Symposium: Citizenship Today, Between Neo-Liberalism and Populism

• Citizenship Today: Opening Remarks \ Adriana Kemp

• Did the Demos Disappear? The Populist Challenge to the Neo-Liberal Conception of Politics \ Danny Filc

• Economic Citizenship in Israel in the Age of National Law: The Case of Palestinian Women \ Amalia Sa’ar

• The Commodification of Citizenship as a Global Trend \ Yossi Harpaz

The Making of Homo Financius: Conventions, Emotions and Morality in Financial Education

Daniel Maman and Zeev Rosenhek

The individualization, privatization and marketization of risk management are defining features of current financialized capitalism. Under these conditions, individuals are required to manage economic and social risks of various types through their participation in the financial arena. This neoliberal project of responsibilization implies the constitution of subjects exhibiting the competencies considered as necessary to engage with financial products and services in what is defined as the proper and efficient manner to assure their present and future welfare. Practices of financial education serve as an important instrument for delineating and promoting the constitutive cognitive, emotional and moral dispositions of the desired homo financius. This article examines the ways in which financial education currently conducted by state and non-state agencies in Israel define, explain and justify proper financial conduct and the individuals’ characteristics underpinning them. We show that these programs mobilize three basic discursive devices: conventions, emotions and moral imperatives. Through these discursive devices, which connect individuals’ desired subjectivities to the individualization, privatization and marketization of risk management, financial education contributes to the normalization of the ideational and institutional logics of the financialization of everyday life.

In Search of a Lost Masculinity: Israeli Male Sex Tourists in Thailand

Guy Bruker and Amalia Sa’ar

This paper documents the scene of Israeli male sex tourists in Pattaya,This paper documents the scene of Israeli male sex tourists in Pattaya,Thailand, where they seek to rehabilitate a masculine domination they feel they have lost because of women’s unduly power and excessive demands. Fieldwork and interviews with sixty tourists in this hub of the global sex tourism industry reveal a strong sense of inferiority regarding their appearance, economic situation, and sexual competence, and a strong resentment towards Israeli women, for havingand sexual competence, and a strong resentment towards Israeli women, for having allegedly impaired their capacity for manhood. The tourists, frustrated by cumulative experiences of failure and constant criticism from women, seek temporary escape in the sex vacation abroad, where they can cash in on the global economic disparities that render it cheap and available. There, they try to realize fantasies of unchallenged patriarchal masculinity through the performance of hyper-masculinity, domination,violence, and women’s subordination. The analysis interprets these practices in light of the tension between women’s increased power and men’s growing difficultiesin acting as main breadwinners, and of the conflicting expectations from men to continue to show sexual and economic capacities, while demonstrating sensitivity and gender egalitarianism.

Spiritual Openness and New-Age Judaism: Class Distinction in a Post-Secular Age

Rachel Werczberger and Dana Kaplan

This article explores New Age Judaism (NAJ) in Israel as a case study demonstrating the reorganization of the religious field and the emergence of new hybrid religious forms in a post-secular age. Whereas most studies on this issue employ a perspective that emphasizes the political and/or ethnic dimensions of such emerging religious forms, we propose a class perspective on the practices of Jewish renewal and focuse on new patterns of distinction that are based on cultural eclecticism and omnivorousness, as well as on the engagement in immersive spiritual experiences – both of which produce a sense of personal authenticity. We show that the participants articulate their activities in terms of practices of ‘spiritual openness’ performed through a) the selective appropriation of non-Jewish and Jewish spiritual techniques, and b) the reconstruction the Jewish ritual, which provides the participantswith a sense of personal and collective belonging to the Jewish tradition. Combined, the two practices delineate symbolic class boundaries between the NAJ participants and those who are perceived as religiously parochial and passive.

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Conversations about Books:

When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel \ Michal Kravel־Tovi

 Tamar Katriel, Haim Hazan and Adam Klin-Oron

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Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization \ Daphna Hacker

Amit Kaplan, Adi Moreno and Sylvie Fogiel-Bijaoui