Maoz Azaryahu

University of Haifa | haifa · Department of Geography and Environmental Studies

Names weave the texture of our daily lives in ways that are self-evident. However, behind their taken-for-granted threads, they conceal a considerable meaning potential that may turn them into malleable vehicles of human goals and agendas. The novelty of this volume lies in the special focus it places on the intersections of naming, identity and to...

Place names, which help identify and distinguish places from one another, weld together language and territory. With its overwhelmingly linguistic orientation, the traditional approach to the study of place names has been fixated on older names, focusing almost exclusively on taxonomies and etymology. In contradistinction, underlying the critical a...

On Friday, 23 January 1931, the prominent Muslim Indian leader Muhammad Ali Jouhar, who died in London on 4 January, was interred in the perimeter of the Jerusalem Haram al-Sharif compound. The article offers a detailed historical analysis of the geopolitics underlying and surrounding the interment of Muhammad Ali in Jerusalem. The underlying premi...

In multilingual societies, not only the names in urban toponymic inscriptions display identity politics and reproduce nationalist discourses but also the languages used. This is clearly the case with multilingual street signs, where specific preferences underlie the choice and placement of languages and scripts, signifying the processes and relatio...

Much of the recent academic literature on the 1948 war portray it a one-sided—and thus simplistic—ethnic cleansing of the Arab population of Palestine. Referred to as the Naqba paradigm, it features the Jews/Zionists as villainous perpetrators and the Palestinian Arabs as feeble victims. Accordingly, the story of “the 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Pales...

The critical turn in the study of toponymy has drawn attention to the politics of place-naming practices and to how place names are embedded into systems of meaning and partake in social and ideological discourses. A measure of historical revision, the commemorative renaming of streets in the context of regime change is a common strategy employed t...

Embedded into the language of the landscape and integrated into the routines of everyday life, toponymic commemorations belong to the political geography of public memory. The impact of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination on Israeli society and culture was made apparent in a space-time matrix of public commemorations, which introduced remembrance of the...

Tel-Aviv, the First Century brings together a broad range of disciplinary approaches and cutting-edge research to trace the development and paradoxes of Tel-Aviv as an urban center and a national symbol. Through the lenses of history, literature, urban planning, gender studies, architecture, art, and other fields, these essays reveal the place of T...

:Drawing on the academic literature on public art conflicts and public memory controversies, the article examines the controversy over the design for Tel-Aviv's Monument to the Holocaust and National Revival, and its failure to perform its commemorative function. It argues that underlying the controversial character of the design and the failure of...

The study of place naming, or toponymy, has recently undergone a critical reformulation as scholars have moved beyond the traditional focus on etymology and taxonomy by examining the politics of place-naming practices. In this article, we provide a selective genealogy of the ‘critical turn’ in place-name studies and consider three complementary app...

Sense of place refers to the emotive bonds and attachments people develop or experience in particular locations and environments, at scales ranging from the home to the nation. Sense of place is also used to describe the distinctiveness or unique character of particular localities and regions. Sense of place can refer to positive bonds of comfort,...

The primary function of street names is to provide spatial orientation. This utilitarian function and their seeming ordinariness tend to conceal that street names belong to structures of authority and legitimacy. Naming streets is a feature of modern political culture. Spatially configured and historically constructed, a set of street names constit...

The article explores three successive anniversary celebrations of Tel-Aviv—1929, 1934, and 1959—as an aspect of the cultural and political history of the city. The three anniversaries examined in this paper were celebrated in the "First Hebrew City" phase of the cultural history of Tel-Aviv and, accordingly, their major theme was Tel-Aviv as a...

Anniversaries are powerful reminders of the human need for signposts to mark the continuous flow of time: they are perceived as extraordinary points in time that occasion, even compel, a celebration. Importantly they offer an opportunity to evaluate the past from the privileged perspective of the present. Refracted through the prism of the always b...

This paper examines how narratives of history are organized spatially at historical sites and memorial spaces, especially in urban settings and in places invested with a sense of collective memory. Much recent research has focused on landscape, memory, and place and how relationships of political and social power influence the representation of his...

This article explores the integration of the “Hebrew Sea” into the Zionist geography of national revival in the pre‐state period of Zionist history. The main argument is that the formation of the “Hebrew Sea” in pre‐state Israel was at the convergence of popular needs, commercial interests, geopolitical concerns and strategic considerations. Either...

The aspiration to make Tel Aviv a great metropolis of world-renown and the awareness of its provincialism have figured prominently in the city's public discourse and cultural history. The paper explores the cultural positioning of Tel Aviv as a city of distinction and fame in different scales of center-periphery dualisms and through successive phas...

This article examines how different visions of Tel Aviv as a seaside city in the 1930s were articulated in terms of urban planning and local politics. It expands on the beach as a site of leisure, pleasure, health and recuperation. It further elaborates on the demand to ‘improve the seashore’ in terms of architecture and urban development. At the c...

This article focuses on contemporary research in geography on issues of public memory and commemoration - the ways in which discourse of the past is constructed socially and expressed materially in landscape, public memorials, and heritage sites. Interest in these sites has grown rapidly because they both reflect-and expose for study - social tensi...

Located on the southernmost tip of Israel, at the meeting point of the Negev desert and the Red Sea, Eilat was occupied in March 1949 in the last military operation of Israel's War of Independence. Notwithstanding official notions of Eilat as a strategic asset and efforts to sustain Israeli presence there in the form of a permanent settlement, in I...

Symbolic places that celebrate history and invest locations with mythical meaning provide a sense of identity in place and time; they fuse history and geography in terms of myth and memory. The retrieval and evocation of ancient history in terms of symbolic places seems to be especially significant in periods of national revival, when the invention...

The naming of streets is part of the ongoing process of mapping the boundaries of the nation. This article examines three sets of Arab-Palestinian street names – pre-1948 Haifa and Jerusalem and post-1948 Umm el Fahm – as locally constructed ‘texts of identity’ in the historical and political context of their official creation. The investigation ai...

This article examines the reconfiguration of memory at the former Buchenwald concentration camp following the reunification of Germany. Buchenwald’s complex history and its function as a national memorial of communist East Germany made the reorientation process a highly controversial issue. At the centre of the controversy was the distinction betwe...

Scores of memorial monuments were erected throughout Israel to commemorate the valorous self-sacrifice of the fallen in Israel's War of Independence (1947—1948). Among the many monuments there were also relics of these military engagements, that remained behind on a specific battleground and were left there to serve as a historical commemoration of...

This paper examines the figuring of water towers in Zionist mythology by focusing on three symbolic functions: the iconographic, the commemorative and the nostalgic. The iconographic function pertains to the iconic employment of water towers in pictorial depictions of the Zionist settlement landscapes. The commemorative function refers to the trans...

This paper examines the figuring of water towers in Zionist mythology by focusing on three symbolic functions: the iconographic, the commemorative and the nostalgic. The icono-graphic function pertains to the iconic employment of water towers in pictorial depictions of the Zionist settlement landscapes. The commemorative function refers to the tran...

The formation of the Hebrew map of Israel following the foundation of the State of Israel was an institutionalized measure of cultural engineering and a procedure of Zionist nation-building aimed at restoring the Hebrew toponomy of the land. The Hebraicization of the landscape was the geographical aspect of Hebrew revival, which predominated Zionis...

Israel Studies 5.1 (2000) 41-64 Opening a McDonald's in the immediate vicinity of a national shrine not only modified the character of the place, traditionally associated with national memory, bereavement, and national history. It could also serve as a symbolic statement. As the above comment demonstrates, the juxtaposition of a McDonald's and a na...

This paper investigates the conflict that arose as the result of opening a McDonald's restaurant adjacent to a national shrine in Israel. This conflict transformed Golani Junction, previously associated with the meanings assigned to the Golani memorial, into a contested place and a controversial issue. The paper outlines the conflict and the attemp...

This article suggests that Israel, just celebrating its jubilee, represents the success of the Zionist revolution: casting Jewish national identity in the mold of Hebrew culture. The article discusses some of the main features of the cultural construction of Hebrew identity as a nation-building measure. It also elaborates on the emergence of a 'new...

This article suggests that Israel, just celebrating its jubilee, represents the success of the Zionist revolution: casting Jewish national identity in the mold of Hebrew culture. The article discusses some of the main features of the cultural construction of Hebrew identity as a national discusses some of the main features of the cultural construct...

Commemorative street names conflate the political discourse of history and the political geography of a modern city. Renaming streets features prominently in revolutionary changes of political regime. As a ritual of revolution, the renaming of the past is also an effective demonstration of the reshaping of political power structures. This article e...

Spontaneously constructed memorials figure in the geography of contemporary popular culture as an authentic articulation of public sentiments. This article examines the spontaneous ritual construction of Tel Aviv city square as a memorial space in the wake of the assassination there of Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on 4 November 1995. After...

Street names are ostensibly visible, quintessentially mundane, and seemingly obvious. This might be the reason why social scientists have hardly addressed the issue of street names in their studies of the structures of authority and the legitimation of power. In this paper the author explores the semiotic and political operation of commemorative st...

Israel Studies 1.2 (1996) 46-74 Permeated with the transcendent, the cemetery at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem is a place where the encounter between the living and the dead is socially organized and culturally regulated within the framework of national tradition. As hallowed premises, the cemetery lies outside of the realm of the mundane, yet it is fir...

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Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History and Memory.