FOLKLORE FROM THE NEGEV TO THE WEST BANK

By Dr. Suzanne Seriff

A month-long summer research trip to Israel/Palestine combined professional networking at the World Congress of Jewish Studies with original oral historical fieldwork with traditional artisans from Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. The trip was generously funded by a Faculty Summer Research Stipend in Israel Studies, and travel grants from the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies and my home department of Anthropology.

The 18th World Congress of Jewish Studies took place on Hebrew University’s Mt. Scopus campus in Jerusalem, August 8-12, and hosted 1,700 worldwide scholars.

My paper, “Holocaust War Toys: Playing with Genocide,” was part of a folklore panel titled “Trauma and Revival: Contemporary Culture.” It serendipitously included two colleagues with close ties to UT faculty: Israeli folklorist Dani Schrire and Canadian ethnomusicologist Judith Cohen. In addition to the Jewish folklore panels, I spent two fascinating days soaking up the brilliant research in Jewish art and museum studies of colleagues from Europe, Israel, South America, and the United States. Several panels exploring the future of Jewish museums and the nature of “Jewish art” will feed directly into my SCJS undergraduate course, “American Jewish Museums and Material Culture.” Although the Congress was rich with research and presentations on many aspects of Jewish history, culture, philosophy, religion, and art from around the world, it was particularly jarring to me, at the same time, to be together in Israel without a single panel or presentation on Jewish-Palestinian issues or relations either past, present, or future.

During the remainder of my time, I traveled from the Galilee to the Negev, and the West Bank to the Mediterranean Sea, doing ethnographic fieldwork with Yemenite, Ethiopian, Bedouin, and Palestinian traditional artisans who share a single experience— they have each won a coveted position over the past decade to participate in the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the largest folk art market in the world.

This research, “Folk Art in the Global Marketplace: An Israeli / Palestinian Pilot Study,” was designed to explore the financial, artistic, and social impact of this international entrepreneurial market on the artists and their workshops once they return to their home communities in Israel and Palestine. In the 15 years of the Market’s existence, there have only been a handful of Israeli/Palestinian artists, and I was able to track down almost every one—either for in-person or virtual interviews. They included a 9th generation Yemenite Jewish jeweler in Tel Aviv’s Jaffa District, a Bedouin women’s rug weaving coop in the Negev, a Palestinian women’s embroidery workshop in Gaza City, a Palestinian glass blowing family workshop in Hebron, and a Jewish Ethiopian basket maker near Pardes Hanna-Karkur. I was interested in learning more about how the Market had impacted their business, artistic, or social justice initiatives in this conflictridden region. Indeed, the three-day escalation of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities and deadly violence in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel in early August was a powerful reminder of the complicated political and personal realities at the heart of these artisans’ lives and work.

Although my sample was relatively small, this pilot study provided hours of important ethnographic documentation and insights on the role of the International Folk Art Market in many artisans’ careers. It ranged from those who came to the Market only once and found it to be the wrong venue for their work, to those who have returned to Santa Fe almost every year for over a decade, bringing home tens of thousands of dollars in revenue each summer, and, gaining access to financial and marketing resources both in their home communities and abroad. Also included in the study was one women’s embroidery cooperative in Gaza City that continues to sell their products at the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe, even while their members are no longer able to physically join other Market artists because of political strife in their home regions which prevents them from receiving the necessary travel visas for the trip to the U.S.

Yet no matter what their experience in Santa Fe, the International Folk Art Market experience seemed to have positive effects on their artisan business for most of the artists upon their return. The founder of the Bedouin women’s weaving cooperative parlayed the publicity around her position at the Market in only one summer (2009) into an invitation to speak at the UN, host Jill Biden in the Negev, gain funds from the Israeli government for literacy and economic development training for Bedouin women, and shift on a dime during Covid from in-person sales to major wholesale contracts with interior arts designers in Scandinavia and throughout Europe. The 39-year-old manager of his family’s glass blowing business in Hebron commented that he felt he had “grown up at the Market” and in the dozen years since he began going to Santa Fe, has seen his family’s small local workshop catapult into an international best seller, even partnering with the famous Dale Chihuly (poster child for the post WWII studio crafts movement) on a joint artisan innovation.

What was most powerful for me was to bear witness to the many concrete ways in which the ongoing conflicts in the region continue to impact the relationships and lives of the artists I interviewed. Although it was perhaps expected that the Palestinian artists (geographically divided in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel) would form close professional and personal bonds with each other through their introductions at the Market, it was also true that some Palestinian/ Jewish friendships and networks were profitably maintained once the artists returned to their home communities. One example of this was the Palestinian glass blowers from Hebron and the Yemenite Jewish jeweler in Jaffa who formed what they referred to as a lasting family and collegial friendship through the years—a friendship that is logistically complicated today by the current walls, policies, and check points that prevent them from traveling to each other’s homes. My husband and I were acutely aware of these geopolitical realities (albeit under the security of American passports) when we happened to get on the wrong bus from Jerusalem to Hebron for my appointment with the artists, and were let off in the Israeli military-controlled “ghost town” neighborhood of what was once a thriving Palestinian business center, having to make our way on foot through an un-manned turnstile back into the West Bank, Palestiniancontrolled area of Hebron.

And while the Market afforded both opportunities, resources, and personal connections to the artists in this conflict-ridden region, my interviews also pointed out the sometimes painful ways in which the Market’s marketing strategies sometimes seemed to naively capitalize on a constructed narrative of “cross-cultural peace through art” that eschewed the real life dangers and realities in this region of the Middle East. One artist relayed the story of how Market staff continually “played up” the coming together of Palestinian and Jewish artists under one folk art Market tent for “photo and interview ops,” without recognizing the potentially dangerous consequences of these visual media portrayals back home. Another Palestinian (Bedouin) artist living in Israel admitted that she was uncomfortable with the Market’s opening night “parade” in which artists are asked to dress in their ‘native dress” and march through town under their national flags—in her case, the national flag of Israel, to which she does not primarily express allegiance.

While I look forward to further processing and analyzing these oral history interviews in the coming months, I know already that this summer’s research has provided me a more nuanced understanding of the complicated ways in which the global art marketplace—and the business of heritage making and marketing more generally—intersects with real world geopolitics to impact the lives, the arts, and the communities of those living in active conflict-ridden regions such as Israel/Palestine.