Israel Studies Review

The relationship between President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and the Herut movement is at the core of this article. Tracking their relationship and dividing it into three periods, under the historiography of the Herut Movement, presents the development of their relationship and its contribution to Herut's legitimation. The article presents the legitimation processes of the Herut movement through a broader description of the concept of political legitimacy. By exploring the president's attitude toward Herut, the article presents how they gained political and public legitimacy. In this way, the study expands the literature both on Herut's legitimization processes and on the role of the president in Israel.

The Israeli Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism has grown considerably in recent years. Fifty congregations and initiatives now operate throughout the country, offering prayer services, holiday and life-cycle ceremonies, study houses, conversion courses, pre-army programs, and more. Despite its increased presence in Israeli life, the movement is still known among the general public mainly for its struggle to achieve equal status and gain official recognition. In fact, the very term ‘Reform Jew’ still carries a derogatory connotation in many sectors of society. This article describes the major turning points encountered by the Israeli Reform Movement in its quest for recognition, the arenas in which it operates and parties with which it negotiates, and the ways in which it differs from its counterpart in North America. While the article focuses on a single movement in the Israeli marketplace of religious identities, it seeks to shed light on religion–state relations and changes in the Jewish world more generally.

What strategies are used to legitimize and enhance the popularity of the Reform marriage ceremony among Israeli Jews? Using a mixed-method grounded-theory technique, this study stresses that the strategies used to legitimize and enhance the popularity of the Reform marriage ceremony among Israeli Jews take place in two parallel realms: the organizational and the individual. At the organizational level, the Israel Reform Movement invests resources into institutionalizing the Reform marriage ceremony in Israel, using the judicial and the political strata to accomplish this goal. At the same time, at the individual level, Reform rabbis operate as street-level policy entrepreneurs by enhancing the visibility of the Reform marriage ceremony among Israeli Jews by advertising themselves and conducting as many ceremonies as possible.

In this article, I present an analysis of Amos Oz's writings, from his early collection of stories, Where the Jackals Howl (1965) to his autofictional novel A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002). Throughout the tumultuous first five decades of Israel's Independence, Oz's oeuvre consistently expressed an implicit tale of darkness. Darkness is the key figure of the national abyss in Oz's literature. As a political category, Oz's interpretation of darkness bears the traces of postcolonial literature, where darkness is a root metaphor; as a poetic principle, darkness holds the unsaid within the literary text. Marking the unsaid, darkness turns to be a recall for depth hermeneutics, as it acknowledges “the hidden” as a core category of meaning in national literatures.

This article examines two documentary films by women filmmakers dealing with combat stress: Irit Gal's Harmed Forces (1999) and Nurit Kedar's On the Edge (2003). The first Israeli female directors to deal with combat stress reactions, their work is distinguished from that of male directors in its criticism of the establishment and society and a camera perspective that identifies and empathizes with combat stress victims, including a cinematic strategy for representing the trauma of war. The article offers close readings of the films’ narratives that reveal their radical criticism of hegemonic attitudes and examines their different ethical concepts, forms of trauma discourse, and modes of identification with combat-stressed soldiers. Reading these films from the historical perspective of women's documentary cinema reveals two different approaches to creating counter cinema.

Shay Rabineau. Walking the Land: A History of Israeli Hiking Trails (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023), 304 pp., $35 (paperback).

Shlomo Ben-Ami. Prophets Without Honor: The 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-State Solution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 400 pp., $31.99 (hardback).

Anat Stern. Combatants on Trial: Military Jurisdiction in Israel during the 1948 War [In Hebrew.] (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2021), 340 pp., NIS 80 (paperback).

Vincent Lemire. In the Shadow of the Wall: The Life and Death of Jerusalem's Maghrebi Quarter, 1187–1967 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023), 400 pp., $32 (paperback).

Rob Geist Pinfold. Understanding Territorial Withdrawal: Israeli Occupations and Exits. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 344 pp., $83 (hardback).

Rogachevsky, Neil, and Dov Zigler. Israel's Declaration of Independence: The History and Political Theory of the Nation's Founding Moment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 300 pp., $39.99 (paperback)

Taragin-Zeller, Lea. The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land (New York: New York University Press, 2023), 200 pp, $28 (paperback).

Segal, Jerome M. The Olive Branch from Palestine: The Palestinian Declaration of Independence and the Path Out of the Current Impasse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022), 316 pp., $29.95 (hardcover)