Abstracts of Current Research:- Above the Death-Pits, beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity: Israeli youth voyages to Poland are one of the most popular and influential forms of transmission of Holocaust memory in Israeli society. Through intensive participant observation, group discussions, student diaries, and questionnaires, the author demonstrates how the State shapes Poland into a living deathscape of Diaspora Jewry. In the course of the voyage, students undergo a rite de passage, in which they are transformed into victims, victorious survivors, and finally witnesses of the witnesses. By viewing, touching, and smelling Holocaust-period ruins and remains, by accompanying the survivors on the sites of their suffering and survival, crying together and performing commemorative ceremonies at the death sites, students from a wide variety of family backgrounds become carriers of Shoah memory. They come to see the State and its defense as the romanticized answer to the Shoah. These voyages are a bureaucratic response to uncertainty and fluidity of identity in an increasingly globalized and fragmented society. This study adds a measured and compassionate ethical voice to ideological debates surrounding educational and cultural forms of encountering the past in contemporary Israel, and raises further questions about the representation of the Holocaust after the demise of the last living witnesses.
- Constructing a shared Bible Land:
Jewish Israeli guiding performances for Protestant pilgrims
: During biblical tours, Jewish Israeli guides and
Protestant pastors become coproducers of a mutually
satisfying performance that transforms the
often-contested terrain of Israel–Palestine into Bible
Land. Guides’ emplaced performances of the Bible
grant a significance to visitors’ movement that
constitutes the visitors as pilgrims. The professional
authority of the guide is increased by his or her
position as “reluctant witness” to scriptural truth
and facilitated by historically transmitted practices
of viewing, classifying history, and orientalizing
shared by Protestants and Zionists. By examining
guiding performances of orientation to biblical sites,
I demonstrate how Zionist and Protestant
understandings become naturalized while
marginalizing Palestinian Arabs. [pilgrimage,
performance, habitus, Bible, Jewish–Christian
relations, tour guide, Holy Land] - ''''A City that Makes All Israel Friends'''': Normative Communitas and the Struggle for Religious Legitimacy in Pilgrimages to the Second Temple: The biblical injunction states: ''''Three times yearly shall all your male issue be seen before the face of the Lord God at the place He shall choose'''' (Deut 16:16; Exod 22:17).
Pilgrimage to the Second Temple was one of the most widespread religiously motivated movements of people in antiquity . In this article, I examine several aspects of pilgrimage to the Second Temple within a theoretical frame drawn from the contemporary anthropological study of pilgrimage. In doing so, I hope to open the way to further dialogue between the study of pilgrimage to the Second Temple and research on other pilgrimages.
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Book Chapters:- Feldman, Jackie, Nationalizing Personal Trauma, Personalizing National Redemption: Performing Testimony at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission, Nicolas Argenti & Katharina Schramm, eds.,, 99-128, Berghan Press, 2009
- Feldman, Jackie, Souffrance Individuelle et Consolidation de la Nation – La Memoire Israelienne non-universelle de la Shoah", La Memoire de la Shoah, Francoise Ouzan et Dan Michman, 217-250, CNRS/Yad Vashem, 2008
- Feldman, Jackie, Between Personal and Collective Memory: The Role of the Witness in Voyages to Poland, Children in the Shadow of the Holocaust: Children – Survivors and Second Generation , Zehava Solomon and Julia Chaitin, 364-393, Hakibbutz Ha me''uchad, 2007
- Feldman, Jackie, ''A City that Makes All Israel Friends'': Normative Communitas and trhe Struggle for Religious Legitimacy in Pilgrimages to the Second Temple, A Holy People: Jewish and Christian Perspectives on Religious and Communal Identity, Marcel Poothuis and Joshua Schwartz, 109-126, Brill, 2006
- Feldman, Jackie, In Search of the Beautiful Land of Israel: Youth Voyages to Poland, Israeli Backpackers and their Society: From Tourism to Rite of Passage, Erik Cohen and Hayim Noy, 217-250, State University of New York Press, 2005
- Feldman, Jackie , The Experience of Communality and the Legitimation of Authority in Second Temple Pilgrimage, Pilgrimage: Jews, Christians, Moslems, Ora Limor and Elchanan Reiner, 88-109, Open University/ Yad Ben Zvi, 2005
- Feldman, Jackie , Israel als Enklave: Inszenierungen jüdisch-israelischer Identität in Polen, Repräsentationen des Holocaust im Gedächtnis der Generationen. Zur Gegenwartsbedeutung des Holocaust in Israel und Deutschland, Margrit Frölich, Yariv Lapid, Christian Schneider , 172-202, Brandes & Apsel (ArnoldshainerInterkulturelle Diskurse 4), 2004
- Feldman, Jackie, Israel-Diaspora Relations the Morning After: How Will Peace Change Relations between Israel and the Jewish Communities in the Diaspora? , The Morning After: An Era of Peace - Not a Utopia, Meron Benvenisti, 477-519, Carmel, Harry Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, Hebrew University, 2002
- Feldman, Jackie, Roots in destruction: the Israeli past as portrayed in Israeli youth voyages to Poland, The Life of Judaism, Harvey Goldberg, 156-170, University of California Press, 2001
- Feldman, Jackie, In the Footsteps of the Israeli Holocaust Survivor: Israeli Youth Pilgrimages to Poland, Shoah Memory and National Identity” , Building History: The Shoah in Art, Memory, and Myth, Naomi Kramer, Peter Daly, Karl Filser, Alain Goldschläger , 35-63, Peter Lang, McGill European Studies Series, Vol. 4, 2001
- Feldman, Jackie, Bearbeitungsformen der Nachkommen und ihre laendspezifischen Kontexte - Israel (Forms of Working Through of Later Generations and their National Contexts - Israel)., Die Gegenwart der Geschichte des Holocaust, Christian Staffa, 233-242, Evangelische Institut, Berlin, 1999
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