The Contributions of the Nonverbal and Visual to the Analysis of Jewish Folklore: Intergenerational Transmission in the Context of Migration

This paper draws upon ethnographic fieldwork and oral history research with elder storytellers who participated in the “Beit She’an Project” (Noy, Shenhar, and Bar-Itzhak, 1977-1979) and their descendants. This project recorded three hundred folk narratives told by Jewish elders of Beit She’an who immigrated from Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq/Kurdistan, and Iran. Ernst (2013) traced the first-generation immigrant elder storytellers and their descendants. Multi-generational interviews were conducted with as many as fifteen different families, extending to three to four generations per family, including “extended kin” and distant relatives.

I address a previously neglected dimension in both the study and transmission of Jewish folklore -- the nonverbal, which involves paralinguistic, kinesic, and visual dimensions. I argue that attention to the nonverbal and visual is critical to understanding intergenerational transmission. The potential for this new methodological and theoretical approach will be discussed as it relates to understanding intersubjective processes during narration, the construction and reconstruction of individual and collective memories, and the role of embodied and sensory experiences in narration and memory.