Introduction | Alexandra Kalev
Research Notes on Society in the Time of Corona
With the higher education system's full transition to online learning platforms during the coronavirus pandemic, cameras in classes have become incredibly prominent in academic and media discourse. Media, Facebook groups, and virtual events in academic settings often dealt with the learning and teaching experiences with cameras in classes. Dealing with cameras, they also described the difficulties and disappointments from academic teaching. This article will examine these discussions of camera activity in academic classes to understand students' and professors' different positions concerning studies and academic teaching. Based on ethnographic observations in virtual discussions and analysis of the media discourse on the subject, I will point out the paradoxical connection between the discussion of cameras and the critique of the higher education system in general. Finally, I will analyze the emotional and therapeutic language in which this critique is formulated.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the health, wellbeing, learning and living arrangements, work and family life of students worldwide. This study analyzed the effect of the implementation of remote learning on Arab-Palestinian female students in the Galilee. This paper aims to address the perpetuation of inequalities vis-á-vis gender-ethno-national-civil status on online learning, focusing on family relations and infrastructure. The paper is based on a qualitative study of Palestinian-Arab female undergraduates during the crisis and a questionnaire showing that these students were forced to study in a shared family space because they did not have their own room and sometimes shared equipment. Furthermore, they were drawn into family obligations, which reinforced their traditional gender role. The data indicate that these circumstances impair their ability to study. The study sheds light on the role of gender family relations in barriers to persistent devotion to higher education and success in attaining an undergraduate degree.
This project examines every-day life in Israeli ultra-Orthodox society during the first five months of the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of ethnographies written by Haredi college students. Following the closing of schools, responsibility over education shifted from the community to the family. These developments challenged the social boundaries governing daily life. Grassroots initiatives such as new prayer groups helped to cope with the new situation and to retain Haredi basic values. An unexpected outcome was a higher level of interaction between people from different Haredi groups. This turn of events has the potential to further development of a common ‘Israeli- Haredi’ identity, but it is also liable to stoke various tensions. We argue that the engendered changes to daily life have threaten the very boundaries of Haredi society, challenging the arrays of authority, leadership and belonging. These vicissitudes have elicited paradoxical processes of many and manifold responses within the community.
During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Israel (March-June 2020), we interviewed ultra-Orthodox society members to examine their experiences, behaviors and attitudes towards their Haredi ingroup and their secular outgroup. Having conducted content analysis, we present preliminary findings which identify the mindset and attitude change of activists and community leaders in ultra-Orthodox communities. All the interviewees were critical of the secular media, which in their opinion took part in "incitement" and generalizations towards the ultra-Orthodox. Moreover, a differential reaction was found towards the rabbinic-ultra-Orthodox leadership: While public activists, nourished by the classical ultra-Orthodox ethos, did not question the status of the rabbis, modern ultra-Orthodox members were skeptical about the authority and capabilities of ultra-Orthodox rabbis. Based on these preliminary insights, it seems that the social and media occurrences set by COVID-19 have catalyzed skepticism and distrust in certain ultra-Orthodox groups toward their leadership.
Contemporary research on the ultra-orthodox society in Israel identifies parallel processes in which modern forces within the ultra-orthodox society promote integration, while conservative forces struggle to preserve the separate character of the community. This study estimates the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on these processes. Based on preliminary data, including in-depth interviews with ultra-orthodox individuals, and analysis of press articles and research reports, we argue that the outbreak of COVID-19 challenged the ultra-orthodox community's fundamental principles. The COVID-19 epidemic challenge the community's voluntary separation from the liberal society, its prohibition on the consumption of external media, its tendency to limit its interaction with state institutions, and the importance the community attributes to religious studies. These challenges led to conflicting patterns within the ultra-orthodox community. While the erosion of the fundamental community principles is not a new phenomenon, the COVID-19 crisis has intensified processes that have hitherto been considered on the community's margins.
Flat-earthers believe that the world is, in fact, flat and motionless. Concurrently, they believe in a widespread conspiracy perpetuated by an international cabal working behind the scenes to further its own goals. This cabal is willing, and even eager, to hurt the rest of humanity. Their rule is made possible by a vast consciousness manipulation operation, focused on spreading lies about the shape of the world, the systems that actually control it, and the events that take place in it. One could expect that the tightening of governmental control of individual lives and the spread of an international pandemic would be easier to process for flat earthers as compared to most people, as both of these are part of their predictions of the future to come. In fact, cognitively and emotionally they also reacted with shock and despair. On the basis of a netnography and interviews, this research note maps the common worldview of flat-earthers, as well as their reactions to the COVID-19 crisis, and offers a tentative thesis: that even a radically different epistemological system is not established independently, but rather, in opposition to the widespread one.
When the pandemic threat became imminent, Israel went to war. Leaders and commentators used a militaristic jargon to address the “war on corona” and the “heroes” on the medical frontlines. But since a fifth of Israel’s healthcare workers are Palestinian citizens, Israeli heroism took on a new face. This research-in-progress includes interviews with Palestinian physicians and political activists, and media analysis. The study considers the experiences and perspectives of Palestinian physicians in moments of health crisis and in light of unprecedented visibility as Palestinians in the Jewish-Israeli public. Particularly, in the context of public campaigns that seized upon this increased visibility to challenge the marginalization of Palestinians by featuring Palestinian doctors saving Israeli lives. This visibility highlighted the limitations of the recognition of the indigenous Palestinian national minority in Israel and the potential and constraints of the medical field as an arena for a politics of recognition.
This research note explores an unprecedented change during the first corona virus pandemic lockdown in Israel/Palestine (March–May 2020): 40,000 Palestinian construction workers received permits to sleep in Israel and were not allowed to return to their homes in the occupied Palestinian territories. This was a reversal of Israel’s policy since 1967, preventing Palestinians from sleeping within the “green line” borders. We argue that the control over the sleep of Palestinian workers is a critical site for establishing colonial sovereignty and neoliberal economy, and enables the state’s regulation of their bodies’ spatio-temporal possibilities. The resonance and difference between the pandemic’s biopolitics and the occupation’s bureaucracy invite two theoretical interventions. First, examining how neoliberal economic forces shape colonial governance; second, understanding Israel’s citizenship regime as an interplay between bureaucratic regulation and control over mobility.
Non-Israeli workers in agriculture, construction and caregiving suffer from a variety of “underlying conditions.” The vulnerability inherent in their terms of employment is expressed in limited labor market mobility and physical and social isolation. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the vulnerability and commodification of these workers. In particular, pandemic-related restrictions have further isolated caregivers and increased employers’ tight control of every aspect of Palestinian workers lives while in Israel. On the other hand, the changes engendered by the COVID-19 crisis have drawn attention to structural flaws in work relations (especially in the caregiving sector) and has led to new political and legal measures that offer hope for improving workers’ rights. Furthermore, an initial analysis indicates that the pandemic has strengthened the bargaining power of agricultural migrant workers due to the shortage of working hands, thus increasing their labor market mobility.
The spread of COVID-19 in Israel/Palestine has created political practices that divert from Oslo Accord routine power and sovereignty arrangements. Through analyzing press and government reports, I examine COVID-19’s political work across Israel/Palestine. The pandemic both contests the dominant order and its separation between Israeli and Palestinian bodies, and it also reproduces power and domination in the guise of collaboration. Engaging with scholarship on relations between nonhuman actors and colonial power, I examine how such agents not only solidify colonial state control but also contest it. The spread of COVID-19 is characterized by Israeli-Palestinian sovereignty games. These move between disease prevention to sovereignty struggles which are counter-beneficial to containing the pandemic. Finally, the agency of viruses, nonhuman species, and their contestation of borders will only increase in the climate change era.
This contribution focuses on the "bare life" of corpses - Jewish people who fell victim to COVID-19 in Israel. These biological creatures were caught under the arbitrariness of the Israeli biopolitical order, between the medical profession and the Orthodox-Jewish rabbinate. Based on a digital ethnography, we found that the Ministry of Health allowed the Orthodox-Jewish rabbinate to expand its hegemony to the mortuary rites of corpses that posed an imminent threat to their surroundings. In exchange, the Orthodox-Jewish rabbinate encouraged mourners to adhere to the medical guidelines during the funerals and following Jewish mortuary rites. By employing Kravel-Tovi's winking metaphor, we propose that these "bare lives" are bearers of the winking practices exchanged between medical and religious agents under the rule of exception. We argue that these two regimes perform daily occurrences of winking under the rule of exception, almost to the point of an uncontrollable blinking.
Prioritizing medical care in situations of shortage is one of the classic bioethical dilemmas. The discussion on the issue of prioritization, which stood out at the beginning of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, arose following a report on the allocation of ventilators. When Israel was eventually not overloaded in a way that required prioritizing patients for ventilators, the question of prioritization seemed to be pushed behind the scenes, but in fact it turned from a clinical dilemma into a public health dilemma. This change highlights one of the salient disadvantages of current prioritization debates: the perception of scarce resources as pre-determined and inevitable. We argue that we need to reexamine the question of prioritization and to discuss it at the level of resource allocation. Moreover, understanding bioethical dilemmas as public issues can expose bioethics as another form of biopolitics.
Analyzing the socioeconomic policies implemented in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic raise many questions on the implications of emergency and consequential crisis on Israeli political economy. Focusing on the Israeli labor market in times of pandemic, this research note asks: what are the implications of the pandemic and the consequent state-of-emergency on the political space of labor relations? It brings new findings to reveal that while in many countries collective labor relations contributed to national coping with the crisis through central dialogue between trade-unions, employers’ associations and the state, in Israel traditional dialogue was replaced with unilateral statist governance based on emergency regulations. The qualitative analysis raises preliminary insights on the changing position of labor actors during the pandemic, the rise of local organizing as well as the double-edged sword of public sector protections. It further demonstrates that unilateral governance deepened previous liberalization trends in labor relations, dramatically weakening the institutional power of workers’ and their associations. The research note concludes with key questions rising from the findings – on the political economic effects of emergency in the labor market as well as in state-society relations.
Drawing on the first waves of a panel survey conducted in two month intervals starting from two weeks into the first lockdown in Israel, the study seeks to assess the impact of labor market status on securing the employment of workers since the time the pandemic erupted and thereafter. Labor market status is identified along two different classifications. First, we look at the type of employment relationship the worker has with her employer. Second, we look at the worker’s proximity to collective industrial relations – whether by means of membership in a trade union or a coverage of collective agreements. The findings reveal disadvantage of non-standard forms of employment and the advantage of unionized workers at the outset of the crisis and its incendiary effect during the crisis. The findings further indicate that stronger measures of employability at these times are accompanied by more flexibility in wages and working-time.
This study takes advantage of a natural experiment produced by COVID-19 pandemic to examine whether a change in labor market conditions similarly affects the job security of workers with and without a college degree. Using a representative sample of the Israeli adult population pre- and post-pandemic, we compare the way college graduates and non-graduates fare in the labor market during times of economic and labor uncertainty. Our results show that the sense of employment security of all workers decreased as a result of the pandemic. However, the perceived job and labor market insecurity of workers without an academic degree worsened to a greater extent due to the pandemic compared to college educated workers, and workers without a degree were more willing to compromise to avoid unemployment, demonstrating the premium for academic education during times of crisis.
This research deals with the effect of the coronavirus outbreak on inequality within and between families in Israel. We ask to what extent employment patterns and unpaid work within the household have changed in light of the pandemic outbreak. Moreover, we seek to examine whether these changes are related to one another. To answer these questions, we used the first wave of a longitudinal survey of adult Israeli men and women who were employed or self-employed in the first week of March, prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. We examine paid and unpaid work patterns before the first lockdown, at the beginning of March, and again at the end of April, during the first lockdown. Our main argument is that women were doubly disadvantaged as a result of the economic crisis. Supporting our argument, we find at the end of April, after the economy was shut down but before it was reopened, there was an increase in gender inequality in the labor market alongside an increase in gender inequality within the household.
Our research examines the impact of COVID-19 related policy during the first lockdown in Israel on the distribution of household work between men and women. Our findings are based on a web-based survey completed by 631 individuals living in a two-parent household, with mid-high income level, and children under the age of 18. We found that work-life balance was the most pressing challenge respondents identified during the first lockdown. The findings disproved our research hypothesis that the COVID crisis will disrupt the gendered division of household labor. We found that while women generally did more household work before and during the first COVID related lockdown, the rate of increase in household work was similar to both men and women, with men reporting a slightly higher increase. However, the most significant increase in women’s household work was an increase in cleaning work. Furthermore, we found a correlation between higher household income and an increase in household work during the lockdown, as well as between the rate of increase in household work and the individual’s labor market position. We further found a correlation between an individual’s increased household work and their partner’s market position. We analyze our findings based on sociological and legal scholarship regarding the gendered distribution of household labor and suggest a gender-sensitive as well as class-sensitive policy discussion of gender-based household and market inequality.
Israel has adopted a policy of lockdowns and movement restrictions in an attempt to curb the spread of COVID-19. Throughout the lockdown periods, an increase in the number of domestic violence incidents has been reported by some victim support services. It has been argued that as a result of the quarantine, the risk to victims of domestic violence has increased, as the prolonged ‘stay at home’ policy intensifies stress, anxiety, and addictions, all known as catalysts for domestic and interpersonal violence. However, do police data exhibit an increase in the number of incidents during the lockdowns, compared to other periods? This research note presents a longitudinal analysis of all domestic violence incidents in the city of Tel Aviv-Yafo (n=7,122) reported to the Israeli Police in 896 days (January 1, 2018 – June 14, 2020). Police records do not indicate a change in incidence of domestic violence crime after the beginning of the lockdowns (March 20, 2020, April 7, 2020) compared to different periods before or between lockdowns. The findings highlight the complexity of measuring crime longitudinally, especially given a dataset characterized by high volatility on the one hand, and lack of congruence between various measures about the scope of the phenomenon, on the other.
This research note presents preliminary findings from a longitudinal study on the lives of families in poverty. In recent years, a poverty-conscious perspective seeks to make the voices of those who experience poverty heard and so to learn from their own life experiences. Expanding this perspective, our research is based on a feminist discourse analysis of eight women's self-documentation diaries during the first lockdown. Our team, made up of researchers and women political activists who themselves experience poverty, sought to describe and understand the mundane realities — both material and emotional — of children, women and families in poverty during and after lockdown. These families, who are left behind also in routine, have just a little room for maneuver in adapting to the new emergency. Thus, in stark contrast to the emotional structure that characterized the middle class during the lockdown, ranging between joy and estrangement in the face of the forced slowdown and self and family convergence, we found that for families in poverty the pandemic has been the continuation of their habitual unprotected life. This bare reality, characterized by the intensification of the “crisis ordinariness” of living in poverty, is described and articulated here by the women themselves.
The Corona pandemic led to changes in consumptions patterns, which are both positive and negative. Past research suggests that crises present opportunities for adopting sustainable consumption practices. Alternatively, they tend to Increase frugality, which can marginalize environmental considerations. This study extends research conducted in 2018 that evaluates the environmental impacts of consumption patterns among Israel’s different socio-economic deciles. The present research returned to the same respondents during the first lockdown to assess how consumptions patterns among different socio-economic deciles, and support for different environmental policy options were influence by the Corona crisis. The findings show that the poorest deciles increase their environmentally destructive behavior, while the wealthiest deciles show modest improvements. All deciles displayed greater frugality in purchasing. The greatest support for disparate policy interventions was for policies presented as environmental. The lowest support reported was for new taxes on daily consumer products, in all socio-economic levels.
The COVID-19 pandemic challenges the socio-political existence of the public space and raises questions about its character and boundaries. This study argues that containment measures imposed on the use of public space and the threat to its availability form perceptions of space and of concrete and symbolic boundaries between the private and the public. Through an analysis of two urban spaces in Tel Aviv-Yafo, we will identify the following: First, people’s actions are an essential shaper of public space; these are a testament to its necessity, and it is embodied in the need for interaction with both acquaintances and strangers, in the need for belonging and in the need for a sense of liberation. Second, the changes in the perception of space are reflected in the formation of boundaries and indicate the dynamism of public space. The city’s beach embodies the renewed claim for public space, which is perceived by the public as a space for temporary redemption. The apartment building balcony is a private territory, which reveals itself as anomalous, projecting into the public space and adapting the latter’s qualities to itself. Both spaces indicate changes in the awareness of space, which are taking place before our very eyes.
Longing for the Past, Hoping for the Future | Hagar Hazaz-berger
The study examines the isolation experience in Israel during the "COVID-19 Crisis", focusing on the stories of the first people who were isolated in Israel. The study is based on an ethnographic fieldwork that began in the early days of the crisis. I conducted in-depth interviews with 53 isolated individuals, observations, and conversations from a safe distance and wrote a field diary. In this paper, I will focus on narratives that contain elements of nostalgia and longing (theme). I will argue that isolated individuals used nostalgia and longing as a source of hope and strength of their personal and social resilience during isolation. The isolation space served them as a liminal space, where indulgence in the past inspired a hope for a better future at a time of crisis and uncertainty (claim). The seeds of hope are now evident throughout the country in the form of rapidly growing protests.
This brief discussion examines short-term dynamics of human-community-food relations and transformations of foodways during the COVID-19 lockdown. It relies on ethnography conducted by students from Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee during which they documented activities, processes, emotions and more regarding their encounters with food. The anomic situation they landed in yielded ample changes. First, the relative slowdown of their normally hectic lives allowed them to reconnect to food as a sphere of knowledge and introduce themselves to the centrality of food in our social lives. A significant increase was registered in emotional eating such as excessive use of alcohol among students living away from families but also rejoicing and enthusiasm to experience new adventures mostly in preparing and sharing of food. The rural environment in which most students reside proved to be more resilient to the havoc inspired by the current pandemic than its urban counterparts. New connections were established in what is commonly titled farm to table connection.
Movement and its Discontents – The Performative Modernity of the Balfour Protests | Hodel Ophir
The essay offers a meditation on the choreography of the Balfour demonstrations of summer 2020, and on the political meaning of movement in these events. Movement and its discontents embodies the oppositions and contradictory consequences of movement, where on the one hand it is a pronounced expressions of freedom and on the other, in contexts of political distress, it is conceptualized as violence in need of policing and restricting. Using ethnographic tools and a gendered lens, the essay explores two choreographies which took place in the Balfour sit-ins and argues for these to exhibit forms of resistance that provide dancers a heightened sense of agency, rooted in the sense of movement or stillness. The author suggests looking at the Balfour demonstrations’ performativity as a showcase of modernity, where modernity’s fundamental qualities, nationalism, democracy, self-actualization and hyper-kinetics, are embodied and performed.
The present study note offers a semiotic and discourse analysis of the Balfour demonstrations in Israel over the summer of 2020 as protests that present generational characteristics. An initial comparison between the 2011 protests and the 2020 protests as protests of a generational nature highlights the acute crises of the latter, due both to the events of the COVID-19 pandemic and an initial generational experience of crisis and future at risk. My attempt is to offer evidence and suggestions that attribute at least part of this generational experience to the preceding generational attitude towards Climate Change which is transferred to the COVID-19 crisis. This attitude, which is characterized by an atmosphere of emergency and criticism on the verge of dissent, is transferred during the COVID-19 crisis from the global level to the local Israeli level. Two test cases, climate activists and cultural activists, exemplify to study the localization movement of universal content accompanied by a generational appearance in the political arena.
Sociological Lexicon for Corona Times
Introduction by the editors | Uri Ram, Shlomo Svirsky and Nitza Berkovich
Autocracy | Assaf David
Food | Daphne Hirsch
Inequality | Yossi Dahan
Indie in Balfour | Dalit Simchai and Uri Dorchin
Intimate Violence | Ruth Presser
Humanity | Shlomo Svirsky
People with Disabilities | Ronny Holler
Anthropology | Tamar Elor
Women's Organizations | Hannah Herzog
Young Adulthood | Yosefa Tabib-Khalif
Bio-Politics | Danny Filc
Food Security | Yishai Menuhin
Home | Yaron Hoffman-Dishon
School | Noga Dagan-Buzaglo
Homeliness In Crisis | Umayyad Diab
Bank of Israel | Daniel Maman
Health | Dana Zarchin
Masculinity | Tair Karzi-Presler
Aging | Gabriella Spector-Marzel
Negative Globalization | Uri Ram
Generation, Gender and Protest | Hannah Herzog
Migration | Adriana Kemp
Government Expenditure | Arie Krampf
Zoom Teaching | Tamar Hagar
Demonstrations | Barbara Svirsky
Zoomester | Regev Nathanson
Infection | Haim Hazan
Cosmopolitan Memory | Nathan Schneider
Human Rights | Ron Dudai
Workers' Rights | Yuval Livnat
The Right to Privacy | Maria Gretzky
Time | Sarit Hellman
Old age | Barbara Svirsky
The Haredi Society | Nissim Leon
Arab-Bedouin Society | Sarab Aborbia Quider
Public Debt | Ronen Mendelssohn
Emergency | Yoav Mehozay
Ceremonies | Hizky Shoham
Knowledge | Amalia Saar
Human-animal Relations | Orit Hirsch-Machiols
Occupation | Yael Barda
Local and Global Economics | Sami Mi'ari
LGBT | Gili Hartal
Asylum Seekers | Anat Ben Dor
Death | Yael Hashiloni-Dolev
/
Protest | Gal Levy
The Metaphor of War | Ofra Ben Yishai
Microorganisms and Humans | Rafi Grossglick and Dan Kotliar
Mask | Nadeem Karkabi
The Middle Class | Uri Ram
State Tracking | Eran Fisher
Health System | Danny Filc
Family | Daphne Hecker
Neo-Feudalism | Gal Hertz
Haredi Women | Judith Hasida
Data | Anat Ben-David
Grandfather\mother | Nitza Berkowitz
Lockdown| Niv Gordon
Solidarity | Tamar Barkai
Simularzoom | Motti Gigi
Securitization | Yagil Levy
Sex | Mia Lavie-Ajai
House work | Amit Kaplan
Work From Home | Uri Ram
Essential Facts | Yael Hasson
Poverty | Gal Levy and Dana Kaplan
The Emotional Age | Julia Lerner
The Coronal City | Oren Yiftachel and Erez Tzafdia
The curve | Tamar Barkai
Politics | Gadi Algazi
Post-Human | Carmel Weissman
Post-Coronalism | Assaf David
Populism | Danny Filc
Financialization | Zeev Rosenhack
Palestinians in Israel | Maha Karkabi-Sabbah and Sami Mi'ari
Feminism | Hedva Isachar
The Face of the Plague | Regev Nathanson
Private and Public | Betty Benvenisti
Precariat | Orly Benjamin
Consumerism | Rafi Grossglick
Risk Group | Debbie Bernstein
Coronspiracy |Tamar Tauber-Posner
Sustainability | Adi Wolfson
Emotions | Hagar Hazaz-berger
Social Distance | Yehuda Shenhav-Shaharbani
Rule of Lords | Danny Gutwein
Tourism | Jackie Feldman
The Sex Industry | Yeela-Lahav-Raz
Mask Culture | Motti Regev