Jewish Studies Heritage Fund Annual Author Talk - Sidra Ezrahi
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Figuring Jerusalem explores how Hebrew writers have imagined Jerusalem, both from the distance of exile and from within its sacred walls. For two thousand years, Hebrew writers used their exile from the Holy Land as a license for invention. The question at the heart of Figuring Jerusalem is this: how did such writers bring their imagination “home” in the 20th century? Ezrahi finds that the same diasporic conventions that Hebrew writers practiced in exile were maintained in the first half of the twentieth century. Even after 1948, when the state of Israel was founded but East Jerusalem and its holy sites remained under Arab control, Jerusalem continued to figure in the Hebrew imagination as mediated space. Only in the aftermath of the 1967 War did the temptations and dilemmas of proximity to the sacred become acute in every area of Hebrew politics and culture. Ultimately, DeKoven Ezrahi shows that the wisdom Jews acquired through two thousand years of exile, as expressed in their literary imagination, must be rediscovered if the diverse inhabitants of Jerusalem are to coexist.