Essay
Under the Canopy of the Protestant Ethic: The Secularization of Religion and the Religionization of Secularism in Israel | Yehouda Shenhav
Symposium in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the Israeli Sociology Societ
Touring the Boundaries of Sociology in Israel: Communities of Knowledge — Borders, Barriers and Openings
Hanna Herzog, Michal Frenkel, Meirav Aharon Gutman, Michael Karayanni, Yael Hashiloni-Dolev, Nissim Leon and Uri Ram
Locals, Not Residents: The Reality of Mixedness in a Jewish City in the Galilee
Israel features one of the highest rates of residential segregation in the western world. With the exception of mixed cities, where Arabs live as a significant minority among the Jewish majority, Jews and Arabs tend to live in separated municipalities. Against the common residential typology of Jewish, Arab and mixed towns in Israel, Karmiel may be characterized as a Jewish-mixed city. As such, the city must cope with a structural tension between its ideology of ethnonational separation and the reality of mixedness. This tension, which stems from the commonplace and structural-historical presence of Palestinian commuters, has been strengthened by growing Palestinian migration to the city. Based on ethnographic work, indepth interviews and archive research, this article considers a range of interactions between Jews and Palestinians in Karmiel, residents and otherwise. The article proposals new tools for analyzing mixed spaces in Israel beyond the limits of a anticipating typology that characterizes them as exceptional. The term 'grassroots segregation' is suggested, not as a reflection of physical separation between ethnic groups, but as a method to manage Jewish-mixed spaces. In Karmiel, 'grassroots segregation' materializes in the disparate treatment of Palestinians in 'spaces of temporariness' versus 'residential spaces'.
Individualization of Urban Struggles: Reclaiming New Public Space in Tel Aviv as a Case Study for Collective Action in the Neoliberal Era | Dorit Garfunkel and Efrat Eizenberg
Contemporary cities are often characterized as places of accentuated individualism, strangeness and alienation. At the same time, with the entrenching neoliberal project and its associated failing alternative political discourse, this era is characterizedas post-political. Despite these trends, new urban bottom-up organizations and collaborations between strangers have arisen to reclaim their urban surrounding and transform the city and its operation. This paper examines an example of urban collective action as an encounter of the rooted individualism with the public sphere. The paper portrays the perspectives of activists in a successful urban struggle on green public space (instead of high-rise residential buildings development) in Tel Aviv. Using participant observation and in-depth interviews with activists, the paper reveals the role of personal interests and collective interests in fueling the struggle. By doing so, it engages with contemporary discourse on urban struggles and challenges the structural dichotomies of strong vs. weak, government vs. citizens and neoliberalism vs. welfare and cooperation.
From Drama to Reality – The Meaning of Television Quality in the Eyes of Television Creators
This article examines the ways in which television creators in Israel interpret and understand the institutionalized definitions of the ‘inferior’ Reality TV genre and the ‘quality’ television series genre. The article focuses on the self-perceptions of Israeli television creators themselves as workers in a creative cultural field that is in the process of differentiation. In-depth interviews with these major television creators show that, all the creators adopt terminology that refers to themselves as artists and to their works as works of art. The creators define the television field, which distinguishes between the different television genres, in a way that blurs the boundaries between the definitions of ‘quality’ and ‘non-quality’ television.
The Art Intelligentsia: On Possession and Power in the Israeli Theatre
Tova Gamliel and Naphtaly Shem-Tov
How should the point of view of artists in Israel’s current kulturkampf be understood? What underlies the inspiration that prompts a representative of such artists to term non-consumers of “high culture” “a herd of beasts lapping at a pile of straw”? The article probes how Israeli mainstream theatre, which is perceived as a liberal, critical and “leftist”, actually became a conservative space that does not uphold pluralist practices. We observe this question through senior theatre actors as significant cultural agencies. By the interweaving of Bourdieu’s habitus with Marvin Carlson’s ghosting, we shall see how the theatre actors preserve their hegemonic status, which catches simultaneously a liberal image with conservative and even racist elements. An analysis of the Israeli theatre actors’ habitus follows the historical tendency in this profession toward “possession” or the “back-to-the past” as additional sources of “artistic capital”. This tendency establishes a close relationship between actors’ heroic biographies and artistic conventions in the Western theatre. The article connects this theatrical habitus to an ideological justification of the Zionist movement in Israel. Theoretically, the novelty of the analysis concerns to the historical element of Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus”.
Professionalism and Professionalization: The State, Social Work and Community Work in Israel
Critical analyses of state-profession relations usually focus on power struggles and neglect how these relations shape the content of professional and statist logics. This argument is examined using a socio-historical analysis of state-social work relations in Israel between the 1920s and the 1980s. The article focuses on the rise of the community work approach in the field of social work during the 1970s, how it challenged the hegemonic view of social problems as stemming from individual difficulties, and how the state contained this challenge. The article argues that professions can challenge and re-shape statist logic and that understanding stateprofession relations requires grasping both formal professionalization and the particular meaning of professionalism in different universes of discourse. The article challenges the dominant historiography and suggests that community work was integrated into the field of social work only during the late 1970s. Materials include archival records, interviews, and secondary sources.
This paper deals with medical and educational texts on girls’ menstruation. It focuses on analysis of texts in Hebrew. These texts were dissaminated amongst Jewish communities in Central Europe from the beginning of 19th century to the establishment of the Jewish settlement and the foundation of Israel. It identifies changing ideologies that offered prescriptions for the benefit of girls and of the society in general, such as organicism and psychoanalysis. During the decades, despite the development of knowledge about the reproductive system of the woman, the message remains similar: girls must rest during this critical period for the benefit of their mental and physical conditions and for the health of the next generation of the Jewish People. The social and political implications of this “scientific” message construct the position of the girls as inferior, passive, dependent. Since the girl is subjugated by her deterministic and biological tragedy, she has no agency and no avenues to social mobility.
Naming Jewish Newborns in Israel: Choosing a Basic Value
The process of naming newborns has borne several ideologies during Jewish history, as in the modern Israeli era. According to Bourdieu (1991), the linguistic habitus changes over time, through small steps, while the unconscious expectation of sanctions shapes the discourse. In order to study the naming processes, semistructured interviews were conducted among 45 secular parents. The interviews indicated that this expectation of sanction directs the naming choices in many cases. The contradiction between selected names and rejected names reflected the splits between three identities: Israeli, Jewish and Western. This article discusses two values which relate to the naming process. The first is the basic value of tradition, while the other is of self-direction. Analysis showed that the selection of names that were defined as Israeli was guided by the execution of the tradition value which motivated by conservativeness, while neglecting the Jewish identity and rejecting western influences. On the other hand stands the execution of the self-direction value, motivated by openness to change, which led to the selection of Western names.
Book Reviews:
On: Shared Accommodation - Politics and Memory / Tama Halpin
On: Beyond the Clinic: The psychological discourse in contemporary culture \ José Brunner and Galia Plotkin-Amram
On: Social organizations that promote alternative conceptions and arrangements regarding death in Israel / Zohar Gazit
On: Marking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global Age \ Amos Goldberg and Haim Hazan
On: Why do you vote right and get left? \ Erez Tadmor
On: An Other Sex – Anthology Of Israeli LGBT And Queer Studies \ Aeyal Gross, Amalia Ziv and Raz Yosef
On: Football belongs to the fans! Research trip following Hapoel Katamon Jerusalem \ Tamar Rapoport (ed.)
On: Society and Economy: Framework and Principles \ Mark Granovetter
On: The Theocratization of the Israeli Military \ Yagil Levy
On: Taking Stock: Cultures of Enumeration in Contemporary Jewish Life \ Michal Kravel-Tovi and Deborah Dash Moore (Eds.)
On: A Well-Worn Tallis for a New Ceremony: Trends in Israeli Haredi Culture \ Nurit Stadler
On: I have never called my wife: Relationships in "Gur" Hasidism \ Nava Wasserman