CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

Ideology and Its Discontents: Between Textuality and Zionism

Organisers: Louise Bethlehem and Neve Gordon

Rottenberg, Catherine (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) ENGENDERING ZIONISM: THE CASE OF EMMA LAZARUS
While many scholars have commented on the polemical aspects of Emma Lazarus' "Jewish" poetry, most have concentrated on her use of religious and racial imagery but have failed to acknowledge the centrality of gender tropes in her writing. In this paper, I argue that it is precisely through the invocation and manipulation of such tropes that Lazarus articulates her version of Jewishness. The Jewish identity that she constructs is linked, on the one hand, to her call for the re-nationalization of Palestine by Eastern European Jews, a call that was indeed radical for the time. But on the other hand, the same identity is saturated with reactionary elements, most striking of which is her re-imagining and refashioning of the Ostjuden. Thus, in her poems she strives to create a "new" Jewish masculinity by eulogizing the virtues of the "last Warrior Jew" and extolling the "Maccabean marshal fire." This is particularly interesting in the context of the 1880s and the emergence of the Zionist project. Emma Lazarus, a woman who precedes Zionism's "founding fathers" e.g., Herzl and Nordau refigures Jewish maleness in hyper-masculine terms, and yet, in doing so, she unwittingly exposes the problematic nature of all identity claims. Her poetry, I argue, discloses how "self"-fashioning is always a site of instability and contestation.

Gordon, Neve (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel) IDEOLOGY AND TRANSLATION: BETWEEN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND ZIONISM
This paper examines the translation of classic political philosophy into Hebrew, arguing that a variety of ideological positions can be disclosed simply by examining the processes of erasure put into effect during translation. Exploring the connection between translation and nation-building, I claim that segments from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, John Locke's Two Treaties of Government and Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan were excised in Hebrew translation in the service of a Zionist identity politics. Insofar as Zionism is a discursive formation, its production and maintenance involves the expulsion of components that may hinder the fabrication of a unified identity, given the potential for counter-narratives to disrupt the nation's totalizing of its own boundaries, and thus to disturb, in Homi Bhabha's words, "those ideological maneuvers through which 'imagined communities' are given essentialist identities." By way of conclusion, I argue that the altered texts are in effect a sign that one ideology overpowered another and led, as it were, to the corruption of the spirit underlying the original project of translating classics into Hebrew, a project that was initiated by Leon Roth for quite different ideological reasons.

Bar-Yosef, Eitan (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel) ZIONISM'S AFRICAN FANTASY: GUTMAN'S LOBENGULU
South Africa, Jacqueline Rose has recently noted (1996), often functions in Israeli literature "as the unlived life of Israel". Indeed, from as early as the Uganda scheme of 1903-envisioning a Jewish colony in Africa that would operate, according to Herzl, as "a miniature England in reverse"-to Ehud Barak's assertion that "Israel is a villa in the jungle", images of Africa have been central to Zionism's self-fashioning. Nahum Gutman's Lobengulu King of Zulu offers an early articulation of this imaginary: written during his visit to South Africa in 1934 (to paint a portrait of Smuts), and serialized in 1935-6 (against the backdrop of the Palestinian uprising), Gutman's adventure-story instantly became an Israeli children's bestseller. By examining Gutman's rewriting of the British/South-African imperial romance-with its fantasy of an ancient Semitic Africa-and exploring later texts in which he re-enacts his African adventures within Palestine itself, this paper will consider the ways in which Gutman's cheerful naïveté both sanctified and destabilized the colonial ambition which underlies the Zionist project. I will conclude by asking how this ambivalence could anticipate the role of "Africa" in post-Apartheid Zionist culture.

Bethlehem, Louise (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) DISPLACED NARRATIVES: ZIONISM MEETS AFRIKANER NATIONALISM
This paper examines the writings of Manfred Nathan, a significant Zionist and Jewish communal leader in the Union of South Africa, particularly with respect to Nathan's role as sympathetic chronicler of Afrikaner history. Nathan's articulations as philo-Afrikaner historian are, I claim, a function of socially constituted forms, narratives and relations that may or may not be commensurate with one another. The contradictions attendant on Nathan's complex identity as a Zionist and South African nationalist are a index of his "hybridity"-a notion Homi Bhabha uses to account for the "in-between" nature of colonial subject-posiitons (1994). It is the crisis or conflict of this hybridity, I suggest, that inflects the projective transference of Zionist tropes and narratives onto the core of Nathan's Afrikaner historiography in an effort to domesticate his own difference-his Anglicized German Jewishness. In conclusion, I seek to show how Nathan attempts to renegotiate Zionist identity for his South African Jewish constituency as a means of sanctioning, and of being sanctioned by, Afrikaner nationalism.