Narratives of collective belonging : American Jews and the history of Israel
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Article I explores the way a diverse sample of American Jewish parochial school students narrated the history of Israel. It analyzes 438 responses to the prompt: "In 2-3 paragraphs, tell the history of the State of Israel as you understand it." The students' responses suggested that many students are aware of the tensions between various historical accounts and adopt different strategies to negotiate between critical historical analysis and Jewish collective belonging. Although there were no differences in the content of the accounts by students' religious denomination or prior study of Israel's history, students adopted different approaches to negotiating critical analysis and collective belonging. Some students told stories of Jewish heritage without taking into account other possible perspectives. Some students engaged with challenges to their inherited stories but only to dispute them. Finally, some students managed to synthesize multiple narratives together while still using a Jewish perspective to frame their account. This last strategy suggests that students can be historically sophisticated without abandoning a commitment to their heritage. Article II examines changes to Jewish parochial students' narratives of the history of Israel after a two and a half week trip there. Seventeen students were interviewed about the history of Israel before and after a two and a half week class trip. Before the trip, most students' accounts lacked logical connections among the different events. Instead, students listed events in chronological order like a timeline. The observations on the trip revealed that the tour guide told a story of Jewish exile and return. After the trip, most students adopted the tour guide's narrative structure of Jewish exile and return. This finding suggests that short trips to Israel may be able to teach a coherent narrative, something formal history classrooms struggle to do. At the same time, it raises questions about the appropriate role of narrative frameworks in history education: to what extent is it possible to teach a narrative framework and still leave room for student inquiry? Article III traces the emergence of anti-Zionism in the American New Left before 1967. Most existing research sees contemporary anti-Zionism as a reaction to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 War. This article finds the roots of anti-Zionism in the racially charged rhetoric of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam in the early 1960s. It argues that particular individuals influenced by Malcolm X and even working in his Organization for Afro-American Unity carried his ideas into the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which published a harshly anti-Zionist newsletter in the summer of 1967 just after the end of the war in the Middle East. From SNCC, this racial interpretation of Zionism spread into the New Left.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Hassenfeld, Jonah |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Education. |
| Primary advisor | Wineburg, Samuel S |
| Thesis advisor | Wineburg, Samuel S |
| Thesis advisor | Kelman, Ari, 1968- |
| Thesis advisor | Zipperstein, Steven J, 1950- |
| Advisor | Kelman, Ari, 1968- |
| Advisor | Zipperstein, Steven J, 1950- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Jonah Hassenfeld. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Education. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Jonah Blum Hassenfeld
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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