Ramle Remade: The Israelisation of an Arab Town, 1948–1967 Danna Piroyansky Ramle Remade | Danna Piroyansky
* Book Review: * *"This book is a truly original piece of historical scholarship, which makes an important contribution to urban history and to Israeli-Palestinian studies. The merits of this research in both form and content are manifold, but one stands out: it is the first serious monograph on Ramle, which highlights an understudied space of interaction between Jews and Arabs in a contested urban setting. While most studies have focused on cities with prior Jewish population, like Jaffa and Haifa, the case of Ramle – an exclusively Palestinian town up to 1948 – deserves further scrutiny.Well grounded in the literature on ethnic urban mix and the specificity of lived spaces and their political struggles, the book proposes a revision of the local history of dispossession and appropriation. The notion of Israelization is a promising conceptual framework to analyze such projects of community building, integration and exclusion, shedding light on past and present emerging configurations and constitutive events. The book is well structured and the bibliography covers a wealth of primary and secondary materials. With this exemplary use of archival sources, the book will certainly be of great value to scholars of urban history and nationalism studies in Israel/Palestine andbeyond."* Daniel Monterescu Associate Professor PhD Program Director Department of Sociology and Anthropology Central European University *About the book:* The 1948 war was a watershed in the long history of Ramle, when most of the town’s original Arab inhabitants were displaced, their material and symbolic assets appropriated by the nascent Israeli state. Those who remained in or returned to the now mostly Jewish city of Ramla became a minority in their former hometown. The core of this monograph is the process of Israelisation that the city of Ramle/Ramla underwent during the 1950s and 1960s, and its differential implications for the town’s ethnic communities. By setting the changes the town experienced between 1948 and 1967 in a wider perspective, Piroyansky thoroughly scrutinises various components of this process. Notions and practices linked to wartime expropriation, commercial appropriation, urban landscape redesign, civic performance and urban planning, are examined here in three different yet complementary layers—municipal, national and international. While three theoretical fields are juxtaposed in the book—those of property and repossession, post-war transformation and urban spatial practices—Piroyansky uses an interdisciplinary approach that is first and foremost historical, incorporating and intertwining legal, geographical, anthropological, sociological, architectural and cultural perspectives and terminologies to combine a theoretical approach with empirical research. * Danna Piroyansky * is a historian of medieval culture who completed her PhD doctorate at the University of London (2005). She has since published reference and text books, as well as several articles, analysing the fascinating inter-relations between culture, religion and politics in the later Middle Ages, with a focus on the creation of cults of political martyrs in fourteenth and fifteenth century England (Martyrs in the Making: Political Martyrdom in Late Medieval England, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). After returning to Israel and as a post-doctoral venture, Piroyansky took up a new research field of modern urban history, particularly studying the cultural aspects of post-1948 Israeli-Arab towns. Piroyansky has so far authored a few studies which discuss the multi-layered narratives standing at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ramle Remade: The Israelisation of an Arab Town 1948-1967 is the outcome of this on-going historical investigation. Piroyansky is currently working on the translation of what is frequently referred to as the first autobiography in English into Hebrew. <http://www.amazon.com/Ramle-Remade-Israelisation-Arab-1948-1967/dp/161838113X>International purchase <http://www.amazon.com/Ramle-Remade-Israelisation-Arab-1948-1967/dp/161838113X> Price: $10.80 + deliveryAmazon.com <http://www.amazon.com/Ramle-Remade-Israelisation-Arab-1948-1967/dp/161838113X> <http://pardes.co.il/book.asp?pID=1231>Direct purchase <http://pardes.co.il/book.asp?pID=1231> Price: 50 NIS Direct purchase <http://pardes.co.il/book.asp?pID=1231> [image: Facebook] <https://www.facebook.com> [image: Twitter] <https://twitter.com/> [image: YouTube] <http://www.youtube.com/> [image: Linkedin] <https://www.linkedin.com/> [image: Google Plus] <https://plus.google.com/> [image: Instagram] <https://instagram.com/> [image: Pinterest] <https://pinterest.com/> [image: Website] <http://www.google.co.il> Pardes Publishing 04-8641939 -- דר' שרי אהרוני עורכת ראשית, ספרות עיון פרדס הוצאה לאור 04-8641939
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