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 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.

 

 

 

Encyclopedia Article: Peled, Ethnic Democracy

Peled, Yoav. “Ethnic Democracy.” The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Chichester: Wiley, 2016.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781118663202.wberen381

Extract

Ethnic democracy is an analytic model meant to describe a form of state that combines majoritarian electoral procedures and respect for the rule of law and individual citizenship rights with the institutionalized dominance of a majority ethnic group over a society. Ethnic democracy consists of two incompatible constitutional principles: liberal democracy, which mandates equal protection of all citizens, and ethnonationalism, which privileges the core ethnic group. Critics of the model have pointed out that the tension between these two contradictory principles causes inherent instability in this form of state. This tension could be overcome, however, and ethnic democracy could be stabilized, if a third constitutional principle, mediating between liberal democracy and ethnic nationalism, were to exist in the political culture.

 

 

 

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

New Article: Alon-Mozes, National Parks for a Multicultural Society

Alon-Mozes, Tal. “National Parks for a Multicultural Society: Planning Israel’s Past and Present National Parks.” In Landscape Culture – Culturing Landscapes: The Differentiated Construction of Landscapes (ed. Diedrich Burns et al; Wiesbaden: Springer, 2015): 173-83.

 

 

Extract

Both case studies demonstrate the power of the landscape as an agent fostering first national and later communal identity. Early planning of Gan HaShlosha and Zippori national parks emphasized the role of the biblical/Hellenistic pastoral landscape in reinforcing a common national identity among the Jewish settlers of Israel. Consequently, the Palestinians’ past was erased from Zippori grounds, as in other places in Israel, and their narrative was silenced.

Due to the failure of the melting pot policy and the emergence of Israel as a multicultural society, contemporary Israeli national parks are designed and managed in order to address the needs of various communities of visitors, and not solely the hegemonic ones. The new clientele includes veteran Jews and new immigrants, various Jewish ethnic groups, ultra-orthodox Jews, Christian pilgrims, and the Palestinians Currently, panning strives to increase the profitability of the parks by recruiting new communities, by enabling mass gatherings and communal cultural events, and by mitigating conflicts among participants. Various stakeholders promote parallel narratives within and surrounding the parks, advancing the parcelization of the area based on time or space zones. Within this relatively enabling system, even the Palestinian narrative of Zippori is marked on the land, in spite of objections based on nationalistic considerations.

 

 

New Article: Shokeid, Transforming Urban Landscapes and the Texture of Citizenship

Shokeid, Moshe. “Newcomers at the Israeli National Table: Transforming Urban Landscapes and the Texture of Citizenship.” City & Society 27.2 (2015): 208-30.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12061

 

Abstract

Advocating research of the “ethnographic present,” the article portrays the recent evolvement of two constituencies in Israeli urban society conceived as new socio-economic-cultural and spatial social “banks”: Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia residing in ethnically segregated urban neighborhoods; the gradual concentration in Tel Aviv’s downtown neighborhoods of authorized and undocumented labor migrants from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, as well as asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan. It reports on the growing protest by local Israeli residents, the government’s efforts to limit the presence of “uninvited strangers,” as well as the active response of the unwelcome aliens. I posit that the emergence of these new ethnic enclaves converges with other critical changes in Israeli institutional life. Major transformations in the texture and tenets of Israeli citizenry, its spatial construction and national identity are steadily progressing.