Overlooking the Border: Narratives of Divided Jerusalem

Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology

By: Dana Hercbergs

Narrated by: Christina Delaine

Overlooking the Border continues the dialogue surrounding the social history of Jerusalem. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book juxtaposes Israeli and Palestinian personal narratives about the past with contemporary museum exhibits, street plaques, tourism, and real estate projects that are reshaping the city since the decline of the peace process and the second intifada.

As sites of memory, Jerusalem's homes, streets, and natural areas form the setting for emotionally charged narratives about belonging and rights to place. Recollections of local customs and lifeways in the mid-20th century coalesce around residents' desire for stability amid periods of war, dispossession, and relocation - intertwining the mythical with the mundane.

Hercbergs begins by taking the listener to the historically Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, whose streets are a battleground for competing historical narratives about the Israeli-Arab War of 1948. She goes on to explore the connections and tensions between Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians living across the border from one another in Musrara, a neighborhood straddling West and East Jerusalem. The author rounds out the monograph with a semiotic analysis of contemporary tourism and architectural ventures that are entrenching ethno-national separation in the post-Oslo period.

©2018 Dana Hercbergs (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Rare glimpses over various border lines

First, this book is an important document, a collection of authentic testimonies, collected with great care and openness. Dana gracefully moves away from the stage and encourages her heroes to tell their story. Equally important, when getting back to the microphone, Dana reflects her experience of listening to the story and shares her understanding with the reader - these are sometimes moments of greater writing, when her vision is shared through her emotions.

The frame story and the analysis are often raw, the editorial struggle to put all the opposing narratives into a single package is clearly visible, the safety of academical distance from the subject is often a cover for borderline romantic longing for lost Eden. Thus, the frame itself is an authentic testimony of a postmodern intellectual vulnerability, stressed by the mainstream history rewriting, gender bias, urbanization, collective moral burden and even poor grammar on the streets. What I would like to see is a Woody Allen movie about the making of this book.

Overall, I would recommend this book for anyone willing to go beyond the borders to find strikingly different perspectives and realities. It goes beyond the story of Jerusalem and Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it is an example study of the cultural multiverse of a reality perception of the same time and place by the different societies, and thus might be of interest to a much broader auditory.