Description
Book SynopsisEric Zakim follows the literary and intellectual career of the powerful Zionist slogan to build and be built from its conceptual origin in reaction to the Kishinev pogroms of 1903, when it first served as an expression of settlement aspiration, until the end of pre-state national expansion in Palestine in 1938. Draining the swamps and making the desert bloom, the Jewish settlers imagined themselves as performing miracles on the land. By these acts, they were also meant to reinvent the very notion of what it was to be a Jew in the modern world. As Jewish settlers reshaped nature in the Holy Land by turning it from one thing into another, they too were newly constructed. Zakim argues that in the period leading up to the establishment of the state of Israel, the action of working the land and building its cities in order to transform both into something essentially Jewish increasingly came to mark a turn inward toward the reclamation of a Jewish subject tied to the very soil of Palesti
Trade Review
"A ambitious, scholarly study of the relationship between the meaning of the slogan, 'Livnot u lhibanot ba' ('To build and be built by / in it'-words from a popular Zionist folksong), and the actual development of the land and its people during the first four decades of the past century." * Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter *
"To Build and Be Built challenges the methodological certainties that have guided popular and academic understandings of the development of Zionist involvement in the land of Israel." * Lifestyles Magazine *
Table of Contents
Introduction. To Build and Be Built
Chapter 1. Belated Romanticism
Chapter 2. The Poetics of Malaria
Chapter 3. The Hebrew Poet as Producer
Chapter 4. The Landscape of a Zionist Orient
Chapter 5. The Natural History of Tel Aviv
Conclusion. The Land Bites Back
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
