Weizmann was a public Jewish elementary school located in a mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood at the heart of Jaffa. The article presents a case study of the school from 2000 to 2011, and particularly the last four years, in an attempt to determine the status and implications of Jewish-Arab integration in the school. While in other contexts, ethnic mixing is dictated from above and designed to promote social integration, in this case it developed from the ground up under the force of circumstances. We refer to this as “circumstantial integration”. The main impetus to developments in the school was the demographic change that has been taking place in the neighborhood over the last few decades, with growing numbers of Arab residents. For various reasons, some of those residents sought to provide their children with a Hebrew-language education. Both the national and municipal education authorities hoped to preserve Weizmann as a Hebrew-language school, but refused to resort to undemocratic discriminatory policies that would exclude Arabs. During the period under study, several alternative strategies have been attempted, with various degrees of failure. We believe that these failures result from the tension between Israel’s definition as both a Jewish and a democratic state. This tension led to indecision between the school’s Jewish and multi-cultural character, resulting in unplanned circumstances dictating developments on the ground. In addition, we found that the various parent groups were not motivated exclusively by Arab-Jewish concerns. The school’s participant communities were also guided by class, cultural and religious considerations that defy the conventional dichotomous nationalist perspective.
Study to Succeed: The Neoliberal Promise and the 2011 Summer Protest
The paper offers a new perspective on the way the neoliberal revolution in Israel influenced the 2011 Summer Protest. The erosion of the promise neoliberalism aims to offer, according to which acquiring higher education would advance individuals’ welfare and provide them with a ‘safety net’ against market volatility, was instrumental in igniting and shaping the protest. This argument is supported by comparing the Israeli protest to its Chilean counterpart. Problems in the realization of the neoliberal promise were created in Chile by the operation of the higher education system, while in Israel they appeared in the passage between academic graduation and labor market remunerations. Therefore, in Chile, the protest focused on the structure of the higher education system, while in Israel, its strongest supporters were academics, whose wage was eroded prior to the protest.
Academic institution and graduates employment opportunities
Yasmin Barselai-Shaham and Meir Yaish
The expansion of the Israeli higher education system, began in the 90's, has created a change in labor market's attitude towards graduates, which is reflected in their occupational achievement that vary depending on the authorizing institution. This study will examine occupational achievement from a unique perspective: Data obtained in a recruitment and placement company will follow the decisions relating to engineers, job seekers, who graduated from various institutions, and thus reflecting how employment opportunities provided to employees are dependent on their degree of attractiveness. Findings indicate that with respect to engineers, labor market distinguishes between graduates by institution attended, and prefer university graduates. Institutional influence remained significant after controlling for demographic variables and work experience. Research also found that employers prefer to have candidates who can demonstrate academic excellence.
Repertoires of Expertise in Israeli Social Change Organizations
Using the case study of the field of social change organizations in Israel, we try to understand how expertise operates in social contexts lacking in professional qualification. Through 39 interviews with members in such organizations we identified a common repertoire of expertise which includes vocabularies, practices and scripts prevalent in the field. This repertoire enables actors to successfully perform relevant tasks, solve common problems, advance their goals and cope with dangers such as cooptation and goal displacement. An analysis of three central aspects of the repertoire – criticism, order and specialization – shows that the relevant practices and scripts address the actors' need to create, maintain and nurture social networks geared towards task-performing or problem-solving. This analysis allows us to offer a way to bridge the gap between conflicting theoretical strands in the sociology of expertise and contribute to the development of this burgeoning theoretical strand.
Laughing in the Square? The Commemoration of Yitzhak Rabin and His Assassination in Israeli Humor
This study explores the collective memory of Yitzhak Rabin through analysis of humorous skits aired after his assassination. The study analyzes aspects of the collective memory as they appeared in the skits and the humor’s usage of such aspects, revealing the conflict between remembrance and forgetfulness of Rabin and the assassination, characteristics of Israeli society and the extent of its recuperation from the national trauma. The study asserts that humor’s position as "lieux de memoire" and its ability to convey subversive messages, allows it to function as a platform for discussion and social negotiation, simultaneously containing multiple points of view. Humor therefore holds the ability to bridge between disparate audiences and to create a multivocal memory even when the collective memory is traumatic and fragmented.
The Right to the Cityscape: Struggles from "bellow" for Arad
The combination of local landscape, sense of place, and sense of community, is a mobilizing power to claim the right to the city, within the framework of clashing and sharing spaces: the absolute, the relative and the relational space from above and from bellow. In the global era this subject almost hasn't been researched in a small frontier town. I argue that due to the threat on its local symbols and injustices, the local identity dynamics mobilize social activism, as is in the case of Arad, a Negev town in Israel. The paper aims to answer the following questions: What caused the creation of civil society grouping process in Arad, which struggles for the right to protect the cityscape vis-à-vis the "free market" forces? What are the role and significance of the social-cultural-physical image that mobilizes the inhabitants and activate them? The paper concludes that the social justice protests, especially in Israel; a weak and non-participating elected municipal leadership; and a strong civil society with an activist heritage caused the blooming of social struggles in the public space that have. The structure of the paper includes: a theoretical framework; a short background of Arad's characteristics; and will concentrate on analyzing the four case studies by employing the interpretive analysis methodology.
This article deploys the framework of political-economy in order to examine the exponential growth of Israel's settlement project. Using archival materials it demonstrates that growth in the region was triggered by a turn away from construction of small and isolated settlement outposts, and a concentration of resources in large urban localities in the areas of high-demand around Jerusalem and the Tel-Aviv metropolitan area. Although met with resistance from the ideologically-religious settlement movement, state-funded urban development initiated by the Ministry of Housing and Construction was concentrated in Settlements such as Ma'ale Adumim, Ariel and Givat Ze'ev which offered affordable housing, public investment in infrastructure and social services, and direct links to employment centers within Israel proper. This investment allowed the State to offer partial solutions to growing housing shortages, which in turn, helped maintain its legitimacy vis-à-vis Israel's lower classes, as well as members of the private-business sector who starting in this period became central partners in the advancement of the settlements project.
Essay:
The Post-Zionist School: A Negative Dialectic | Udi Adiv
In this article I will examine the recent works of the post-Zionist writers. Quite certainly, and contrary to the writers of the neo-Zionist schools, these works examined the reality of the Zionist movement and the Israel society in rather more critical tools. Having said that, the problem with the post- Zionist school is twofold. On the one hand, it is problem of criticism for criticism's sake, where the main issue is lack of any ideal perspective, from which the criticism is to be made. On the other hand, providing that, at best, the criticism of the post-Zionists reaches these places of an "ideal", that ideal simply duplicates the dominant reality. For that reason, it is scarcely surprising to find that criticism embraced and welcomed as such by the mainstream institutions.
Two perspectives on the book "Exile of the Broken Vessels : Haredim in the Shadow of Madness" by Yehuda Goodman
Two perspectives on the book "Women and Migration: Art and Gender in a Transnational Age" by Tal Dekel
Book Reviews:
On: Why Love Hurts \ Eva Illouz
On: Points of reference: Changing Identities and Social Positioning in Israel \ Zeev Shavit, Orna Sasson-Levy and Guy Ben-Porat (eds.)
On: Ethnographic Encounters in Israel: Poetics and Ethics of Fieldwork \ Fran Markowitz (ed.)
On: Housewives of Japan \ Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni
On: Agency and Gender in Gaza: Masculinity, Femininity and Family during the Second Intifada \ Aitemad Muhanna
On: Popular Music and National Culture in Israel \ Edwin Seroussi and Motti Regev
On: School for Cool: The Academic Jazz Program and the Paradox of Institutionalized Creativity \ Eitan Y. Wilf
On: Practices of Difference in Israeli Education: A View from Below \ Yossi Yonah, Nissim Mizrachi and Yariv Feniger (eds.)
Response of Beverly Mizrachi to a review of her book by Henriette Dahan Kalev
Paths to Middle-Class Mobility among Second-Generation Moroccan Immigrant Women in Israel