Time for Action
[b]»Time for Action!«[/b] For some time now, this catchcry has been heard in the field of the arts and culture with a new insistence. Whether it is a matter of the emergence of politicised approaches in the artistic field or of the transition from art to concrete forms of protest, these days the urge to take politically or socially motivated action is mingled in many places with issues of artistic representation and articulation.
springerin 2/2003 takes its readers to the locations where such intermingling takes place, as well as examining the conditions under which the new interest in global injustices can be coupled with critical forms. For example, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman analyses the large-scale changes brought about by the increasing division into a global elite and a growing class of the dispossessed and »unwilling tourists«. Jeff Derksen complements this by asking to what extent the new global ambitions of the single remaining superpower can be said to have a culturo-imperialistic dimension and under what conditions this becomes tangible.
The articles by Hedwig Saxenhuber, Dorothee Richter and Hito Steyerl examine a concrete, internationally significant flashpoint away from the recent wars, focusing on the present disputes surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as crisis situations within Israel itself. A number of articles investigating the developments in particular eastern European scenes and their socio-political references provide a second thematic focus in this issue. Herwig G. Höller, for instance, recapitulates the precarious utilisation of activist art in official Moscow and in a second article takes a look at the films of the Serb director Zelimir Zilnik – awkward and constantly critical of the powers-that-be. And Boris Buden analyses the contrived presentation of so-called »Balkan art« in the European culture industry.
It seems often enough these days as if artistic forms of political action are being put to a severe test. On the one hand, there is an increasing number of protests at the so-called »globalisation summits«, or for concrete reasons, such as the Iraq war; on the other, these forms of protest are difficult to translate into artistic terms. Two articles that investigate the growing popularity of activist approaches in the contemporary French art scene (Martin Conrads, Jens Emil Sennewald) document what such transfers can look like in specific cases.
[b]Cover[/b]
[b]Meir Gal: Nine Out of Four Hundred: The West and the Rest[/b]
Since the establishment of Israel we have heard mostly from and about its
European (Ashkenazi) Jews. Numerous books and articles have depicted the
State of Israel as a country which successfully managed to bring together
people of different ethnic origins. Unfortunately, these publications have
created a perception that is far from the realities non-Ashkenazi groups
have had to endure. Mizrahim (Jews of Asian and African origins, and Arab
Jews, commonly referred to as Sephardim) who have written extensively about
the discrimination against Mizrahim in Israel and who have documented the
history of Mizrahi resistance have been censured and criticized. To this
day, Mizrahi activists in Israel are marginalized and often excluded from
public positions and funding.
The official textbooks on the history of the Jewish people used in Israeli
schools are dedicated almost exclusively to the history of European Jewry.
For decades the Ministry of Education systematically deleted the history of
Jews who came from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. These books helped
establish a consciousness that the history of the Jewish people took place
in Eastern Europe and that Mizrahim have no history worthy of remembering.
The origins of this policy date back to mid 1800’s to the Ashkenazi
treatment of the Mizrahi Diaspora prior to the establishment of the State of
Israel. Both Jewish European communities as well as the Jewish Eastern
European leadership in Palestine (and later in Israel), categorized
non-European Jews as backward and primitive. Cautionary measures in the
form of selective immigration policies were enacted in the 1950’s in order
to reduce the “dangerous Levantine influence” of non-European cultures on
the new Israeli entity.
>From the moment of their arrival in Israel, Mizrahim were forced to deny
their Jewish-Arab identity which they held for centuries in Arab countries
and in Palestine. Throughout this era there was no contradiction between
being a Jew and an Arab simultaneously. The advent of Zionism and the
establishment of the Israeli State drove a wedge between Mizrahim and their
origins, and replaced their Jewish - Arab identity with a new and
instantaneous Israeli identity based on hatred of the Arab world. The
inevitable outcome was an irreconcilable Mizrahi denial of its own past
which gradually evolved into self-hatred (The severe ethnic conflict within
Israel, its resulting class division as well as its impact on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is entirely absent from most if not all
discourse on Middle Eastern history and politics).
The book shown in the photograph is the official textbook of the history of
the Jewish people in recent generations that was used by high school
students (including myself) in the 1970’s. The nine pages I’m holding are
the only pages in the book that discuss non-European Jewish history. Hence
the title: Nine Out of Four Hundred (The West and the Rest). My intention is
to put an end to the speculative character of the argument whether or not
Mizrahim have been discriminated in Israel. Today the Ministry of Education
continues to erase the history of its non European Jews despite the fact
that they comprise more than half of the Israeli population. This is only
one example of the ways through which the State minoritized its non-European
majority.
(New York, 1997)