Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped American Passions About Israel

This chapter reviews Shalom Goldman's Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped American Passions about Israel (2019). Despite its title, this book has little to say about how “the arts shaped American passions about Israel.” The exposition of its “arts” examples is more lucid in the book's introduction than in its body. More than two-thirds of the volume convey insufficiently researched or inaccurate reports about Israeli history, often focusing on issues that have nothing to do with the ostensible topic of the arts' presumptive “soft power” in the shaping of the U.S.–Israel relationship. There is also an untoward amount of autobiographical memoir writing crisscrossed with sweeping, questionable allegations about the two Jewish cultures under study. Goldman seems unconcerned about delivering on his promise to write about American cultural icons and Israel, and he produces such a short roster of these icons, that the book inculcates a contrary, and possibly correct, impression suggesting that, on a celebrity cultural level at least, America has never really been “starstruck” about the promised land.

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Book Reviews

Israeli Studies Review ◽

10.3167/isr.2020.350309 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 35 (3) ◽

pp. 154-167

Author(s):

David N. Myers ◽

Pnina Lahav ◽

Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder ◽

Adi Mahalel ◽

Lauren B. Strauss

Keyword(s):

Publishing House ◽

Early Years ◽

New Haven ◽

Yale University ◽

Indiana University ◽

Promised Land ◽

Chapel Hill ◽

The Arts ◽

Theodor Herzl

Derek Penslar, Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 256 pp. Hardback, $26.00.Sharon Geva, Women in the State of Israel: The Early Years [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes Publishing House, 2020), 304 pp. Paperback, $20.00. eBook, $13.00.Vered Kraus and Yuval P. Yonay, Facing Barriers: Palestinian Women in a Jewish-Dominated Labor Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 298 pp. Hardback, $99.99.Rachel Rojanski, Yiddish in Israel: A History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 338 pp. Hardback, $95.00. Paperback, $40.00. eBook, $19.99.Shalom Goldman, Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped American Passions about Israel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 256 pp. Hardback, $28.00. eBook, $21.99.

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Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction Vol. 1 1919 - 1959. Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land, Vol. 2. 1960 - 1987

The Journal of New Zealand Studies ◽

10.26686/jnzs.v0ins31.6689 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Kirsty Baker

Keyword(s):

New Zealand ◽

Art Writing ◽

Promised Land ◽

Aotearoa New Zealand ◽

The Arts

Colin McCahon remains an inescapable figure in the arts discourse of Aotearoa New Zealand. His long-standing reputation as our greatest painter, though frequently disputed, continues to cast its shadow over the landscape of both art writing and display.

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Electron Microscopy in Molecular Biology

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100060027 ◽

1967 ◽

Vol 25 ◽

pp. 2-3

Author(s):

Cecil E. Hall

Keyword(s):

Electron Microscopy ◽

Molecular Biology ◽

Noise Level ◽

Molecular Structures ◽

Material Structure ◽

The Arts ◽

Shadow Casting ◽

Electron Image ◽

High Degree ◽

Very High

The visualization of organic macromolecules such as proteins, nucleic acids, viruses and virus components has reached its high degree of effectiveness owing to refinements and reliability of instruments and to the invention of methods for enhancing the structure of these materials within the electron image. The latter techniques have been most important because what can be seen depends upon the molecular and atomic character of the object as modified which is rarely evident in the pristine material. Structure may thus be displayed by the arts of positive and negative staining, shadow casting, replication and other techniques. Enhancement of contrast, which delineates bounds of isolated macromolecules has been effected progressively over the years as illustrated in Figs. 1, 2, 3 and 4 by these methods. We now look to the future wondering what other visions are waiting to be seen. The instrument designers will need to exact from the arts of fabrication the performance that theory has prescribed as well as methods for phase and interference contrast with explorations of the potentialities of very high and very low voltages. Chemistry must play an increasingly important part in future progress by providing specific stain molecules of high visibility, substrates of vanishing “noise” level and means for preservation of molecular structures that usually exist in a solvated condition.

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