Rescuing the person from the symbol: "Peace now" and the ironies of modern myth

History and Memory

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 141-168

  Feige, Michael ^a  

^a BEN GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV   (Israel)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84863600976     PISSN: 0935560X     EISSN: 15271994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ham.1999.0001     Document Type: Article

References (76)

1. The title of the article was suggested by a phrase used by Yaron Ezrahi, Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel (New York, 1997), 114.
2. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, 1953);
3. Donald Phillip Verene, ed., Symbol, Myth and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945 (New Haven, 1979).
4. Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern Historical Consciousness (New York, 1991);
5. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, MA, 1983);
6. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London, 1983);
7. Matt K. Matsuda, The Memory of the Modern (New York, 1996).
8. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, MA, 1985);
9. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire", Representations, no. 26(Spring 1989):7-25;
10. cf. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York, 1980)
11. and On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, 1992);
12. Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, VT, 1993).
13. Henry Tudor, Political Myth (London, 1972).
14. On myth in totalitarian regimes, see Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New York, 1946);
15. Jay W. Baird, To Die for Germany (Bloomington, 1982);
16. Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1983);
17. George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York, 1975).
18. See Barry Schwartz, "The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory", Social Forces 61(1982):374-402;
19. idem, "Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington", American Sociological Review 56(1991):221-36;
20. idem, "Iconography and Collective Memory: Lincoln's Image in the American Mind", The Sociological Quarterly 32, no. 3(1991):301-319.
21. David Apter, "The New Mytho/logics and the Specter of Superfluous Man", Social Research 52, no. 2(1985):269-308;
22. Robert Young, White Mythology: Writing History and the West (London, 1990).
23. Sheldon Wolins, "Postmodern Politics and the Absence of Myth", Social Research 52, no. 2(1985):239.
24. See Lynn Spillman, Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia (Cambridge, MA, 1997).
25. On commemoration of problematic pasts, see Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory (New York, 1992);
26. Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, "The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past", American Journal of Sociology 97(1991):376-420;
27. Lori J. Ducharme and Gary Alan Fine, "The Construction of Nonpersonhood and Demonization: Commemorating the Traitorous Reputation of Benedict Arnold", Social Forces 73, no. 4(1995):1309-31;
28. idem, "Main Street on Main Street: Community Identity and the Reputation of Sinclair Lewis", The Sociological Quarterly 39, no. 1(1998):79-99;
29. Clarence Mondale, "Conserving a Problematic Past", in Mary Hafford, ed., Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage (Urbana, IL, 1994), 15-23.
30. See Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge, MA, 1992);
31. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning in Europe, Israel, and America (New Haven, 1993);
32. Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (New York, 1995).
33. Edward M. Bruner, "Abraham Lincoln as an Authentic Reproduction: A Critique of Post-Modernism." American Anthropologist 96, no. 2(1994):397-415;
34. Edward M. Bruner and P. Gorfain, "Dialogic Narration and the Paradoxes of Masada", in Bruner and Stuart Plattner, eds., Text, Play and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society (Washington, D. C., 1984), 56-79;
35. Tamar Katriel, "Performing the Past: Presentational Styles in Settlement Museum Interpretation", Israel Social Science Research 9, nos. 1 and 2(1994):1-26;
36. James L. Nolan and Ty F. Buchman, "Preserving the Postmodern, Restoring the Past: The Cases of Monticello and Montpelier", The Sociological Quarterly 39, no. 2(1998):253-69.
37. See Eric Gable, Richard Handler and Anne Lawson, "On the Uses of Relativism: Fact, Conjecture, and Black Histories at Colonial Williamsburg", American Ethologist 19, no. 4(1989):791-805.
38. Gary Alan Fine, "Reputational Entrepreneurs and the Memory of Incompetence: Melting Supporters, Partisan Warriors and Images of President Harding", American Journal of Sociology 101(1996):1159-93.
39. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember: Themes in Social Sciences (Cambridge, 1989).
40. Tudor, Political Myth.
41. On modernity and individualism, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1989).
42. Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, 1995);
43. Nahman Ben-Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Wisconsin, 1995).
44. Baruch Kimmerling, "Patterns of Militarism in Israel", European Journal of Sociology 2(1993):1-28.
45. Charles S. Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State (Berkeley, 1983).
46. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge, 1987)
47. and "The New Historiography: Israel Confronts Its Past", Tikkun 3, no. 6(1988):19-23, 99-102;
48. Israeli Historiography Revisited, special issue of History and Memory 7, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1995).
49. For criticism on the new historians, see Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians" (London, 1997).
50. On the sociocultural aspect of the Gush Emunim phenomenon, see Gideon Aran, "A Mystic-messianic Interpretation of Modern Israeli History: The Six Day War as a Key Event in the Development of the Original Religious Culture of Gush Emunim", Studies in Contemporary Judaism 4(1988):263-75;
51. idem, "Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Bloc of the Faithful in Israel", in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago, 1991), 265-344.
52. On Peace Now, see David Newman and Tamar Hermann, "A Comparative Study of Gush Emunim and Peace Now", Middle East Studies 28, no. 3(1992):509-30;
53. Mordehai Bar-On, Peace Now: A Profile of a Movement (Tel Aviv, 1985) (in Hebrew);
54. David Hall-Cathalla, The Peace Movement in Israel, 1967-1987 (London, 1990);
55. Tamar Hermann, Advantages and Disadvantages of "Pragmatic Pacifism": The Obstacle-Strewn Path of the Israeli Peace Movement, Working Paper no. 208/9 (Open University of Israel, 1989);
56. idem, "From Brit Shalom to Peace Now" (Ph. D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 1996) (in Hebrew);
57. Tzali Reshef, Peace Now (Jerusalem, 1996) (in Hebrew).
58. On Peace Now and the Israeli military ethos, see Michael Feige, "Peace Now and the Legitimation Crisis of 'Civil Militarism'", Israel Studies 3, no. 1(1998):85-111.
59. See Hermann, Advantages and Disadvantages of Pragmatic Pacifism.
60. For a dramatic description of the demonstration, see Shulamit Hareven, "Instead of an Introduction: A Testimony", in idem, Messiah or Knesset (Tel Aviv, 1987), 14 (in Hebrew).
61. On one example from Gush Emunim, see Tamar El-Or and Gideon Aran, "Giving Birth to a Settlement", Gender and Society 9, no. 1(1995):60-78.
62. Eliezer Witztum and Ruth Malkinson, "Bereavement and Commemoration: The Double Face of the National Myth", in Ruth Malkinson, Simon Shimshon Rubin and Eliezer Witztum, eds., Loss and Bereavement in Jewish Society in Israel (Jerusalem, 1993), 231-58 (in Hebrew);
63. Hanna Naveh, "On Loss and Bereavement in Israeli Existence", Alpayim 16(1998):85-120 (in Hebrew).
64. For ethnocracy, see Oren Yiftachel, "Israeli Society and Jewish-Palestinian Reconciliation: Ethnocracy and Its Territorial Contradictions", Middle East Journal 51(1997):1-16.
65. Dalia Rabikovitz, "God Will Speak for the Victim", Politika 3(1985):29 (in Hebrew).
66. Reshef, Peace Now, 115-16.
67. Ezrahi, Rubber Bullets, 111.
68. "On Kitsch, a Symposium", Salmagundi (1990): 85-86.
69. Ezrahi, Rubber Bullets, chap. 5.
70. Cf. my article "Let the Dead Go? A Comparison between the Treatment of Movement Martyrs in Gush Emunim and Peace Now", in David Ohana and Robert Wistrich, eds., Myth and Memory: Transfigurations of Israeli Consciousness (Jerusalem, 1996), 304-320 (in Hebrew).
71. Avraham Burg, "Emil Grunzweig: The Death of Israeli Innocence", in Nissim Mishal, ed., Those Were the Years (Tel Aviv, 1998), 243 (in Hebrew).
72. Aliya Gildin, ed., Truth, Open Argument and Democracy (Jerusalem, 1984) (in Hebrew).
73. Ezrahi, Rubber Bullets, 113.
74. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, selected and translated by Annette Lavers (New York, 1977).
75. Ezrahi, Rubber Bullets, 115.
76. Ha'aretz, 30 Oct. 1996.