Melancholic Attachments: Diaspora and Sexuality in Contemporary Israeli Cinema
This essay explores the intersectionality between diaspora and nationalism, heterosexuality and queerness in recent Israeli cinema. I would like to argue that the films Three Mothers and Late Wedding offer a radical critique of both Israeli national and diasporic narratives relying on a patrilineal family tree structured by heterosexual marriage and reproduction and therefore excluding non-heteronormative sexualities and desires. The films expose and challenge the politics of oedipal organization and normative kinship systems by deploying modes of melancholia to reimagine and reassemble new forms of identification and belonging to spaces such as home and nation that have traditionally denied queer existence.
The More the Merrier? Some Cultural Logics of the Institution of Siblingship in Israel
Over the last decades, a rich and interdisciplinary body of knowledge about siblingship has emerged. In addition, sociological and feminist writings have dealt with the institution of the family, marriage, and the politics of reproduction. However, the routinization of the birth of brothers and sisters has remained relatively marginal in deconstructive sociological research, and very little has been said about the intensity of the discourse that purports to explain the very existence of what I call "the institution of siblingship". This article seeks to enrich the knowledge about the routinization of the institution of siblingship in Israeli society. It is argued that this institution is constructed inter alia by three cultural logics: (1) a discourse of "moral parenthood"; (2) ideas concerning the "good virtue" of the "correct size” for a family; and (3) cultural attitudes regarding temporality within the family and "family time".
Identity Rifts Among Religious Priests of Immigrants from Ethiopia in Israel
Rachel Sharabi and Aviva Kaplan
This research deals in young and old Ethiopian religious priests (kessoch), who are spiritual leaders of immigrants from Ethiopia in Israel. These two "invisible" groups cope differently with their social and cultural marginality and lack of legitimacy from the religious establishment and society in Israel. Among the old kessoch, some found new meaning for their life in Israel, and attempt to preserve significant identity rifts. Others are disengaged from life materials in the present, and find meager meaning. In contradistinction, the young kessoch express a behavior pattern of "daily resistance" towards the absorbing society. They selectively choose "parts of reality" with meaning appropriate for them. Wise use of "identity rifts" serves them in their social inclusion processes.
Waves of Communication: Symbolic Type and Systematically Distorted Communication
Based on a participant observation study conducted in 1993 in "Little Home", a semi-commune in Tel Aviv, this article examines Grathoff’s Symbolic Type Theory (1970) and Habermas’s Deliberative Democracy Theory of "systematically distorted communication" in regards to symbolic type in which men are trapped. It further examines behavior with a unique pattern I call "waves" that occurs among women as a protest against the symbolic types. Habermas’s thesis relates to the power emanating from the lifeworld in the form of strategy disguised as communication. This pathology derives from asymmetrical family relations that create emotional disorders in the individual. The symbolic types witnessed within the family/commune of "Little Home", enabled an in-depth study of a unique structure of systematically distorted communication.
"Between politics and therapy, between criticism and pity: debates among mental health practitioners over the experience of the Disengagement from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank" | Galia Plotkin Amrami
The article addresses the relationship between professional knowledge, politics and morality. It analyzes the modes of representation and mediation of the Disengagement experience in the interpretations of mental health practitioners and seeks to detect the expressions of their political positions in the therapeutic narratives subjected to the principles of professional discourse. Two expressions of the presence of the political in therapeutic narration are discussed: 1) the conception of causality in constructing the narratives of the evacuation experience and 2) the modes of mediation of this experience directed to mobilize empathy. It was found that the criticism against the settlement ideological project was reflected in the construction of the causality in a way that challenges the evacuee's moral and psychological purity. On the other hand, one can point at the strategies and conditions of the mediation of the "Disengagement trauma" that transform it into suffering worthy of therapeutic empathy. This case study raises the need to expand the theoretization of complex intertwining of therapy and politics, enactment of therapeutic practitioner's moral criticism and her/his commitment to empathic recognition of suffering as such.
This paper examines the relationship between two sociological terms: professionalism and hegemony, focusing on a time of crisis - the crisis of a hegemony that has been shaken and an elite whose power has declined, as well as the crisis of a profession whose authority and autonomy have suffered. This relationship is examined by means of analyzing the professional architectural discourse in Israel in the 1980s, during the first stages of the privatization process. The findings suggest that in times of crisis, the profession abandons the professional discourse and takes part in social power struggles. Using the professional monopoly and ostensibly professional terms, professionals attack the social powers threatening their class, in an attempt to preserve the old hegemonic order.
Sociology in the first person
After the Prison | Ofra Greenberg
Taking leave of their research community can be a prolonged and complex process for anthropologists. It generally occurs in stages and in some cases never actually comes to an end. In this article I present such a case. Years after completing and publishing my anthropological study of a women’s prison in Israel I unexpectedly came across former inmates. These indirect encounters provided a trickle of information on events that had taken place in the intervening period. The fresh data painted the distant past in different shades and raised questions about my interpretation of events at the time. This process generates deliberations about the act of taking leave of the field, and about the temporal and spatial boundaries of anthropological research.
This article seeks to answer the question: Why has Baruch Kimmerling not described Israel as a colonial society in spite of the obvious similarities his analysis of Israeli society bears to colonial theory. First, five central "Kimmerling theses" on Israel are offered, then it is shown that criticism aimed at the school of thought that Israel is a colonial society are simultaneously equally critical of the "Kimmerling theses." It is then argued that Kimmerling refrained from using the colonial label since he preferred to coin is own scholarly nomenclature. Finally, the broader question of the use of politically loaded terms in the social sciences is considered.
Two perspectives on the book "How society is possible?" by Georg Simmel
Book Reviews:
On: The Bureaucracy of the Occupation in the West Bank: The Permit Regime 2000-2006 \ Yael Berda
On: Whose City Is It? Planning, Knowledge and Everyday Life \ Tovi Fenster
On: Figurations of Violence and Belonging: Queerness, Migranthood and Nationalism in Cyberspace and Beyond \ Adi Kuntsman
On: Fantasy of the State: Photographs of IDF Female Soldiers and Eroticization of Civil Militarism in Israel \ Chava Brownfield-Stein
On: Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self \ Elly Teman
On: Arab-Jewish Activism in Israel-Palestine \ Marcelo Svirsky
On: Fortified Land: Police and Policing in Israel \ Erella Shadmi
On: Food For Thought: Transnational Contested Identities and Food Practices of Russian-Speaking Jewish Migrants in Israel and Germany \ Julia Bernstein
On: Martin Buber: The Hidden Dialogue \ Dan Avnon
On: From the Promised Land: Modern Discourse on African Jewry \ Jonas Zianga
On: Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet \ Deborah A. Starr and Sasson Somekh (eds.)
On: In the Cement Boxes: Mizrahi Women in the Israeli Periphery \ Pnina Motzafi-Haller
Response of Esther Herzog to a review of her book by Lauren Erdrich
Patrons of Women: Literacy Projects and Gender Development in Rural Nepal