- Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Ben Gurion university of the Negev
POB 653
Beersheba, Israel 84105 - +972-8-647-2083
- Jackie Feldman is a full professor in sociology and anthropology at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He has resear... moreJackie Feldman is a full professor in sociology and anthropology at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He has researched pilgrimage and tourism and the interface between them, Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land, pilgrimage to the Second Temple and Jewish-Israeli youth voyages to Poland. He holds the Avnon Chair in Holocaust Studies and heads the Rabb Center for Holocaust Studies, and has published on performance, socio-political positioning and the transmission of identity in Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum, Berlin. His book A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land: How Christian Pilgrims made me Israel was published by University of Indiana Press in 2016. His previous book, Between the Death Pits and the Flag: Youth Voyages to Holocaust Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity, was published by Berghahn Press in 2010. He is currently engaged in a DFG joint Israeli-German project on Holocaust memory in a digital age.edit
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Research Interests: Pilgrimage and Judaism
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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,... more
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 them. The practice of selfies marks a shift from witness to witnessee and from onsite to online presence. Yet it also builds on previous practices: photography, postcards and souvenirs, the affordances of the architecture of the memorial site, the bodily presence of the survivor-witness as mediator of the Holocaust, and the redemptive value assigned to the physical presence of the visitor as “witness of the witness.” We suggest that the combination of continuities with the past alongside the radical break with previous witnessing practices empowers selfie-takers, while arousing the indignation of gatekeepers of Holocaust memory.
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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... more
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. Nevertheless, some participants’ responses reaffirm popular suspicions and prejudices, which the ceremony seeks to overcome. Interreligious hospitality here is not so much an act of theological reconciliation, but a political act also directed toward other actors – like the Israeli right-wing and Israeli society, which grant the Orthodox a monopoly on Judaism. While the shared ritual practice offers a dialogical model that engages broader publics through doing, the analytic frame of hospitality sensitizes us to the importance of space and language in the power relationships of hosts and guests. It helps explain the challenges to the messag...
Research Interests: Sociology, Sociology of Religion, Jewish Studies, Ethnography, Performance Studies, and 12 moreIsrael Studies, Ethnographic Fieldwork (Anthropology), Judicial Reform, Hospitality, Ritual Theory, Interreligious Dialogue, Israel, Reform Judaism, Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Interreligious Relations, Anthropology of Religion, and Israel Palestine
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... more
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 Christian pilgrim and his pastor but often the Jewish-Israeli guide as well. In such groups, Christian pilgrims’ initial religious views may be confirmed or challenged through the guide’s presentation of Christian holy sites, the Bible, and his own life history. Guides may struggle with their attraction to and repulsion from Christianity and their own Jewish commitments in the course of shepherding pilgrims through the Land.
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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... more
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 as a legitimation of Israeli heritage, between commitments to missionary Evangelical Christianity and to Judaism, between Evangelical practice and those of other Christian groups at holy sites, and between faith-based certainties and scientific skepticism. These encounters are both limited and enabled by the frames of the pilgrimage: The environmental bubble of the guided tour, the Christian orientations and activities in the itinerary, and the power relations of hosts and guests. Yet, unplanned encounters with religious others in the charged Biblical landscape offer new opportunities for reflection on previously held truths and commitments...
Research Interests: Religion, Christianity, Sociology, Tourist Behavior, Pilgrimage, and 12 morePerformativity, Symbolic Interaction, Evangelicalism, Judaism, Interreligious Dialogue and Education, Interreligious Dialogue, Israel, Pilgrimage and travel to the Holy Land, Jerusalem, Tourism, Religions, and Holy Land Studies
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1 Cf. Timothy Mitchell: Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order, in: Ni-cholas B. Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and Culture, Ann Arbor: The Universi-ty of Michigan Press 1992, pp. 289-317 at p. 289. 2 Cf. Edward W. Said: Orientalism, London:... more
1 Cf. Timothy Mitchell: Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order, in: Ni-cholas B. Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and Culture, Ann Arbor: The Universi-ty of Michigan Press 1992, pp. 289-317 at p. 289. 2 Cf. Edward W. Said: Orientalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978, p. 1; ...
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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... more
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 events. We claim that guiding and festival events at JMB marginalise Holocaust memory and present an image of Jews of the past that promotes a multicultural vision of present-day Germany. In guiding performances, the identity of the guide as German/Jewish/Muslim is part of the guiding performance, even when not made explicit. By comparing tour performances for various publics, and the 'storytelling rights' granted by the group, we witness how visitors' scripts and expectations interact with the museum's mission that it serve as a place of encounter (Ort der Begegnung). As German-Jewish history at JMB serves primarily as a cos...
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For many Evangelical Christians, a trip to the Holy Land is an integral part of practicing their faith. Arriving in groups, most of these pilgrims are guided by Jewish Israeli tour guides. For more than three decades, Jackie Feldman—born... more
For many Evangelical Christians, a trip to the Holy Land is an integral part of practicing their faith. Arriving in groups, most of these pilgrims are guided by Jewish Israeli tour guides. For more than three decades, Jackie Feldman—born into an Orthodox Jewish family in New York, now an Israeli citizen, scholar, and licensed guide—has been leading tours, interpreting Biblical landscapes, and fielding questions about religion and current politics. In this book, he draws on pilgrimage and tourism studies, his own experiences, and interviews with other guides, Palestinian drivers and travel agents, and Christian pastors to examine the complex interactions through which guides and tourists "co-produce" the Bible Land. He uncovers the implicit politics of travel brochures and religious souvenirs. Feldman asks what it means when Jewish-Israeli guides get caught up in their own performances or participate in Christian rituals, and reflects on how his interactions with Christian tourists have changed his understanding of himself and his views of religion.
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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... more
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 pilgrimage? The articles demonstrate that distance from pilgrimage sites and ignorance of local knowledge is important in intensifying pilgrims’ experience and maintaining the power of traditional authorities. While some shrines readily adopt new technologies to diffuse their messages, activities and images, pilgrimages continue to rely on embodiment and sociality to solidify communities and commitments. The variety of engagements of pilgrimages with changing media and emerging historical realities testifies to the viability of the forms and practices of pilgrimage in transmitting other kinds of knowledge.
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Research Interests: Sociology of Religion, Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Pilgrimage, Pilgrimage, and 14 moreAnthropology of Christianity, Anthropology of Eastern Christianity, Anthropology of Europe, Affect/Emotion, New Age (Western Esotericism), Affect (Cultural Theory), Anthropology of ethics and morality, Tourism, Anthropology of Islam, Seduction, Seduction theory, Anthropology of Judaism, Anthropology of Religion, and New Age Religions
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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... more
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 Israeli independence fighters; recent monuments, paths and
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Updated through December 2021
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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... more
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 as a legitimation of Israeli heritage, between commitments to missionary Evangelical Christianity and to Judaism, between Evangelical practice and those of other Christian groups at holy sites, and between faith-based certainties and scientific skepticism. These encounters are both limited and enabled by the frames of the pilgrimage: The environmental bubble of the guided tour, the Christian orientations and activities in the itinerary, and the power relations of hosts and guests. Yet, unplanned encounters with religious others in the charged Biblical landscape offer new opportunities for reflection on previously held truths and commitments. I conclude by suggesting that Holy Land guided pilgrimages may broaden religious horizons by offering an interreligious model of faith experience based on encounters with the other.
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Trialogue on Peace in World Religions. Evnagelische Kirchentag, Dortmund
Updated to February 25, 2021.