Seizing Jerusalem

Seizing Jerusalem
Author: Alona Nitzan-Shiftan
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 625
Release: 2017-05-30
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1452954577

After seizing Jerusalem’s eastern precincts from Jordan at the conclusion of the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel unilaterally unified the city and plunged into an ambitious building program, eager to transform the very meaning of one of the world’s most emotionally charged urban spaces. The goal was as simple as it was controversial: to both Judaize and modernize Jerusalem. Seizing Jerusalem chronicles how numerous disciplines, including architecture, landscape design, and urban planning, as well as everyone from municipal politicians to state bureaucrats, from Israeli-born architects to international luminaries such as Louis Kahn, Buckminster Fuller, and Bruno Zevi, competed to create Jerusalem’s new image. This decade-long competition happened with the Palestinian residents still living in the city, even as the new image was inspired by the city’s Arab legacy. The politics of space in the Holy City, still contested today, were shaped in this post-1967 decade not only by the legacy of the war and the politics of dispossession, but curiously also by emerging trends in postwar architectural culture. Drawing on previously unexamined archival documents and in-depth interviews with architects, planners, and politicians, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan analyzes the cultural politics of the Israeli state and, in particular, of Jerusalem’s influential mayor, Teddy Kollek, whose efforts to legitimate Israeli rule over Jerusalem provided architects a unique, real-world laboratory to explore the possibilities and limits of modernist design—as built form as well as political and social action. Seizing Jerusalem reveals architecture as an active agent in the formation of urban and national identity, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about Zionism, and the crisis within the discipline of architecture over postwar modernism, affected Jerusalem’s built environment in ways that continue to resonate today.

Seizing Jerusalem

Seizing Jerusalem
Author: Alona Nitzan-Shiftan
Publisher: Quadrant Book
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780816694280

Encounters : modern architecture and Israeli nationalism -- Profession : East Jerusalem and the emergence of the Sabra architects -- State : facts on the ground -- City : urban beautification -- Frontier : a holy testing ground for a discipline in crisis -- Project : the Western Wall plaza.

Jerusalem

Jerusalem
Author: Merav Mack
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2019-05-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300245211

A captivating journey through the hidden libraries of Jerusalem, where some of the world’s most enduring ideas were put into words In this enthralling book, Merav Mack and Benjamin Balint explore Jerusalem’s libraries to tell the story of this city as a place where some of the world’s most enduring ideas were put into words. The writers of Jerusalem, although renowned the world over, are not usually thought of as a distinct school; their stories as Jerusalemites have never before been woven into a single narrative. Nor have the stories of the custodians, past and present, who safeguard Jerusalem’s literary legacies. By showing how Jerusalem has been imagined by its writers and shelved by its librarians, Mack and Balint tell the untold history of how the peoples of the book have populated the city with texts. In their hands, Jerusalem itself—perched between East and West, antiquity and modernity, violence and piety—comes alive as a kind of labyrinthine library.

The City of Jerusalem

The City of Jerusalem
Author: Dr. Meir Margalit
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2020-02-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782846859

The author writes from the experience of thirty years working in the Jerusalem municipality, including 21 years as a public official and ten years as an elected councilor representing the left-wing Meretz party. This book is born from an urgent need to understand the mechanisms articulating the city in which I live, which I love and for which I suffer. I am from Jerusalem, I could not live in another city and the barbarities my government is perpetrating on the Palestinian parts of the city do not allow me to remain quiet. Through this book I engage with the prevailing model of power and repression and the neo-colonial system that expresses its perverse functioning. This book is centered on the political and economic mechanisms practiced by Israel in East Jerusalem over the last decade. These mechanisms reinforce the occupation and keep Jerusalems Palestinians subjugated through co-optation into the Israeli system. Analysis is centered on the changes wrought during the mayoralty of Nir Barkat (20082018), who came into politics from the business world and introduced management concepts to the workings of municipal government. While Barkat succeeded in creating the illusion of a new era in eastern Jerusalem, the result is heartbreaking displacement and vulnerability toward East Jerusalems residents, and the application of urban planning that impacts negatively on residents legal status. The City of Jerusalem: The Israeli Occupation and Municipal Subjugation of Palestinian Jerusalemites is a profound sociological and economic analysis of a city under a normalised occupation which has destroyed the very essence of what Jerusalem stands for: a reflection of diverse religious belief within a multicultural setting, where citizens rights are upheld and not discriminated against for political purpose.

Under Jerusalem

Under Jerusalem
Author: Andrew Lawler
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2023-09-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0593311760

A spellbinding history of the hidden world below the Holy City—a saga of biblical treasures, intrepid explorers, and political upheaval “A sweeping tale of archaeological exploits and their cultural and political consequences told with a historian’s penchant for detail and a journalist’s flair for narration.” —Washington Post In 1863, a French senator arrived in Jerusalem hoping to unearth relics dating to biblical times. Digging deep underground, he discovered an ancient grave that, he claimed, belonged to an Old Testament queen. News of his find ricocheted around the world, evoking awe and envy alike, and inspiring others to explore Jerusalem’s storied past. In the century and a half since the Frenchman broke ground, Jerusalem has drawn a global cast of fortune seekers and missionaries, archaeologists and zealots, all of them eager to extract the biblical past from beneath the city’s streets and shrines. Their efforts have had profound effects, not only on our understanding of Jerusalem’s history, but on its hotly disputed present. The quest to retrieve ancient Jewish heritage has sparked bloody riots and thwarted international peace agreements. It has served as a cudgel, a way to stake a claim to the most contested city on the planet. Today, the earth below Jerusalem remains a battleground in the struggle to control the city above. Under Jerusalem takes readers into the tombs, tunnels, and trenches of the Holy City. It brings to life the indelible characters who have investigated this subterranean landscape. With clarity and verve, acclaimed journalist Andrew Lawler reveals how their pursuit has not only defined the conflict over modern Jerusalem, but could provide a map for two peoples and three faiths to peacefully coexist.

American Presidents and Jerusalem

American Presidents and Jerusalem
Author: Ghada Hashem Talhami
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2017-04-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1498554296

Any casual observer of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict would immediately recognize that the holy city of Jerusalem is the core issue impeding a permanent peace settlement between the two antagonists. The religious symbolism of this city and its centrality to major religious faiths has never faded and has become increasingly vital to various strands of twentieth-century religious nationalisms. The political fate of Jerusalem was inevitably mired in international political struggles of the Cold War, particularly after the United States inherited Britain’s mantle as the ultimate arbiter of regional conflicts and strategic disputes. The asymmetrical balance of military power between Israel and Jordan made superpower intervention both inevitable and unpredictable. This study examines the policies of twentieth-century US presidents regarding the status of Jerusalem. It traces the evolution of the United States’ embroilment in the politics of Mandatory Palestine, successive wars, and regimes that vied for control over Jerusalem, and tracks the conflicting historical narratives presented by various states in the region. It also takes a detailed look at the role of the American Jewish lobby, which constantly pressured the United States to overlook Israel’s refusal to go back to the lines of June 5, 1967, or to stop creating facts on the ground in East Jerusalem. The role of the oil lobby in seeking the reversal of Israeli annexationist steps in Jerusalem is also analyzed. The failure of several American presidents to broker an Arab–Israeli peace agreement is seen here as the result of the latitude enjoyed by presidential advisers in determining the main contours of American foreign policy in this region and guarding access to the chief executive in times of crisis. Finally, the book is an illustration of the perils of downplaying the human rights abuses of junior client states in order to placate national lobby groups in the Untied States, leading to the entrenchment of the Israeli state not only over Jerusalem, but throughout the West Bank.

Like Dreamers

Like Dreamers
Author: Yossi Klein Halevi
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 580
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0062274821

Winner of the Everett Family Jewish Book of the Year Award (a National Jewish Book Award) and the RUSA Sophie Brody Medal. In Like Dreamers, acclaimed journalist Yossi Klein Halevi interweaves the stories of a group of 1967 paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem, tracing the history of Israel and the divergent ideologies shaping it from the Six-Day War to the present. Following the lives of seven young members from the 55th Paratroopers Reserve Brigade, the unit responsible for restoring Jewish sovereignty to Jerusalem, Halevi reveals how this band of brothers played pivotal roles in shaping Israel’s destiny long after their historic victory. While they worked together to reunite their country in 1967, these men harbored drastically different visions for Israel’s future. One emerges at the forefront of the religious settlement movement, while another is instrumental in the 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. One becomes a driving force in the growth of Israel’s capitalist economy, while another ardently defends the socialist kibbutzim. One is a leading peace activist, while another helps create an anti-Zionist terror underground in Damascus. Featuring an eight pages of black-and-white photos and maps, Like Dreamers is a nuanced, in-depth look at these diverse men and the conflicting beliefs that have helped to define modern Israel and the Middle East.

Social Housing in the Middle East

Social Housing in the Middle East
Author: Mohammad Gharipour
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2019-03-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0253039878

As oil-rich countries in the Middle East are increasingly associated with soaring skyscrapers and modern architecture, attention is being diverted away from the pervasive struggles of social housing in those same urban settings. Social Housing in the Middle East traces the history of social housing—both gleaming postmodern projects and bare-bones urban housing structures—in an effort to provide a wider understanding of marginalized spaces and their impact on identities, communities, and class. While architects may have envisioned utopian or futuristic experiments, these buildings were often constructed with the knowledge and skill sets of local workers, and the housing was in turn adapted to suit the modern needs of residents. This tension between local needs and national aspirations are linked to issues of global importance, including security, migration, and refugee resettlement. The essays collected here consider how culture, faith, and politics influenced the solutions offered by social housing; they provide an insightful look at how social housing has evolved since the 19th century and how it will need to adapt to suit the 21st.

Insurgent Aesthetics

Insurgent Aesthetics
Author: Ronak K. Kapadia
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2019-10-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478004630

In Insurgent Aesthetics Ronak K. Kapadia theorizes the world-making power of contemporary art responses to US militarism in the Greater Middle East. He traces how new forms of remote killing, torture, confinement, and surveillance have created a distinctive post-9/11 infrastructure of racialized state violence. Linking these new forms of violence to the history of American imperialism and conquest, Kapadia shows how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic multimedia artists force a reckoning with the US war on terror's violent destruction and its impacts on immigrant and refugee communities. Drawing on an eclectic range of visual, installation, and performance works, Kapadia reveals queer feminist decolonial critiques of the US security state that visualize subjugated histories of US militarism and make palpable what he terms “the sensorial life of empire.” In this way, these artists forge new aesthetic and social alliances that sustain critical opposition to the global war machine and create alternative ways of knowing and feeling beyond the forever war.

In the Land of the Patriarchs

In the Land of the Patriarchs
Author: Noam Shoked
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2023-09-19
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1477328548

"An account of the design of West Bank settlements from 1967, when housing settlements were still an abstract idea, to the present, when they have become hotly contested. It addresses the complicated relationship between politics and the built environment and questions assumptions about politics and the built environment. The author looks closely at five settlements-Hebron, Ofra, Nofim, Beitar Illit, and Pnei Kedem-to analyze the settlement movement, the country Israel has become since 1967, and, more broadly, "the production of space in sites of political conflict." For Shoked, the role of contingency is key: government policy shaped the design of settlements, but so too did other actors. As Shoked writes, "the analytic categories of expert and user, above and below, frequently dissolve in the unfolding process of design, construction, and inhabitation.""--