Three Jewish Journeys Through an Anthropologist's Lens

From Morocco to the Negev, Zion to the Big Apple, the Closet to the Bimah

von Moshe Shokeid

400 Seiten, Hardcover

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

THREE JEWISH JOURNEYS presents seventeen essays collected from this leading Israeli anthropologist's varied ethnographic work. It draws from, in particular, three published studies of physical and cultural dislocation. The first examined the immigration of Jewish craftsmen and peddlers from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco to a farming community in the Negev, highlightingthe challenge to their family structures and traditional charismatic religious leadership. The second observed Israeli immigrants in Queens, who, reluctant to admit they would never return, organized nostalgic get-togethers of "onenight-stand ethnicity," but failed to form the enduring social institutions earlier "permanent" immigrants had. The last study involved not ageographical journey but an internal one. Its field was a gay and lesbian synagogue in New York that for many of its members provided an opportunity to reconnect with religious and cultural traditions from which they werealienated. The Three Jewish Journeys were, no less, the ethnographer pursuing his craft.Moshe Shokeid is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Tel Aviv University,where he was department Chair. A graduate of Hebrew University, he received his Ph.D. from Manchester. Past President of the Israeli Anthropological Association, he has held visiting positions in New York, Stockholm, Berlin, Iowa, and at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton.His works include A Gay Synagogue in New York (1995); Children of Circumstances (1988); The Dual Heritage (1971); The Predicament of Homecoming (1974) and Distant Relations (1982), both co-authored with Shlomo Deshen; andthe Hebrew memoir An Israeli's Voyage (2002)."I chose to become a professional observer which is the expertise and privilege of anthropologists. When I came to choose my own territory of anthropologicalfieldwork, however, I was no longer excited by the idea of sailing to distant lands to discover an exotic society completely dissociated from my own life experiences. Instead, I employed my anthropological education to search for exotic tribes hiding in my own backyard."

• ISBN: 9781934843369
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 01.09.2009
• Größe: 240 x 161 mm
• Verlag: Academic Studies Press