In this article the authors use the concept of “place memory” to contemplate how the temporal qualities of places inflect the activities carried out in them by considering how one group, the Haifa chapter of Women in Black (WiB) in Israel, makes conscious and unconscious use of the possible readings of an “ordinary” place and its history. The authors demonstrate the argument by analyzing the group’s peregrinations over the past twenty years. After pointing to some scholarly insights regarding the use of place by protest movements and a brief introduction to the city of Haifa and WiB and its members, the authors move through the various sites where the movement held its vigils; they close by considering how the pasts of a place permeate the present and, in so doing, disrupt any possible unilinear reading of a place and open it up to multilinear and nonlinear readings.
L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1961). The first of such studies that comes to mind is David Lowenthal’s study The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
2.
Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place (London: Edward Arnold, 1977); John A. Jakle, The Visual Elements of Landscape (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). For an in-depth discussion of genus loci, see Gunila Jivén and Peter J. Larkham, "Sense of Place, Authenticity and Character: A Commentary," Journal of Urban Design 8 (2003): 67-81.
3.
Tova Benski, "Breaching Events and the Emotional Reactions of the Public: Women in Black," in Helena Flaum and Debra King, eds., Emotions and Social Movements (London: Routledge, 2005), 57-78; Sarah Helman and Tamar Rapoport, "Women in Black: Challenging Israel’s Gender and Socio-Political Orders,"British Journal of Sociology48 ( 1997): 683; Orna Sasson-Levy and Tamar Rapoport, "Body, Gender, and Knowledge in Protest Movements: The Israeli Case,"Gender & Society17 (2003): 379-403; Hannah Safran, "Alliance and Denial: Lesbian Protest in Women in Black," in Chava Frankfort-Nachmias and Erella Shadmi, eds., Sappho in the Holy Land: Lesbian Experience and Dilemmas in Contemporary Israel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 191-209; Erella Shadmi, "Between Resistance and Compliance, Feminism and Nationalism: Women in Black in Israel,"Women’s Studies International Forum23 (2000): 23-34.
4.
Orna Blumen and Sharon Halevi, "Staging Peace through a Gendered Demonstration: The Case of Women in Black in Haifa, Israel," Annals of the Association of American Geographers99 (2009): 977-985.
5.
For a survey of the field and the challenges social memory studies pose, see Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, "Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices," Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105-40. One cannot help but mention the great influence of historian Pierre Nora’s concept of "lieux de mémoire" as expounded in his work Rethinking France, trans. Mary Trouille (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001-2006).
6.
For examples of studies on the controversy surrounding the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Enola Gay exhibition at the Smithsonian, see Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, "The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past," American Journal of Sociology 97 (1991): 376-420; and Paul Boyer, "Exotic Resonances: Hiroshima in American Memory," in Michael J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For Israel, see Tamar Berger, Dionysus at Dizengoff Center [in Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv: Ha’Kibbutz Ha’meuchad, 1998); Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Tamir Sorek, "Cautious Commemoration: Localism, Communalism and Nationalism in Palestinian Memorial Monuments in Israel," Comparative Studies in Society and History 50 (2008): 337-68.
7.
Lisa Benton-Short, "Politics, Public Space and Memorials: The Brawl on the Mall," Urban Geography 27 (2006): 297-329; Fernando J. Bosco, "The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Three Decades of Human Rights’ Activism: Embeddedness, Emotions, and Social Movements," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96 (2006): 342-65; John Michael Roberts, "Spatial Governance and Working Class Public Spheres: The Case of Charterist Demonstration at Hyde Park," Journal of Historical Sociology 14 (2001): 308-36; Tali Hatuka and Rachel Kallus, "The Architecture of Repeated Rituals: Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square," Journal of Architectural Education 61 (2008): 85-95.
8.
Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 186-87; also see Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
9.
Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History ( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 46.
10.
Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994), 15. Also see Tim Ingold, "The Temporality of the Landscape," World Archaeology 25 (1993): 152-73; Joanna Brück, "Experiencing the Past? The Development of Phenomenological Archeology in British Prehistory," Archaeological Dialogues 12 (2005): 45-72.
11.
Alan Mayne and Susan Lawrence, "Ethnographies of Place: A New Urban Research Agenda," Urban History 26 (1999): 325. For a similar study carried out in Dresden, see Raymond Isaacs, "The Urban Picturesque: An Aesthetic Experience of Urban Pedestrian Places," Journal of Urban Design 5 (2000): 145-80. Also see Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymonone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
12.
Tim Creswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 16. Creswell’s argument echoes that of geographer Edward W. Soja who argued, "Social and spatial structures are dialectically intertwined in social life, not just mapped one onto the other as categorical projections." Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space on Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1990), 127.
13.
Doreen Massey , "Places and Their Pasts,"History Workshop Journal39 (1995): 186; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change ( Cambridge, UK: Blackwell, 1990), 227.
14.
On March 25, 1911, 146 immigrant garment workers (mostly young women) trapped in the building died in the fire. Karen J. Kroslowitz, "Spontaneous Memorials: Focus for Dialogue and Discourse," Museums and Social Issues 2 (2007): 243-56.
15.
Hilda Kuper, "The Language of Sites in the Politics of Space," in Setha M. Low and Denis LawrenceZúňiga, eds., The Anthropology of Space and Place (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 247-62. Also see Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theater State in the Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 102, 124, 131.
16.
Paul Rabinow , "Ordonnance, Discipline, Regulation: Some Reflections on Urbanism," in Low and Lawrence-Zúňiga, Anthropology of Space, 353-62.
17.
Steve Pile, "Opposition, Political Identities and Spaces of Resistance," in Steve Pile and Michael Keith , eds., Geographies of Resistance (London : Routledge, 1997), 26-30.
18.
Paul Routledge , "Backstreet, Barricades and Blackouts: Urban Terrains of Resistance in Nepal,"Environment and Planning D: Society and Space12 (1994): 559-78.
19.
Fernando J. Bosco, "Place, Space, Networks, and the Sustainability of Collective Action: The Madres de Plaza de Mayo,"Global Networks1 (2001): 307-29.
20.
Ernest Renan, "What Is a Nation?" trans. Martin Thom, in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 8-23; Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: The Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Also see Jose Marques, Dario Paez, and Alexandra F. Serra, "Social Sharing, Emotional Climate, and the Transgenerational Transmission of Memories: The Portuguese Colonial War," in James W. Pennebaker, Dario Paez, and Bernard Rimé, eds., Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997), 253-75; Richard L. Derderian, "Algeria as a Lieu de Mémoire: Ethnic Minority Memory and National Identity in Contemporary France," Radical History Review 83 (2002): 28-43.
21.
Alberto Melucci , "The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements,"Social Research52 ( 1985): 797.
22.
Manuel Castells , The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (London: Arnold, 1983), 1.
23.
For a detailed study of the use Women in Black (WiB) makes of material culture and the performative aspects of the vigil, see Sharon Halevi and Orna Blumen, "The Site of Silence: The Economy of Non-memory in Israel" Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (forthcoming).
24.
The railroad, which ran from Damascus in Syria to Medina in Saudi Arabia, turned Haifa into a major depot. See William Ochsenwald, The Hijaz Railroad (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1980).
25.
Technion was officially opened only in 1925 (some twelve years after the building had begun), although classes began to be held in late 1924.
26.
Arnon Soffer and Baruch Kipnis, "Development of Built-Up Area, Haifa," in Arnon Soffer and Baruch Kipnis, eds., Atlas of Haifa and Mount Carmel [in Hebrew] (Haifa, Israel: University of Haifa, Applied Scientific Research, 1980), 63.
27.
Deborah Bernstein , Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 48-80; May Seikaly, Haifa: Transformation of an Arab Society, 1918-1939 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995).
28.
Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Israel 2010. Table 2.12 http://www.cbs.gov.il/reader/ shnaton/templ_shnaton.html?num_tab=st02_12x&CYear=2010 (accessed February 18, 2011). The metropolitan area encompasses over half a million people, about 10 percent of the national population. Mixed cities is a term widely used in Israel to describe an urban situation in which Jewish and Arab communities live in and share the same municipal jurisdiction; see Dan Rabinowitz and Daniel Monterescu, "The Transformation of the Urban Mix in Palestine/Israel in the Modern Era," in Daniel Monterescu and Dan Rabinowitz, eds., Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities: Spatial Dynamics, Gender Relations and Cultural Encounters in Palestinian-Israeli Towns (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 3-6. About 6 percent of the pre-1948 Arab population remained in Haifa, but over the years their numbers grew with the influx of newcomers from the rural hinterland.
29.
Ghazi Falah, Michael Hoy, and Rakhal Sarker, "Co-existence in Selected Mixed Arab-Jewish Cities in Israel: By Choice or by Default?"Urban Studies37 (2000): 775-96.
30.
Blumen and Halevi, "Negotiating National Boundaries: Palestinian and Jewish Women’s Studies Students in Israel,"Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power12 (2005): 512, http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713663307~db=all~tab=issueslist~branches=12.
31.
Today WiB is a worldwide network of women committed to opposing war, violence, and injustice through public demonstrations.
32.
Helman and Rapoport, "Women in Black," 683; Safran, "Alliance and Denial," 191-209.
33.
These findings are shared by all the major studies of WiB vigils in Israel; see Helman and Rapoport, "Women in Black"; Safran, "Alliance and Denial"; Benski, "Breaching Events"; Sasson-Levy and Rapoport, "Body, Gender, and Knowledge"; and Shadmi, "Between Resistance and Compliance."
34.
In the late 1990s, to decrease air pollution in the city the central bus station was abandoned and spilt into two stations on the northern and southern outskirts of Haifa
35.
Until the late 1980s it was fairly common for Israeli soldiers (and many teenagers) to hitchhike between and within towns; since then the army has discouraged military personnel from continuing this practice, and most civilians have stopped too.
36.
Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 1995), 78; also see Mahyar Arefi, "Non-place and Placelessness as Narratives of Loss: Rethinking the Notion of Place," Journal of Urban Design 4 (1999): 179-83.
37.
Not all scholars agree with this view; Peter Merriman, for example, argues that Augé overstates his case when describing the novelty and difference of nonplaces and points that people who work in these "nonplaces" may come to experience them as "places." Merriman, "Driving Places: Marc Augé, Non-Places, and the Geographies of England’s M1 Motorway," Theory, Culture & Society 21 (2004): 145-67; also see Justine Lloyd, "Airport Technology, Travel and Consumption," Space and Culture 6 (2003): 93-109.
38.
See Yossi Katz, "The Establishment and Beginnings of the Neighborhood of Herzelia-The First Hebrew Neighborhood on the Carmel," [In Hebrew] Horizons in Geography 8 (1982): 49-56.
39.
The "garden city movement" was an approach to urban planning conceived of by the British urban planner Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928). For more on the "garden city" movement in England and in Palestine, see Stanley Buder, Missionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990); Standish Meacham, Regaining Paradise: Englishness and the Early Garden City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Neal I. Payton, "The Machine in the Garden City: Patrick Geddes’ Plan for Tel Aviv," Planning Perspectives 10 (1995): 359-81; Zvi Elhyani, "Horizontal Ideology, Vertical Vision: Oscar Niemeyer and Israel’s Height Dilemma," in Haim Yacobi, ed., Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 89-115.
40.
Yossi Ben Artzi, "Hadar Ha’carmel-The Heart of Hebrew Haifa" [in Hebrew], in Mordechai Naor and Yossi Ben Artzi, eds., Haifa in Development, 1918-1948 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1989), 251-62; Shimon Stern, "Hadar Ha’carmel-The Center of Jewish Life in Haifa" [in Hebrew], in Naor and Ben Artzi, Haifa in Development, 38-46.
41.
Myra Warhaftig, They Laid the Foundation: The Lives and Works of German-Speaking Jewish Architects in Palestine, 1918-1948, trans. Andrea Lerner (Tubingen , Germany: Ernst Wasmuth, 2007), 28-35, 288-93, 342-47.
42.
Naftaly Goldshleger, Irit Amit-Cohen, and Maxim Shoshany, "A Step Ahead of Time: Design Allocation and Preservation of Private Open Space in the 1920s-The Case of a Garden Suburb in Israel," GeoJournal 67 (2006): 56-67. Another important architect who was deeply involved in the urban planning of the Hadar Ha’carmel neighborhood, and indeed has left a lasting mark on Haifa itself, was Adolf Rading (1888-1957); his compatriot, architect and city planner, Richard Kaufman (1887-1958), had a similar impact on another of Haifa’s "garden city" neighborhoods, Ahuza; Ben Artzi, The Creation of the Carmel as a Segregated Jewish Residential Space in Haifa, 1918-1948 [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Hebrew University and Magnes Press, 2004).
43.
The offices were on Hillel Street. It just so happens that the protest was situated on the corner of two main streets named Herzl and Balfour (the rough American equivalent to this would be the corner of Washington and Jefferson). For more on the symbolic value of street names, see Duncan Light, "Street Names in Bucharest, 1990-1997: Exploring the Modern Historical Geographies of Post-Socialist Change," Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004): 154-72.
44.
Dan Bar-On , "Israeli Society between the Culture of Death and the Culture of Life,"Israel Studies2 (1997): 106-7.
45.
In 1953 the Technion moved to its new campus in Naveh Sha’anan, and only the Department of Architecture remained in Hadar Ha’carmel. The building was restored in 1986 and since then has housed a science museum.
46.
A 1995 survey found that close to 40 percent of Hadar Ha’carmel’s population was made up of immigrants who arrived after 1990; see http://www.iaa-conservation.org.il/article_Item_heb.asp?subject _id=37&id=95 (accessed October 19, 2008).
47.
Edna Lomsky-Feder and Tamar Rapoport, "Homecoming, Immigration and the National Ethos: Russian Jewish Homecomers Reading Zionism," Anthropological Quarterly 74 (2001): 1-14; Zvi Bekerman, "The Discourse of Nation and Culture: Its Impact of Palestinian-Jewish Encounters in Israel," International Journal of Intercultural Relations 26 (2002): 409-27.
48.
Researchers’ notes.
49.
Ben Artzi, From Germany to the Holy Land: Templer Settlement in Palestine [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1996). The colony was also the temporary home for slightly more eccentric visitors, such as diplomat, author, and traveler Sir Laurence Oliphant (1829-1888), who resided in the colony (1882-1885). Oliphant had been closely associated with the religious movement (the Brotherhood of the New Life) founded by American Thomas Lake Harris (1823-1906); he also entertained several notions regarding recolonization projects of the area.
50.
In 2008UNESCO declared the shrine, adjacent buildings, and gardens a world heritage site.
51.
Daniel Monterescu and Roy Fabian, "The ‘Golden Cage’: Gentrification and Globalization in the Andromeda Hill Project, Jaffa" [in Hebrew], Theory and Criticism23 (2003): 141-78.
52.
Sayid Kashua, "Haifa, the Bohemian City" [in Hebrew], Ha’aretz (special supplement-Arab Scenes), May 25, 2004, 14-17; Hannah Herzog, "Mixed Cities as Places of Choice: The Palestinian Woman’s Perspective," in Monterescu and Rabinowitz, Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities, 243-57.
53.
Sami Smooha, "Jewish Ethnicity in Israel: Symbolic or Real?" in Uzi Rebhum and Chaim Isaac Waxman, eds., Jews in Israel: Contemporary Social and Cultural Patterns ( Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2004), 56. Smooha uses the term Mizrachim to refer mainly to Jews from Arab countries; while they do indeed constitute the majority within this group, the term also encompasses Turkish, Kurdish, Iranian, and Indian Jews.
54.
After the theater’s demolition, the lot stood vacant for many years; in the late 1990s, City Center mall was built in its place.
55.
Rabinowitz, "‘The Arabs Just Left’: Othering and the Construction of Self amongst Jews in Haifa Before and After 1948," in Monterescu and Rabinowitz, Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities, 51-64. For life in Mandate Haifa, see Ben Artzi, "The Uniqueness of Haifa and Its Development in the Mandate Period," in Naor and Ben Artzi, Haifa in Development, 27-37; Daphna Sharfman, and Eli Nachmias, eds., Tea on the Casino’s Balcony: Coexistence in Haifa during the British Mandate, 1920-1948 [in Hebrew] (Haifa, Israel: Mishpaton, 2006).
56.
Michel Foucault , "Of Other Spaces," trans. Jay Miscowiec, Diacritics16 (1986): 24.
