The Making of the Georgian Nation

Review a wide-ranging book that analyzes the ways in which public imaginary has taken form in heritage sites throughout Spain. ― Sephardic Horizons Product Description The 2015 law granting Spanish nationality to the descendants of Jews expelled in 1492 is the latest example of a widespread phenomenon in contemporary Spain, the "re-discovery" of its Jewish heritage. In The Memory Work of Jewish Spain, Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa examine the implications of reclaiming this memory through the analysis of a comprehensive range of emerging cultural practices, political initiatives and institutions in the context of the long history of Spain's ambivalence towards its Jewish past. Through oral interviews, analyses of museums, newly reconfigured "Jewish quarters," excavated Jewish sites, popular festivals, tourist brochures, literature and art, The Memory Work of Jewish Spain explores what happens when these initiatives are implemented at the local level in cities and towns throughout Spain, and how they affect Spain's present. Review Based on extensive fieldwork, The Memory Work of Jewish Spain offers a well-theorized and well-historicized account of the heritage industry in contemporary Spain that encourages tourists to visit former Jewish quarters (real or invented) where Jewish culture was, precisely, obliterated. The book's most original feature is its analysis of the "multidirectional memory" that entangles the "recovery" of Jewish culture with the memory work around the victims of Francoist reprisals in and after the Spanish Civil War, in both cases predicated on an unpalatable history of violence that many prefer to ignore. -- Jo Labanyi, New York University About the Author Daniela Flesler is Associate Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. She is author of The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration and editor (with Adrián Pérez Melgosa and Tabea A. Linhard) of Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era.Adrián Pérez Melgosa is Associate Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. He is author of Cinema and Inter-American Relations: Tracking Transnational Affect and editor (with Daniela Flesler and Tabea A. Linhard) of Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era.