Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place

Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place. Edited by Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt and Alexandra Nocke. (Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008. Pp. xii + 375. Foreword, acknowledgments, inttoduction, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $124.95 cloth.)From 2001 to 2007, the interdisciplinary research group Makom: Place and Places in Judaism met at the University of Potsdam to probe the perception and experience of Jewish space and place. Their meetings resulted in the publication ?? Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, a collection of eighteen essays on the topic by architects, historians, political scientists, folklorists, artists, curators, anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural studies scholars. The book is heavy (400 pages) and pricey, but those factors are justified by the richness of its material - diverse empirical research and theoretical analyses that interrogate the boundaries of Jewish space and place through distinct disciplinary lenses.In their introduction, editors Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt, and Alexandra Nocke outiine the Makom group's motivations to research the geographies of life. The work of the Makom group, they say, aimed to address several realities about Jewish space and place: that no comprehensive or institutionalized Space Studies yet existed; that academic discourse about space typically ran along dichotomized lines (Israel vs. diaspora, religious vs. secular, leftist vs. rightist, Zionist vs. post-Zionist); that since the Holocaust, scholars have rarely demonstrated an objective approach to European topography, more often focusing on death and commemoration than living people and spaces; and, lasdy, that the political significance of Israel has overshadowed other spaces and places since its founding in 1948 (15-16). The group thus embarked on six years of research and writing to complicate these realities with nuanced theory and a wide range of field projects.Interest in both historical and current experiences of Jews in contact zones and sites of boundary (significant both as places and as spaces) thus guides the book's investigations, with questions such as, How do spaces emerge? Who is involved in the process of their emergence? And, how are spaces contested, performed, and used? (1-2). The authors study these questions through examinations of physical places, conceptual spaces, and the dynamic processes of their construction and deconstruction.Divided into five parts, the book begins with Construction Sites, a section of case studies by Miriam Lipis, Manuel Herz, and Haim Yacobi that target the issue of belonging through symbolic and physical constructions. They examine the sukkah [ritual 'tabernacle,' Hebrew], the eruv [real or symbolic fence or enclosure, Hebrew] , and the Israeli town of Netivot to understand how boundaries develop and dissolve.Jewish Quarters follows, offering new takes on old quarters through studies by Kenneth Helphand, Susan Gilson Miller, Etan Diamond, Eszter Brigitta Gantner, and Matyas Kovacs. They examine ghetto gardens created by Jews, the spatial boundaries between Jews and Muslims in the mellah ['walled quarter,' Arabic] in Morocco, the religious micro-spaces of Thornhill, Toronto, and subcultures of Budapest's urban landscape. …

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