A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land

Jackie Feldman

Description

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For many Evangelical Christians, a trip to the Holy Land is an integral part of practicing their faith. Arriving in groups, most of these pilgrims are guided by Jewish Israeli tour guides. For more than three decades, Jackie Feldman—born into an Orthodox Jewish family in New York, now an Israeli citizen, scholar, and licensed guide—has been leading tours, interpreting Biblical landscapes, and fielding questions about religion and current politics. In this book, he draws on pilgrimage and tourism studies, his own experiences, and interviews with other guides, Palestinian drivers and travel agents, and Christian pastors to examine the complex interactions through which guides and tourists "co-produce" the Bible Land. He uncovers the implicit politics of travel brochures and religious souvenirs. Feldman asks what it means when Jewish-Israeli guides get caught up in their own performances or participate in Christian rituals, and reflects on how his interactions with Christian tourists have changed his understanding of himself and his views of religion.

1. How Guiding Christians Made Me Israeli
2. Guided Holy Land Pilgrimage—Sharing the Road
3. Opening Their Eyes: Performance of a Shared Protestant-Israeli Bible Land
4. Christianizing the Conflict: Bethlehem and the Separation Wall
5. The Goods of Pilgrimage: Tips, Souvenirs, and the Moralities of Exchange
6. The Seductions of Guiding Christians
7. Conclusions: Pilgrimage, Performance, and the Suspension of Disbelief

Sujets

• Middle Est
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Israel
• Travel writing
• History of the Middle East
• Middle East
• Anthropology

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 11 avril 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253021489
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land
A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land
How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli
JACKIE FELDMAN
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Jackie Feldman
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Feldman, Jackie, author.
Title: A Jewish guide in the Holy Land : how Christian pilgrims made me Israeli / Jackie Feldman.
Description: Bloomington ; Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015036094| ISBN 9780253021250 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253021373 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253021489 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Tourism-Israel. | Tourism-West Bank. | Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages-Israel. | Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages-West Bank. | Feldman, Jackie. | Tour guides (Persons)-Israel-Biography.
Classification: LCC G155.I78 F45 2016 | DDC 915.69404/54092-dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036094
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To my beloved late grandparents, Max and Pola Lipschutz; my father, Henri (Chaim) Feldman; and my mother Ruth Feldman (may she live). To my wife Rachel and my children Elika and Shaya. And in tribute to my late professor and mentor, R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, who introduced me to the passion of comparative religious study .
CONTENTS
Foreword by Erik Cohen
Acknowledgments
1 How Guiding Christians Made Me Israeli
2 Guided Holy Land Pilgrimage-Sharing the Road
3 Opening Their Eyes: Performance of a Shared Protestant-Israeli Bible Land
4 Christianizing the Conflict: Bethlehem and the Separation Wall
5 The Goods of Pilgrimage: Tips, Souvenirs, and the Moralities of Exchange
6 The Seductions of Guiding Christians
7 Conclusion: Pilgrimage, Performance, and the Suspension of Disbelief
Notes
References
Index
FOREWORD
I T WAS A great pleasure for me to write a foreword to Jackie Feldman s book. I have been following Jackie s personal and academic careers-which have been, as this book shows, virtually inseparable-for well over thirty years. Our acquaintance began when Jackie was writing his MA thesis on Second Temple pilgrimages and consulted with me about sociological approaches to pilgrimage. It was a rare occasion in the Hebrew University for a student of the Department of Jewish Thought, in the Faculty of Humanities, to cross lines and approach someone in the Social Sciences Faculty for advice-most scholars in Jewish studies at that time kept away from a sociological perspective in their historical or religious studies. But it was a characteristic step for Jackie; as this book witnesses, he has specialized in crossing lines in his work as a Jewish guide of Christian pilgrims. Our early encounter also constituted an unintended beginning of his gradual transition from Jewish studies to social anthropology, which eventually became the discipline on which he based his academic career.
Jackie s doctoral dissertation, which he eventually turned into a book on the journeys of Israeli-Jewish youths to the Nazi extermination camps in Poland, was still a conventional anthropological study in which the author s voice is that of the participant-observer describing and analyzing the ideological background and the complexities of these pilgrimages to sites of death. However, save for stating his personal engagement with the topic, he did not dwell on his own role in those trips and kept himself in the background. In sharp contrast, this book is a hybrid work that straddles the boundaries between personal biography, autoethnography, and anthropology, in which the author entertains a double position, constituting as much a part of the explanans as of the explanandum .
Being multifaceted, Jackie s book can be read according to different scripts: I believe that the most significant one is the autobiographic-that of the unique, perhaps idiosyncratic way in which Jackie, an immigrant to Israel, escaped the stultified atmosphere of Orthodox Judaism in the United States and formed his Jewish identity and his relationship to Judaism and Israel in the course of his work as a Jew guiding Christians in the Holy Land. He achieved that not by confronting Christianity but rather by engaging with it deeply and sympathetically, without identifying with it. The descriptions of his rhetoric performances, in which he takes a Christian religious perspective while at the same time establishing a border between himself as a Jew and the Evangelical Christian pilgrims, are among the most interesting and entertaining features of the book. But his gambit could succeed, as Jackie himself recognizes, only in the spatially and temporarily isolated context of the pilgrimage situation.
A second script touches upon the role of Jackie s encounter with the Christian pilgrims in the formation of his attitude to Israel. Notably, he invokes Ahad Ha am s vision of Jewish autonomy, as a precondition for Jewish cultural flourishing, rather than Herzl s vision of Jewish independence in a national state. Jackie is not a political Zionist, and he hardly mentions Zionism in the book. Indeed, Jackie s encounter with the harsh but petty realities of Israeli daily life, in which he found himself, as an Anglo-Saxon immigrant, an outsider, led him to choose guiding as an opportunity to present the Holy Land to pilgrims on a grander scale, unencumbered by those distractions. At the same time, his encounters with Arab coworkers in the course of his work made him aware of the plight of the Palestinians under Israeli rule, turning him into an increasingly more critical citizen of his adopted country.
Finally, the book is an exceptionally perceptive and insightful piece of anthropological research that could have been written only by a researcher with a long and varied experience with different denominations of Christian pilgrims and their distinctive perspectives and interests. And only an anthropologist with an experienced guide s rhetorical abilities could have given us such a lively and often amusing insider s story of how Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land are performed.
Jackie believes that the Holy Land, despite different readings of the symbols inscribed on its landscape, provides a common ground on which Jewish guides and Christian pilgrims could meet. The book s message is one of Jewish-Christian mutual understanding, if not of total reconciliation of their divergent interpretations of that landscape. But this is achievable only due to the suspension of the pilgrimage situation from the realities of ordinary life. Implicit in Jackie s presentation is the realization that a similar mutual understanding between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs is not so easily achievable, because their encounter cannot be suspended from those realities. But he still believes that there is space enough in the Holy Land for both these people to coexist.
Erik Cohen Bangkok, February 2015
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
O NE SUMMER, A couple of years after I had become a licensed Israeli tour guide, I was sitting in my grandfather s office in New York. He took me downstairs to the diamond bourse to show me off. An old acquaintance of his, a diamond dealer from Antwerp like himself, came by, and he boasted of his grown grandchildren: There s Ronnie, he s in Peace Studies at Berkeley. And David, he s in quantum mechanics; Jongy, he went into the Business. And Jackie, he turned to me, he lives in Israel.
My grandfather, of blessed memory, reckoned that nothing good, or at least nothing very respectable, could come out of tour guiding. In part, I wrote this book to prove him wrong.
This research would not have been possible without the help and support of my colleagues. I thank my friends at Ben Gurion University of the Negev who read and commented on drafts of the book and related articles: Fran Markowitz, Nir Avieli, Andre Levy, Lev Grinberg, and the late Shmuel Ben-Dor, as well as other members of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Thanks also to Yoram Bilu, Virginia Dominguez, Kirsten Endres, Harvey Goldberg, Moshe David Herr, Michael Herzfeld, Steve Langfur, Chaim Noy, Amnon Raz-Karakotzkin, Amos Ron, David Satran, Adoram Schneidleder, Keren-Or Schlesinger, and Detleva Tochova and to my research assistants Smadar Farkas, Michal Padeh, Josh Schmidt, Matan Shapiro, and Michele Syen, as well as the anonymous readers of the publications that reviewed the manuscript and previous articles. Special thanks to Yael Guter for material from tourguide interviews and to my fellow guide and professor Amos Ron for the innumerable conversations in the tour guide course hotel dining rooms, cafeterias, community colleges, cars, desert jeeps, seminars, each other s houses, coffee shops, and every other place we have schmoozed in over the last thirty-five years.
Thanks to my mentors Don Handelman and the late Zwi Werblowsky and to Erik Cohen, who not only stimulated my thinking through