Workshop for Faculty and Graduate Students
Amy Horowitz, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Dept. of Comparative Literature, Lecturer, International Studies Program, The Mershon Center
Friday, April 29, 12 noon (The workshop was originally scheduled for April 22 but has been postponed to the following Friday, April 29)
University Club, President's Room (upstairs), Indiana Memorial Union, Bloomington
Participants are asked to read a copy of Professor Horowitz's article prior to the workshop. The article can be found here.
Israeli Poet and Jerusalemite, Yehuda Amichai writes:
Once, I was sitting on the steps by the gate of David's Tower. I had placed my two baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their focal point.
"You see that man with the baskets? Just to the right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period--just to the right of his head"
"But he's moving! He's moving!" I said to myself.
Redemption will only come when their guide tells them:
"You see that arch from the Roman Period? It's not important! But next to it sits a man who's brought fruit and vegetables for his family"1
Amichai reminds us that redemption -- to my way of thinking, the coming of humane values and multi-leveled understanding – requires a foregrounding of the everyday acts of people, those who shop in Jerusalem's markets and malls, take food home to their families, and pause to catch their breath against a Roman Pillar along the way. To pursue this kind of enlightenment, ethnographers and their subjects - roles that, as we know, sometimes can reverse themselves - fashion their stories from lived or acquired memories. The ethnographic enterprise in disputed territories like Jerusalem becomes an in-gathering and recontextualizing of contested chronologies and claims.
The Jerusalem Project, an ongoing engagement among Palestinian, Israeli, and US scholars, artists, students, and community leaders, sharpens Amichai’s problematic, challenging us to consider what happens when we refocus our gaze on the human beings resting beneath the Roman Arch with their week's worth of family groceries.
What follows, as a necessary logic of ethnography in disputed territories is a three-part response to Amichai’s challenge:
First, a statement of the problem of counter-representation – the collaborative construction of opposed frameworks of time, care, and value.
Second, a narrative of the development and use of these conflicting frameworks in the context of the Jerusalem Project, which we undertook on the cusp of a very hopeful historical moment in the early 1990s.
Third, a summary of what the project - its processes and its products - tell us about limits of this kind of cultural dialogue, especially when it involves not only Israeli and Palestinian partners enmeshed in an ongoing relationship as occupier and occupied, but a U.S. partner as well, whose role is fraught with asymmetry and ambiguity.
My talk includes narratives from the ethnographic phase in the early 1990s such as Woody Guthrie’s canonic folksong reinvented by one of the Israeli participants at a planning meeting. I will also draw upon stories from Israeli, Palestinian, and US students and faculty (2007-2010) who participated in one of the project outcomes – a (sometimes) tripartite course entitled Living Jerusalem offered at OSU (2006-2011), Al Quds Univeristy (2007), and Hebrew University (2007, 2010).
Amy Horowitz is an activist, producer, writer, and teacher. She believes that aesthetic forms, in particular music, resist, defy, or slip across the political boundaries that undertake to separate them. In 1972, while still a college student and a VISTA volunteer in Oregon, Horowitz founded one of the earliest women’s clinics, The Ashland Women’s Health Center. She began producing and distributing women’s music in 1973 and was invited by Holly Near to move to Los Angeles to help with booking and coalition building in 1975. One collaborative project that they undertook was an LP recording featuring Sweet Honey In the Rock. In 1977, Horowitz moved to Washington DC to work with the Sweet Honey on creating a national and international constituency. She founded and directed Roadwork, a non-profit women’s cultural organization that served some twenty women artists from the 1970s till 1994. Horowitz’s work with progressive women artists like Bernice Johnson Reagon and Holly Near formed her multi-racial, cross-cultural theories and inspired such projects as the Sisterfire Festival and the Jerusalem Project, an engagement among Israeli and Palestinian scholars, artists and students that continues today. Amy Horowitz became Assistant and Acting Director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings where she received a Grammy as co-producer for the Anthology of American Folk Music in 1997.
Horowitz’s interest in the unlikely coalitions and inevitable contradictions of music, culture and everyday life led to her graduate work on the complexities of the music of Israeli Jews from Islamic countries. She received an MA in Jewish Studies from New York University in 1986 and a Ph.D. in Folklore from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994.
In 2001, Horowitz was invited to be scholar-in-residence at The Ohio State University’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies. In 2003, she created Protest Music as Responsible Citizenship, inviting Bernice Johnson Reagon, Harry Belafonte, Pete Seeger, and Holly Near to a two-day, filmed conversation. In 2006, Horowitz hosted Israeli and Palestinian colleagues at Mershon to develop an innovative class entitled Living Jerusalem, through which Ohio State-and Jerusalem-based Israeli and Palestinian students and faculty meet together in video conference and make weblogs to grapple with readings related to this conflicted city. Horowitz is also a visiting scholar at the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. In addition to her academic work, she has developed community projects such as the Shalom, Salaam, Peace project, which brought together 5th graders from Muslim, Jewish, and Christian day schools in Columbus, Ohio.
Horowitz’s award-winning book, Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic, explores a subversive music style created by young Israeli Jews from Islamic countries in the 1970s and 1980s and their struggle to be heard in the country’s largely Eurocentric music industry. Her interest in contemporary Israel began in 1970 when, as International President of B’nai B’rith Girls, she was invited to the country to meet with government officials and youth leaders. She discovered Israel as a complex, diverse and multi-dimensional society rather than the mythical refurbished “promised land” of her childhood. The book bears out her youthful intuition. In it, she narrates the struggles of Middle Eastern and North African Israeli musicians, presenting the diverse and at times contentious ethnic, aesthetic, and national identities that coexist in contemporary Israel.
