on the biblical novella Ester, yet another narrative of exile and persecution. Ironically, the Jews who had been saved from extinction during the Second World War were now living in a world of spiritual disintegration and madness in the Israeli mental hospital. This situation radically questioned both the notion of survival as well as the idea of homecoming. The mental hospital served as a symbol for the collective trauma of the Israeli society, representing a new form of Galut and of a spiritual exile in the new home. The performance very poignantly raised the question - in the tradition of Purim, the annual Jewish holiday celebrating the survival in ancient times - of whether the state of Israel really led to the salvation of the Jewish people.

The Palestinian violin player at the roadblock must be 'read' within the context of the complex Israeli dialectics between exile and homecoming. This dialectics, with its obvious meta-theatrical references, lies at the heart of the Gesher production of Adam Ben Kelev. It was performed in a circus tent, representing an itinerant performance tradition where the performers have no other home than the performance space itself, the tent and the carriages accompanying it. Instead of the degradation of the mental-hospital setting of the Neveh Zedek production, implying that Israel is a mad-house, the audience of the Gesher theatre production was confronted with the story of Adam Stein's gradual humiliation during the Shoah and the sufferings of his survival within a circus space. (2)

The famous circus artist Adam Stein had been forced to accompany the victims on their way to the gas chambers with his canine tricks and by playing the violin. Among these victims were both his wife and his daughter, who appear later in his life, in the mental hospital, also situated in the circus tent, as shadows or reincarnations reminding him of his own painful past. His wife is transformed into the nurse Jenny in the hospital, and the same actress plays them both. The actress who plays his daughter also plays a young girl in the hospital, who also behaves like a dog, refusing to become a two-legged human. This story, of a human being who believes he/she is an animal, is based on a traditional Jewish Hassidic tale where the son of the king has to be cured of his belief that he is an animal in order to reach redemption. The actor who plays Klein, the Nazi officer, also plays Dr. Gross, the director of the hospital, who continues to torture Adam Stein even after his 'official' survival. All these characters, as they appear in the circus, are different reflections of Stein's oversensitive imagination, also drawing our attention to the meta-theatrical aspects through which memories become transformed into a burlesque circus show.

The Israeli imagination carries a heavy overload of images and memories like these. Israel is a country haunted, in particular, by ghosts of a specific past. And the realities recorded by the camera at the roadblock cannot prevent certain associations, which do not have to be accurate or based on facts and statistics. They just constitute a presence, bringing back memories, stirring associations within the Israeli public sphere, regardless of how many cases there actually were of musicians and singers who survived because of their music. These images create constellations, "appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger" as Walter Benjamin formulated such complex chains of associations in 'On the Concept of History' ("Selected Writings" 391). Or, quoting one of his formulations from the Arcades Project:

   It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or
   what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that
   wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to
   form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a
   standstill. [...] The image that is read - which is to say, the
   image in the now of its recognizabilty - bears to the highest
   degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all
   reading is founded. (462-463)

The crucial question that has to be raised when looking at the photo of the violin player at the check-point, however, is who do these associations serve, and what is their aim? Who decides what the significance of the "perilous critical moment" really is?

When Palestinians in different contexts term themselves 'the victims of the victims' referring to the complex genealogy of suffering and victimization, they are drawing on the same associations. But what does it mean to make these connections? By drawing attention to this specific case through which the Holocaust was directly foregrounded, the everyday suffering of Palestinians stopped in roadblocks actually becomes marginalized. By pointing more or less directly at this exceptional and extreme case of humiliation, the photograph draws attention to the Jewish suffering rather than to the daily humiliation of the Palestinians stopped at roadblocks like the women trying to bring their products to the markets, the children on their way to school or the sick people trying to reach the hospital on time - in short all those who are forced to face the roadblocks on an everyday basis and are humiliated by their mere existence. And the roadblocks are only one of the more visible signs of the Israeli occupation, a symptom of a much larger plight and humiliation.

A week after the initial publication of the photo of the violin player, Akiva Eldar published an additional article in Haaretz (December 2, 2004):

   The story of Wissam Tayam, the Palestinian violinist who played for
   Israel Defense Forces soldiers at the Beit Iba checkpoint near
   Nablus, aroused widespread public debate. But the women of Machsom
   [Checkpoint] Watch, whose Horit Herman-Peled filmed the incident,
   say that they saw no particular significance in it because they are
   exposed every day to much worse scenes. The women were even
   disappointed about the stir the picture of the musician created,
   when a picture of women and children crushed in the "carousel" (as
   the checkpoint's revolving door is called) goes by unnoticed. The
   incident raised a number of questions. Among them: Is there place
   for association with pictures of Jewish musicians in the death
   camps, or is this another case of cheapening the Holocaust?
   Herman-Peled was shocked both by the banality of the incident and
   the indifference of those present, including the members of her own
   organization. She was mistakenly credited in this column with a
   comparison made by the daughter of Holocaust survivors to musicians
   in the death camps.

The same day (December 2,2004), the Israel author Yitzhak Laor also published an article, also in Haaretz, drawing some additional conclusions from the incident:

   Every so often, ghosts from "the Jewish past" are summoned by a
   contemptible action in the occupied territories. Someone manages to
   photograph it. There are dramatic headlines about it, as in the
   case of the young Palestinian ordered to play the violin, but then
   the affair quickly becomes "an exception". Most of the soldiers do
   not compel violinists to play at the checkpoints. Most of the
   soldiers do not kill little girls. Most of the soldiers do not
   confirm the killing. But the melodramas help to conceal the larger
   truths. Israelis do not like the truth. [...] The checkpoint system
   belongs entirely to the Israeli unwillingness to give up all of the
   territory of the West Bank, including all of the settlements. The
   checkpoint system is aimed at ensuring Israeli control over the
   lives of the Palestinians. [...] Melodramas about the hardhearted
   soldiers who forced the Palestinian to play his violin
   compartmentalize this as an exception, and again conceal the
   system. Again, "the generations of Jewish people" return to the
   center of the picture. Again, the Jews will remember their past.
   Again, it will be about our lives, and not about Palestinian
   suffering. And again the tabloids will set the "lynch-like" tone of
   our lives in their pornographic headlines. But the truth is
   stronger. Whoever is unprepared to separate from the West Bank,
   with all of its settlements, does not understand that he is paving
   the way for generations of checkpoint soldiers.

In addition to the complex historical constellations and associations triggered by the photograph of the violin player at the checkpoint, the notion of 'The Third Generation' in the fake-advertisement also refers to the new cellphone technology through which it has become possible to e-mail a cellphone photograph to another cellphone or to an e-mail address. The logo in the upper right hand corner of the image, looking like the logo of the cellphone company Orange, suggests that the soldier with the cellphone in the first picture has just sent an image from the check-point, just as the photographer of this image, Horit Herman-Peled, which includes the soldier with the phone, has taken a picture that can be sent electronically anywhere in the world and can now be seen on the internet.

There is an uncanny contradiction between the speed with which the images are distributed and communicated on the internet and the severe limitations of movement that the Palestinians are subjected to under the continuing Israeli occupation. This opposition between speed and standstill seems to be an inherent feature of these border landscapes. The Israeli army has its reasons for wanting to reach everywhere quickly, and it obviously lies in its interest to obstruct the mobility of the Palestinians.

A recent (July 2009) advertisement for Cellcom, another Israeli cellphone company, depicts an event on the Israeli side of the Separation Wall between Israel and Palestine. This Wall has as a rule been built within Palestinian territory, on the 'other' side (from an Israeli perspective) of the so-called 'green line' and only in a few cases on this line which constituted the border between Israel and the West Bank (which then was a part of Jordan) as it existed up until the Six Day War in 1967. The construction of this wall started in 2003 in order, as the Israeli government claimed, to prevent suicide bombers access to the Israeli cities. But since the wall incorporates large portions of Palestinian land as well, sometimes separating children from their schools, farmers from their fields and what grows on them and sick people from hospitals and clinics (just as the checkpoints), the International Court of Justice in The Hague, on 9 July 2004, declared the wall to be in breach of international law. This has however not prevented the continued construction of the wall and the fact that it incorporates massive areas of Palestinian land on the Israeli side. This wall, yet another aspect of the ongoing Israeli occupation, will be 670 km long when it is completed, and where it consists of concrete it is about eight to ten meters high (approximately 25-33 feet). Through its brutal ugliness it has created a deep ecological and psychological scar in the idyllic landscape that it passes through.

The wall, just like the roadblocks, has limited or even prevented the freedom of movement of numerous Palestinians. This concrete barrier has also prevented the view that many Palestinians have had of their immediate surroundings and the number of afternoon sunshine hours in their gardens has been radically diminished. Since the wall is built as far away as possible from Israeli/Jewish villages and settlements, inside Palestinian territory, the Israelis are obviously not affected in the same way.

In the Cellcom advertisement (which can be seen on YouTube http://www.youtube.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/watch ?v=AH02uc1vB4k) (3) we see an Israel army jeep patrolling the Israeli side of the Wall as a football suddenly comes over the Wall and lands on the front of the jeep. The driver quickly stops the car and five soldiers get out looking somewhat perplexed, while one of them kicks the ball back to the other side of the wall from where it no doubt came. As they are about to get in the jeep to continue their patrol the football comes back again and now it seems evident that the invisible 'partner' on the other side of the Wall 'wants' to play a 'game' - and one of the soldiers makes a call on his cellphone telling 'everybody' to come quickly to a certain section of the fence to join the game and to cheer. Within seconds several jeeps with both male and female soldiers arrive and the ball is kicked back and forth several times, while everybody is cheering and one of the soldiers, jumping joyfully into the arms of one of his fellow soldiers, screams happily that "we just wanted to have some fun". The one minute commercial ends by reminding us which cellphone company enabled them (including the invisible Palestinians) to share the 'joy' of this game of soccer.

So far I have found three 'edited' (subverted) versions of this ad on YouTube. In one of them (http://www.youtube.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/watch?v=MPxfI5o7ouo&feature =related) instead of the game in front of the wall which everyone joins, we see an Israeli artillery soldier, also with a cellphone attached to his ear, who is giving a command to shoot and then we see the city of Gaza - apparently in footage from the Israeli attack on the Gaza-strip which began in late December 2008. We see the cannon fire and heavy smoke coming from one of the hits just beside a big apartment building. The soldier girls from the original Cellcom ad are applauding as we see another hit near the same place.

In another 'edited' version (http ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fhJXGPbA7I) we see the ball hitting a young, handcuffed Palestinian boy wearing a kaffiyeh who gradually falls to the ground. And the cartoon in Ha'aretz from the same week that the three videos appeared tells the story of Palestinian suffering and degradation from their side of the fence (fig. 3).

The bare, grey surface of the Wall, in particular on the Palestinian side, has also become a site for graffiti protesting its existence and the Israeli occupation. Some of the more striking images, though not with a direct political message, have been painted by the UK based anonymous graffiti artist Banksy. The Wall is "the ultimate tourist site for a graffiti artist" as Banksy, who is keeping his identity a closely guarded secret, has put it. According to The Guardian, August 5, 2005, Jo Brooks, his spokeswoman, said there were some "hairy" moments as Banksy was painting his images. "The Israeli security forces did shoot threateningly in the air and there were quite a few guns pointed at him." According to the same article, "Banksy has also recorded on his website how an old Palestinian man said his painting made the wall look beautiful. Banksy thanked him, only to be told: 'We don't want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home!'" (4)

The Wall, in turn, is just one of the many forms of more than forty years of Israeli occupation under which two generations of Palestinians have suffered.

The Wall also prevents the Israelis to see those realities. Banksy's images, which can only be viewed on the Palestinian side of the wall, frequently consist of windows or cracks, supposedly making the Wall transparent, enabling the Palestinian onlooker to see something on the Israeli side which obviously is not there: an empty beach with palm-trees, looking like a tourist ad (but without people) or a snow covered mountain looking like the Alps (fig. 4). Other Banksy images express a wish to reach the other side by a ladder or a bundle of balloons. And looking at these images with my own Israeli eyes, they become a poignant reminder that the Palestinians, besides the anguish of being occupied are not able anymore to see their 'other' (Israeli) side. We have become separated.

Final Reflections

My aim with these deliberations is to argue for an ethical position in the labour we do as spectators and researchers of film, theatre, performance and art, proposing a still (very) preliminary framework for examining our positions as witnesses, not merely as passive onlookers or distant, detached observers, but as active and engaged witnesses. I want to argue that consciously taking on such a witnessing position, carefully and critically watching images like these will assist us in establishing such a moral stance. Performances as well as other artistic expressions, and today also the electronic media in conjunction with other social and cultural institutions, serve as witnesses, literally inviting us in turn to become witnesses.

In order to delineate the role of the witness within the cultural and critical discourses we pursue, we first have to explore how the protocols of witnessing are constituted. Regardless of whether the witness is finally supporting or subverting the officially accepted narratives in our societies, the position of the witness is of crucial importance for the cultural as well as the legal negotiations triggered by performances in the widest sense of this term.

Witnessing is based on an ongoing dialectics between the private and the public spheres. This dialectics fluctuates between the intimate forms of witnessing, the primal scene, as outlined by Freud, in particular related to different forms of trauma and desire, while the Brechtian form of witnessing, reporting about a public event, the street accident, retold or demonstrated by a story-teller, regulates public opinion as well as ideological positions. Even if the mutual relevance of these two intellectual endeavours is perhaps not immediately apparent, examining them in tandem can be productive for the advancement of such an ethical approach.

Peggy Phelan has implicitly pointed at the dialectics between the private and the public, arguing that even if "theatre has borrowed the understanding of witnessing from psychoanalysis and political ethics, it seems to me that theatre has been somewhat shy in pursuing what it can add to the force of witnessing itself" (13). Witnessing, she claims, is so rich with nuances, that "to solicit an ethical witness in a theatre event requires one to trust that the border of performance exceeds its spatial and temporal boundaries" (13). This is certainly true of other media as well.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche proposed a model for a multi-focal vision where the spectator, at least on an ideal level, is viewing a performance both from inside and outside a fictional world, as a privileged member of the chorus as well as an external spectator. These suggestions, even if they were penned in a totally different context, can hopefully also direct us towards an understanding of the complex visual regimes that have been created by the roadblocks and the rhetorical strategies they reinforce or resist as well as the Wall itself and the images it generates. It is important to note that technologies like the camera, the cellphone and the internet play a crucial role in creating a speedy creation and distribution of images, while the political situation itself seems to be at a standstill.

For Nietzsche, the magical power of art is a guarantee that the spectator will neither be completely separated from, nor totally absorbed by the world of illusion, but will instead always also be able to develop a viewpoint that examines both the performance and the world from a distance. Nietzsche concludes his argument about such a critical witnessing position by saying that

   [a] public of spectators as we know it was unknown to the Greeks:
   in their theatres the terraced structure of concentric arcs made it
   possible for everybody to actually overlook the whole world of
   culture around him and to imagine in absorbed contemplation, that
   he himself is a chorist. In the light of this insight we may call
   the chorus in its primitive form, in proto-tragedy, the mirror
   image in which the Dionysian man contemplates himself. (62-3)

Nietzsche's bifocal vision, looking at the performance and the world simultaneously, creating a high degree of self-absorption for and of the viewer-spectator, as well as a position from which it is possible to begin a critique, contains a wordplay on the double sense of 'overlook' in English as well as in the German original--ubersehen--meaning both to survey and to ignore simultaneously. The place to begin such a critique is perhaps by looking at that which the rhetorical strategies of these images somehow make us overlook. When we see, we are at the same time not seeing.

DOI 10.1515/ARCA.2010.019

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1999.

--. Selected Writings. Vol. 4, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Kaynar, Gad. "The Holocaust experience through theatrical profanation." Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in drama and performance. Schumacher, Claude, ed.., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, 53-69.

Levin, Hanoch. "The Child Dreams: A Play in Four Parts." The Labor of Life: Selected Plays. Trans. by Barbara Harshav, Stanford: University Press, 2003, 127-71.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage, 1967.

Phelan, Peggy. "Performing Questions, Producing Witnesses." Foreword to Tim Etchells, Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, London and New York: Routledge, 1999, 9-14.

(1) Accessed on July 28, 2009.

(2) There were, as Gad Kaynar has emphasized, also several scenes where actors playing victims were seated among the circus-spectators, "who are thereby also stamped as potential victims" (62).

(3) The Cellcom advertisement and its variations were accessed on July 28, 2009.

(4) http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,11711,1543171,00.html (accessed January 24, 2008).

Rokem, Freddie

Source Citation   (MLA 7^th Edition)

Rokem, Freddie. "The violin player, the soccer game and the wall-graffiti: rhetorical strategies in the border-regions between Israel and Palestine." Arcadia - International Journal for Literary Studies45.2 (2011): 326+. Academic OneFile. Web. 26 Feb. 2013.

Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA254244529&v=2.1&u=colu44332&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w

Face to Face (Illegal) Installation

JR and Marco's 2007 illegal art installation in Israel and Palestine combines strategies of graffiti art and photography. They photographed Israeli and Palestinian people of the same profession and juxtaposed them on the wall and at various other points in Israel and Palestine. The artists are French. There is a nice video about this piece at this link:  http://www.jr-art.net/videos/face-2-face.

This work reminded me of the article about graffiti. However, it shows the way in which contemporary artists can work as interventionists, bringing about dialogue and awareness in contemporary environments.

Final Project: Anti-Zionism and Judaism

I made changes to my project idea from my initial project idea post. My current project explores anti-Zionism within the Jewish community in comparison to anti-Semitic anti-Zionism. I am looking at documentation at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati in addition to the sources outlined at the end of this outline. Generally, I am interested in the question of how can we create space in contemporary Jewish communities for the critical discussion of Zionism. In part, an understanding of the history of Jewish critique of Zionism is needed in order for this to happen.

Final Project Outline

Jennifer E.

I.               Introduction to the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati

a.     Anti-Semitic Collection

                                               i.     1954-1964

                                              ii.     nature of the collection

                                            iii.     types of documents included

                                            iv.     types of stereotypes about Jews and hatred voiced about Jews

II.             Characteristics of Anti-Semitic Anti-Zionism, 1954-64

a.     as described by American anti-Semitic writers 1954-64

b.     Ways in which anti-Zionism relates to other hatred of the Jews and stereotypes evidenced in this body of writing.

III.           Characteristics of Jewish critiques of Zionism (not Anti-Semitic)

a.     Anti-Zionism and Reform Judaism, 1897-1915

b.     Elmer Berger and the American Council for Judaism

                                               i.     Records at the American Jewish Archives, 1937-1968

                  c. Religious-based critiques of Zionism within the Jewish Community (3 Oaths in the Talmud)

d. Contemporary Examples

IV.            Are contemporary critiques of Israeli policies within Jewish communities anti-Zionist or Post-Zionist? What is the difference?

a.     “anti” vs. “post”

b.     Trend of labeling Jews who criticize Israeli policies as “self hating Jews” and “anti-Zionists” and as not “religious”

V.              The future of critical dialogue in Jewish Communities

a.     Can there be a place for critical dialogue about Israeli policies within Jewish communities without calling into question the authenticity or loyalty of ones Jewish identity?

References:

American Jewish Archives, Anti-Semitism Collection, 1954-1964, Cincinnati (various sources, TBD).

American Jewish Archives, American Council for Judaism Records, 1937-1968, Cincinnati (various sources, TBD).

Brownfeld, A. (2009). Attempts to silence critics of Israeli policis as “self-hating

Jews” a failing strategy. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 28(8), pp.

53-54.

Butler, J. (2012). Parting ways: Jewishness and the critique of Zionism. New York:

Columbia University Press.

Corrigan, E. (2009). Is anti-Zionism anti-Semitic? Jewish critics speak. Middle East

Policy,16(4), pp. 146-159.

Don-Yehiya, E. (2012). Orthodox and other American Jews and their attitude to the

state of Israel. Israel Studies, 17(2), pp. 120-128.  

Fishman, D. (1998). Reform Judaism and the anti-Zionist persuasive campaign,

1897-1915, Communication Quarterly, 46(4), pp. 375-395.

Friesel, E. (2011). On the complexities of the modern Jewish identity: Contemporary

Jews against Israel. Israel Affairs, 17(4), pp. 504-519.

Klug, B. (2004). The myth of the new anti-Semitism: Reflections on anti-Semitism,

anti-Zionism and the importance of making distinctions. The Nation,

February 2, 2004.

Lapkin, T. (2005). The strange mythology of anti-Zionism. Quadrant, 49(12), pp. 21-

27.

Mendes, P. (2009). The strange phenomenon of Jewish anti-Zionism: Is it a

contradiction in term? The Australian Experience. Midstream, 55(3), p. 10.

Mendes, P. (2008). The strange phenomenon of Jewish anti-Zionism: Self-hating

Jews or protectors of universalistic principles? Australian Journal of Jewish

Studies, 22, pp. 96-132.

Myers, D. (2006). Can there be a principled anti-Zionism? On the nexus between

anti-historicism and anti-Zionism in modern Jewish thought. The Journal of

Israeli History, 25(1), pp. 33-50.

Prior, M. (2005). Comment: A disaster for dialogue: Anti-Zionism, anti-Semitisim,

and racism, Holy Land Studies, 4(1), 87-91.

Ross, J. (2011). Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish anti-Zionism.

Washington D.C.: Potomac Books.

Shapira, A. (2006). Israeli perceptions of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. The

Journal of Israeli History, 25(1), pp. 245-266.

Shatz, A., ed. (2004). Prophets outcast: A century of dissident Jewish writing about

Zionism and Israel. New York: Nation Books.

Volkov, S. (2006). Readjusting cultural codes: Reflections on anti-Semitism and anti-

Zionism. The Journal of Israeli History, 25(1), pp. 51-62.

Home and Diaspora

I found the discussion of home and whether or not one feels at home particularly interesting in light of the research I have been doing in relationship to Zionism, anti-Zionism, and diaspora for my final project. One of the books I am reading, New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora, examines the ways in which Jews in the United States no longer identify with the diaspora and how places like Los Angeles and particularly New York City have become major Jewish centers in the United States, American Jewish "homelands" so to say. 

What is interesting is the way in which the authors of New Jews present the notion of NYC as a Jewish homeland as a contemporary idea. However, in my research for my final project I have found that references to the United States as Israel by anti-Zionist Jews existed in the early 1900s. A prominent slogan of the anti-Zionists was, "America is our Palestine. Washington is our Jerusalem" (Cohen, 1951, p. 375 in Fishman, 1998). 

Zionists argued for a "negation of the diaspora" by establishing a Jewish homeland. However, early anti-Zionists argued that American Jews were already home as American citizens. Interestingly, they also criticized Zionism as being racist.

Some Orthodox Jews, mainly Haredi, see the diaspora or exile as something that we are not supposed to "negate" and reference the three oaths in the Talmud. This is a religiously-based issue with Zionism arguing that we cannot forcefully take the Holy Land and that it is only through the coming of the Messiah, that Jews are reunited with this "home."

This is a cut and paste of the text of the Three Oaths in Hebrew and English translation:

The context of the Talmudic dialogue containing the Three Oaths is a discussion in which attempts are made to defend Rav Zeira's desire to leave Babylonand go to the Land of Israel. It begins on Ketubot 110b and continues on 111a (where the Three Oaths are plainly conveyed). The Gemara quotes R. Yossi ben R. Chanina:

ג' שבועות הללו למה אחת שלא יעלו ישראל בחומה ואחת שהשביע הקדוש ברוך הוא את ישראל שלא ימרדו באומות העולם ואחת שהשביע הקדוש ברוך הוא את אומות העולם שלא ישתעבדו בהן בישראל יותר מדאי.

"Why/What are these Three Oaths? One, that Israel should not storm the wall RaShI interprets: forcefully}. Two, the Holy One adjured Israel not to rebel against the nations of the world. Three, the Holy One adjured the nations that they would not oppress Israel too much"."^[1]

So, I suppose this all brings me to the personal question of am I home? In a religious sense, no, not entirely. Not until the Messiah comes. But in a socio-cultural sense...yes, of course I am home. My home is the location of my family.