Intertwined Landscape

This article examines the ways in which Zionist intellectuals interacted with Arabo-Islamic culture in the Yishuv by looking into the cultivation of Islamicate knowledge pertinent to land and nature and its impact on the construction of the Jewish cultural landscape. I argue that in establishing a connection between Jews and the natural landscape of Palestine/ Israel, Jewish intellectuals relied on Arabo Islamic culture and its centuries of knowledge about the flora and the land itself. In their search to comprehend the flora and place names of the land of the Bible, Jewish individuals consulted Arabo-Islamic sources, finding them instrumental to their national enterprise. The culmination of these endeavors is that, in addition to Jewish and Western sources, Islamicate culture was one of the wellsprings from which Jewish intellectuals drew in shaping the emergent culture in the Yishuv and the early decades of the State of Israel.

Making Radio Talk

This chapter considers emerging forms of radio speech developed for formats ranging from scheduled talks to professional announcing. Disrupting established styles of public speaking, radio offered rich subject matter for the new discipline of speech communication, which helped to formalize new rules favoring a well-modulated delivery with restrained, natural speech and careful control over rate, pitch, and enunciation. Three larger sets of cultural tensions impacted these emerging announcing practices: (1) tensions surrounding a standardized national speech movement and its implicit regional, gender, and class biases; (2) concerns over an emergent culture of personality that informed debates on desired degrees of formality and informality in radio speech; and (3) long-standing concerns over disembodied communication-at-a-distance exacerbated by radio’s severing of voices from speakers' physical bodies. Resulting efforts to discipline the radio voice spurred important shifts in period voice culture that resonated across fields from rhetoric and theater to film and phonograph entertainment.