Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-mp689 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T10:11:38.297Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Review Essay

Review products

LitalLevy. Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. 360 pages. Cloth US$39.95 ISBN 9780691162485.

Gil Z.Hochberg. Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone. Durham: Duke Press, 2015. 224 pages. Paper US$23.95 ISBN 978-0822358879.

YaronShemer. Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. 304 pages, illustrations. Cloth US$75.00 ISBN 978-0-472-11884-7.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2017

Michal Raizen*
Affiliation:
Ohio Wesleyan University

Extract

The field of Middle Eastern Studies has seen a recent spate of publications that offer a timely and nuanced look at the intersection of language, ideology, and visual representation in Israel-Palestine. Scholars of cultural studies, comparative literature, history, film studies, and the visual arts will appreciate the breadth of perspective offered by a combined reading of Lital Levy's Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg's Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, and Yaron Shemer's Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel. This cluster of studies, taken as a whole, offers a coherent critical intervention into the politics of a literary and visual field marked by silences, lacunas, blind spots, and elisions. Poetic Trespass sketches the contours of a Hebrew literary landscape inhabited by a tacit Arabic presence. With a purview that extends to literature, cinema, and the plastic arts, Visual Occupations probes the tension between systemic practices of concealment and strategic modes of lending visibility. Identity, Place, and Subversion, a powerfully articulated analysis of Mizrahi cinema, interrogates the notion that ethnic difference has become irrelevant in the context of a contemporary Israeli melting pot.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America, Inc. 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)