Israel and Its Mediterranean Identity by David Ohana (Palgrave MacMillan)

David Ohana offers an insightful and original look at Israeli society, its past, present, and future. Ohana is more than a historian and the book provides a new and inspiring way of looking at Israel and its cultural options, one that is very much worth reading.Israel and Its Mediterranean Identity is a detailed and comprehensive work which reviews Israel’s Mediterranean identity, starting with its Zionist ideological origins and taking us up to the present, as Israel struggles with what it means to be a post-ideological Mediterranean country. How do Israelis define their collective identity in the region? Are they modern crusaders? Do they belong to the Middle East, to Europe, to the global village? Perhaps they do not have to choose between the local and the global. The cultural survey in this book of the contemporary visual arts, popular music, literature, and architecture in Israel reveals the young Israeli society as a vividly Mediterranean one. Israel and its Mediterranean Identity aspires to examine the Mediterranean option for Israel--a multi-cultural society situated between east and west.

David Ohana is a historian of modern European history, Jewish history and the history of Israel. He teaches and researches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Paris-Sorbonne, Harvard University, and the University of California at Berkeley. He is a full professor of History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Ohana completed his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The recipient of aFulbright Fellowship, he spent his post-doctorate studies at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. From 1990-2000 he was a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute, where he founded and directed the Forum for Mediterranean Cultures; since 2000, he has been a fellow at the Ben-Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism. Ohana has written and edited numerous books in Hebrew, English, and French, including Origins of the Israeli Mythology: Neither Canaanites nor Crusaders and Modernism and Zionism.