2009-2012
Jews have often been represented as the consummate example of an urban people. In Europe and North America, observers as diverse and influential as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Robert Park, John Higham, Arthur Ruppin, Walter Benjamin, and seminal figures in the arts from Franz Kafka, to Philip Roth, Woody Allen, -and the painter R.B. Kitaj, have all claimed that Jews not only preferred to live in cities, but also that their long and seemingly "imprinted" pattern of urban dwelling actually shaped the way they lived, interacted with and reflected on their world. Jews were not only a prime case of urban adaptation, but served, indeed, as a prototype for an entire range of new social thought about and cultural representation of the urban experience and the modern world. In the Jew-as-urbanite we are often faced with rhetorical gestures that recall older archetypical "Jewish" representations, such as the wandering Jew able to move freely (and therefore easily depicted as "rootless"). In the postmodern and post-colonialist theories of Jean-Fran(fois Lyotard, Homi Bhabha and others, the "small-j jew" is so emblematic as to risk becoming invisible as a real protagonist in the world.
the urban environment. Among the many questions to be addressed are:
• How (and when) did Jewish newcomers experience new urban environments in Europe, North America and the Middle East?• How were these new arenas represented by generations of Jewish artists, writers and intellectuals?
• How does the position of Jerusalem in the Hebrew imagination complicate the experience and representation of 'cities' for Jews in Israel and abroad?
• What role did the image of the city have on emerging concepts of nation and community among Jews around the world as well as in the State of Israel?
Other questions that members of this group would like to address include: How have Jewish communal institutions like synagogues, charitable organizations and reform projects been influenced by and responded to the challenges of metropolitan living? How have the images of particular cities in the arts and public discourse refracted the Jewish experience? Can we claim that Jews in the various cities of the modern world constitute an enlarged if fragmented "imagined community"? How do European cities that have been wiped from the "Jewish map" continue to inform the imagination? How has the memory of Jewish centers in places like Baghdad and Casablanca been incorporated into contemporary identities? And how do the "ruined cities" to which Jews have returned inscribe the past in their physical and spiritual landscapes? Additionally, the group would also look at the place of urban landmarks, cityscapes, architecture and urban tourism in contemporary Jewish cultures and societies and, to this end, to broaden the discussion within our group by inviting the participation of others.
Group Members:
Prof. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi sidra.dke@gmail.com
Prof. Aziza Khazzoom khazzoom@mscc.huji.ac.il
Conferences
In April 2012 hosted a workshop titled: "Why Jerusalem?”
In June 2012 the group organized a conference under the title: "Jews and Cities: Modern Encounters and Solitudes”