‘The dense, murky water of the past’: Swamps, Nostalgia and Settlement Myth in Meir Shalev’s The Blue Mountain

Hydrofictions ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 69-107
Author(s):  
Hannah Boast
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Blue Mountain ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
National Mythology

This chapter examines the changing meanings of swamp drainage in Israel’s national mythology. Swamp drainage was undertaken in the early twentieth century by the Jewish National Fund and again after the establishment of the State of Israel. Once seen as a triumph of Zionist ingenuity, draining swamps was redefined in the late twentieth century as an emblem of Zionism’s environmental hubris. This chapter assesses this history through Meir Shalev’s magical realist novel The Blue Mountain (1988), situating Shalev’s text in its contemporary contexts of environmentalism and post-Zionism.

Diaspora as Nation

2021 ◽  
pp. 389-408
Author(s):  
Jonathan Ray
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
North African ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Diasporic Identity ◽  
Italian Culture ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter traces the evolution of the so-called “Eastern” Sephardic diaspora in its Mediterranean context from 1492 to the late twentieth century. It looks at the way in which these exiles and their descendants forged a new diasporic identity characterized by sprawling mercantile networks that linked Jews and Conversos, new forms of Judeo-Spanish, and a nostalgia for medieval Spain. At first, the mutual sense of estrangement between the refugees and the native Jews among whom they came to settle reinforced communal solidarity among the Sephardim. From the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the Mediterranean Sephardim adopted aspects of Ottoman, North African, and Italian culture, but succeeded in maintaining a distinct communal character amid a shifting set of political contexts and associations. During the twentieth century, the mass migration of Mediterranean Sephardim to the State of Israel helped recast them as “Eastern” Jews, or Mizrahim.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Heritage Industry ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter introduces the concept of the “archaeomodern” and its connection to the aging of the quintessential modern medium of film. It sketches the historical and cultural background of the archaeomodern turn in the late twentieth century, including the development of an obsession with the past in the heritage industry and the rise of postmodernism. It then discusses two phenomena from the 1980s and 1990s—a mannerist or baroque revival, and the development of media archaeology—that complicate the habitual association between tradition and the past or modernity and the future. The introduction suggests that archaeomodern cinema was characterized by the return to failed or abandoned modern experiments and other relics from the modern past.

scholarly journals Discrimination? Protestantism and Jewish Christians in the State of Israel

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gert J Van Klinken
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Jewish Christians

During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Jewish mission became an established branch of Protestant mission in general. As the Jewish converts to Protestantism remained fairly few in numbers, these converts were expected to engage in missionary efforts too, among their fellow Jews. One of the results of the ensuing polarization was the exclusion of baptized Jews from the citizenship of the State of Israel, where they were considered traitors by a majority of society. This article argues that programmes for Jewish-Christian dialogue in the State of Israel came under pressure to bar the Jewish Christians from taking part, and explores the question whether the ensuing policies can be ranked as examples of discrimination against this group.

Hasidism: The Third Century

1996 ◽  
pp. 415-426
Author(s):  
Joseph Dan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Orthodox Judaism ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Jewish Mysticism ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mystical Tradition ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter examines the third century of hasidism, considered the most enduring phenomenon in Orthodox Judaism in modern times. Gershom Scholem described hasidism as the ‘last phase’ in a Jewish mystical tradition that spanned nearly two millennia. Yet at the conclusion of his account of the movement in the last chapter of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, he appeared, with some regret, to view his subject as a phenomenon of the past. The contrast between this view of hasidic history and the reality of Jewish life in the late twentieth century could not be greater. The hasidism of today cannot be treated as a lifeless relic from the past. It appears to have made a complete adjustment to twentieth-century technology, the mass media, and the intricate politics of democratic societies without surrendering its traditional identity in the process.

scholarly journals V.M. SHUKSHIN AND “NEW PEASANT POETS”: SURVIVED CHILDREN OF NOT SURVIVED FATHERS

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-15
Author(s):  
A.A. Shorokhov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The article combines two significant historical and literary phenomena. The first is a group of Russian poets and prose writers of the early twentieth century, known under the general name “new peasant poets”. The second is a group of Russian writers of the late twentieth century, whose work has received a steady definition of “village prose”. V.M. Shukshin’s works are also referred to this cultural phenomenon. The article attempts to get away from simplifying definitions of “urban romance”, “village prose”, and to establish the civilizational continuity of Shukshin’s work with “new peasant poets” of the early twentieth century. The author also tries to consider the phenomenon of the group of “new peasant poets” from the cultural, philosophical and historical-biographical points of view – In the unity of their work, fate and dramatic changes in the history of Russia. The article uses theoretical works on Russian and world literature and history by M.M. Bakhtin, V.V. Kozhinova, I.R. Shafarevich, G.I. Shmeleva, P.F. Alyoshkina, S.Yu. and S.S. Kunyaevs, recent publications on Shukshin’s works by V.I. Belov, A.D. Zabolotsky, and A.N. Varlamov.

scholarly journals Fragments of a Hungarian Past in the Literature of 1.5 and Second-Generation Austro-Hungarian Immigrants in Israel

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Ilana Rosen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Distinct Group ◽  
The Past ◽  
Previous Generation ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Multicultural Setting ◽  
The One ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Contemporary Israeli literature is presently preoccupied with the past diasporic lives of the previous generation, the one that came to Israel from practically all four winds in the mid-late twentieth century. Hungarian-Israeli writers—e.g., Yoel Hoffmann, Judith Rotem, Yael Neeman and Esti G. Hayim—constitute a distinct group within this stream of 1.5 and second generation poets and novelists who have written about immigration and State foundation, often using a documentary or fictionalized memoirist mode. This article highlights the components of these writers' complex burden of a whole world destroyed, in most cases, not long before they were born and which they strive to restore or at least re-imagine in their oeuvre as contemporary Israeli writers. These components include: Holocaust trauma and its transference to the second generation, Hungarian speaking families within the Israeli multicultural setting, the ties of these families with their Hungarian foreign relatives, and household objects related to this past.

Dissenting Traditions and Missionary Imaginations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin D. Livingstone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe ◽  
Directing Attention ◽  
Independence Movements ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter follows the long arc of the ‘missionary novel’, from the exhortation and promotion emanating from a missionary culture embraced by a Protestant Christendom to a dissenting literary culture under siege from imperial servants, secularists, and postcolonial independence movements. It notes that the African missionary novel in particular provides fertile material for the investigation of Dissenting Protestantism as it engaged with the twentieth century. Many ‘humanitarian’ novels disseminated knowledge about mission fields and ‘new’ peoples, and so were part of (and criticized for) the globalizing imagination of early twentieth-century Europe and the spread of the professions. Case studies include Elsie Milligan, Arthur E. Southon, Ambrose Haynes, Marion Percy Williams, Arthur Chirgwin, Harry H. Johnston, and Joyce Cary, among others. The chapter extends the debate on mission and empire by directing attention to issues of postcolonial reception, disclosing the ways in which the so-called ‘dissidence of Dissent’ was both challenged and appropriated by anti-colonial authors in the mid to late twentieth century.

Litigating for Profit

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Dennis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Law ◽  
Legal Strategies ◽  
Legal Barriers ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Michael Dennis looks at grocery workers in the late twentieth century, and the lopsided power mounted against their effort to organize. Despite the clear sentiment in favor of unionization, employers unleased antiunion consultants and legal barriers that countered the millions of dollars spent by the union to organize. Dennis shows that employer determination supported by the state were the chief reasons for management’s victory. Unions’ reliance on legal strategies were no match for employers’ determination to skirt the boundaries of the law.

Common Law Marriage

1987 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. C. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Open Problems ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Common Law Marriage

To re-open problems of the past and to rake up arguments long since laid to rest may seem a singularly pointless exercise for a family lawyer of the late twentieth century. Yet the controversy which raged in the 1840s over the requirements for common law marriage was never satisfactorily resolved; and even today the question could still arise and an authoritative answer be required.

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