Desert in the promised land /

Desert in the promised land /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Zerubavel, Yael, author.
Imprint:	Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2019]
Description:	1 online resource
Language:	English
Series:	Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.
Subject:	Deserts -- Symbolic aspects -- Israel. Discourse analysis -- Israel. Semiotics -- Israel. Deserts -- Symbolic aspects. Discourse analysis. Semiotics. Negev (Israel) -- Symbolic representation. Israel. Israel -- Negev. Electronic books.
Format:	E-Resource Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/12019981

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9781503607606 1503607607 9781503606234
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index. Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on December 11, 2018).
Summary:	At once an ecological phenomenon and a cultural construction, the desert has varied associations within Zionist and Israeli culture. In the Judaic textual tradition, it evokes exile and punishment, yet is also a site for origin myths, the divine presence, and sanctity. Secular Zionism developed its own spin on the duality of the desert as the romantic site of Jews' biblical roots that inspired the Hebrew culture, and as the barren land outside the Jewish settlements in Palestine, featuring them as an oasis of order and technological progress within a symbolic desert. Yael Zerubavel tells the story of the desert from the early twentieth century to the present, shedding light on romantic-mythical associations, settlement and security concerns, environmental sympathies, and the commodifying tourist gaze. Drawing on literary narratives, educational texts, newspaper articles, tourist materials, films, popular songs, posters, photographs, and cartoons, Zerubavel reveals the complexities and contradictions that mark Israeli society's semiotics of space in relation to the Middle East, and the central role of the "besieged island" trope in Israeli culture and politics.
Other form:	Print version: Zerubavel, Yael. Desert in the promised land. Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2018 9781503606234

Table of Contents:

Desert as historical metaphor
The desert mystique
Desert as the counterplace
The Negev frontier
The Negev Bedouins
Unsettled landscapes
The desert and the tourist gaze
Epilogue : memory, space, and contested visions.