Tel Aviv - Mumbai - Tel Aviv: Same-Sex couples seeking parenthood in India

In Israel religious belonging remains a central category of citizenship. Laws concerning reproductive technologies such as the surrogacy law from 1996 are strongly informed by Orthodox rabbis’ kinship concepts (Kahn 2000, Shalev 1998, Weisberg 2005). A set of regulations secures that heterosexual Jewish couples bring into being children who are unequivocally Jewish themselves. The Israeli surrogacy law can therefore be understood as part of a policy seeking to reproduce the boundaries of the Jewish-Israeli collective. Same-sex couples do not fit this narrow definition of family and have no access to surrogacy in Israel. Yet gay couples maintain that parenthood is a universal civil right and bypass their exclusion through surrogacy arrangements abroad. The proposed paper follows these couples to Mumbai, which has become a popular destination for surrogacy in recent years. After their children’s birth the couples spend three to five weeks in India. In this time they not only take on their new tasks as fathers. They are also occupied with the bureaucracy of disconnecting the children from India and turning them into Israeli citizens. The paper elaborates on the bureaucratic processes and the hurdles same-sex couples encounter when seeking recognition of their parenthood and citizenship for their children. It unveils the intricacies and ramifications of Israel’s contradicting surrogacy policy of enforcing narrow definitions of family inside the country and simultaneously outsourcing problematic cases.

Contrasts, Contacts, and Interconnections — Tel Kinrot as an Early Iron Age Key Site in the Northern Jordan Rift Valley at the Dawn of the 1st Millennium BCE

Ancient Kinneret (Tēl Kinrōt [Hebrew]; Tell el-ʿOrēme [Arabic]) is located on a steep limestone hill on the northwestern shores of the Sea of Galilee (2508.7529 [NIG]). The site, whose settlement history began sometime during the Pottery-Neolithic or the early Chalcolithic period, is emerging as one of the major sites for the study of urban life in the Southern Levant during the Early Iron Age (c. 1130–950 BCE). Its size, accessibility by major trade routes, and strategic location between different spheres of cultural and political influence make Tēl Kinrōt an ideal place for studying the interaction of various cultures on urban sites, as well as to approach questions of ethnicity and regionalism during one of the most debated periods in the history of the ancient Levant. The paper will briefly discuss the settlement history of the site during the Early Iron Age. However, the main focus will lie on the material culture of the late Iron Age IB city that rapidly evolved to a regional center during the transition from the 11th to the 10th century BCE. During this period, ancient Kinneret features a multitude of cultural influences that reach from Egypt via the Central Hill Country until the Northern parts of Syria and the Amuq region. While there are indisputably close ties with the ‘Aramaean’ realm, there are also strong indications that there were – at the same time – vivid socio-economic links with the West, i.e. the Southern and Northern Mediterranean coasts and their hinterland. It will be argued that the resulting ‘cultural blend’ is a typical characteristic of the material culture of the Northern Jordan Rift Valley in the advent of the emerging regional powers of the Iron Age II.

Who, When, and Why – Investigating Cultural Footprints at Early Iron Age Tel Kinrot

Ancient Kinneret (Tel Kinrot [Hebrew]; Tell el-‘Orēme [Arabic]) is located on a steep limestone hill on the northwestern shores of the Sea of Galilee (map ref. 2508.7529 [NIG]; 35.56/32.87 [WGS84]). The site, whose settlement history began sometime during the Pottery-Neolithic or the early Chalcolithic period, is emerging as one of the major sites for the study of urban life in the Southern Levant during the Early Iron Age (c. 1130–950 BCE). Its size, accessibility by major trade routes, and strategic location between different spheres of cultural and political influence make Tel Kinrot an ideal place for studying the interaction of various cultures on urban sites, as well as to approach questions of ethnicity and regionalism during one of the most debated periods in the history of the ancient Southern Levant.

Das Werk als Feige und als Figur. Ambivalenzen der Rezeption zwischen Valéry, Mallarmé, "Tel Quel" und Francis Ponge

L’œuvre poétique de Valéry est caractérisée par une esthétique de la perfection, de la pureté et de la clôture. La série ouverte et hétérogène des "Cahiers", en revanche, ne se laisse guère ranger dans la catégorie de l’œuvre. Selon Valéry, la réorientation intellectuelle à la base de cette opposition est due au "choc" subi par la découverte de l’œuvre mallarméenne. Les divers écrits valéryens sur Mallarmé nous servent à reconstruire cette relation ambivalente et nous aident à éclairer sa conception non moins ambivalente de l’œuvre d’art. Nous soutenons que ce ne sont pas ses propres travaux, mais les poésies de Mallarmé qui lui semblaient des œuvres achevées à proprement parler. Pour décrire l’expérience de perfection et d’achèvement que lui fournit la lecture du "Coup de dés", Valéry se sert de la notion de figure qui, entre autres, comporte des associations géométriques. Sous la forme d’un hommage ambivalent, Francis Ponge oppose aux concepts valéryens de figure et d’œuvre d’art une poétique de l’objet matériel et concret qui s’incarne dans "La figue (sèche)", publiée en 1960 comme pièce inaugurale de la revue "Tel Quel".