Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadowof the Intifada by Adia Mendelson-Maoz presents a new perspective on themultifaceted relations between ideologies, space, and ethics manifested incontemporary Hebrew literature dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflictand the occupation. In this volume, Mendelson-Maoz analyzes Israeli prose written between 1987 and 2007, relating mainly to the first and second in tifadas, written by well-known authors such as Yehoshua, Grossman, Matalon, Castel-Bloom, Govrin, Kravitz, and Levy. Mendelson-Maoz raises criticalquestions regarding militarism, humanism, the nature of the State of Israel asa democracy, national identity and its borders, soldiers as moral individuals,the nature of Zionist education, the acknowledgment of the Other, and the sovereignty of the subject. She discusses these issues within two frameworks. The first draws on theories of ethics in the humanist tradition and its critical extensions, especially by Levinas. The second applies theories of space, and inparticular deterritorialization as put forward by Deleuze and Guattari andtheir successors. Overall this volume provides an innovative theoretical analysis of the collage of voices and artistic directions in contemporary Israeli prose written in times of political and cultural debate on the occupation and its intifadas.
Adia Mendelson-Maoz is an associate professor of Israeli literature and culture, and the chair of the Department of Literature, Language and the Arts at the Open University of Israel. She specializes in the multifaceted relationships between literature, ethics, politics, and culture, mainly in the context of Hebrew literature and Israeli culture. She is the author of two books, Literature as a Moral Laboratory: Reading Selected 20th-Century Hebrew Prose, published in Hebrew in 2009 by Bar Ilan University Press, and Multiculturalism in Israel: Literary Perspectives published in 2014 by Purdue University Press. She has authored numerous articles in books and journals, including Social Jewish Studies; PHILOSOPHIA; Shofar; Social Identities; the Journal of Literary Theory; Israel Studies Review; the Journal of Narrative Theory; and Women Studies.
In an age of fake news and post-truth, this is an important book about the value of literature and the moral lessons it can teach us. Mendelson-Maoz looks at Israeli literature in the crucible of the Intifadas and examines the ways in which Israeli writers deal with some of the difficult challenges the conflict with the Palestinians has posed for Israeli society in recent decades.
