Call for Papers
Emblems of Diasporic (Re)turns:
One of the central achievements of the Ashkenazi hegemony in Israel/Palestine has been the homogenization of the diaspora in Hebrew culture. The diaspora was purged from its historical context and functioned as a universal threshold that negated the diverse realities of diaspora Jewish cultures. But the cultural hybrids created during the last century undermined the binary rhetoric that differentiated between “here” and “there”.
A Bessarabian Hasidic niggun, for example, could easily become a canonical Hebrew lullaby despite the rhetoric of the negation of the diaspora; and post-biblical texts that served no function under the purview of Zionist Bible-centrism could undermine national constructs while rendering greater visibility to the histories excluded by the Zionist management of Jewish history. In recent decades, this attention has served as a catalyst for new dialectical returns to Arab Jewish cultures, to contemporary poetry that draws on medieval and early modern Hebrew poetry, and to music that integrates non-Western oral Jewish musical traditions yet eschews exoticization so as to avoid modes of otherness.
For a symposium on “Emblems of Diasporic (Re)turns”in its 2019 issue, Hebrew Studies seeks articles that discuss the perceptions of the diaspora, diasporic importations, and dialectical return to the diaspora, examined from historical, historiographical, cultural, and theoretical perspectives on Hebrew culture from the 1920s to the present.
Articles should be 10,000 words or less, including footnotes and headings but excluding the abstract, and they must not have been published elsewhere.
Please send the manuscript as a Word file as an attachment by February 1, 2019 to <hebrewstudiesjournal@gmail.com>.
The name of the file should consist of the article’s abbreviated title. Together with the article, the author must include a file containing the author’s name, the title of the article, and the author’s contact information, including full postal address and e-mail address. The name of this file should be the author’s name. Do not include the author’s name in the main file; also, the author should exclude or mask any information in the article that may be used to identify the author.
Any inquiries should be addressed to Pamela Barmash, Editor, Hebrew Studies <pbarmash@wustl.edu> or to Assaf Shelleg, symposium guest editor <shelleg.assaf@mail.huji.ac.il >.
For more information about submissions to Hebrew Studies, see <https://www.naphhebrew.org/publication/hebrew-studies>.
Pamela Barmash, Washington University in St. Louis
Assaf Shelleg, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem