Ranen Omer-Sherman has received the American Philosophical Society’s sabbatical award

Ranen Omer-Sherman has received the American Philosophical Society’s sabbatical award for his project on Levantine identities in memoir and fiction. This work enlarges on his two previous books: Diaspora & Zionism in Jewish American Literature and Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert which examine the formation of hybrid, diasporic, and cosmopolitan subjects in contemporary literature. The idea of the Levant has lately emerged in the literature produced by a range of writers, from Israel, Lebanon, Turkey and other sites in the Mediterranean world, who are eager to transcend the antagonistic categories of Arab and Jew, Middle-Easterner and European, Occidental and Oriental. In place of the reductive and hostile paradigms of identity that increasingly demarcate the “East” and “West” or that presuppose a “clash of civilizations,” many writers of the Levant and the Middle East recover the creative potential inherent in ambiguity, often invoking the cultural world of Muslim Spain, striving to overcome our own age’s paranoid and fanatic predilection for certainty, self-righteousness, and absolutes. As the West falls ever more precipitously into what seems a thoroughly anachronistic and fatal conflict with Islam and the “East,” he identifies a rich range of narrative responses as dynamic gestures toward a cultural richness and mingling, a heterogeneous community rather than the kinds of enclosures proscribed by rigid identities. He asserts that even in Israel, where one might readily imagine the most unwavering sense of a concrete, collective identity, it is not difficult to come across substantial formulations of a wistful hybridity that might transcend the brutality imposed by the circumscribed attachments of territory and identity.

In addition, Ranen will spend his sabbatical researching the possibilities for a book on late developments in the Kibbutz movement as well as completing the Index and copyediting his forthcoming co-edited book on The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches which will be published by Rutgers later this year. During the fall of 2008 he will be a Visiting Scholar at the University of Haifa, Israel.

April 1, 2008