This advanced undergraduate seminar – also open to interested graduate students – is part of a series of seminars that seek to provide a deeper understanding of the links between the region now known as Israel and Palestine and the peoples that have inhabited it or have made it into part of their mental, mythical, and religious landscape throughout history. At the very heart of these seminars is the question: What makes for the bond between groups and place real or imagined, tangible or ephemeral. Students taking part in this seminar will include participants in the Providence-Jerusalem Exchange Program on Israel-Palestine from Brown University and the Hebrew University, as well as other students from the Hebrew University interested in the topic.
This semester’s seminar seeks to put the discourses on the Shoah and the Nakba – the mass displacement of the Palestinian in 1948 – in dialogue with each other, and to position both within broader conceptual, political and historical contexts. These two traumatic events are often discussed separately and disconnectedly; for some the mere fact of invoking them in the same context is an act of intellectual, historical, and moral inconsistency, even scandal. The opposition to deliberating these two events jointly and within broader contexts includes considerations of enduring and profound emotions of injury; exclusivity of pain and victimhood; and contestations of the validity of comparison and analogy. Nevertheless, these two events are related historically to each other in many different ways and have become constitutive components of contemporary Palestinian nationalism and Jewish and Israeli identities and politics. Our seminar will attempt to critically explore the transformative potential of jointly reflecting on these two crucial events in JewishIsraeli and Palestinian history, memory, and politics.
In the course of the seminar we will pay particular attention to comparative perspectives and to recent challenges to the discourse of exceptionalism, which have proposed setting the Holocaust and the Nakba within the larger context of colonialism and the modern nation state’s dynamics of population policies, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, aimed at homogenizing, transferring, and eradicating populations and thereby accomplishing radical spatial transformations. The Holocaust is intimately related to Nazi conceptions of space (as in Lebensraum) and to the perception (not exclusively by the Nazis) of Jews as a rootless and landless people, as in “the wandering Jew.” The Holocaust also resulted in a crucial spatial and demographic shift in Jewish history: moving the center of European Jewish existence to Israel/Palestine and the United State (and indirectly leading to the elimination of Jewish communities in North Africa and the Arab lands). The Nakba is directly and closely related to colonial views of Palestine as “empty” and to the Zionist urge and practical policies geared toward nationalizing and rooting the “landless Jews” through colonizing, Judaizing, and deArabizing the space/land of Palestine/Israel and establishing a Jewish majority, sovereignty and state. These eliminatory notions and policies have, among other things, turned a vast number of Palestinians into refugees and dispersed them in various locations of exile across the globe.
Students are expected to attend all sessions, read all assigned materials, and participate actively in class discussions, as well as to contribute each week in writing to discussions on the course website. Each student will present a mid-term paper of no more than 5 pages on a selection of the readings on April 27 (Week 5). A final paper on a topic related to the seminar and agreed on in consultation with the instructor is due no later than June 8.
Grades will be determined as follows: mid-term paper = 25%; final paper = 40%; attendance and active participation = 35%
Required readings will be available in PDF on the course website
This semester’s seminar seeks to put the discourses on the Shoah and the Nakba – the mass displacement of the Palestinian in 1948 – in dialogue with each other, and to position both within broader conceptual, political and historical contexts. These two traumatic events are often discussed separately and disconnectedly; for some the mere fact of invoking them in the same context is an act of intellectual, historical, and moral inconsistency, even scandal. The opposition to deliberating these two events jointly and within broader contexts includes considerations of enduring and profound emotions of injury; exclusivity of pain and victimhood; and contestations of the validity of comparison and analogy. Nevertheless, these two events are related historically to each other in many different ways and have become constitutive components of contemporary Palestinian nationalism and Jewish and Israeli identities and politics. Our seminar will attempt to critically explore the transformative potential of jointly reflecting on these two crucial events in JewishIsraeli and Palestinian history, memory, and politics.
In the course of the seminar we will pay particular attention to comparative perspectives and to recent challenges to the discourse of exceptionalism, which have proposed setting the Holocaust and the Nakba within the larger context of colonialism and the modern nation state’s dynamics of population policies, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, aimed at homogenizing, transferring, and eradicating populations and thereby accomplishing radical spatial transformations. The Holocaust is intimately related to Nazi conceptions of space (as in Lebensraum) and to the perception (not exclusively by the Nazis) of Jews as a rootless and landless people, as in “the wandering Jew.” The Holocaust also resulted in a crucial spatial and demographic shift in Jewish history: moving the center of European Jewish existence to Israel/Palestine and the United State (and indirectly leading to the elimination of Jewish communities in North Africa and the Arab lands). The Nakba is directly and closely related to colonial views of Palestine as “empty” and to the Zionist urge and practical policies geared toward nationalizing and rooting the “landless Jews” through colonizing, Judaizing, and deArabizing the space/land of Palestine/Israel and establishing a Jewish majority, sovereignty and state. These eliminatory notions and policies have, among other things, turned a vast number of Palestinians into refugees and dispersed them in various locations of exile across the globe.
Students are expected to attend all sessions, read all assigned materials, and participate actively in class discussions, as well as to contribute each week in writing to discussions on the course website. Each student will present a mid-term paper of no more than 5 pages on a selection of the readings on April 27 (Week 5). A final paper on a topic related to the seminar and agreed on in consultation with the instructor is due no later than June 8.
Grades will be determined as follows: mid-term paper = 25%; final paper = 40%; attendance and active participation = 35%
Required readings will be available in PDF on the course website
- Teacher: Bartov Omer