Alek D. Epstein

LOOKING FOR PONTIUS PILATE'S FOOTPRINTS NEAR THE WESTERN WALL: RUSSIAN JEWISH TOURISTS IN JERUSALEM

This study examined trips to Jerusalem by Russian Jewish tourists who visited Israel during late 1998. The research examines the expectations prior to travel, their actual experiences, and how they related to prior expectations. A content analysis was undertaken of tourist memories and reflective diaries. This analysis was supplemented by personal interviews and by participant observations undertaken during the course of Russian-language guided tours of Jerusalem. The research set out to examine tourist expectations and the differences between expectations and reality. Russian Jewish tourists arrive in Israel having left a country in transition. In the present study it is proposed that what has been called the “master narrative” for Russia has been lost and that this combined with the changed status of religion may have led to an intensified search for roots. The self-identification of today’s post-Soviet Jewish intelligentsia is made up of a unique combination of Jewish legacy and the heritage of the Grand Russian Culture, which has been created by Jewish writers and artists as well, although its main narrative is a Christian one. They regard Jewish writers and artists as having made a significant contribution to the development of Russian identity. In the present research it is suggested that any tour by a member of the Post-Soviet Jewish intelligentsia to Jerusalem may be viewed as a “double pilgrimage.” The first component is as a pilgrimage to King David’s capital, the capital of the original and ancient Jewish state. In this context the Western Wall may be viewed as the most sacred place in Jerusalem. The second component is as a pilgrimage to the roots of Christian civilization. In this context the Via Dolorosa, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the Holy Sepulchre may be viewed as key sacred sites in Jerusalem. In practice, however, the landscapes of the Western Wall and the Garden of Gethsemane differ markedly from the expectations that tourists have and incongruity is evident within the dual role as the center of the Judeo-Christian civilization. In contrast to tourists’ expectations of Israel as a destination, Jewish history is in fact communicated most cogently at Yad VaShem, established in 1953 as a place to commemorate Jewish Holocaust victims. It is here that Russian Jewish tourists appear to gain an understanding of their roots.

Languages of Science in the Era of Nation-state Formation: The Israeli Universities and Their (non)Participation in the Revival of Hebrew

This paper presents sociological analysis of the linguistic and cultural identity of two of Israels most influential and high-ranked universities during their formative years, that were also the de facto formative years of the Israeli state-in-the-making (1924–1948). We argue that the influence of external universal factors on a nation-state was sometimes crucial long before the period characterised by social scientists as an era of globalisation. Influenced by European nationalism, the leaders of the Zionist movement emphasised the importance of the restoration of Hebrew as a national language. In various European national movements the universities played a central role in the revival or creation of a national culture: the language, the national epic, the folklore were all cultivated and nurtured by the universities. This was not the case in the Jewish renaissance: the cultural revolution took place outside academia. The most cardinal phenomenon in this context – the revival of the Hebrew language – had almost no connection whatsoever with academic bodies. The phenomenon discussed in this essay should not be underestimated by historians and sociologists, especially provided the fact that Israel is traditionally perceived as one of the most successful and impressive instances of nation building in the 20th century.

State-mediated “hierarchy of diversities” and the freedom of individual self-identification: Towards a dynamic liberal model of muticulturalism

Abstract The contemporary choice is between society structured as a set of ethnically determined communities and the liberal society, which acknowledges the uniqueness of each individual as well as his/her personal way of self-identification. There are two points which are extremely important in the discussion: first, no culture is ever homogeneous, and co-existence of different streams is an inevitable feature of social reality; second, culture contributes to action not by supplying the ultimate values toward which the action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire of habits, skills and styles, from which people construct ‘strategies of action’. According to the liberal view, individuals, even if they belong to one ethnic group, seek to make their own choices, to form their own beliefs and judgments, while individual self-identification can be predetermined not only by ones belonging to the ethnic group, but also by ones gender, political views, etc. The idea of multiracial democracy contradicts the f...

Languages of Higher Education in Contemporary Israel

In Israel as elsewhere, English has become the de facto second language of academic life 1

Judging the Trial: Hannah Arendt as a Moral Philosopher of Nation-State Building

Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt is a thought-provoking film about Arendt’s controversial 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. The film captures Arendt at a crucial moment in her life and career, along with several other prominent intellectuals, Martin Heidegger, Mary McCarthy, and editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn. Using footage from the actual Eichmann trial (1961) and weaving a narrative that spans three countries (Germany, Israel, and the United States), von Trotta beautifully turns Arendt’s often invisible passion for thought into immersive, dramatic cinema. Hannah Arendt’s closing remarks to her students— she has refused the board’s request to resign —qualifies as one of the great classroom scenes in cinema and a thrilling lesson in courage. “‘We respectfully advise you to relinquish your teaching obligations’,” the board member suggested, but Hannah Arendt replied: “‘Under no circumstances will I give up my classes, ... and because of the extraordinary support of the students I have decided to... speak publicly about the hysterical reaction to my report [on the Eichmann trial]’.” The film centers on Arendt’s journalistic coverage of the Eichmann trial and the polemics it cause, and does not attempt to encompass her life and intellectual legacy, though some see Arendt as perhaps the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century. The fundamental tension that marked all her work between universalism and her Jewish identity seemed to have been resolved by her report on Eichmann’s trial. Attending this trial was, in her own words, a “late cure.” While Arendt’s report on the trial has been widely scrutinized in books and articles, this film not only offers a new look at the event and the debate but also significantly enlarges the audience. Arendt was born in 1906 to an assimilated German Jewish family. In September 1929, she married Gunther Stern, whose pen-name was Gunther Anders (they divorced in 1937; in 1940 she married the German poet and leftist thinker Heinrich Blucher, whose first wife was the Jewish-Austrian writer Elisabeth Freundlich). That year, she completed her dissertation on the idea of love in the thought of St. Augustine and earned her doctorate. However, the rise of anti-Semitism distracted her from metaphysics and turned her attention to the historical dilemma of German Jews. By writing a biography of Rahel Varnhagen (who lived in Berlin in the early nineteenth century and hosted a famous literary salon), Arendt sought to understand how her subject’s conversion to Christianity and repudiation of Judaism could illuminate the conflict between minority status and German nationalism. Arendt was always interested in secular Jewish matters and hardly at all in Judaism as such. The biography was not published until 1958, by which time Arendt’s concern was no longer directed at the question whether the Jews were fit to enter the salons, but whether they were fit to inhabit the earth.

ULRICH AMMON (ed.), The dominance of English as a language of science: Effects on other languages and language communities . Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001. Pp. xiii + 478. Hb. DM 256.00.

This statement is an opening point for the discussion on the effects of the dominance of English as a language of science on other languages and speech communities. The global search for a common auxiliary language that allows unprecedented possibilities for international cooperation, and the resulting prevalence and dominance of English in science, vary in kind and degree, as well as in effects, across language communities and countries. The volume under review is an outstanding one with respect to both thematic diversity and depth of analysis in most of its essays. Since Fishman et al. 1977 edited the first collection of essays on the spread of English, numerous valuable books on the status of English as a global language have been published (Flaitz 1988, Doyle 1989, Kachru 1992, Pennycook 1994, Hartmann 1996, Fishman et al. 1996, Crystal 1997, Ryan & Zuber-Skerritt 1999), but there is no doubt that Ulrich Ammon has edited an extremely innovative and insightful volume.