A Place In History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, And The Creation Of Jewish Urban Space

Book Summary

"While her love for Tel Aviv is palpable, Mann maintains a critical distance from her subject, which assures A Place in History" its own place as an authoritative guide to the complex textualities of Israel's largest urban area."--Tikkun" "A Place in History offers a fresh perspective on Tel Aviv, the first Hebrew city, by presenting an imaginative literary walk through symbolic spaces and historic layers. The city unfolds as a cultural landscape of memory and forgetting, a site of political conflict and change, an urban space negotiating global and local aesthetics, the private and the public, the new and the old." --Yael Zerubavel, Director, Center for the Study of Jewish Life, Rutgers University "A Place in History" is a cultural study of Tel Aviv, Israel's population center, established in 1909. It describes how a largely European Jewish immigrant society attempted to forge a home in the Mediterranean, and explores the role of memory and diaspora in the creation of a new national culture. Each chapter is devoted to a particular place in the city that has been central to its history, and includes literary, artistic, journalistic, and photographic material relating to that site. This is the first book-length study of Tel Aviv in English. It will appeal to readers interested in urban cultures, the contemporary Middle East, modern Jewish history, and Israeli literature. It also contributes to the ongoing public debate about memory, memorials and urban identity.

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