State Workers: Religious Zionism and the Weight of State-Run Conversion

Michal Kravel-Tovi

The great majority of conversion agents I met throughout my ethnographic study of state-run Orthodox conversion in Israel identified as religious Zionists. In this article, I explore the reasons why employees and volunteers in the state conversion apparatus are associated with religious Zionism, and how, by expressing a shared commitment to the national mission of conversion, the religious Zionist community reworks its collective identity as well as it symbiotic, if troubled, relationship with the state. I argue that by urging their public to shoulder the weight of state conversion, rabbinic, educational, and political elites within religious Zionism rework their movement’s distinct character. These elites use conversion as a means to remind their public of who they are as religious Zionists.

Gendered Career Pathways in Israel

Galit Aharon

This article examines the effect of career pathways of men and women in Israel on their earnings. Using the Israeli CBS’s Social Survey of 2008 and utilizing sequence analysis and cluster analysis techniques, the data consistently shows the asymmetry between women’s and men’s distinctive career pathways. While delayed entry to part-time and steady part-time career pathways are more heavily concentrated with women and delayed entry to full-time employment contains mainly young educated men, full-time continuous job is equally gendered. Furthermore, the gender composition of the pathways entails earnings differentials, full-time continuous job being the most profitable pathway and delayed entry to part time employment penalizes women for discontinued employment. Steady part time employment minimizes the gender negative effect on earnings and can be used as another mechanism for integrating women into paid economy, especially when family demands are high.

Disillusionments Sponsored by the Market: Popular Financial Discourse and the Recurring Theme of Disappointments with Central Social Institutions | Galit Ailon

In the past decades researchers have begun to focus attention on the broadening circles of financial engagement. Studies conducted in the U.S. and the U.K. have linked the popularization of finance to processes of neo-liberalization. Focusing on the popular financial sphere in Israel, the paper examines the discourse that is used to promote investing and trading among the general population. It shows how the effort to construct the value and meaning of financial action rests on attempts to emphasize the failures and incapacities of central social institutions – primarily, marriage, work organizations, and the state – to economically protect individuals and secure their freedom. Thus the popular financial discourse constitutes the financial awareness in terms of disillusionments with other institutions and portrays these disillusionments as both painful and liberating. Constructing the market as an anti-institution of sorts, the disillusionment discourse further grants legitimacy to a pure, unattached market focus on profit.

Inequality in Bachelor’s Degree Completion: Social Background, Previous Achievement and Institutional Characteristics | Yariv Feniger, Oded Mcdossi and Hanna Ayalon

In light of expansion and diversification processes in the Israeli higher education system the study explored social inequality in bachelor’s degree completion. By merging census data with several additional files, it followed a large sample of Israeli youth from high school into higher education. Findings reveal that Arabs (compared to Jews), men (compared to women), and individuals with fewer economic resources and lower previous achievement have lower odds of completing the bachelor’s degree in the allotted timeframe. On the institutional level it was found that public colleges have higher dropout rates compared to universities and private colleges even after controlling for students’ social background and previous achievement.

Bread of Shame: Mechanisms of Othering in Soup Kitchens

Yael Cohen, Michal Krumer-Nevo, Nir Avieli

This article examines processes of othering in seven soup kitchens in Israel through participant observations as a staff-volunteer and as a diner. While othering and otherness are discussed widely, their empirical study in regard to poverty is focused mainly on discourse analysis of texts that appeared in the media. This article contributes to this body of knowledge by analyzing the everyday routines, habits, norms, rules, and arrangements of space and time that turn the diners from “ordinary” people to “Others”. This process contains four simultaneous mechanisms: drawing boundaries, distancing and rejection, stripping of personal identity, and the attribution of stigma. The article discusses these mechanisms in the context of othering of people in poverty. In addition, the article discusses methodological issues that derive from the unique use of body senses as a research tool.

Accounts of Fibromyalgia among Physiotherapists in Israel

Neta Roitenberg and Avihu Shoshana

This article explores the accounts of fibromyalgia among physiotherapists in Israel, the resources available to them when they treat patients, and the alternatives to which they turn when they experience scarcity in professional resources. The findings of the study led to the emergence of four themes: “uncertainty, ambiguity, and creativity of the physiotherapy treatment of the disease”, “psychological construction of the disease, patients, and treatment”, “the desired management of the disease” by way of encouraging neoliberal subjectivity, and: “learning to live with the pain”: developing a special relationship with the pain concept based on making it insignificant and routine. The discussion section elaborates on the ramifications of these findings with regard to the patient’s role (“good patients” and “bad patients”), the approach to pain, and the epistemological change required from the physiotherapists to deal with fibromyalgia.