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This paper analyzes the major change in the Jewish sacred space in Israel. It demonstrates the distinct process wherein pilgrimages emphasizing ancient Jewish history are often replaced by visits at the tombs of venerated contemporary figures. In various places throughout Israel (and the Diaspora), a complex system of sacred tombs has developed comprising sites that are physically and symbolically distant from Jerusalem. In recent years, cemeteries throughout the State of Israel have been transformed from burial places serving the families of the deceased to pilgrimage destinations for visitors specifically seeking to prostrate themselves on the holy graves of rabbis, public figures, and leaders of communities and Hasidic dynasties, whether Mizrachi or Ashkenazi. This tsadikification process has developed almost without institutional or national political involvement, and is the result of the activities of individuals and families, non-profit organizations, Hasidic dynasties, and various organizations promoting the expansion of the map of Jewish sanctity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining reports and discussions among Israeli diplomats from 1982 to 1984, this paper seeks to expand the discourse on Israeli-Latin American-Jewish relations, investigating Israel's perceptions of Jews' safety in Argentina during the end of its dictatorship. The analysis deepens the understanding of the experiences and dynamics in Israel's approaches towards Argentine Jews in contexts of crisis, tracing the development of Israeli views, including difficulties in maintaining relations with the Jewish community during times of political uncertainty. Despite the numerous critical political crises in Argentine and Latin American history, Israeli diplomats' attempts to cope with Latin American political ambiguity has not received enough attention in Latin American-Jewish studies, especially in terms of the triangle of the Israeli-Latin American-Jewish community. This article proposes to refine these approaches, exploring Israel's decisions and attitudes in terms of its relations with Latin America and with Jews, not only according to the dichotomy between the politics and ethnicity of the Jewish State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past decade, historians and social scientists have begun extensively to research the issue of philanthropy and charities in general, and that of Jewish philanthropy in particular. This paper reviews some of the main characteristics of philanthropic activity of the Jewish elite in post-emancipation Europe (1791–1878) and especially in Britain. Elite philanthropy was not the only form of philanthropy in the Jewish community. Middle-class philanthropy was another form, and traditional charitable activities constituted a third form. This paper focuses solely on elite philanthropy in England between c.1850–c.1880. Moses Montefiore and Lionel de Rotshchild were two of the most influential leaders of the Anglo-Jewish philanthropic elite. The paper deals mostly with the activities of these leaders of the Jewish community in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to identify the emergence of the concept “new anti-Semitism” in both public discourse and academic research in Israel. Our main argument is that the new anti-Semitism has emerged in tandem with changing values within Israeli society, primarily the adoption of a mythic-traditional perspective. This historical review focuses on description of a key event: United Nations Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism. We argue that increasing adherence to Jewish tradition goes hand in hand with the assimilation of Jewish myths regarding anti-Semitism. Scholarly discourse about new anti-Semitism is presented through critical study of Shmuel Almog's anthologySin'at Yisrael ledoroteiha(A History of Hatred of Israel). This study is the first to be published that discusses an updated view of anti-Semitism in Israeli public discourse and academic research, emphasizing how the State of Israel has become its object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fierce debate over conversion to Judaism raging in Israel today has been fuelled by the Israeli Law of Return and the resulting immigration of large numbers of non-Jews to Israel from the Soviet Union. It has precedents, however, in earlier rabbinic literature. This paper traces the conversion debate from its Talmudic origins, through the nineteenth century halakhic polemic, to the present day. It demonstrates how the processes of secularization and nationalism that have affected the Jewish community have impacted on a changing balance in the roles of religion and nationalism in the definition of “who is a Jew” and “who is a convert?” It also shows how halakhic rulings are affected by social changes and how the ideologies of halakhic authorities impact their decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-secularism in Israel is expressed, among other ways, by the growing public acceptance of identities that are neither religious nor secular. This paper is predicated on research of individuals located on the boundaries of Orthodox Religious Zionism. It explores their attitudes on a range of issues and argues that they reflect their post-secularist identities. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with young men and women who chose to abandon the strictures of a Religious Zionist lifestyle as well as those who still remain within its bounds. Various late-modern and post-secular modes of thought and expression were identified in interviewees’ narratives. These included pluralism, relativism, egalitarianism, the personalization of relationships with God, and a disregard for theological arguments based upon scientific findings. It is argued that these attitudes are related to two late-modern social processes: (1) the rise of individual expressivism and (2) the belief in the liberal human-rights ethic. These tendencies cut across the social divide between interviewees who left Religious Zionism and those who chose to remain within the fold, traversing the previously dominant religious–secular social divide and thus serving as yet another indication for the blossoming of new post-secular spaces in Israeli Jewish society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Hungary was a multidenominational society without a clear ethnic majority that had one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. The Kingdom was a constituent part of the Habsburg Empire with significant levels of autonomy that emerged as a nationalizing state upon the Compromise of 1867. How did the public contest over the legal standing and societal role of the Jews develop in such a special environment? How were major debates on Jewish matters related to the redefinitions of the Hungarian nation? Was there a specific “Jewish question” with a dynamic of its own in the nineteenth century or were such debates embedded in broader discussions? To answer these questions, this paper will discuss the three most important Hungarian debates of the epoch, namely those of the 1840s, 1860s and 1890s. Drawing on a growing body of secondary literature particularly in Hungarian, it aims to offer an overall interpretation of the Hungarian Jewish move towards emancipation and therefore will fill a significant gap in the scholarly literature of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the 1930s and 1940s hundreds of children were diagnosed in Tel Aviv's Psycho-Hygiene Clinic for Children as suffering mainly from organic retardation or neurosis. Those diagnosed as retarded or “educationally impaired” were sent either to special education institutions or to vocational schools and, in severe cases, to closed institutions. The children diagnosed as neurotic were usually treated individually at the clinic or in private clinics by mental health specialists and remained with their families. In most cases those diagnosed as retarded were children of Mizrahi origin whilst the children diagnosed as suffering from neurosis were of Ashkenazi origin. This paper argues that the diagnosis of so many children as problematic, as well as the relationship between their diagnosis and their ethnic origin, embodies two basic trends in yishuv society, especially prominent during the British Mandate: the labelling of the Mizrahim in general, and Mizrahi children in particular, as culturally and mentally inferior; and a high degree of intervention on the part of mental health specialists. The involvement of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and specialists in fields such as mental hygiene and Psycho-Hygiene created a pathologization of social and economic problems, and by doing so obscured the harsh realities of immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the relationship between memory, trauma and ethics in the Israeli war film Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008). I argue that Waltz with Bashir highlights a traumatic rupture between history and memory, and points to the decline of national collective memory in Israel. In the film, the war is represented as the private memory of a distinct social group-soldiers who fought in the First Lebanon War-and is no longer a collective memory, a lived and practised tradition that conditions Israeli society. The film is constructed as a kind of lieu de memoire that houses repressed traumatic events that have been denied entry into the nation's historical narrative, and which the protagonists feel duty bound to remember. This detachment from the national collective memory draws the film into a timeless world of dreams, hallucinations and fantasies. The film does not aspire to reveal the true details of the war. Rather, it is concerned with memory and the very process of remembering, as well as with the ethical questions that they pose to both the film's protagonists and its viewers. These questions are reflected both in the film's narrative and in its unique aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the ways in which Mizrahim—Jewish immigrants who came to the State of Israel after 1948—influenced the local Jewish sacred geography. Besides taking part in rituals in the older and more established holy places such as King David's Tomb on Mount Zion, Mizrahim tended to adopt and develop holy places where only hints of ancient Jewish sanctity were to be found. These places were used before 1948 mainly by the local Muslim population and were adopted now by Jews. This reality prevailed mainly in the social and geographical periphery of Israel, in regions and places where immigrants were usually settled by the Israeli establishment during the 1950s and 1960s. Mizrahim, in need of accessible and informal holy sites near their new settlements, brought now to the development of such places as the Tomb of Raban Gamliel in Yavne, the Tomb of Judah in Yahud, and the Tomb of Benjamin near Kfar-Saba. The emergence of this sacred space, in a state that had just come into being and into which there had been mass immigration of Mizrahim, displacing or replacing the indigenous population of Arabs, is at the heart of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]