Spatial Citizenship as a Negotiation Process: The Gay Community in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem
This paper focuses on the multiple meanings of urban citizenship of gay people who live in Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Jerusalem. The paper investigates urban citizenship as ‘bottom up’, constructed on everyday life, and as ‘top down’, analyzing the municipal establishments’ and gay organizations’ perceptions of gay urban citizenship. After a short theoretical discussion the paper presents the existing research on gay communities’ interactions in global cities. It then illustrates the geographical, political and cultural differences between Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Jerusalem, and analyzes the research findings including the gay parades in the two cities. It concludes with a summary that emphasizes the various expressions of gay urban citizenship in the two cities.
This article maps the relationships between individuality and communal solidarity in the Israeli “Rainbow” gatherings, and their connections with local perceptions of the national collective. By analyzing the interactions through which the individual, the community, and the nation are made meaningful for participants, we demonstrate how the individual and the community are mutually constructed, and how communal solidarity is formed by disengagement from the political. Through this ethnography, we re-examine the sociological narrative according to which the Israeli collective has weakened in recent decades. The relations between “individualization,” “community,” and “the nation” should be understood, we argue, both in relation to macro-sociological discourses and as constructed in local fields, and in the pragmatic actions through which subjects are shaped.
Secular by the Letter, Religious by the Spirit: Attitudes of the Israeli New Age to Jewish Law
Adam Klin-Oron and Marianna Ruah-Midbar
A new religious identity group has formed in Israel: religious secularity. After characterizing the “package deal” of Israeli secular identity, we furnish examples from the Israeli New Age to highlight its recent transformations.
New Agers’ attitudes to religious Jewish law (halacha) are placed along an axis: from indifference or opposition, through hybrids between tradition and New Age, to preservation of Orthodox halacha. While the extreme attitudes reproduce the accepted Israeli division between secular and religious groups, the religious nature of all of the attitudes undermines this division. We demonstrate how creative adaptations, combining New Age and tradition, solve contradictions in the identity of secular Israelis and further the development of a new religious identity group: religious secularity.
Between Friends and Strangers: Micro-Segregation of Haredim in Jerusalem
Shlomit Flint, Nurit Alfasi and Itshak Benenson
Sanhedria, an inner-city neighborhood in Jerusalem, is populated mostly by members of several sects belonging to the Haredi community. Sanhedria residents are close in their economic status and share preferences in their way of life; still, their choice of residence is affected by the specific residential relations maintained between the sects’ members. The Sanhedria case thus allows examination of non-economic intra-urban processes of segregation and congregation. Residential relations among sects, as reflected in their residential choice and the observed residential distribution, are examined. Powerful mechanisms of residential micro-congregation at the household, individual building, and neighborhood level are revealed and evaluated. These mechanisms provide an insight into processes occurring in dense inner-city neighborhoods shared by different groups.
Jewish Orthodox guidebooks to marriage are a burgeoning genre. We analyzed twenty such manuals to investigate how the authors deal with the twofold challenge of presenting the religious family as preferable, and assisting religious couples who are experiencing difficulties. We identified several common themes: First, authors depict romantic love as hollow, and recommend instead that couples ‘work’ on their relationship using psychotherapeutic techniques frequently attributed to ‘the Sages’. Second, authors have an essentialist view of gender differences; they therefore call on couples to strive for ‘partnership’ rather than the ubiquitous ‘equality’. We posit that the authors use rationalist arguments to disenchant romantic love and emphasize gender differences in order both to re-enchant marriage and maintain gender stratification.
The Social Construction of the Enemy from Within: Israeli Black Panthers as a Target of Moral Panic
Using documents recently made public by the Israel state archives, we identify two main state strategies which shaped a raging public moral panic regarding the emergence of the Israeli Black Panthers in the early 1970s in Israel. The Black Panthers were depicted as carriers of hatred and as belonging to the unproductive segments of society. We present documents that show how the Israel police organization assumed a political role during this period and served as a central player in forging moral panic, fueled by the media, the Knesset, and social science experts. It included the criminalization of the Black Panthers and their political de-legitimation by ballooning socially constructed links with the anti-Zionist Matzpen movement (The Socialist Organization in Israel). The broader implications of the results are discussed.
When the Private Meets the Public: The Politics of Recognition in an LGBT Organization for Education and Social Change | Yoni Kupper and Danny Kaplan
We discuss organizational aspects in the politics of recognition following an ethnographic study of Hoshen, an LGBT outreach organization. Hoshen members avoid a common collective identification as predicted in studies of new social movements. Instead they develop a personal narrative designed to attract sympathy from their audience based on shared liberal values. Audience attitudes straddle between classic liberal discourse, which is blind to differences in the public sphere, and a minortizing discourse, associated with multi-culturalism and geographical segregation. In response Hoshen activists present an intermediary discourse of individual-public recognition that calls for unique public arrangements for LGBT subjects on the basis of individuality rather than collectivity. The study underscores how the politics of recognition constrains the expression of individual identity.
This study is based on the tradition of urban sociology and anthropology, disciplines that strive to connect physical and cultural structures. I maintain that the craftspeople of culture are not about difference, nor are they meant as alternatives. The purpose of the narratives spoken in the city centers is to pave the way into the heart of the imagined community. Having failed in their efforts to belong as equals, Israel’s Olim-immigrants have adopted a strategy named “distinct participation”. Analyzing their conduct and actions, I conclude that to belong to the nation-community, they must first become different, and nothing says different better than ethnicity. That is the iron cage of ethnicity: it is not only distinctive and compartmentalizing, it is also an entry ticket, a laissez-passer.
Responses:
Aikidō is not a Pacifistic Martial Art (Response to Bar-On Cohen’s Article [Vol.11, No.1, 2009)
Book Reviews:
Introduction | Michal Pagis and Shlomo Fischer, Book Review Editors
On: Racism in Israel \ Yehouda Shenhav and Yossi Yonah (eds.)
On: Reinventing the Nation: Palestinian Intellectuals in Israel \ Honaida Ghanim
Two perspectives on the book "Off the beaten Track: The Mizrahim and the Shoah" by Hanna Yablonka
On: Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel—Or, How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual \ Aziza Khazzom
On: Between Baghadad and Ramat Gan: Iraqi Jews in Israel \ Esther Meir-Glitzenstein
On: Crisis and Change in a New State: Education, Religion, and Politics in the Struggle Over the Absorption of Mass Immigration in Israel \ Eliezer Don-Yehiya
On: Forsaken Children: The Backyard of Mandate Tel-Aviv \ Tammy Razi
On: Ad Nafesh: Refugees, Immigrants, Newcomers and the Israeli Psychiatric Establishment \ Rakefet Zalashik
On: Erased from Space and Consciousness: Depopulated Palestinian Villages in the Israeli-Zionist Discourse \ Noga Kadman
On: Circles of Exclusion: The Politics of Health Care in Israel \ Dani Filc
On: Stratification in Higher Education: A Comparative Study \ Yossi Shavit, Richard Arum and Adam Gamoran (eds.)
On: Law and Culture in Israel at the Threshold of the Twenty First Century \ Menachem Mautner