Heidi Grunebaum

Heidi Grunebaum is a writer and scholar at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Her work focuses on social and aesthetic responses to the afterlives of genocide, war and mass violence and on the Holocaust, apartheid and the Nakba, in particular. Her research interests include critical memory studies; aesthetics and politics; postcolonial theory and public culture. With Mark J. Kaplan she made the feature length documentary films, The Village Under the Forest (2013) and The Return (2024). Her poetry is published in Botsotso Journal for South African Arts and Cultures and Running Towards Us: New Writing from South Africa and New Contrast.

Beyond partition: the aesthetics of Jewish world-making after Zionism

This research project engages with what it might mean to re-constellate the perceptual and sensorial distributions of partition, an operative idea of colonial modernity, as these pertain to the current predicaments of Zionism as the hegemonic form of Jewish nationalism in Israel. Zionism was the European Jewish political response to the failure of Europe to resolve the political conundrum it named “the Jewish Question”, a conundrum which marked the problem both of “minority” and of “race” for Europe’s political modernity. With this project, I seek to develop a postcolonial critique of Zionism as part of a wider critique of the edifice of Euro-American forgetting its implication in the “world systemic order” (Sylvia Wynter) – its forms of slavery, extraction, ecocide, genocide, and racial subjection. Inside this frame, the critique of Zionism may better examine why partition remains the dominant way to imagine a territorialised political and ethical relationship between Jew and Palestinian. If assimilation, domination, segregation, expulsion, apartheid and extermination were colonial modes of subjection, the Zionist enterprise in Palestine would remove Jews from a Europe that had historically subjected its Jewish populations to all kinds of administrative exclusions, including, with the Shoah, extermination. In addressing this predicament, this project, imagined as a collection of essays, seeks to rethink the problem of Jewish collectivity in Palestine and the modes of partition it inaugurated through an engagement with the artistic production by those historically erased by the nationalisation of Jewish memory and whom may offer, through a close reading of a selection of cultural production by Palestinian, Arab Jewish and anti-Zionist Jewish artists, writers and filmmakers, an image of Jewish world-making beyond partition.

Associate Professor Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, Capetown, South Africa

Book of the Missing. Lagos: Praxis Magazine, 2019.
with Kurt Campbell. Athlone in Mind. Cape Town: Centre for Humanities Research, 2017.
with Emile Maurice, eds., Memorializing the Past: Everyday Life in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation. Uncontained. Cape Town: Centre for Humanities Research, 2012.
Commission. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011.