The Un-Chosen Body: Disability Culture in Israel

The Un-Chosen Body: Disability Culture in Israel

In the first work to bring crip aesthetics into conversation with Israel studies, Ilana Szobel explores disability culture and disability justice through the work of artists with disabilities in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. This book outlines the production and performance of a range of projects by poets, filmmakers, and performers to examine how they reframe or reimagine accessibility in artistic, cultural, and political spaces through creative expression and suggests their works' potential for social transformation. Through close analysis of this vibrant underground subculture, Szobel proposes new avenues for understanding genealogies of art on disability, depictions of sexuality and vulnerability of disabled women, disability as political violence, community building among the disabled, and imagined disability futures. Szobel renders a clear critique of forms of oppression―ableism, sexism, heteronormativity, settler colonialism, and state violence―within Israel/Palestine and how artists with disabilities creatively address and undo their relationship to structures of power. For those interested in disability justice, gender, and creativity, Szobel illustrates how Israeli and Palestinian artists create new possibilities through their work. "Ilana Szobel's The Un-Chosen Body offers a compelling analysis of disability culture in Israel, revealing the vivid brilliance of disabled poets, artists, and filmmakers whose work deserves our attention. Szobel grapples forthrightly with state violence and social inequality―and makes a powerful case for the political urgency of thinking critically with disability."―Julia Watts Belser, author of Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole "Szobel brilliantly analyzes how artists in Israel/Palestine represent and mobilize disability. Her account is especially powerful because it is not always one of triumph or progress; it dwells in moments of pain, violence, exclusion, and nonrecognition as well as focusing on the art and artists who provide models for rethinking accessibility. Szobel carefully considers a broad spectrum of forces, from the intimacy of desire for a specific body to complexly related identities including gender, sexuality, and age to geopolitical power relations and the Israel/Palestine conflict. The result is a book that both sits with the complexity of disability in our world and pushes its reader to imagine new futures."―Sarah Imhoff, Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Chair in Jewish Studies, Indiana University "Exploring the provocative work of disabled creators and subjects who refuse to stay on the margins, Szobel claims Israeli art as a powerful form of political protest. The Un-Chosen Body is an exhilarating analysis of the flourishing creativity of Israeli disability culture."―Rachel B. Gross, author of Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice "In her nuanced study of cultural production and performance by disabled artists in Israel and Palestine, Ilana Szobel delineates a vital, original, and diverse creative force. Keenly attuned to the sociopolitical context of this art and critically engaged with factors that intersect with disability―gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, economic status, national identity―Szobel's The Un-Chosen Body makes a compelling case for social and political justice by inviting readers to think in new ways about Israeli culture."―Karen Grumberg, Stiles Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature, University of Texas at Austin "In this remarkable study, Ilana Szobel attends to the unique linguistic, geographic, and historical influences that have shaped Israeli disability culture from the twentieth century to the present day. 'Who has a right to speak for another?' pulses at the heart of this book, a question that Szobel explores with deep attention and unflinching honesty."―Adriana X. Jacobs, associate professor of modern Hebrew literature, University of Oxford Brings crip aesthetics and disability justice into conversation with Israel studies. In the first work to bring crip aesthetics into conversation with Israel studies, Ilana Szobel explores disability culture and disability justice through the work of artists with disabilities in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. For these performers, filmmakers, and artists, art allows them to reimagine and reframe accessibility in artistic, cultural, and political spaces while also connecting the embodied experience of disability to the power dynamics of geopolitical violence. Szobel demonstrates how these artists create community, make nuanced depictions of identity and desire, and imagine disability futures. Ilana Szobel is the Braun Chair Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at Brandeis University, specializing in Hebrew literature, women and gender studies, and disability studies. She is the author of Flesh of My Flesh: Sexual Violence in Modern Heb