Tamara Neuman

Andrew W. Mellon Regional Fellow in the Humanities

20112012 Forum on Adaptations

Tamara Neuman

Visiting Assistant Professor, Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College

Seizing Zion: A Cultural Account of Religious Adaptation and Jewish Settlement over the Green Line

My project focuses on two parallel forms of adaptation forged in the context of religious settlement in the West Bank. It investigates the adaptation of a changing and increasingly fragmented spatial landscape as it is produced in relation to new forms of national belonging and social exclusion. It also focuses on the adaptation of diasporic Judaism to a place-based form of observance, which seeks to claim Palestinian areas as sites of Jewish origin. I consider these interlinked adaptations—of a landscape and a religious tradition—in relation to a military occupation and the governance of the Palestinian majority population in this area.