New Article: Gamliel, The Lasting Hegemony in Israeli Theatre

Gamliel, Tova. “Ghosts and Habitus: The Lasting Hegemony in Israeli Theatre.” Ethnography (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1750635216643113

 
Abstract

The article asks why the Israeli theatre’s ‘voicing hegemony’ practices endure despite a critical public debate that favors cultural pluralism. Ethnographies at two central repertory theatres elicit the meanings of the theatre’s ‘back-to-the past’ institutional habitus, as revealed in observations and in-depth interviews with actors, and disclose artistic dispositions that bolster veteran actors’ stature in the theatre and Israeli art generally. Analysis of the findings links professional capital with the twilight of an artist’s theatrical career. One conclusion connects the theatrical habitus with justification of Israel’s Zionist ideology. Theoretically, the article illuminates the historical component of the Bourdieuian concept of habitus. The duplication of this component in the back-to-the-past habitus inheres to mythification processes and makes the theatrical habitus relatively resilient to social changes.

 

 

New Book: Natanel, Sustaining Conflict

Natanel, Katherine. Sustaining Conflict. Apathy and Domination in Israel-Palestine. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016.

 

 

Sustaining Conflict develops a groundbreaking theory of political apathy, using a combination of ethnographic material, narrative, and political, cultural, and feminist theory. It examines how the status quo is maintained in Israel-Palestine, even by the activities of Jewish Israelis who are working against the occupation of Palestinian territories. The book shows how hierarchies and fault lines in Israeli politics lead to fragmentation, and how even oppositional power becomes routine over time. Most importantly, the book exposes how the occupation is sustained through a carefully crafted system that allows sympathetic Israelis to “knowingly not know,” further disconnecting them from the plight of Palestinians. While focusing on Israel, this is a book that has lessons for how any authoritarian regime is sustained through apathy.

 

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Everyday of Occupation
• 2 Bordered Communities
• 3 Normalcy, Ruptured and Repaired
• 4 Embedded (In)action
• 5 Protesting Politics
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

 

KATHERINE NATANEL is a Lecturer in Gender Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter.

New Article: First, Common Sense, Good Sense, and Commercial Television

First, Anat. “Common Sense, Good Sense, and Commercial Television.” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 530-48.

 

URL: http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3551

 

Abstract

In an era when identity is a hybrid process, it is interesting to examine whether and how it is possible to glean the presence or absence of certain cultural groups from their representations in a given culture. To do so, I employ two key Gramscian concepts: common sense and good sense. Using three research reports (from 2003, 2005, and 2011) that employed content analysis techniques, this article assesses the visibility of various subgroups in Israeli TV programs and majority-minority power relations in a variety of genres on commercial channels in the prime-time slot. This article focuses on three aspects of identity: nationality, ethnicity, and gender.

 

 

 

Conference Paper: Kimhi, Is Foreign Farm Labor a Blessing or a Curse?

Kimhi, Ayal. “Is Foreign Farm Labor a Blessing or a Curse? Evidence from Israel”. International Association of Agricultural Economists, August 9-14, 2015.

 

URL: http://purl.umn.edu/211852 [PDF]

Abstract

After Israel became self-sufficient in food in the late 1960s, farmers started migrating out of agriculture while production continued to increase towards export markets. This process intensified considerably when foreign labor became available. Traditional production theory predicts that foreign workers replace local workers, but the number of Israeli hired farm workers has actually increased since the arrival of foreign labor. This paper develops a modified theoretical model in which farm labor is heterogeneous, so that changes in the number of foreign and local hired workers are not necessarily opposite in sign. The results of the model are consistent with the observation that the availability of foreign labor has led to an increase in the production and export of labor-intensive horticultural products. Farms became larger and more specialized, and this has led to labor specialization, with foreign workers doing manual tasks and Israeli hired employees doing mostly managerial and professional tasks.

 

 

 

New Article: Perez & Sasson-Levy, Avoiding Military Service in a Militaristic Society

Perez, Merav, and Orna Sasson-Levy. “Avoiding Military Service in a Militaristic Society: A Chronicle of Resistance to Hegemonic Masculinity.” Peace & Change 40.4 (2015): 462-88.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/pech.12143

 

Abstract

This article examines the connection between masculine identity and avoidance of military service in a militaristic society. Based on retrospective interviews with Israeli middle-class men who initiated their release from military service on medical–psychological grounds, we argue that this choice embodies resistance to patterns identified with the local hegemonic masculinity and that this resistance gradually intensifies over the life course. The first signs of opposition emerge in early adolescence, when the perception of self diverges from the conventional masculine mold. The emotionally charged encounter with the military deepens this resistance, which is then reinforced by the decision not to serve, and ultimately leads to the construction of the present nonconformist identity. The development of a nonconformist self that is not subject to the dictates of the local hegemonic masculinity demonstrates how in a militaristic society, even a personal decision not to serve becomes an act rife with gendered meanings and political significance.

 

 

 

New Article: Ehrlich, Israel’s Hegemonic Right

Ehrlich, Avishai. “Israel’s Hegemonic Right.” Socialist Register 52 (2016).

 

URL: http://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/25600

 

Abstract

All the political parties in Israel, apart from Arab and ultra-Orthodox, define themselves as Zionist. The right in Israel identifies itself strongly as Jewish either in a religious or ethno-nationalistic sense or, more amorphously, in terms of the ‘politics of belonging’. In today’s political parlance in Israel, ‘Judaism’ is not a religion but a political ideology, best termed ‘political Judaism’, which claims the powers of religion: veracity, certitude, absoluteness and the polarity of good versus evil. To be a Jew according to the right means firstly not to be an Arab. To be on the left is tantamount to being an Arab because people on the left support Arabs. The right aspires to Jewish supremacy in Israel and says so explicitly. To be a Jew is not only to fulfill the religious qualification of being born to a Jewish mother; Jewish belonging is now expressed in primordial, essentialist, mystical terms. The politics of identity, of political Judaism, adds a McCarthyist rancour and an exclusionary dimension of banishment from the community to political divisions. To belong now requires unqualified loyalty.

 

 

New Book: Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom

Kotef, Hagar. Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

 

We live within political systems that increasingly seek to control movement, organized around both the desire and ability to determine who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces, from gated communities to nation-states. In Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, Hagar Kotef examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces. Ranging from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control that circumscribe the lives of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, this book shows how concepts of freedom, security, and violence take form and find justification via “regimes of movement.” Kotef traces contemporary structures of global (im)mobility and resistance to the schism in liberal political theory, which embodied the idea of “liberty” in movement while simultaneously regulating mobility according to a racial, classed, and gendered matrix of exclusions.

 

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements

• Introduction
• 1. Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and Its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine / Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir
• 2. An Interlude: A Tale of Two Roads—On Freedom and Movement
• 3. The Fence That “Ill Deserves the Name of Confinement”: Locomotion and the Liberal Body
• 4. The Problem of “Excessive” Movement
• 5. The “Substance and Meaning of All Things Political”: On Other Bodies
• Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

 

HAGAR KOTEF is based at the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University.

 

 

New Article: Segalo et al, Engaging Memory and Imagination Within Decolonizing Frameworks

Segalo, Puleng, Einat Manoff, Michelle Fine. “Working With Embroideries and Counter-Maps: Engaging Memory and Imagination Within Decolonizing Frameworks.” Journal of Social and Political Psychology 3.1 (2015).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v3i1.145

 

Abstract

As people around the world continue to have their voices, desires, and movements restricted, and their pasts and futures told on their behalf, we are interested in the critical project of decolonizing, which involves contesting dominant narratives and hegemonic representations. Ignacio Martín-Baró called these the “collective lies” told about people and politics. This essay reflects within and across two sites of injustice, located in Israel/Palestine and in South Africa, to excavate the circuits of structural violence, internalized colonization and possible reworking of those toward resistance that can be revealed within the stubborn particulars of place, history, and culture. The projects presented here are locally rooted, site-specific inquiries into contexts that bear the brunt of colonialism, dispossession, and occupation. Using visual research methodologies such as embroideries that produce counter-narratives and counter-maps that divulge the complexity of land-struggles, we search for fitting research practices that amplify unheard voices and excavate the social psychological soil that grows critical analysis and resistance. We discuss here the practices and dilemmas of doing decolonial research and highlight the need for research that excavates the specifics of a historical material context and produces evidence of previously silenced narratives.

 

 

New Article: Waterman, Ideology and Events in Israeli Human Landscape Revisited

Waterman, Stanley. “Ideology and Events in Israeli Human Landscape Revisited.” Jewish Journal of Sociology 57.1-2 (2015).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5750/jjsoc.v57i1/2.107

 

Abstract

This paper casts a retrospective gaze at an article written as a beginning academic who had immigrated to Israel just two years prior, some 40 years ago. Not wanting to alter anything I had written, it was subsequently published nearly five years later. In that paper, I observed a deep abyss between the Israel I “understood”—mainly through reading—before I immigrated and which I thought I “knew”, and the Israel I was experiencing following my arrival. This chasm led me to identify Israeli myths contra an Israeli reality and caused me to pose what were for me, at the time of writing, some disturbing questions about Israeli landscape and society. I did this by choosing three iconic landscapes — new towns, kibbutzim and the desert — and picking away at misunderstandings about them and the way in which we perceived Israel. Four decades on, I ask whether I had been impulsive in writing that paper then with so little experience and if a similar paper in a similar vein were to be written, set in 2015 rather than 1974, what questions might be asked about Israel now and what would they say about Israeli society and culture?

 

 

New Article: Hagay and Meyers, National Narrative in Coverage of Israeli National Soccer Team Matches

Hagay, Haim and Oren Meyers. “Everybody’s Team? The National Narrative in the Hebrew Press Covering Israeli National Soccer Team Matches.” Media, Culture, and Society 37.4 (2015): 530-46.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443714566898

 

Abstract

Sports media offer a unique discourse site because the nationalistic nature of reporting is often radicalized and in most cases ‘the national flag is waved with eternal enthusiasm’. Therefore, this study examined changes in the coverage of the Israeli national soccer team between 1949 and 2006 through an exploration of the identity of the journalistic narratives’ storytellers and protagonists. Our findings illuminate a complex picture: whereas during the Israel’s formative era sports reporters pursued a patriotic narrative that praised the players for their fighting spirit and contribution to national prestige, in recent decades the sports sections echo a new variety of local, professional, and gender voices that challenge the supposedly natural hegemony of national identity. These changes can be explained by factors rooted in the fields of journalism, sports, and the politics of identity.

New Article: Sela-Shayovitz, The Role of Israeli Media in the Social Construction of Gang Rape

Sela-Shayovitz, Revital. “‘They Are All Good Boys’: The Role of the Israeli Media in the Social Construction of Gang Rape.” Feminist Media Studies (early view, online first).

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14680777.2014.993675

 

Abstract

This paper analyzes the construction of incidents of gang rape in Israeli newspapers between the years 2000 and 2010. The study examines the differences between the news media framing of gang rape and individual rape. Results indicate that the coverage of gang rape significantly differs from that of individual rape. Newspaper coverage over-emphasizes instances of gang rape in relation to individual occurrences of rape by means of sensational headlines and “yellow” journalism. Moreover, the construction of gang rape reflects a convergence of gender, race, and class oppression through the blaming and marginalizing of victims, criminalizing rapists from socially marginal groups, and absolving offenders most closely associated with the upper middle class. These findings suggest that the Israeli media play a key role in perpetuating patriarchal hegemony and social inequality.

 

 

 

 

Dissertation: Cohen, Israeli State Violence/Mizrahi Resilience: An Ethnography of Mizrahi Experiences of War and Eviction and Their Intersection with Palestinian Experiences

Cohen, Ilise Benshushan. Israeli State Violence/Mizrahi Resilience: An Ethnography of Mizrahi Experiences of War and Eviction and Their Intersection with Palestinian Experiences. California Institute of Integral Studies, 2013.

 

URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/1461742758

 

Abstract

Mizrahi Jews have historically been marginalized in Israeli society despite the fact that they make up the majority of Israel’s Jewish population. Through ethnographic research, this study highlights the experiences of Mizrahi Jews around two Mizrahi communities that continue to experience marginalization: Kfar Shalem, a neighborhood in south Tel Aviv that was the site of evictions without compensation in 2007, and Kiryat Shemona, a development town on Israel’s northern border that was directly affected by the second Lebanon war in 2006. Areas of focus of the research include the process of eviction without compensation for Kfar Shalem, the lasting effects of cross-border military conflict in Kiryat Shemona, and the violence produced by these experiences. The research methods utilized included ethnographic interviews, participant observation, archival research, and advocacy. The research participants in Kfar Shalem included Mizrahi families evicted from their homes, lawyers who represented the residents, and Mizrahi activists involved with the community. The research participants in Kiryat Shemona consisted of Mizrahi families who maintained a presence during the war and those who were displaced, and mental health professionals dealing with the effects of the war on residents. I also interviewed two Palestinian citizens of Israel who were able to speak to complex issues of displacement and citizenship. The dissertation frames the ethnographic research in a historical context that includes the U.N. partition of Palestine, Palestinian expulsion/ethnic cleansing, Mizrahi immigration to Israel, and the instrumentalization of Mizrahi Jews being settled in former Palestinian areas. It draws on comparisons between the struggles and ongoing activism of Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians in Israel/Palestine. The findings reveal the complex struggles of Mizrahi identity, discourses of discrimination and internalized oppression, and Mizrahi exposure to physical violence, loss of economic status, and instrumentalization by the state. The findings also highlight meaningful similarities and differences between Mizrahi and Palestinian experiences of state violence and about Mizrahi resilience and agency.

Subject: Cultural anthropology; Middle Eastern Studies; Judaic studies

Classification: 0326: Cultural anthropology; 0555: Middle Eastern Studies; 0751: Judaic studies

Identifier / keyword: Social sciences, State violence, Israel, Discrimination, Mizrahim, Mizrahi-Palestinian alliance, Mizrahi resistance

Number of pages: 567

Publication year: 2013

Degree date: 2013

School code: 0392

Source: DAI-A 75/02(E), Aug 2014

Place of publication: Ann Arbor

Country of publication: United States

ISBN: 9781303480928

Advisor: M’Panya, Mutombo

Committee member: Simons, Shoshana; Shubeli, Rafi

University/institution: California Institute of Integral Studies

Department: Social and Cultural Anthropology

University location: United States — California

Degree: Ph.D.

Source type: Dissertations & Theses

Language: English

Document type: Dissertation/Thesis

Dissertation/thesis number: 3598997

ProQuest document ID: 1461742758

New Article: Prashizky and Remennick, Gender and Cultural Citizenship among Non-Jewish Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union in Israel

Prashizky, Anna and Larissa Remennick. “Gender and Cultural Citizenship among Non-Jewish Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union in Israel.” Citizenship Studies 18.3-4 (2014): 365-383.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13621025.2014.905276

 

Abstract

About 330,000 of partial Jews and gentiles have moved to Israel after 1990 under the Law of Return. The article is based on interviews with middle-aged gentile spouses of Jewish immigrants, aiming to capture their perspective on integration and citizenship in the new homeland where they are ethnic minority. Slavic wives of Jewish men manifested greater malleability and adopted new lifestyles more readily than did Slavic husbands of Jewish women, particularly in relation to Israeli holidays and domestic customs. Most women considered formal conversion as a way to symbolically join the Jewish people, while no men pondered over this path to full Israeli citizenship. Women’s perceptions of the IDF and military service of their children were idealistic and patriotic, while men’s perceptions were more critical and pragmatic. We conclude that women have a higher stake at joining the mainstream due to their family commitments and matrilineal transmission of Jewishness to children. Men’s hegemony in the family and in the social hierarchy of citizenship attenuates their drive for cultural adaptation and enables rather critical stance toward Israeli society. Cultural politics of belonging, therefore, reflect the gendered norms of inclusion in the nation-state.

New Article: Cohen, Mizrahi Subalternity and the State of Israel

Cohen, Kfir. “Mizrahi Subalternity and the State of Israel. Towards a New Understanding of Mizrahi Literature.” Interventions 16.3 (2014): 380-404.

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369801X.2013.816075

Abstract

This essay proposes a new approach to Mizrahi literature by re-examining the socioconceptual relation between Mizrahi subalternity and the state of Israel. Examining the recent post-Zionist/postcolonial criticism, I argue that its literary categories and social analysis conceive of the Mizrahi only through the medium and form of the state and only in so far as its ‘culture’ procures it with an alternative content for Israeli Eurocentric nationalism. Such a ‘statist’ and national articulation of the Mizrahi, critical as it might be, confuses the conditions of Mizrahi cultural identity and legitimate speech whose site is civil society with the conditions of subalternity produced in the Israeli social formation as a whole, and thus ends up misconceiving the Mizrahi subaltern and its literary appearance. Since Mizrahi subalternity emerges in social and discursive fields that cannot be rendered in such a ‘statist’ language, it thus holds alternative knowledge and forms that both reveal the conceptual limits of the post-Zionist stance and allow for a new interpretive approach to Mizrahi literature. However, since canonical Mizrahi literature – as with most recent Mizrahi criticism – has always imagined the Mizrahi in statist terms, I argue that this alternative language and knowledge does not exist as such in Mizrahi literature, but only in a displaced form as its unconscious. To provide an example for such a new interpretation and approach, I offer a reading of Shimon Ballas’s The Transit Camp.

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.