Jackie Feldman

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev | bgu · Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Can long-distance hiking present an alternative to the mechanisation, uncertainty and alienation of contemporary European life? Through interviews with hikers on the Via Alpina in the European Alps, we explore this question, applying Ning Wang's insights on tourism as exemplifying the ambivalence of modernity. Modern technologies increase communica...

In recent years, the "digital" is redefining Holocaust memory by facilitating the co-production of memory by a wide spectrum of new agents. While digital culture opens new horizons, it also poses new challenges for Holocaust memory, education, and commemoration. This introduction to the special section "Digital Holocaust Memory from the Margins" pr...

Selfies at Auschwitz have become increasingly popular, and have generated agitated public debate. While some see them as an engaged form of witnessing, others denounce them as a narcissistic desecration of the dead. We analyze the taking, composition, and circulation of several of the most popular selfies of Auschwitz and the online reactions to th...

This ethnography analyzes three Israeli Reform Jewish rituals as manifestations of interreligious hospitality. The Daniel Reform congregation invites Muslim residents of Jaffa to participate in rituals incorporating Arabic and Muslim clergy and prayers. The egalitarian and pluralistic Jewish symbols and narratives promote neighborly relationships....

In the heritage site of Luang Prabang, Laos, international and local stakeholders employ the practices and rhetoric of conservation to constitute and reaffirm their belonging to imagined national communities. By negotiating with each other the preservation of old houses and temple rites, French heritage experts reaffirm the role of France as a univ...

Drawing on auto-ethnographic descriptions from four decades of my own work as a Jewish guide for Christian Holy Land pilgrims, I examine how overlapping faiths are expressed in guide–group exchanges at Biblical sites on Evangelical pilgrimages. I outline several faith interactions: Between reading the Bible as an affirmation of Christian faith or a...

Two themes that surface in the articles in this collection are: Visual knowledge and the means of acquiring it—the ability of pilgrims to see and read signs while overlooking or avoiding other sources of knowledge that are visible or readily available; and the issue of authority: who propagates and gains from the teaching, images, and practices of...

This article, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Luang Prabang, Laos, since 2006, expands the analysis of the conflicts and divergent interpretations regarding non-Western UNESCO World Heritage Sites. We suggest that the Buddhist temples of Luang Prabang, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1995, may best be understoo...

This article examines the construction of authenticity through vernacular architecture at the World Heritage Site of Luang Prabang, Laos. Our findings suggest that the rhetoric of authenticity is part of the larger matrix of knowledge and power that enables UNESCO to impose its world-views on non-Western countries and to create facts on the ground...

Pilgrim itineraries often promote trips to the Holy Land so that pilgrims may see where Jesus walked, make the Bible more real, and strengthen their Christian faith. I suggest, however, that Christian pilgrimage may also be an interreligious and intercultural encounter. The environmental bubble of the guided group pilgrimage encloses not only the C...

This special issue devotes comparative and ethnographic attention to the topic of the tour guide as cultural mediator. Based on studies in a panoply of countries (UK, Israel, Peru, Cuba, Reunion, Germany) and sites (museums, pilgrimages, casual street-guiding, mountain treks, folkloric displays), we demonstrate how various settings, power relations...

Zygmunt Bauman wrote that whereas the modern problem was to construct an identity and keep it stable, the postmodern one was to avoid fixation and keep all options open. He characterises this shift from solid modernity to liquid postmodernity as the movement ‘from pilgrim to tourist’: the pilgrim follows a lifelong path through the desert of life....

The Jewish Museum Berlin (JMB) is a dynamic, performative space that negotiates between representing the Jew as an integral part of German history and as ultimate Other. While this tension has been documented through the political history of the museum (Lackmann 2000; Pieper 2006; Young 2000), we focus on the dynamics of guided tours and special ev...

The articles in this special section on pilgrimage and the Holy Lands provide a wide range of perspectives on the practice, representation, and production of sacred space as expressions of knowledge and power. The experience of space of the pilgrim and the politically committed tourist is characterized by distance, impermanence, desire, contestatio...

The movement of money in Christian pilgrimage is a profound mirror of cultural classifications. By examining tips, commissions, and souvenir purchases in Holy Land pilgrimages, I show how the transfer of monies activates a series of multiple, complex relationships between Jewish guides, Palestinian drivers, and Christian pilgrims. I identify the 'c...

Wie ist es um das Verhältnis zwischen modernem Massentourismus und den unterschiedlichen Spielarten von »Kulturerbe« bestellt? Wo Einheimische und Touristen aufeinandertreffen, verändern materielles wie immaterielles Kulturerbe - ja oft sogar Ethnizität und sozio-kulturelle Identität - ihre Ausdrucksformen und Bedeutungsinhalte. Vielfach entsteht K...

Dass der Orient eher ein Konstrukt des Westens als eine eigenständige geographische Einheit darstellt, ist seit den Debatten, die Edward Saids wirkmächtiges Buch »Orientalismus« ausgelöst hat, bekannt. Dieser interdisziplinäre Band untersucht die gegenseitigen Beeinflussungen und dialektischen, auch imaginativen Austauschbeziehungen zwischen »Orien...

By examining tour brochures, practices of landscape display, posters and tour guiding narrations, I seek to understand how Bethlehem and the "separation wall" between Jerusalem and Bethlehem are integrated into the experience of Western Christian pilgrims of a variety of theological orientations. I argue that current practices of display and narrat...

"Jackie Feldman's book presents a fascinating and robust ethnographic study of Israeli youth voyages to Poland. Utilizing a most impressive array of methods, including participant observation, group discussion, content analysis of student diaries, and questionnaires, Feldman proposes that youth voyages may be unpacked as state-orchestrated civil re...

Christian theme sites are the latest stage in a process of sanctification of space in which historically embodied Protestant ways of seeing inscribe Protestant understandings on the Holy Land to produce a textualized sacred landscape. After sketching the evolution of Protestant sacred spaces in the Holy Land, attention is focused on two recent Chri...

During biblical tours, Jewish Israeli guides and Protestant pastors become coproducers of a mutually satisfying performance that transforms the often-contested terrain of Israel–Palestine into Bible Land. Guides' emplaced performances of the Bible grant a significance to visitors' movement that constitutes the visitors as pilgrims. The professional...

Focusing on recent changes at a central Israeli site marking the Holocaust and the fallen, I demonstrate that memorial sites are palimpsests, with careers that reflect changing understandings of death and national sacrifice. In the early years of statehood, the site and the rituals performed there depicted Holocaust victims as morally inferior to I...

Israel Studies 7.2 (2002) 84-114 THE 2001 HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY SPEECH delivered by Israel's Minister of Education, Limor Livnat, is not so much a description of the current Israeli situation, as a prescription for Israeli Holocaust memory in general, and for the visits by Israeli youth to the death camps in Poland, in particular. The objective of...

Focusing on recent changes at a central Israeli site marking the Holocaust and the fallen, I demonstrate that memorial sites are palimpsests, with careers that reflect changing understandings of death and national sacrifice. In the early years of statehood, the site and the rituals performed there depicted Holocaust victims as morally inferior to I...

Title on added t.p.: The pull of the center and the experience of communitas in second temple pilgrimage. Thesis (M.A.)--ha-Universiṭah ha-ʻIvrit, 1988. Microfilm.