The year is 2007 and while I’m leading a student tour in Jerusalem, my ten-year-old daughter witnesses the completion of one of the Jerusalem sections of the Israeli separation barrier while trying to travel to Beit Jala with her former Palestinian classmate from Hand in Hand Bilingual School. The Israeli government celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the “reunification” of Jerusalem while Palestinians prepare to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the “catastrophic Nakba.” Also in the city at this time is Dana Hercbergs, a transparently left-leaning Ashkenazi, Israeli American ethnographer with a motivation to “find commonality” between the peoples of Jerusalem and open a gate into the narratives and counter-narratives of memory of the two decades (1948-67) between those events.
Hercbergs ventures into Jerusalem’s divided spaces in search of stories that will form the basis of her book, Overlooking the Border: Narratives of Divided Jerusalem. It’s a difficult undertaking due to the city’s contested spaces and her American Israeli identity, which she is candid about in the book. As readers, we trace her steps on guided tours and pause to map out museum exhibitions, street signs, and graffiti art: sites of erasure and of emboldened reinscription. We listen to personal reminiscence, sometimes awkwardly recounted due to Hercbergs’s self-acknowledged Arab language limitations and the trust issues that arise from various stigmas attached to her identity. As she transforms the individual, communal, and institutional storytelling that she finds by chance and by circumstance, Hercbergs’s corrective to the dearth of attention that has been paid to this period foregrounds and unmasks memory tales: emotionally evocative experiences and ideological perspectives (xx), binaries of intertwined threads of everyday life in an overdetermined city. The emotional and the ideological are not the only binaries to unbraid. There are the intrusions of municipal and state policies, particularly around funding, and the complexities of gender, class, ethnic, and generational asymmetries. Hercbergs deftly situates the reader within these contexts without overwhelming the storytellers with history, policy, celestial intervention, and relentless newsfeeds.
In gathering memory tales to illuminate the story of Jerusalem’s ethno-national conflict, Hercbergs is looking for a third space beyond either/or. Here she draws on Lefebvre’s notion of the production of space as “both and also,” and the power of ethnography to map out a space where narrative and narrator can meet, can co-be. We understand that there is no going back to what I would call a simpler symmetrical time because before occupation and annexation was the colonial project of a religious state in which the local inhabitants were subjugated, disenfranchised, and exiled. I find Bernice Johnson Reagon’s concept of “straddling” helpful here because to resist binarism is not to erase difference or dueling spaces. Reagon argues that it is necessary to negotiate or straddle into a third space—a mechanism for staying sane (Reagon 1994). In Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit argues that the task is to recognize “the departure of the binaries and oppositions by which we used to imagine the world” (83). Or as I have argued, it is to acknowledge that difference is constantly crystallized and dissolved. This is not a passive acquiescence; it is a proposal for a new politic of the aesthetic.
The storytelling Hercbergs innovatively employs is a roadmap into Jerusalem’s history. The weave is complicated not only by ideology and emotion but also by nostalgia and self-preservation. Hercbergs’s own emotional honesty is one of the book’s strengths. She tells us when the stories overwhelmed her. She is honest about wanting to “get past” stories of occupation until she realizes that these stories reveal the way the past is alive in the present. Although she wishes for “co-being” and a break in the pattern of separating Palestinian and Israeli narratives, she resists the pull to create a narrative of coexistence.
I offer a few lingering questions. On the minor side, the thumbnail-sized photos included in the book are difficult to access as sites of visual narration. Presumably, there were technical considerations, but I would have left them out. More centrally, I wonder about the distinction between inherited memories and lived memories. Time always misbehaves, especially in overwrought locations like Jerusalem, and we live the past, present, and future as a kaleidoscopic continuum rather than a neat chronology. I also want to trouble the term marginalized, which defines those resistor groups in terms of what their oppressors do to them — keeping them on the margins — rather than by how they define themselves, perhaps as resetting the margins. Finally, I wonder what the book may be overlooking. My position is that the Jewish state and the democratic state are another binary to be resisted. It’s about the erasure, for example, of the Palestinian name and place, of Sheik Badr that once marked where the well known Gan Sacher park now stands. And here I refer to Edward Said who would not participate in a project about Jerusalem unless he could write about his home in West Jerusalem (Horowitz 2016). Binarisms are not just a theoretical matter, they become cautionary, even dangerous tales when they outline asymmetry and erasure.
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’s 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.
Works Cited
Horowitz, Amy. "Next Year in Washington: The Jerusalem Program—Postponement and Rebirth." In Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, edited by Olivia Cadaval, Sojin Kim, and Diana Baird N'Diaye, 243-74. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016.
Reagon, Bernice Johnson. "’Nobody Knows the Trouble I See’; Or, ‘By and By I'm Gonna Lay Down My Heavy Load,’" The Journal of American History 78 (1991):111-9. doi:10.2307/2078089.
Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. New York: Nation Books, 2004.
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[Review length: 1119 words • Review posted on November 21, 2019]