Abstract
Both the elevated Western values of liberalism and humanism, and the perception that “there is that which is human and then there is the ‘other.’” were adopted by Zionism and dominate Israeli schoolbooks to this day. The “human” is the powerful “Western”, and the “other” is the weak, often defined as “oriental”. The paper addresses the representation of three groups that constitute the “others” vis-à-vis whom “Israeliness” is constituted: East European feeble Jews who were exterminated during the Holocaust, vis-à-vis whom the Israeli “sabra” muscle-man was constituted. Their life world is hardly discussed but their terrible death is foregrounded in a traumatizing manner, reminding the young readers of the fate of stateless Jews, and prompting them not to become these Jews again although, as schoolbooks make very clear, the threat of a new Holocaust is hovering above us constantly. Therefore, Israelis must be armed, fearless, ferocious, and control, distance, and eliminate their potential exterminators, the Palestinians who replaced the European Nazis in Israeli discourse and who are Nazified in schoolbooks. The third group is the non-European (Arab and Ethiopian) Jews, brought to Israel to sustain a Jewish majority. They threaten the “western” character of the state and are marked as primitive, backward, and in constant need of acculturation if they are to fit into Israeli “Western” society, which seeks to distinguish itself sharply from the Orient. In this study, I show that the inter-connectedness of the multimodal representations of all three groups and discuss their pedagogic implications.
Presenters
Nurit Elhanan-PeledLecturer, Hebrew Language, Communication, David Yellin Academic College, Israel
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Multimodal-Analysis,Schoolbooks,Othering,Holocaust,Palestinians,Arab-Jews,Ethiopian-Jews
