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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 

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