Overlooking the Border: Narratives of a Divided Jerusalem

Description: An ethnographic tapestry of personal and institutional narratives about Jerusalem's social history.

Brief description: Dana Hercbergs holds a PhD in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught in universities in Canada and the United States and currently resides in Haifa.

Review Quotes:

Overlooking the Border: Narratives of Divided Jerusalem is an innovative work that will contribute across multiple fields. The overlapping meanings conveyed by its title inspire contemplation of the subject. Furthermore, a major contribution of the book is Hercbergs' introduction of what I would term the transparency of asymmetry. She contributes to the uneven, "unstable ground" of an ethnographic inquiry that foregrounds storytellers from multiple locations and across enemy lines, where the ethnographer is a member of the occupying side, albeit a self-professed resistor to the occupation. Hercbergs unmasks the uneven treatment of the storytellers, the richness of the characters, and the structural development of the storyline on the Israeli side in contrast to the Palestinian side where, with the exception of a few trilingual storytellers, we rely on Hercbergs rather than the residents themselves to guide us. Although this may sound like a criticism, it is, in fact, praiseworthy and will deepen future ethnographies that are conducted across enemy lines by ethnographers who are born within a conflict on the side of the group in power. I hope that future works will theorize this concept in more detail.