Customer Reviews

A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and C)

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Viewed from afar, Jerusalem is the city that best captures the spirit of modern Israel. But as Barbara Mann shows in this profound and beautiful book, it is in Tel Aviv - the first modern Jewish city -- that the complexities of the Zionist project are most evident. Mann describes these complexities in both broad strokes (as when she presents the long ambivalent history of Jewish attitudes towards space and place) and fine detail (as when she describes the old cemetery in the middle of Tel Aviv, and how its meaning has changed over the generations). Mann is a Berkeley-trained literature professor, so she's conversant in the sorts of contemporary theory that one encounters at universities. She carries her erudition lightly, though, using the tools of cultural studies and literary theory to explain what she sees, without getting carried into the jargony hermeticism that makes much academic writing insufferable and impenetrable. This could be because Mann is also an accomplished poet. Time and again she finds a perfect, small example that illustrate her big points, and these images stick with you after you've closed the book. She writes simply and beautifully, with pathos and with power.

I recommend this book for anyone who wants a deeper view of Israel than it is possible to get from the evening news. Also for anyone interested in modern Jewish history and modern Jewish identity. For people who might find themselves drinking coffee at a kiosk on Rothschild or a café on Dizengoff on a Friday morning (I am one of these people), this book is a gem and a gift and a must.

By the time one is done reading Barbara Mann's "A Place in History," one of the richest interdisciplinary studies of the creation of Jewish national culture to date, it is hard to understand why we waited so long for a scholar to carefully examine the crucial construction of Tel Aviv which, for most Israelis, has long represented the true center of national life and identity. A confident and wonderfully lively scholar, as familiar with European modernist responses to the city as she is with the lyrical impulses of Chaim Nahman Bialik, Leah Goldberg, and other Hebrew poets, Mann draws with wonderful skill on the rich archival sources she investigated. Another useful feature of "A Place in History" is the generous inclusion of numerous black and white reproductions of artists such as Gutman and Reuven Rubin, as well as Mann's own deeply evocative photographs of the city that clearly lives in both her heart and intellect. Readers will also appreciate the book's sensible organization which moves logically from perceptive discussion of utopian visions of the new Hebrew city in Jewish European discourse (many readers may be surprised to learn that Herzl's 1902 novel Altnueland was not the first Zionist utopian novel), through the city's life in the early 20th-century until the rapid years of growth after statehood. In a final chapter that is at once moving and richly analytical, Mann addresses the fraught aftermath of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, in terms of the transformation of public space as well as in narratives by Etgar Keret, Alona Kimchi, and other artistic renderings of the national trauma. "A Place in Histor"y is consistently rewarding, offering rich understandings of early Zionist culture in its myriad forms, and unprecedented analysis of Tel Aviv as a deeply conflicted but always critically vital site and source of literary and artistic expression.

If you want to understand Tel Aviv's dynamic, its history, its architecture, and the models its founders had in mind, this is a very nice book. It's well written and well researched.

Mann's A Place in History is a study of the founding and development of Tel Aviv, and she handles this from a variety of angles. But Mann is first and foremost an historian with a decided post-modern orientation, so this study is replete with words like "text" "trope" and "problematized." The net result of this is a work that is far too intellectual and clouds the extremely fascinating story of the founding of the first Jewish, or more correctly, Hebrew city. That said, Mann has access to some wonderful sources, interesting historical photographs, and is well versed in the art and architecture Tel Aviv has generated in it's over 100 years of existence. When she allows the city of tell its story, the book is compelling and important. When she gets bogged down in theory and terms, there is a strong pull to stop reading this book.