Bulletin: Higher Education and Student Life

Articles

• Mira G. Baron, Real Estate in Studentified Neighborhoods
• Avinatan Hassidim, Assaf Rommm, and Ran I. Shorrer, Redesigning the Israeli Psychology Master’s Match
• David R. Katz, Israeli Medical Education
• Raz Kletter, Water from a Rock: Archaeology, Ideology, and the Bible
• Pierre Kletz and Granit Almog-Bareket, Higher Education in Management
• Shaul Lev-Ran, Yoed Steinmetz & Mark Weiser, Attitudes towards Substance Use among Medical Students in Israel
• Miki Malul, Dafna Schwartz, and Raphael Bar-El, The Role of Academic Institutions in Mitigating the Israeli-Palestinan Conflict
• Ami Rokach, Higher Education in Israel: An Overview
• Dalit Yassour-Borochowitz and Helena Desivillia, Incivility Between Students and Faculty in an Israeli College

Theses

• Eyal Ziggy Clyne, Middle Eastern and Islam Studies in Israeli Universities (PhD, Manchester)

New Article: Violi, A Peace-Building Experience in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Violi, Patrizia. “Just Words under the Wall: A Peace-Building Experience in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” In Gender and Conflict: Embodiments, Discourses and Symbolic Practices (ed. Georg Frerks, Annelou Ypeij, and Reinhilde Sotiria König; London and New York: Routledge, 2016): 217ff.

 

 

Extract

This experience, in which I was personally involved, was a three-year EU-financed project initiated in late 2005 entitled ‘Building Constituencies for Women’s Alternative Ways for Peace’. Its primary objective was to promote encounters between Palestinian and Israeli women and support peacemaking efforts by The Jerusalem Link, an organisation involving two Women’s Centres: Bat Shalom and Jerusalem Center for Women.’ The Jerusalem Link involving these two women’s organisations was established in 1994 to bring about a just, comprehensive and lasting peace between the two peoples of Palestine and Israel, and its feminist grounding is explicitly emphasised in the declaration of intent.

 

 

New Book: Kahanoff, Jews and Arabs in Israel Encountering Their Identities

Kahanoff, Maya. Jews and Arabs in Israel Encountering Their Identities. Transformations in Dialogue. Lanham and London: Lexington Books and Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute, 2016.

 

 

Jews and Arabs in Israel Encountering their Identities reveals the powerful potential of inter-group dialogues to transform identities and mutually negating relations. Using meetings with Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arabian students who attend the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as case studies, Kahanoff examines the hidden psychological dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and illustrates how each participant’s sense of identity shifted in response to encounters with conflicting perspectives. Kahanoff contends that an awareness of the limitations of dialogue, without the renunciation of its value, is the most realistic basis upon which to build a sustainable agreement. This book is recommended for scholars of psychology, sociology, religious studies, political science, and communication studies.

 

Table of Contents

• Part I. Center Stage Conversations
• Chapter One: Split Discourse: Jews and Arabs Converse
• Part II. Behind the Scenes
  
• Chapter Two: Internal Jewish-Israeli Dialogues
  
• Chapter Three: Internal Palestinian-Arab Dialogues
  
• Part III. Inner/Hidden Dialogues
  
• Chapter Four: Jewish Israeli Dilemmas
  
• Chapter Five: Palestinian Arab Dilemmas
  
Chapter Six: Theoretical Aftertalks: Dialogical Transformations

 

MAYA KAHANOFF is lecturer at the Swiss Center Graduate Program for Conflict Research, Management and Resolution and associate research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

New Article: Mor et al, Can Facebook Promote Dialogue in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict?

Mor, Yifat, Yiftach Ron, and Ifat Maoz. “‘Likes’ for Peace: Can Facebook Promote Dialogue in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict?.” Media and Communication 4.1 (2016): 15-26.
 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/mac.v4i1.298
 
Abstract

This study examines the ways in which social media is used to promote intergroup dialogue and reconciliation in the context of the protracted, ethnopolitical conflict between Israeli-Jews and Palestinians. We focus on content analysis of posts and comments on a Facebook page named “Tweeting Arabs” which was established and is administered by Pales-tinian citizens of Israel. This page states that its’ main goal is to publicize opinions, thoughts and beliefs of Palestinians, enabling the moderate voice to be heard and encouraging dialogue between Israeli-Jews and Palestinians. The analysis is based on a data set containing posts and comments collected from “Tweeting Arabs” since the page was founded in November 8th 2014 and until December 4th 2014. This data set contains 85 posts which gained a total of 9657 “likes”, and 461 “shares”, as well as 3565 comments and replies to these posts. Our findings reveal that while posts that pre-sented the narrative of Palestinian suffering were mostly followed by negative comments from Israeli-Jews, posts that brought up the Palestinian moderate and peace seeking voice elicited higher Jewish–Israeli acceptance and sympathy. The research adds to our understanding of Facebook as a dialogue provoking platform that enables users from different ethnopolitical groups in divided and conflicted societies to perform peacebuilding actions.

 

 

 

Lecture: Gribetz, Religion, Race, & The Early Zionist-Arab Encounter (Berkeley, March 17, 2016)

Thursday, March 17

PUBLIC LECTURE DEFINING NEIGHBORS: Religion, Race, & The Early Zionist-Arab Encounter  Jonathan Gribetz Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Judaic Studies, Princeton University 5:30 PM Reception, 6 PM Lecture Warren Room, 295 Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley Please RSVP Here

New Book: Sharvit & Halperin, A Social Psychology Perspective on The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Sharvit, Keren, and Eran Halperin, eds. A Social Psychology Perspective on The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Celebrating the Legacy of Daniel Bar-Tal, volume 2. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2016.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been waging for decades, resulting in mass losses, destruction, and suffering with profound effects on the members of the involved societies. Furthermore, its effects reach beyond the involved societies and influence regional and global stability. Many attempts have been made to bring this conflict to peaceful resolution, but so far without success. Due to its intensity and extensive effects, this conflict has drawn the attention of scholars from numerous disciplines, who attempted to explain the causes of the conflict and the reasons for the difficulties in resolving it. Among these one can find historians, geographers, political scientists, sociologists, and others. Social and political psychologists have also addressed this conflict, and one of the most influential among them has been Daniel Bar-Tal.

This is the second of two volumes intended to pay tribute to Daniel Bar-Tal’s scholarly contribution upon his retirement from his position at Tel Aviv University. While the first volume was devoted to Bar-Tal’s general theory of the sociopsychological foundations of intractable conflict and the theory’s relation to other prominent theoretical frameworks, this volume is devoted to applying Bar-Tal’s theory to the specific case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In his most recent book, published in 2013, Bar-Tal acknowledges the immense effects that living in Israel, being exposed to this conflict, and taking part in it have had on his thinking, theorizing, and empirical research regarding intractable conflicts. We too, as his former students, have been inspired by living in Israel and by Bar-Tal’s work to continue to investigate the sociopsychological dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and through them to advance the understandings of intractable conflicts in general.

 

Table of Contents

• Sociopsychological Foundations of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Applying Daniel Bar-Tal’s Theorizing
  Keren Sharvit
• Stereotypes and Prejudice in Conflict: A Developmental Perspective
  Yona Teichman
• Young Children’s Experiences and Learning in Intractable Conflicts
  Meytal Nasie
• The Israeli Collective Memory of the Israeli-Arab/Palestinian Conflict: Its Characteristics and Relation to the Conflict
  Rafi Nets-Zehngut
• The “Silenced” Narrative of 1948 War Events Among Young Palestinians in Israel
  Eman Nahhas
• Perceptions of Collective Narratives Among Arab and Jewish Adolescents in Israel: A Decade of Intractable Conflict
  Anan Srour
• “Seeing Through a Glass Darkly”: Israeli and Egyptian Images of the Other During the Nasserite Period (1952–1970)
  Elie Podeh
• The Jewish–Israeli Ethos of Conflict
  Neta Oren
• Ethos of Conflict of the Palestinian Society
  Ronni Shaked
• Harmed by Our Protection: Exposure to Political Violence and Political Preferences in the Range of Fire
  Daphna Canetti
• Emotions and Emotion Regulation in Intractable Conflict and Their Relation to the Ethos of Conflict in Israeli Society
  Ruthie Pliskin
• When Jewish and Zionist Identities Encounter Otherness: Educational Case Study
  David Ohad
• Peace Education Between Theory and Practice: The Israeli Case
  Soli Vered
• Containing the Duality: Leadership in the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process
  Nimrod Rosler
• The Role of Peace Organizations During Peacemaking Processes: The Case of the Jewish-Israeli Society
  Tamir Magal
• The Road to Peace: The Potential of Structured Encounters Between Israeli Jews and Palestinians in Promoting Peace
  Ifat Maoz
• Addressing Israelis’ and Palestinians’ Basic Needs for Agency and Positive Moral Identity Facilitates Mutual Prosociality
  Ilanit SimanTov-Nachlieli
• Transitional Justice in Societies Emerging from Intractable Conflicts: Between the Right to Truth and Collective Memory
  Ofer Shinar Levanon
• Index
• About the Authors

 

New Article: Sheehi and Sheehi, Searching for a Third Space in the Palestine-Israel Matrix

Sheehi, Lara, and Stephen Sheehi. “Enactments of Otherness and Searching for a Third Space in the Palestine-Israel Matrix.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2015.66

 

Abstract

This article offers an exploration of the Third Space possibilities within the inter-subjective experience of Palestinians and Israelis. It explores the sociopolitical forces that constitute psychological threats to potential Third Spaces. We map the psychic structures that govern the relationship between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, inside Israel and in the Occupied Territories. We will see how these relationships are fundamentally structured by asymmetries of power and subjectivity, resulting in closures of possibilities that could constitute a workable and genuinely reciprocal inter-subjective space of relatedness. As a result, their interaction is characterized by a series of what we term “enactments of otherness,” masterfully preemptive defensive processes that safeguard the object from further oppression and denigration. These enactments may arise from a “perverse” relationship between dominating and dominated subjects; however, they do not preclude the potential for creating radical alternative spaces and subjectivities from which Israelis and Palestinians can, together, co-create viable inter-subjectivities.

 

 

 

New Article: Shtern, Urban Neoliberalism vs. Ethno-National Division in Jerusalem’s Shopping Malls

Shtern, Marik. “Urban Neoliberalism vs. Ethno-National Division: The Case of West Jerusalem’s Shopping Malls.” Cities 52 (2016): 132-9.

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URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2015.11.019

 

Abstract

Most research on ethnically and nationally contested cities posits that urban spatial segregation trends will remain decisive so long as the macro level national conflict persists, and assumes that the neoliberalization of urban space would only strengthen such trends. Over the last decade however, and despite the ever deepening national conflict, Jerusalem has seen the emergence of neoliberal spaces of consumption that serve as resilient spaces of intergroup encounter between Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab populations. In this article I will examine and compare two such neoliberal spaces in Jerusalem, and show how under certain conditions, privatized urban spaces can undermine processes of ethno-national segregation. I argue that interactions between members of the two rival groups are challenged and reshaped by neoliberal spaces and that the relocation of the ethno-national intergroup encounters to privatized spaces of consumption could represent a temporal shift to a class based encounters.

 

 

 

New Article: Shoshana, The Language of Everyday Racism and Microaggression in the Workplace

Shoshana, Avihu. “The Language of Everyday Racism and Microaggression in the Workplace: Palestinian Professionals in Israel.” Ethnic and Racial Studies (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1081965

 

Abstract

Based on interviews with Palestinian professionals in Jewish organizations in Israel, this article discloses a distinctive practice of ‘everyday racism’ and microaggression – a language of everyday racism. This ‘language of everyday racism’ refers to Hebrew words and expressions that are routinely used by Jews in their mundane conversations and that include the word ‘Arab’ when describing a deficiency or defect, some sort of unsightliness, filth, or general negativity (as in the expression ‘You’re dressed like an Arab woman’). This article not only describes the language of everyday racism as a specific form of everyday racism and microaggression (national microaggression), it also illustrates how this language activates the Palestinian professionals in a reflexive manner. The discussion section describes how the internal dialectic between structure and agency is critical to understanding the language of everyday racism, which in turn acts as a mechanism of the inequality that underlies face-to-face interactions.

 

 

New Book: Shamir, The Native Foreigner; Representations of Hybridity in Modern Israeli Fiction

Shamir, Ayelet. The Native Foreigner. Representations of Hybridity in Modern Israeli Fiction. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2016 (in Hebrew).

 

 

The notion of hybridity is suppressed in the discussion over Israeli society, culture, and literature. This book deals with the concept of hybridity, its cultural genealogy, its essence and characteristics. It offers to use it as a prism for reading three works of modern Israeli prose, “Refuge” (1977) by Sami Michael; “Arabesques” (1986) by Anton Shammas and “The Liberated Bride “(2001) by A.B. Yehoshua.

These works represent the very essence of the cultural hybrid experience that exist between Jewish and Arabic, and express the social and linguistic dualism characteristic of this experience. Forces of attraction and repulsion interact between these two societies, and this dualism causes internal conflicts while allowing for mutual input. Alongside manifestations of anxiety, separatism, and rejection by the other minority, which is often perceived as a “native foreigner” within us, there is also an equally strong presence of wishes of mixture, attraction, and erotic intimacy, disruptive wishes which signify blurring and crossing of boundaries.

This book deals with various questions: who is the native foreigner? What is its voice? What is actually the hybrid “Third Israeli”? What might be the best literary expression of it?

 

AYELET SHAMIR is an author, and the chair of the Department of drama literature creative-expressive arts, at the Oranim Academic College.

 

 

 

New Article: Ranta, Re-Arabizing Israeli Food Culture

Ranta, Ronald. “Re-Arabizing Israeli Food Culture.” Food, Culture & Society (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2015.1088192

 

Abstract

This paper examines the role Arab-Palestinian food plays in the construction of Israeli national identity and food culture. In particular, it sets out to understand the recent willingness in Jewish-Israeli society to acknowledge Arab, and to a lesser extent Arab-Palestinian, culture and food. This new phenomenon has resulted in the re-Arabization of Israeli food culture. For the first time Arab and Arab-Palestinian food is acknowledged, written about and celebrated. This follows a historically longer process in which the construction of Israeli identity and food culture was based on adaptation and imitation, leading to appropriation and nationalization of Arab-Palestinian food culture.

 

 

 

New Book: Bekerman, The Promise of Integrated Multicultural and Bilingual Education

Bekerman, Zvi. The Promise of Integrated Multicultural and Bilingual Education. Inclusive Palestinian-Arab and Jewish Schools in Israel. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

 

 

The Promise of Integrated and Multicultural Bilingual Education presents the results of a long-term ethnographic study of the integrated bilingual Palestinian-Jewish schools in Israel that offer a new educational option to two groups of Israelis–Palestinians and Jews–who have been in conflict for the last one hundred years. Their goal is to create egalitarian bilingual multicultural environments to facilitate the growth of youth who can acknowledge and respect “others” while maintaining loyalty to their respective cultural traditions. In this book, Bekerman reveals the complex school practices implemented while negotiating identity and culture in contexts of enduring conflict. Data gathered from interviews with teachers, students, parents, and state officials are presented and analyzed to explore the potential and limitations of peace education given the cultural resources, ethnic-religious affiliations, political beliefs, and historical narratives of the various interactants. The book concludes with critique of Western positivist paradigmatic perspectives that currently guide peace education, maintaining that one of the primary weaknesses of current bilingual and multicultural approaches to peace education is their failure to account for the primacy of the political framework of the nation state and the psychologized educational perspectives that guide their educational work. Change, it is argued, will only occur after these perspectives are abandoned, which entails critically reviewing present understandings of the individual, of identity and culture, and of the learning process.

 
Table of contents

• Introduction
• Part 1
• 1. Positioning the Author
• 2. Theoretical Perspectives
• 3. Methodology: From Theory to Implementation
• 4. Schools in Their Contexts
• Part 2
• 5. The Parents
• 6. Teachers at Their Work
• 7. The Children
• Part 3
• 8. School Routines: Culture, Religion, and Politics in the Classroom
• 9. Ceremonial Events
• 10. Conflicting National Narratives
• Part 4
• 11. The Graduates
• 12. Conclusions
• Author Index
• Subject Index

 

ZVI BEKERMAN teaches anthropology of education at the School of Education and The Melton Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His main interests are in the study of cultural, ethnic, and national identity, including identity processes and negotiation during intercultural encounters and in formal/informal learning contexts. He is particularly interested in how concepts such as culture and identity intersect with issues of social justice, intercultural and peace education, and citizenship education.

 

 

 

New Article: Malul et al, The Role of Academic Institutions in Mitigating the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Malul, Miki, Dafna Schwartz, Raphael Bar-El. “The Role of Academic Institutions in Mitigating the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” Journal of Policy Modeling (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpolmod.2015.12.006

 

Abstract

We explore whether the implementation of an education policy with Israeli students in a business school, including the elaboration of business projects, actually affects their attitudes towards cooperation with Palestinians. We find that this education pilot project increases the awareness of important barriers, but still at the same time improves the ability to identify appropriate cooperation models and the evaluation of benefits to all sides. Appropriate policy measures are derived, including education programs with the potential participation of third countries, subsidies and governments actual support to cooperation as an instrument for the optimization of socio-political benefits and indirect economic benefits.

 

 

New Article: Kidron, Jews and Palestinian-Arabs in Mandatory Haifa

Kidron, Anat. “Separatism, Coexistence and the Landscape: Jews and Palestinian-Arabs in Mandatory Haifa.” Middle Eastern Studies 52.1 (2016): 79-101.
 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2015.1081177
 
Abstract

Haifa was named a ‘mixed city’ by the British, who ruled Palestine from 1917 to 1948, in reference to the two national communities that inhabited the town. This definition was not neutral, and reflected the Brits aspirations to create national coexistence in Palestine among the diverse urban societies.

Reality was more complicated. The basic assumption of this paper follows the idea that the bi-national urban society of Mandatory Haifa developed into dual society, albeit with much overlapping in economic and civil matters, but takes it one step further: through highlighting changes in the urban landscape, I wish to argue dominance of the national European modern Hebrew society over the Palestinian-Arabs and the traditional and oriental Jewish societies and ideas alike. The changes in the urban landscape tell us the story of Zionism’s growing influence and dominance, and the way the urban landscape was used to embody Zionism’s modern European ethos. The neighbourhood’s segregation, therefore, represents not only the effort to separate but to create a modern national ‘sense of place’ that influenced the city development.

 

 

 

New Article: Tubi and Feitelson, Bedouin Herders and Jewish Farmers in the Negev, 1957–1963

Tubi, Amit, and Eran Feitelson. “Drought and Cooperation in a Conflict Prone Area: Bedouin Herders and Jewish Farmers in Israel’s Northern Negev, 1957–1963.” Political Geography 51 (2016): 30-42.

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URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.11.009

 

Abstract

Climate change is increasingly considered a security problem by academics and politicians alike. Although research is challenging such neo-Malthusian views, it focuses on conflict, or lack thereof, paying limited attention, if any, to cooperation. This study examines the effect of a severe drought on a spectrum of both conflict and cooperation in a highly incendiary setting, between Muslim Bedouin herders and Jewish agricultural settlements in Israel’s semi-arid northern Negev region. This region, lying between the Mediterranean zone and the Negev Desert, has historically been a battle ground between farmers and pastoralists.

Using archival data, both conflictive and cooperative interactions between the two groups during the 1957–63 drought, the worst in the 20th century, were examined. The results indicate that although the entire range of responses occurred, violence was limited and occurred only when some of the Bedouins migrated to the more northern Mediterranean zone. In the semi-arid northern Negev the Bedouins and two settlements engaged in substantive cooperation and assistance. Grazing on damaged crops in return for payment was also practiced during the drought.

A number of factors that affected both conflict and cooperation are identified. The severity of conflicts increased when farmers and herders lacked previous familiarity, while the need to reduce the drought’s impacts and settlements’ left-wing political affiliation formed main incentives for cooperation. Measures taken by state institutions to directly reduce frictions and to provide relief assistance were central to the overall limited level of conflict, but also reinforced the power disparities between the groups.

 

 

 

Dissertation: Harel, “The eternal nation does not fear a long road”: An Ethnography of Jewish Settlers in Israel/Palestine

Harel, Assaf. “The eternal nation does not fear a long road”: An Ethnography of Jewish Settlers in Israel/Palestine, PhD thesis, Rutgers University, 2015.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3VD71FW

 

Abstract

This is an ethnography of Jewish settlers in Israel/Palestine. Studies of religiously motivated settlers in the occupied territories indicate the intricate ties between settlement practices and a Jewish theology about the advent of redemption. This messianic theology binds future redemption with the maintenance of a physical union between Jews and the “Land of Israel.” However, among settlers themselves, the dominance of this messianic theology has been undermined by postmodernity and most notably by a series of Israeli territorial withdrawals that have contradicted the promise of redemption. These days, the religiously motivated settler population is divided among theological and ideological lines that pertain, among others issues, to the meaning of redemption and its relation to the state of Israel. This dissertation begins with an investigation of the impact of the 2005 Israeli unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip upon settlers and proceeds to compare three groups of religiously motivated settlers in the West Bank: an elite Religious Zionist settlement, settlers who engage in peacemaking activities with Palestinians, and settlers who act violently against Palestinians. Through a comparison of these different groups, this dissertation demonstrates that while messianism remains a central force in the realities of Jewish settlements and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it exists these days in more diversified forms than before. In addition, this ethnography illustrates how religion both underlies and undermines differences between Israelis and Palestinians and argues that local communities and religious leaders should be included in peace processes. Finally, by examining how messianic conceptions of time among different groups of Jewish settlers connect to their settlement practices, this study reveals the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be as much about time as it is about space. Accordingly, this dissertation has broader implications for understanding the contemporary role of religion and time within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the political struggles of the Middle East.

 

 

New Article: Davis & Garb, Partnering with the Informal E-Waste Industry

Davis, John-Michael, and Yaakov Garb. “A Model for Partnering with the Informal E-Waste Industry: Rationale, Principles and a Case Study.” Resources, Conservation and Recycling 105A (2015): 73-83.

 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2015.08.001
 
Abstract

Various forms of informal activity have long played an under-recognized yet substantial role in solid waste management, especially in developing countries. In particular, informal activity is prominent in the electronic waste (e-waste) sector, whose volume and impacts have grown rapidly over recent decades. While the worrying aspects of informal e-waste recycling have been widely discussed, less attention has been given to its positive potential and to its relation to formal e-waste actors and policies. These topics have direct implication for pathways for transitioning from informality, and, in particular, ways in which informal recyclers can build on their strengths while beginning to operate in cleaner ways that retain livelihoods while reducing ill effects.

In this paper, we draw upon extensive field work as well as secondary literatures to offer a taxonomy of management stances towards informal e-waste practices. These range from hostility through disconnection to interaction and, finally, synergy. Our recommendation is for the latter since the informal sector has important strengths and merits, as well as its harmful aspects, while formal approaches that ignore or attempt to squelch the informal sector do not yield constructive outcomes. Specifically, we suggest an incremental ratcheting synergistic model that draws on the respective strengths of both sectors to forge a genuine partnership between them. We describe six key elements of this model, and illustrate it through application to the Israeli–Palestinian context we have studied in depth. In particular, we show how the treatment of copper cables, now one of this industry’s largest and most harmful segments, can be improved through an incremental series of synergetic solutions that preserve or even improve livelihoods of informal recyclers while greatly reducing their health and environmental impacts.

 

 

 

New Article: Alkaher & Tal, Making Pedagogical Decisions to Address Challenges of Joint Jewish–Bedouin Environmental Projects

Alkaher, Iris, & Tali Tal. “Making Pedagogical Decisions to Address Challenges of Joint Jewish–Bedouin Environmental Projects in Israel”. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10382046.2015.1106115

Abstract

This interpretive study identifies challenges of working with Bedouin and Jewish Israeli youth in two multicultural projects: education for sustainability and place-conscious education. It also describes the ways the adult project leaders addressed these challenges and their views on the effectiveness of their decisions. Participants comprised 16 Bedouin and Jewish educators. Data collection included interviews and observations of project meetings and staff meetings. Project leaders reported challenges related to (1) intergroup differences in environmental viewpoints, knowledge, and learning styles, (2) embedding issues of environmental justice in the multicultural discourse, and (3) Bedouin–Jewish interactions. To address these challenges, the leaders separated groups for some learning activities, directed discourses, adopted bilingual teaching strategies, and emphasized unique socio-cultural characteristics. Their level of satisfaction with most of their decisions is high. They avoided discussing the broader socio-political Arab–Jewish conflict. The findings highlight dilemmas that multicultural environmental projects pose and suggest the need to adopt critical pedagogy of place to address such dilemmas and challenges. The findings also emphasize the need to better prepare educators for environmental education in multicultural settings.

 

 

 

New Article: Hakak, Undesirable Relationships’ between Jewish Women and Arab Men

Hakak, Yohai. “Undesirable Relationships’ between Jewish Women and Arab Men: Representation and Discourse in Contemporary Israel.” Ethnic and Racial Studies (early view; online first).

 

URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1103877

 

Abstract

Demography has been broadly considered as a key aspect of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. On the Jewish side, State intervention to encourage Jewish immigration and Jewish births is well known. Much less known are the efforts to discourage inter-faith relations. These ‘problematic relationships’ between Arab men and Jewish women from low socio-economic backgrounds have become a high priority item in public discussions over the last decade. In this article I will explore the main discursive practices used in this heated debate by those opposing these relationships. ‘Moral panic’ as a theoretical framework will help me analyse the ways in which Jewish women and Arab men who engage in such relations are presented. As I will show, attempts to criminalize and vilify Arab men meet with strong opposition. Presenting Jewish women as weak and passive victims seems as a more successful strategy, especially when done by professionals from the psych-professions.

 

 

 

Lecutre: Tzfadia, Israel’s Jewish-Arab City (Rutgers, Dec 3, 2015)

 

Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, Rutgers University

Presents

Erez Tzfadia

Living Together Separately: Israel’s Jewish-Arab City

Thursday, December 3, 2015; 7:30pm

Douglas Campus Center, 100 George Street, New Brunswick