Jewish Topographies

Grounding a range of global case studies from past and present within a theoretical framework of the 'spatial turn', it explores innovative metholodological approaches that help to map Jewish topographies, thereby offering a fascinating new perspective on Jewish places in their diversity and multi-dimensionality.

How have Jews experienced their environments and how have they engaged with specific places? How do Jewish spaces emerge, how are they contested, performed and used? With these questions in mind, this anthology focuses on the production of Jewish space and lived Jewish spaces and sheds light on their diversity, inter-connectedness and multi-dimensionality. By exploring historical and contemporary case studies from around the world, the essays collected here shift the temporal focus generally applied to Jewish civilization to a spatially oriented perspective. The reader encounters sites such as the gardens cultivated in the Ghettos during World War II, the Israeli development town of Netivot, Thornhill, an Orthodox suburb of Toronto, or new virtual sites of Jewish (Second) Life on the Internet, and learns about the Jewish landkentenish movement in Interwar Poland, the Jewish connection to the sea and the culinary landscapes of Russian Jews in New York. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, with a strong foothold in cultural history and cultural anthropology, this anthology introduces new methodological and conceptual approaches to the study of the spatial aspects of Jewish civilization.

Autorentext

Julia Brauch is a political scientist and Anna Lipphardt and Alexandra Nocke are both cultural anthropologists. They were all members of the research group MAKOM at the University of Potsdam, Germany, which between 2001 and 2007 focused on the meaning of place and space within Jewish civilization.

Inhalt

Exploring Jewish Space; I: Construction Sites; 1: A Hybrid Place of Belonging; 2: "Eruv" Urbanism; 3: From State-Imposed Urban Planning to Israeli Diasporic Place; II: Jewish Quarters; 4: Ghetto Gardens; 5: The Mellah of Fez; 6: Religious Microspaces in a Suburban Environment; 7: Altering Alternatives; III: Cityscapes and Landscapes; 8: Poland; 9: A View of the Sea; 10: Desert and Settlement; 11: Jews and the Big City; IV: Exploring and Mapping Jewish Space; 12: Travel and Local History as a National Mission; 13: Taking Distance; 14: Tales of Diaspora in the New Fluid Atlas of Virtual Place; V: Enacted Spaces; 15: Foodscapes; 16: The Buena Vista Baghdad Club; 17: Mini Israel; Epilogue; 18: Virtual Jewish Topography