Israeli Culture and Emergency Routine

Vered Weiss is the Serling Israeli Visiting Scholar and Israel Institute Teaching Fellow at The Michael and Elaine Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel at Michigan State University.Avner Dinur is lecturer of Jewish studies at Sapir College.Irit Ronen is PhD candidate at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and a teaching fellow at the Department of Multidisciplinary Studies at Sapir Academic College.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Introduction: Israeli Culture and Emergency RoutineIrit Ronen, Avner Dinur, Vered WeissChapter 1. The State of Emergency and the Ethos: The Poetry of Aharon ShabtaiIrit RonenChapter 2. Monstrous Memory: Memory and Marginality in To the End of the Land by DavidGrossman and Jorge Luis Borges’ “Funes el Memorioso”Vered WeissChapter 3. Stress, Repression, and Humor in Israeli Comics: The Cases of Rutu Modan andGilad SeliktarIlaria StillerChapter 4. Rockets, Turtles, and the Political Abyss: Hebrew Literature from the Gaza EnvelopeOsnat LemkoChapter 5. Facing the Chaos: Contemporary Israeli Literature (Re)Acting to Uncertain TimesOmri Herzog and Nurith GertzChapter 6. “I’ve never seen the world be so cruel” Performances of Mizrahi masculinity under astate of emergency in Sderot: A sociological-gender analysis of the film Hula and NatanMoti Gigi and Haim (Hai) BittonChapter 7. The State of Israel Is Disintegrating. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Conclusion of theFilm On the Hilltop Youth, Religious Zionism, and Israeli LiteratureYael ShenkerChapter 8. A Stressful Identity: Jews, Other Nations, and Other ReligionsAvner DinurConclusion: Essays from Sapir, a College under AttackAvner Dinur, Irit Ronen, Vered WeissAbout the Contributors

The essays in this volume provide for the first time a glimpse into the cultural representations of and about the emergency routine that informs life in the Israeli Gaza Envelope. Nuanced, insightful, and politically aware, they provide a nuanced and illuminative perspective into the ongoing what civilian life looks like during a protracted ‘low-intensity’ war. This is a crucial reading not only for those who are interested in contemporary Israeli culture and society, but also to anyone who studies civilian life in war zones in general.