Arab and Jewish Spaces in Modern Hebrew Literature Curriculum of Jewish Schools (Hebrew)

• In Event: Spaces, Places, and Memory in Israeli Fiction

Abstract

Apart for very few studies, most of the research on Arab society in Hebrew literature deal with the figure of the Arab and with social questions. One of the innovations of the proposed lecture is to shift the discussion to the literary representation of Arab and Jewish spaces in literary works included in textbooks for Jewish elementary schools in Israel. These works are included in two curricula, published in 1978 and 2003 respectively. The first focus of this lecture is to characterize the physical place as described in prose and poetry. Its second focus is to examine the cultural, ideological and symbolic shaping of the place, which constructs the country’s identity and image. The content analysis applied in the proposed study relies on approaches to the study of formal and implicit curricula, on qualitative-interpretive literary analysis, and on critical discourse analysis. It is also informed by Marxist and postcolonial approaches that view space as the outcome of cultural constructions serving the prevailing power relations. The findings show no difference in the representation of Arab space between the 1978 and the 2003 curricula. Both exclude it and turn it into “no place”, while glorifying the Jewish space and strengthening the relationships between it and Jewish-Israeli figures by naturalizing the latter’s ownership of the land. Hebrew literature, as represented in both curricula, structures the Arab space as frozen in time and as uninhabited or rural, as constructed in the pre-statehood Zionist ethos and the early settlement discourse. The Hebrew texts offered to the students construct the Arab space as an imaginary category, where as the Jewish-Israeli space is structured in terms of symbolic-ancient and concrete-contemporary categories. These mental constructions of the country’s space explain the representation of Arab space in Jewish school textbooks as excluded from the Zionist ethos.

Author

• Amer Jamel Dahamshe, Arab Academic College - Haifa and University of Haifa