This Trilingual book [English- Arabic-Hebrew] examines the Temple Mount as a key visual icon in a variety of cultural arenas of Israeli life. By analyzing photographs, posters, postcards, architectural models, sketches and heritage sites, the essays collected here exposes the centrality of Temple Mount in the Zionist discourse, not only of marginal religious messianic groups, but also of the Israeli mainstream, which defines itself as ostensibly secular.
The eight articles that comprise this book are accompanied by a collection of both popular and rare images of the Temple Mount, found in institutional Israeli archives and in private collections. In addition, it includes contemporary photographs that engage with the historical collection and respond to it.
This book is a cross between an academic volume, a memorial album and an exhibition catalog. It presents original and critical researches, but also strives to break out beyond the boundaries of academia by its accessible form and language. It aesthetics recall memorial albums, but it also seeks to undermine the authority of memory such albums pertain to possess. It is an exhibition catalog, but the exhibition itself is borderless and without a specific time frame, as it is still growing.
Editor: Noa Hazan
Contributors: Barak Avital, Guez Dor, Hazan Noa, Jabali Muhammad, Merav Mack, Ophir Hagar, Schwartz Hava, Padan Yael, Yacobi Haim
Prologue - Noa Hazan Above and Beyond the View Line - Noa Hazan and Avital Barak The Return To The Momument - Hava Schwartz Temple and Law - Haim Yacobi Moving the Second Temple - Yael Padan Imagination, Memory and Fantasy - Merav Mack How many political-theological particles can be replicated from a single photograph? - Muhammad Jabali From Orientalism to Militarism – photographic representations of the Dome of the Rock - Dor Guez I See Her, and I See Neither Mount Nor Temple - Hagar Ophir