| Mideast Initiative Welcomes Visiting Professor
This year, the Tri-College Middle Eastern Studies Initiative and the Bi-College Peace and Conflict Studies Program welcome Visiting Assistant Professor Tamara Neuman to the Bryn Mawr campus. Neuman, an anthropologist who studies the religious dimensions of the Israeli settlement movement, has taught at Reed College and the University of Chicago and comes to Bryn Mawr from a research affiliation at Harvard University. She earned her B.A. in classics and anthropology from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago.
During her time at Bryn Mawr, Neuman will be working on a book titled Seizing Zion: Jewish Militancy and Israeli Settlement Over the Green Line. The manuscript is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork she conducted, primarily in Hebron, with the support of Fullbright Hays, the CASPIC/John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, and the Henry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
"The book is an exploration of a new turn in religious sensibility that I characterize as place-based," Neuman says. "It represents a shift in the understanding of Jewish identity — from a diasporic community based on the shared celebration of events to a religion that focuses on holy places. In settler communities, living in these places is at the very core of what it means to be Jewish. I examine how that shift is realized at an everyday level."
Neuman's interest in the cultural context of the settlement movement is, she says, part of a broader interest in peace and conflict studies in general. Her teaching at Bryn Mawr will focus on the analysis of conflict and approaches to the resolution of conflict.
This fall, Neuman will teach the introductory course in the Peace and Conflict Studies program.
"I plan to use a series of case studies, beginning with the MOVE conflict that occurred in Philadelphia in 1985," she says. The MOVE incident, in which Philadelphia police firebombed a house belonging to a mostly antigovernment back-to-nature group in West Philadelphia, left 61 houses destroyed by fire and 11 people dead. "So often we think about war and conflict as something that happens abroad, but here is a very dramatic example that took place just a few miles away. It illustrates the point that, in fact, conflict is present in many social settings."
From Philadelphia, Neuman's case studies will proceed to Central America and the Middle East — "areas in which the United States has had a hand in shaping conflicts."
The course will also look briefly at practical approaches to mediating disputes and at peace movements and peace activism.
Next semester, Neuman will take on three courses. "Palestine and Israeli Society" will examine how the Palestinian experience has influenced the dynamics of Israeli Society. "Middle Eastern Diasporas" will focus on "communities living outside the Middle East as well as communities that are not confined to a particular nation-state," she says. An advanced-topics course will deal with genocide.
This will be Neuman's first experience of teaching at a women's college, and she is eager to see how gender dynamics affect students' approaches to the study of peace and conflict. "I think attention to gender within the framework of peace-and-conflict studies is very important," she says. "Colleagues of mine have suggested various hypotheses about how men and women differ in their attitudes toward conflict, and it will be interesting to see whether my experience here bears them out."
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