Dr. Yael Zerubavel will be Darkhei Noam's spring Shabbat Scholar-in-Residence. She will speak twice on Shabbat

1. During Tefilah before Musaf:

"Tourism and the Performance of Antiquity in Israeli Culture."

The Hebrew culture gave rise to a variety of mnemonic practices that highlighted the symbolic connection between the ancient Jewish past and the modern Zionist present. The talk will discuss different performative practices and rhetorical strategies used by Israeli Tourism to further introduce Antiquity into contemporary "Israeli Experience."

2. During the Community Lunch  (Note: the lunch will take place at West Side Institutional Synagogue, 120 West 76th Street, between Amsterdam & Columbus Ave):

"The 'Desert' as a Symbolic Landscape in Israeli Culture."

The Hebrew culture constructed dual meaning of the desert as a symbolic landscape that conveyed a highly ambivalent attitude and different understanding of its role during the prestate period. The talk will suggest the continuity and change in contemporary Israeli approach to the desert in the settlement, the environmental, and the tourist discourses. The talk is dawn from her forthcoming book "Desert in the Promised Land: Nationalism, Politics and Symbolic Landscapes" (Stanford University Press, 2018).

Dr. Zerubavel is the Founding Director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University and a Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers University. Professor Zerubavel is a scholar of memory studies with an expertise in modern Israeli society. She has taught courses on Israeli culture, Israeli literature, memory and related subjects.

The focus of Dr. Zerubavel's research, as well as of her award-winning book - Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (1995) -- and numerous articles, is the cultural construction of Israeli national myths and the politics of commemoration She utilizes an interdisciplinary approach in addressing the impact of nationalism, secularization, immigration and dislocation, the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the reshaping of Jewish memory in Israel and developments within Israeli culture.

Professor Zerubavel is currently exploring the impact of the Holocaust and the Middle Eastern conflict on attitudes towards death, sacrifice, and bereavement and the image of the Israeli war-widow in Israeli fiction and film. She is also working on another book that will examine contemporary representations in fiction, media articles, popular performances, tourist sites and other texts and sources, of antiquity and the changing role of the Bible in contemporary Israeli culture.

This Scholar-in-Residence Shabbat is sponsored by Mindy, Eric, Charlie and Maya Hecht in loving memory of Mindy's father, Dr. Charles H. Feldman, Yitzchak Tzvi ben Yaakov v'Leah, z"l.
 

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