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Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book juxtaposes Israeli and Palestinian personal narratives about the past with contemporary museum exhibits, street plaques, tourism, and real estate projects that are reshaping the city since the decline of the peace process and the second intifada. What emerges is a portrayal of Jerusalem both as a local place with unique rhythms and topography and as a setting for national imaginaries and agendas with their attendant political and social tensions.  As sites of memory, Jerusalem’s homes, streets, and natural areas form the setting for emotionally charged narratives about belonging and rights to place. Recollections of local customs and lifeways in the mid-twentieth century coalesce around residents’ desire for stability amid periods of war, dispossession, and relocation?? intertwining the mythical with the mundane. Hercbergs begins by taking the reader to the historically Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, whose streets are a battleground for competing historical narratives about the Israeli-Arab War of 1948. She goes on to explore the connections and tensions between Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians living across the border from one another in Musrara, a neighborhood straddling West and East Jerusalem. The author rounds out the monograph with a semiotic analysis of contemporary tourism and architectural ventures that are entrenching ethno-national separation in the post-Oslo period. These rhetorical expressions illuminate what it means to be a ??erusalemite in the context of the city’s fraught history.  Overlooking the Border examines the social and geographic significance of borders for residents’ sense of self, place, and community, and for representations of the city both locally and abroad. 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Chapter 3 examines food and class with tales that reflect on how sharing food to support those in need is a universal social act considered a \"\"mitzvah\"\" (a Jewish religious obligation), but it can also become an unspoken burden for the providers. Chapter 4 deals with food and kashrut-the tales included in this chapter expose the various challenges of \"\"keeping kosher,\"\" mainly the heavy financial burden it causes and the social price paid by the inability of sharing meals with non-Jews. Finally, Chapter 5 explores food and sacred time, with tales that convey the tension and stress caused by finding and cooking specific foods required for holiday feasts, the Shabbat and other sacred times. The tales themselves can be appreciated for their literary quality, humor, and profound wisdom. 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The stories they tell encompass a myriad of genres and themes, including mythical tales,historical legends, sacred legends, demon legends, realistic legends, märchen of various sorts, novellas, jokes and anecdotes, and personal narratives.  Contributors employ diverse approaches to analyze and interpret the stories. The methods applied include the classic comparative approach, which looks at tale types, oikotypes, and motifs; formalism, which considers narrative roles and narrative functions; structuralism, which aims to uncover a story’s deep structure and its binary oppositions; a psychological approach, which analyzes the tales using psychological theories, ranging from Freud to Lacan; Marxist theory, which sees the folktale as an expression of the class struggle; and more.  Translated for the first time into English, the stories included and accompanying essays are evidence of the lively research being conducted today on folk literature. 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Based on forty-five in-depth narrative interviews, the research in this book examines how identities and a sense of belonging emerge on different social levels - the individual, the group, and the collective - through voices that evoke both the familiar and the Other. In addition, \"\"A Narrative Community\"\" makes a significant contribution to modern tourism literature by exploring the sociolinguistic dimension related to tourists' accounts and the transformation of self that occurs with the experience of travel. In particular, it addresses the interpersonal persuasion that travelers use in their stories to convince others to join in the ritual of backpacking by stressing the personal development that they have gained through their journeys. This volume is groundbreaking in its dialogical conceptualization of the interview as a site of cultural manifestation, innovation, and power relations. 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