Beyond Revisionism: Recent Trends in Israeli Historiography

This article contends that the "new history" of the Israeli-Arab conflict is no longer a revolutionary force in Israeli academia, & that it represents only a small portion of the historiographical innovation that has taken place within Israeli academia within the past 15 years. To some degree, the arguments of revisionist historians have been incorporated into the mainstream historiographic consensus, while the more extreme arguments have been marginalized. At the same time, academic interest has expanded beyond Israel's military & political history to include the mass immigration of the state's early years, the impact of the Holocaust & of the Holocaust survivors on the state, transformation within the Orthodox community & its relations with the secular majority, & a variety of forms of economic, cultural, & gender history. In contemporary Israeli historiography, self-conscious revisionism is ultimately less significant than incremental innovation as a force for the creation of knowledge. Adapted from the source document.