Reenvisioning Israel through Political Cartoons: Visual Discourses During the 2018–2021 Electoral Crisis examines the ways in which the work of Israeli political cartoonists broadens conversations about contemporary challenges in the country. Matt Reingold shows how 21 cartoonists across 10 different Israeli newspapers produced cartoons in response to the country’s social and political crises between December 2018–June 2021, a period where the country was mired in four national elections. Each chapter is structured around an issue that emerged during this period, with examples drawn from multiple cartoonists. This allows for fertile cross-cartoonist discussion and analysis, offering an opportunity to understand the different ways that an issue affects national discourse and what commentaries have been offered about it. By focusing on this difficult period in contemporary Israeli society, the volume highlights the ways that artists have responded to these national challenges and how they have fashioned creative reimaginings of their country.

Do political cartoon predict violence? To answer this question Ilan Danjoux examined over 1200 Israeli and Palestinian editorial cartoons to explore whether changes in their content anticipated the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in October of 2000. Despite stark differences in political, economic and social pressures, a notable shift in focus, style and tone accompanied the violence. With numerous illustrations and detailed methodology, Political Cartoons and the Israeli Palestinian Conflict provides readers an engaging introduction to cartoon analysis and a novel insight into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a region fraught with contested realities, the cartoon’s ability to capture the latent fears and unspoken beliefs of these antagonists offers a refreshing perspective on how both Israelis and Palestinians perceived each other and their chances for peace on the eve of the Second Intifada.

The Comics of Asaf Hanuka: Telling Particular and Universal Stories tells the story of how cartoonist Asaf Hanuka illustrates both universal and particular narratives. Through close readings of Hanuka’s entire catalogue of comics and graphic narratives, Hanuka’s work is situated within the broader story of his own experiences of being an insider (as a Jew and Israeli) and an outsider (as a Mizrahi, or Judeo-Arab) in Israeli society. By moving chronologically through Hanuka’s works, the book traces how Hanuka navigates these disparate particular identities alongside more universal concerns about how to be a present partner to his spouse and to his children.

"The Comics of Asaf Hanuka: Telling Particular and Universal Stories tells the story of how cartoonist Asaf Hanuka illustrates both universal and particular narratives. Through close readings of Hanuka's entire catalogue of comics and graphic narratives, Hanuka's work is situated within the broader story of his own experiences of being an insider (as a Jew and Israeli) and an outsider (as a Mizrahi, or Judeo-Arab) in Israeli society. By moving chronologically through Hanuka's works, the book traces how Hanuka navigates these disparate particular identities alongside more universal concerns about how to be a present partner to his spouse and to his children"--

Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature offers fresh approaches to understanding how grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and perpetrators treat their traumatic legacies. The contributors to this volume present a two-fold perspective: that the past continues to live in the lives of the third generation and that artistic responses to trauma assume a variety of genres, including film, graphic novels, and literature. This generation is acculturated yet set apart from their peers by virtue of their traumatic inheritance. The chapters raise several key questions: How is it possible to negotiate the difference between what Daniel Mendelson terms proximity and distance? How can the post-post-memorial generation both be faithful to Holocaust memory and embrace a message of hope? Can this generation play a constructive educational role? And, finally, why should society care? At a time when the lessons and legacies of Auschwitz are either banalized or under assault, the authors in this volume have a message which ideally should serve to morally center those who live after the event.

Sacred Body analyzes exemplary Jewish texts, narratives, and cultural practices that show how these artifacts unhinge the “sacred” from the divine and focus instead on the “everyday sacred,” earthly existence in order to celebrate life-affirming decisions, actions, and relationships, and avoid abstraction, metaphysics, and apocalypticism.

Pragmatic-Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Amos Oz’s Writings: Words Significantly Uttered presents intermediate links between three intellectual domains: the literary works of Amos Oz, American Pragmatism, and object-relations psychoanalysis. The interdisciplinary method employed here involves a presentation of Oz’s writings as the starting point for an existential debate that addresses a mental-conceptual struggle. This conceptual conflict, which has been given aesthetic shape in the literary work, inspires the presentation of central pragmatic and psychoanalytic concepts which contribute to a new and richer understanding of the conceptual tension or existential challenge. The chapters interpret Oz’s works not only as literary masterpieces but as existential-philosophical expressions. Dorit Lemberger’s argues that Oz reconceptualizes psychological, personal, familial, and often national, processes in a way that allows readers to understand such processes in general life from a retrospective perspective.