New Article: Sherrard, American Biblical Archaeologists and Zionism

Sherrard, Brooke. “American Biblical Archaeologists and Zionism: How Differing Worldviews on the Interaction of Cultures Affected Scholarly Constructions of the Ancient Past.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84.1 (2016): 234-59.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfv063

 

Abstract

A major critique of American biblical archaeologists has focused on biblical presuppositions they brought to their work, whereas Israeli archaeologists have been critiqued for promoting Jewish ethno-nationalism through their work. I maintain, however, that American archaeologists also participated in the debate over Zionism, implicitly (and not necessarily consciously) through writings about the ancient past, and explicitly through political activism. This article focuses on contemporaries William Foxwell Albright and Millar Burrows, who disagreed about Zionism. Burrows, who opposed Zionism, characterized the ancient world in terms of cultural interaction and fluidity, while Albright, who favored Zionism, characterized the ancient world in terms of rigid ethnic boundaries. Burrows published a book about Palestinian refugees; thus, his political involvement was no secret. Albright’s political involvement in favor of a Jewish state, which he later denied, is reconstructed here from archival materials. The terms of this debate still resonate, as demonstrated by the current controversy over archaeological theory at the City of David site in Jerusalem.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

New Article: Sasson et al, Does Taglit-Birthright Israel Foster Long-Distance Nationalism?

Sasson, Theodore, Michelle Shain, Shahar Hecht, Graham Wright, and Leonard Saxe. “Does Taglit-Birthright Israel Foster Long-Distance Nationalism?” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 20.4 (2014): 438-54.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13537113.2014.969149

 

Abstract

Taglit-Birthright Israel has brought hundreds of thousands of diaspora Jewish young adults on tours of Israel. Drawing on data from a large-scale program evaluation, we ask how the program affects participants’ feelings of homeland attachment and political views on contentious homeland issues. North Americans who traveled to Israel with Taglit between 2010 and 2012 were surveyed together with a comparison group of applicants to the program who did not participate. In multivariate analysis, Taglit sharply increases feelings of connection to Israel but has no effect on attitudes concerning the future of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The program modestly increases scores on a “favorability” scale and modestly increases opposition to a possible division of Jerusalem in a future peace deal. In contrast to Benedict Anderson’s theory of long-distance nationalism, the findings suggest that feelings of homeland connection can be fostered without triggering ethnonationalist attitudes associated with the political right.

New Article: Willen, Debating Unauthorized Migrants’ Deservingness in Israel

Willen, Sarah S. “Lightning Rods in the Local Moral Economy: Debating Unauthorized Migrants’ Deservingness in Israel.” International Migration (early view).

 

URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/imig.12173/abstract

 

 

Abstract

Localized debates about who unauthorized migrants are and what they do, or do not, deserve unfold in a culturally specific register that is deeply charged with emotion and moral valuation. Structuring such debates are vernacular discursive frames that emerge from, and reflect, a common “local moral economy.” Taking Israel as case study, this article examines six elements of the country’s local moral economy – biopolitical logic, historical memory, political emotion, popularized religion, an ideology of “fruitful multiplication,” and hasbara (“public diplomacy”/propaganda) – and explores their impact on public debates about unauthorized and irregular forms of migration. Here, as elsewhere, conventionalized distinctions that frame much migration scholarship – e.g. “economic” vs. “political” migrants, “migrant workers” vs. “refugees,” even the terms “authorized” and “unauthorized” themselves – bear but limited salience. Migration researchers who hope to influence local policy debates must recognize the weight and influence of local moral economies, and the chasms that divide vernacular from conventionalized frames. Achieving this sort of nuanced understanding is, at root, an ethnographic challenge.

 

 

New Book: Elbaz, Loyalty to the Source (in Hebrew)

Elbaz, Sagi. Loyalty to the Source: Media, Ideology and Political Culture in Israel. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2014 (in Hebrew).

URL: http://www.resling.co.il/book.asp?series_id=3&book_id=756

אלבז, שגיא. נאמנות למקור. תקשורת, אידיאולוגיה ותרבות פוליטית בישראל. תל אביב: רסלינג, 2014.

על רקע חילופי האליטות וחוסר היציבות במערכת הפוליטית, ולאור השינויים המבניים במפה התקשורתית, ניתן היה לצפות שכלי התקשורת ישקפו את התמורות הסוציו-פוליטיות בישראל. ציפייה זו מתבססת על הנחה מוקדמת, ערכית ביסודה, שעל תקשורת המונים בחברה דמוקרטית מוטלת האחריות לקיים שוק חופשי של רעיונות ולייצג מנעד רחב של דעות במרחב הציבורי. ואולם ספרו של שגיא אלבז מגלה שקיימים פערים גדולים בין סוגיות הליבה בשיח התקשורתי לבין התכנים השוטפים. לטענת אלבז, התקשורת משקפת את התמורות הפוליטיות, הביטחוניות והכלכליות בחברה הישראלית, במיוחד על רקע שינויים במאפייני האליטה הפוליטית והחברתית, אבל יחסה לנושאי ליבה לאומיים אינו משתנה באופן יסודי.

המחבר מפתח מודל אשר מניח ששלוש קבוצות כוח – אליטות פוליטיות, צבאיות וכלכליות – הממוקמות במוקדי הכוח המרכזיים של החברה הישראלית משתמשות בכלי התקשורת כדי לגייס הסכמה ציבורית רחבה לסדר הקיים וכדי להצדיק את שלטונן. בין השאר הן מגבשות ליבה ערכית-קונצנזואלית שעיקריה הם: לאומיות יהודית, תרבות ביטחונית וליברליזם כלכלי. כל אחת מסוגיות הליבה האלה מיוצרת, משוכפלת ומופצת להמונים בתיווך אמצעי התקשורת – אותם מנגנוני הסכמה אידיאולוגיים הכפופים לאליטות. לצד ניתוח תוכן עשיר, הספר מכיל ראיונות עומק עם פוליטיקאים ועיתונאים בכירים אשר שופכים אור על דפוסי העבודה של המדיה ועל מידת המעורבות של האליטות בעיצוב סוגיות הליבה בתקשורת הישראלית.

הספר נאמנות למקור מתבסס על עבודת הדוקטור של המחבר, אשר זיכתה אותו בפרס הדוקטורט המצטיין במדע המדינה לשנת 2013, מטעם האגודה הישראלית למדע המדינה.

ד”ר שגיא אלבז הוא חוקר, עורך ומומחה לתקשורת פוליטית. ספרו הראשון, “דעת מיעוט בעיתונות העברית – ייצוג האוכלוסייה הערבית במרחב ציבורי משתנה” (הוצאת דיונון, 2013), זכה לשבחי הביקורת.

New Article: Sion, Boundaries Crossing and Blurring: The Case of Tali Fahima

Sion, Liora. “Boundaries Crossing and Blurring: The Case of Tali Fahima.” Current Sociology 62.3 (2014): 431-448.

 

URL: http://csi.sagepub.com/content/62/3/431.abstract

 

Abstract

This article applies the case of Tali Fahima, an Israeli woman who was convicted of aiding the enemy during wartime, in order to analyse how the ethno-national community is threatened by members it fails to control and fit into existing categories. The author argues that what makes an assumingly bright boundary so sensitive and problematic to cross is not its impenetrability but its actual vulnerability. The state tries to police uncertain citizens and if necessary to expunge them from the collective in order to imagine the boundaries as bright again. The author examines how Fahima used her privileged body to protect a Palestinian insurgent and the ways in which her body is invested with the meanings of national, ethnic and sexual boundaries and analyses how the Israeli security services, courts, media and public define proper citizenship and belonging.

Cite: Lavie, Writing against Identity Politics: An Essay on Gender, Race, and Bureaucratic Pain

Lavie, Smadar. “Writing against Identity Politics: An Essay on Gender, Race, and Bureaucratic Pain.” American Ethnologist 39.4 (2012): 779-803.

URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01395.x/abstract

Abstract

Equating bureaucratic entanglements with pain—or what, arguably, can be seen as torture—might seem strange. But for single Mizrahi welfare mothers in Israel, somatization of bureaucratic logic as physical pain precludes the agency of identity politics. This essay elaborates on Don Handelman’s scholarship on bureaucratic logic as divine cosmology and posits that Israel’s bureaucracy is based on a theological essence that amalgamates gender and race. The essay employs a world anthropologies’ theoretical toolkit to represent bureaucratic torture in multiple narrative modes, including anger, irony, and humor, as a counterexample to dominant U.S.–U.K. formulae for writing and theorizing culture.