The Symbol and the Stone: Jerusalem at the Millennium

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between sacrality and sovereignty, between symbolic and material realities in Jerusalem's politics from the Six Day War of 1967 to the present and as Jerusalem moves toward the millennium. It begins with the Israeli efforts to separate the city's sacred places from political solutions and how this affects religious traditions and their communities in the city. It takes up the growing symbolic importance of Jerusalem for American evangelical Christians, then how the city functions as a ritual theater for Israeli and Palestinian politics, and, finally, how the city is doubly cleaved: between communities at the level of politics and within each community around the relationship between the political order and the religious order, especially since the signing of the Oslo accords and the defeat in 1993 of Jerusalem's longtime liberal mayor, Teddy Kollek, and his replacement by center-right Likud mayor Ehud Olmert.