New Article: Kallius et al, Politics of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Hungary

Kallius, Annastiina, Daniel Monterescu, and Prem Kumar Rajaram. “Immobilizing Mobility: Border Ethnography, Illiberal Democracy, and the Politics of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Hungary.” American Ethnologist (early view; online first).

ְְ 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/amet.12260

 

Abstract

In the summer of 2015, more than 350,000 migrants moved through Hungarian territory. Almost immediately there emerged in response a dialectic between, on the one hand, depoliticizing narratives of crisis that sought to immobilize the migrants and, on the other, concrete political mobilization that sought to facilitate their mobility. While state institutions and humanitarian volunteer groups framed mobility in terms that emphasized a vertical form of politics, a horizontal counterpolitics arose by the summer’s end, one that challenged hegemonic territorial politics. The state’s efforts to immobilize resulted only in more radical forms of mobility. Outlining an ethnography of mobility, immobilization, and cross-border activism, we follow the dramatic yet momentary presence, and subsequent absence, of migrants in an evanescent rebel city marked by novel political solidarities.

 

 

 

New Article: Hochman, Framing and Attitudes Toward Asylum Seekers in Israel

Hochman, Oshrat. “Infiltrators or Asylum Seekers? Framing and Attitudes Toward Asylum Seekers in Israel.” Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 13.4 (2015): 358-78.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2014.982779

 

Extract

This study asks whether framing asylum seekers in Israel as “infiltrators” posing threats to the country amplifies exclusion toward them. The term “infiltrators” associates asylum seekers with the anti-infiltration law passed in the 1950s to fight terrorists and dissociates asylum seekers from their unique position as holders of special rights. The term “infiltrators” may thus influence the attitudes of the Israeli public regarding the treatment of asylum seekers. Findings demonstrate that respondents presented with the “infiltrators” frame were more likely to show exclusionary attitudes. Findings additionally show that the framing effect mediates the relation between perceived socioeconomic threat and exclusion.

 

 

 

CFP: “Promised Lands: Israel-Diaspora Relations and Beyond” Workshop for Young Scholars (Munich, May 23-25, 2016)

The young scholars’ workshop focuses on the relationship between the State of Israel and Jewish communities worldwide. This relationship is often conceptualized in ideologically charged terms. “Diaspora,” the term most frequently used for Jewish communities outside of Israel, describes these relations in terms of “center” and “periphery” and is filled with negative connotations going back to religious traditions of spiritual diminishment and exile. But beyond messianic utopias, the actual state plays a great variety of different roles among Jews and their communities. Since its creation in 1948, Israel has shaped and formed the perceptions and self-perceptions of Jews around the world. What is more, these communities influence and shape Israeli culture, society and politics. Migration in both directions is a key element of these relations as migrants serve as agents of transcultural exchange and considerably help shaping mutual perceptions. These complex and multilayered relations and their representations are at the center of the workshop.

The workshop offers young scholars from Europe in the field of Israel Studies a forum to discuss their work with their peers and senior scholars alike. Scholars on the doctoral and post-doctoral level (within three years after completing their Ph.D.) can expand their networks and help to foster a vivid academic community of Israel Studies in Europe.

The workshop is supported by the Israel Institute and will take place at the Center for Advanced Studies / LMU Munich, Mai 23-25, 2016 under the direction of Michael Brenner (LMU Munich), Daniel Mahla (LMU Munich) and Johannes Becke (Center for Jewish Studies Heidelberg). Featured speakers include Derek Penslar (Oxford/Toronto) and Michael Berkowitz (UCL London).

To apply please send in an abstract of up to 300 words about the proposed paper and a CV until January 18, 2016 to: daniel.mahla@lrz.uni-muenchen.de.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

– Political, economic and social relations between the State of Israel and Jewish communities worldwide

– Israeli emigration and its representation

– The concept of Jewish Diaspora and its changes after 1948

– The meanings and significance of the concept of a “dispersed people” for Jews and Israel

– The roles of exile and home in Jewish weltanschauung

– The influence of the state on Jewish-Gentile relations outside of Israel

– The impact of the establishment of a Jewish state on world Jewry

– The relationship between global and local in Jewish history

-Comparative perspectives on diaspora nationalism and Homeland-Diaspora relations

– Israeli Arab/Palestinian conceptions of “Diaspora”

– Palestinian emigration and its representation

– Non-Jewish diaspora communities in Israel (e.g. Armenians)

– Jewish and non-Jewish migration into Israel

ToC: Hebrew Studies 56 (2015)

Below are the relevant articles for Israel Studies from the latest issue of Hebrew Studies. For a full Table of Contents,click here.

 

Innovative Designation of Diminution in the Writings of Abraham Shlonsky

pp. 231-243

Bat-Zion Yemini

Memory and History in Israeli Post-Apocalyptic Theater

pp. 245-263

Zahava Caspi

Questioning Boundaries of Language and the World: Ambivalence and Disillusionment in the Writings of Shimon Adaf

pp. 265-294

Dorit Lemberger

Hebrew Neologisms in the Writings of Anton Shammas

pp. 295-314

Adel Shakour, Abdallah Tarabeih

The Pain of Two Homelands: Immigration to Israel in Twenty-First Century Hebrew Prose Fiction

pp. 315-331

Smadar Shiffman

“Our Virgin Friends and Wives”?: Female Sexual Subjectivity in Yona Wallach’s Poetry

pp. 333-356

Amalia Ziv

New Testament Jesus in Modern Jewish Literature: A Symposium

pp. 357-358

Zev Garber

Jesus and the Pharisees through the Eyes of Two Modern Hebrew Writers: A Contrarian Perspective

pp. 359-365

Neta Stahl

A Question of Truth: Form, Structure, and Character in Der man fun Natseres

pp. 367-376

Melissa Weininger

Overtones of Isaac and Jesus in Modern Hebrew Narrative

pp. 377-384

Aryeh Wineman

The Jewish Jesus: Conversation, Not Conversion

pp. 385-392

Zev Garber

Reviews

 

Compassion and Fury: On The Fiction of A. B. Yehoshua by Gilead Morahg (review)

pp. 433-436

Yael Halevi-Wise

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Periodicals

pp. 437-456

Books Received — 2015

pp. 457-460

New Article: Johnston, Aliyah le-Berlin

Johnston, Zachary. “Aliyah Le Berlin: A Documentary about the Next Chapter of Jewish Life in Berlin.” In Being Jewish in 21st-Century Germany (ed. Olaf Glöckner and Haim Fireberg; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015): 152-62.

 

 

Abstract

The American movie director and producer Zachary Johnston shares with us his insights on the emergence of a diaspora of Israeli youth in Berlin. In many ways – second only to Fania Oz-Salzberger – he is one of the pioneers in identifying the phenomenon that he follows in his documentary, and he had done it well before it became a hot issue in the Israeli media in 2014. Johnston challenges the common Israeli set of values about migration. “One cannot use the term ‘aliyah‘ out-of-context without eliciting a knee-jerk response due to its value-loaded nature of the word, which is tied to the ‘ascent’ of Jews to Israel.” He adds: “Perhaps, this new age of Israeli and Jewish exploration in Germany has a higher purpose that has yet to be ascertained, that down the road the concept of aliyah will receive a something deeper, stronger, and broader meaning for the nation of Israel and its citizens.”

 

 

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 Book: Eshet, The Interest in UFOs and Extraterrestrials in Israeli Society (in Hebrew)

Eshet, Techia. For Their Eyes Only. The Interest in UFOs and Extraterrestrials in Israeli Society. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2015 (in Hebrew).

 

 

 

In the last decade of the 20th century, more than fifty years since the first report of a “flying saucer” in the United States, there has been a growing interest in UFOs and extraterrestrials in Western culture in general and in Israel in particular. At times it seems that spacecrafts have landed in Israel en masse and thousands of extraterrestrials have conquered every part of its culture: the TV screens, daily newspapers, websites and billboards. The interest in UFOs and extraterrestrials, which flourished in Israel in various arenas during the 1990s, is discussed in this book in the context of addressing issues of identity and otherness.

This offers a different and fascinating perspective in a an extraordinary and innovative field of study; a “different” world, which is ostensibly distant, but in fact is close in many ways. “Glimpsing” into the world of those dealing with UFOs and extraterrestrials reveals not only this unique and intriguing subculture, but also very sheds light on the local and global culture of which we are all apart. The employment of extraterrestrial otherness reflects in this book the culture at large, including the changes and transformations that have taken place in Israeli society, alongside an observation of existential issues and concepts related to time, space, body and human existence. This gripping journey into the intricacies of the other and the marginal demonstrates that the preoccupation with the other, the cosmic, and the alien enables the strengthening of the relationship to the present and the local. In addition, the book discusses major cultural issues such as religion, politics, internal and external divides and conflicts, and pseudo-science.

To Their Eyes Only is based on anthropological research conducted within the framework of a doctoral thesis written by Techia Eshet. The study, which lasted several years, included Participant observations in conferences of “the Israeli Center for UFO Research” and in clinics offering treatment through extraterrestrials, along with interviews with practitioners in the field, and analysis of reports on evidence about seeing a UFO sightings or extraterrestrial encounters.

Techia (Thea) Eshet is a doctor of anthropology; Lecturer at the University of Haifa.
.

Dissertation: Hankins | Black Musics, African Lives, and the National Imagination in Modern Israel

Hankins, Sarah Elizabeth. Black Musics, African Lives, and the National Imagination in Modern Israel. PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 2015.

 
URL: http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/17467531

 
Abstract

“Black Musics, African Lives, and the National Imagination in Modern Israel,” explores the forms and functions of African and Afro-diasporic musics amidst heated public debate around ethnic identity and national membership. Focusing on musical-political activity among Ethiopian Israeli citizens, Sudanese and Eritrean refugees, and West African labor migrants in Tel Aviv, I examine how diverse types of musicking, from nightclub DJing and live performance to church services and protest concerts, voice African and Afro-descendent claims to civic status in a fractured urban environment. Grounded in ethnographic participant observation, the dissertation analyzes musical and political activity through the lens of “interpretive modes” that shape contemporary Israel’s national consciousness, and which influence African and Afro-descendant experiences within Israeli society. These include “Israeliyut,” or the valorization of so-called native Israeli cultural forms and histories; “Africani,” an emerging set of aesthetic and social values that integrates African and Afro-descendent subjectivities into existing frameworks of Israeli identity; and “glocali,” or the effort to reconcile local Israeli experience with aspects of globalization.

Tracing “blackness” as an ideological and aesthetic category through five decades of public discourse and popular culture, I examine the disruptions to this category precipitated by Israel’s 21st century encounter with African populations. I find that the dynamics of debate over African presence influence an array of mass-cultural processes, including post-Zionism, conceptions of ethnic “otherness,” and the splintering of Israel’s left into increasingly narrow interest groups. Contributing to the literature on continuity and change within urban-dwelling African diasporas, this dissertation is the first monograph exploring dramatic transformations of Israel’s highly consolidated national culture through in-depth ethnography with migrant groups.

 

 

New Article: Brown, Re-examining the Transnational Nanny

Brown, Rachel H. “Re-examining the Transnational Nanny. Migrant Carework beyond the Chain.” International Feminist Journal of Politics (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14616742.2015.1007728

 

Abstract

This article explores whether the concept of a global care chain is useful in understanding the migration of careworkers internationally. It examines how an affective approach to understanding migration could supplement the care chain analysis by accounting for the overlapping, shifting, contingent and non-linear networks of emotion that arise during migrations. Analyzing carework through the lens of an “affective economy” is more revealing of the multiple experiences of Filipino gay and transgender caregivers in Tel Aviv and New York, Peruvian careworkers in Spain and Polish careworkers in Germany, as but three brief, illustrative examples. First I will discuss what the care chain approach can illuminate about the multiple and varied stories of migrant careworkers and how it may also essentialize or oversimplify their experiences. I will then suggest that the model naturalizes the caring, biological mother and reinforces geographical and ideological binaries such as North/South, winner/loser and domination/dependency. Finally, I will discuss how the care chain model presents a linear conception of time and space, obscuring the overlapping and multi-directional routes of migration that careworkers travel. Ultimately I will argue that an affective approach creates the theoretical language that can help build what Chela Sandoval calls a coalitional consciousness.

 
 
 
 
 

Screening and Discussion: Shadow in Baghdad (SOAS, Nov 20, 2014)

SOAS Centre for Jewish Studies

Shadow in Baghdad

Film Screening and Panel Discussion

7pm Thursday 20^th November

Khalili Lecture Theatre, SOAS

 

The film will be followed by a panel discussion with

Linda Menuhin Abdul Aziz (journalist, film protagonist)

Adel Darwish (author and journalist);

Amal al-Jubouri (Director of the Arab Human Rights Academy)

Chair: Dr. Yair Wallach (SOAS)

SHADOW IN BAGHDAD (director: Duki Dror, 2013) tells the story of Linda Menuhin Abdul Aziz, who escaped the upheaval of Iraq in the early 1970’s to Israel, and her father, who disappeared shortly thereafter to an unknown fate. The film follows Linda as an unexpected connection with a young Iraqi journalist sets her back on the path towards Baghdad and the truth behind her father’s disappearance. What they ultimately uncover is not only the fate of Linda’s father but that of the once thriving Iraqi Jewish community whose glorious history came to an abrupt end in the 1970’s. At once a story of tragedy and redemption, Shadow in Baghdad tells of an important chapter in the turbulent history of the Middle East as it points to a distinct hope for the future as well.

THE PANEL DISCUSSION will consider Iraq’s Jewish past against the country’s current predicament and the question of human rights, civic solidarity and minorities in the Middle East.

All Welcome

The event is free and there is no need to book

SOAS, University of London
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG

 

New Article: Cohen & Kranz, State-assisted Highly Skilled Return Programmes: Israel and Germany Compared

Cohen, Nir and Dani Kranz. “State-assisted Highly Skilled Return Programmes, National Identity and the Risk(s) of Homecoming: Israel and Germany Compared.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (ahead of print)

 

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369183X.2014.948392

 

 

Abstract

State-assisted return programmes (SARPs) have emerged as key components of diaspora mobilisation strategies in countries of origin. Especially in countries where the principle of jus sanguinis underpins citizenship regimes, these programmes have often been drawn from ostensibly national(istic) discourses in order to encourage the repatriation of (mostly highly skilled) citizens residing abroad. Drawing on interviews with public officials and migrants as well as content analysis of primary and secondary materials, this paper examines SARPs deployed by Israel and Germany. It argues that while the discourse and practice within which state programmes are embedded (re-)construct the nation in certain ways that are commensurate with perceived determinants of return, migrants have often rejected these formulations, underscoring instead a range of neglected personal and professional return-oriented risks. The paper’s main contribution lies in better clarifying the links between highly skilled return migration policy, national identity and migration determinants and uncovers the diverging articulations of return used by state and migrants alike.

New Article: Rebhun, Israeli Émigrés in the United States and Europe Compared

Rebhun, Uzi. “Immigrant Acculturation and Transnationalism: Israelis in the United States and Europe Compared.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 53.3 (2014): 613-35.

URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jssr.12135/abstract

Abstract

This article examines relations between social integration into host societies, religio-ethnic acculturation into group belonging, and ties to home country among Israeli émigrés in the United States and Europe. I use data from a 2009–2010 Internet survey into which I incorporated country-contextual characteristics. The results of multivariate analyses show that a social integration combining duration of residence abroad and local citizenship enhances religio-ethnic identification. Another measure of integration, social networks, deters group behaviors. All measures of general integration inhibit attachment to the home country, whereas religio-ethnic acculturation is largely insignificant for transnationalism. The religiosity of the new country does not influence immigrants’ religio-ethnic patterns or homeland attachment. Insofar as group size is a significant determinant of particularistic behaviors, it weakens them. The more policy-based opportunities newcomers receive, the more they dissociate from group behaviors and homeland ties. Irrespective of individual and contextual factors, living in the United States encourages group affiliation more than living in Europe does. The results are discussed in reference to four working hypotheses—marginalization, integration, assimilation, and separation—and from a U.S.-European comparative perspective.

 

Dissertation: Amihay, The Imagetext Turn in the Hebrew Novel

Amihay, Ofra. Migrating Images: The Imagetext Turn in the Hebrew Novel. New York University, 2014.

 

URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/1518939613

 

Abstract

This dissertation examines the effect of twentieth-century “new media” models on literature, in the form of the late twentieth-century wave of literary works in which visual images play a central poetic role. Demarcating this body of works as an independent cultural turn, I label this “the imagetext turn” thus following two groundbreaking terms coined by W. J. T. Mitchell, “the pictorial turn” and “imagetext.” Based on philosophical discussions regarding the egalitarianism behind text and image hybrids (Benjamin, Rancière, Mitchell), and theories of the democratic nature of the novel (Auerbach, Lukács, Bakhtin) and photography (Sontag, Barthes, Azoulay), I focus on the marriage of novels and photographs. The case study for this exploration is three contemporary Israeli novelists: Yoel Hoffmann, Ronit Matalon, and Michal Govrin. Following a survey of the approach towards the visual image in Modern Hebrew literature, I identify their works as comprising the “imagetext turn” in Hebrew literature while marking their importance within a general literary development, primarily through a comparison to W. G. Sebald’s novels. My study of Hoffmann analyzes the web of Others in his novels through the photographic mechanism of the negative, suggesting the juxtaposition of text and photographs in How Do You Do Dolores echoes the Other behind text, place, and language in all his work. In my analysis of Matalon I discuss the double role photographs play in Matalon’s pursuit of postcolonial ideas in The One Facing Us, operating both as “portable roots” and as “poetic immigrants,” thus offering a subversive reading of reality that undermines nostalgia. Finally I show how through an intricate combination of narrative and visual images Govrin creates in Snapshots a literary representation of both the ideals and the blind spots of the 1990s left-wing movement of secular return to Jewish sources in Israel.

Subject: Comparative literature; Middle Eastern literature; Judaic studies

Classification: 0295: Comparative literature; 0315: Middle Eastern literature; 0751: Judaic studies

Identifier / keyword: Language, literature and linguistics, Social sciences, Hebrew literature, Govrin, Michal, Photography, Matalon, Ronit, Sebald, W. G., Hoffmann, Yoel

Number of pages: 308

Publication year: 2014

Degree date: 2014

School code: 0146

Source: DAI-A 75/07(E), Jan 2015

Place of publication: Ann Arbor

Country of publication: United States

ISBN: 9781303805424

Advisor: Feldman, Yael

Committee member: Hirsch, Marianne; Mann, Barbara E.; Engel, David; Kaplan, Marion

University/institution: New York University

Department: Hebrew and Judaic Studies

University location: United States — New York

Degree: Ph.D.

Source type: Dissertations & Theses

Language: English

Document type: Dissertation/Thesis

Dissertation/thesis number: 3614848

ProQuest document ID: 1518939613

New Article: Rosenberg-Friedman, Story of Ada Sereni, Head of the Mossad Le’aliyah in Italy

Rosenberg-Friedman, Lilach. “National Mission, Feminine Identity and Female Leadership in a Mythical Masculine Organization: The Story of Ada Sereni, Head of the Mossad: The Story of Ada Sereni, Head of the Mossad Le’aliyah in Italy during the 1940s.” Women’s Studies 43.5 (2014): 589-618.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00497878.2014.914396

 

Abstract

Before the establishment of the Mossad, Israel’s mythological secret service agency (formed in 1949), another secretive organization operated in the region. This organization, known as the Mossad Le’Aliyah Bet (henceforth the Mossad), was responsible for helping Holocaust survivors immigrate illegally to Palestine. Few people are aware that a woman, Ada Sereni, headed the organizations’ important Italian division from July 1945 to May 1948, an intense period during the struggle for the establishment of the State of Israel. This article seeks to present the characteristics of Ada Sereni’s actions, the new identity she developed during this period, and her complex leadership style.

New Article: Hankins, Multidimensional Israeliness and Tel Aviv’s Tachanah Merkazit

Hankins, Sarah. “Multidimensional Israeliness and Tel Aviv’s Tachanah Merkazit: Hearing Culture in a Polyphonic Transit Hub.” City & Society 25.3 (2013): 282-303.

 

URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ciso.12023/abstract

 

Abstract

Israel’s heated public debate over the socio-political implications of increasing demographic diversity plays out with special prominence in Tel Aviv, home to large minority citizen populations and a destination for foreign workers and refugees from Asia and Africa. The city’s New Central Bus Station, or tachanah merkazit, is a transit hub and commercial complex in which multiple ethnic groups enact aesthetic and cultural dimensions of Israeli urban and national identity in flux. This paper presents a sensory ethnography of the tachanah: sonic and musical expressions of “local” and “global” Israeliness are analyzed against a backdrop of near-constant motion and transit. The somatic and ideological dimensions of movement enable Jewish Israelis, minority citizens and foreigners to assimilate sounds of culture within the tachanah at deeply-felt, personal levels. The tachanah’s sonic activity is inherently political, having the potential to impact collective identity and civic reality in Tel Aviv and across Israel

Cite: Raijman, South African Jews in Israel

Raijman, Rebeca. “Moving to the Homeland: South African Jews in Israel.” Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 11.3 (2013): 259-77.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15562948.2013.801728

 

Abstract

This article focuses on Jewish South African immigrants migrating to Israel. It examines motives for migration, the ways by which migrants organized their move to the new country, and the types of resources (individual and institutional) on which they relied to make and implement their decision. Our study suggests that both push and pull factors explain South African Jewish migration to Israel. The unstable socioeconomic and political situation prevalent in South Africa was the main push factor explaining the desire to leave the country, whereas a strong Jewish and Zionist identity acted as a strong pull factor driving South African Jews to Israel. In addition, the existence of social networks and institutional frameworks linking the two countries helped perpetuate the migration over time. Two salient conceptual points emerge. First, theories that stress the economic aspects of migration alone are not helpful in explaining South African Jewish migration to Israel. We must also consider how ethnic identities related to the host society (e.g., their Jewish and Zionist identity) affect potential migrants’ decision making. Second, in order to understand the process of the migration of Jews to Israel, it is important to refer to the communal and social structures in the countries of origin and of destination.

Reviews: Kanaaneh and Nusair, eds. Displaced at Home

Kanaaneh, Rhoda Ann and Isis Nusair, eds. Displaced at Home. Ethnicity and Gender among Palestinians in Israel. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2010.

Reviews

• Sa’ar, Amalia. “Review.” Review of Middle East Studies 45.1 (2011): 113-115.
• Bachal, Lauren, et al. “Review.” Contemporary Sociology 40.5 (2011): 639-40.
• Gluck, Sherna Berger. “New Directions in Palestinian Oral History.” Oral History Review 39.1 (2012): 100-111.
• Vivier, Elmé. “Review.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 13.3 (2012): 203-207.
• Arar, Khalid. “Review.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 40.2 (2013): 227-30.

.

Dissertation: Katan, Language Socialization and Linguistic Ideologies among Israeli Emissaries in the United States

Language socialization and linguistic ideologies among Israeli emissaries in the United States

 

Author: Kattan, Shlomy

 

Publication info: University of California, Berkeley, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2010. 3413403.

 

http://pitt.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/749359605?accountid=14709

 

Abstract: Research in both the anthropology and sociology of education has increasingly come to consider the institutional effects of migration, globalization, and transnationalism on learning environments. Yet, most studies examining transmigration and education have only looked at migrant children in schools rather than at the transitions they undergo as transnationals across settings. We know little of the linguistic and socializing practices that occur during migrants’ transitions from place to place and how they come to define the migratory and educational experience for transnational children. This multi-sited, global ethnography examines language socialization practices and linguistic ideologies among families of Israeli emissaries ( shlichim ) employed by the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI). The study documented the transitions undergone by families with school-age children in the months of their preparation for their move from Israel to the United States and during the first year and-a-half in the U.S.. Data collection for this project took place in both Israel and New York at the homes of the families, the children’s schools, peer group activities, extracurricular programs, play, and summer camp. The focus of this dissertation project is on routine home and school practices which orient children to attitudes towards their identities as Israelis, as Zionists, as transnationals, and as temporary residents of the United States. The study approaches this question through the lens of the language socialization paradigm, a subfield of linguistic anthropology which understands socialization to occur both through the use of language and to the use of language. I argue that through attention to language use and form children are taught to attend to symbolic boundaries between Israeli, Jewish Diasporan, and U.S. American identities. The simultaneous reinforcement and transcendence of these symbolic boundaries is a defining characteristic of living transnationally. I find that transnational identities: (1) Are constructed through an explicit recognition of the boundaries between the linguistic and cultural practices of the homeland and the host country; (2) are negotiated through attention to the authenticity of members of the homeland, the host country, and the transnational community; that is, through attention to the extent to which individuals stay within the symbolic boundaries that separate the homeland and the host-land; and (3) Display an ambivalence toward affiliation with the host country by accentuating and emphasizing the linguistic and cultural practices of the homeland. Based on these findings, I call for a language socialization approach to studying transnationalism which recognizes the role of the local and the global, the contemporary and the historical, and the orthodox and heterodox in everyday transnational practices. By focusing on the shlichim ‘s transition from Israel to the United States, the dissertation obtains a view of migration often unavailable to researchers: the preparation for departure and initial arrival to the country of destination. This period of transition is formative in the emissaries’ experiences and as they define themselves vis-à-vis their country of origin and their host country. In this sense, this dissertation contributes to an understanding of the role of language in transnational practices, thus supplementing the growing field of research around questions of transnationalism, diaspora, and identity.

 

 

Subject: Linguistics; Cultural anthropology; Educational sociology

Classification: 0290: Linguistics; 0326: Cultural anthropology; 0340: Educational sociology

Identifier / keyword: Education, Social sciences, Language, literature and linguistics, Language socialization, Ideologies, Israeli, Emissaries, Diaspora, Identity, Israel, Shlichut, Symbolic boundaries,; Transnationalism

Title: Language socialization and linguistic ideologies among Israeli emissaries in the United States

Number of pages: 144

Publication year: 2010

Degree date: 2010

School code: 0028

Source: DAI-A 71/09, Mar 2011

Place of publication: Ann Arbor

Country of publication: United States

ISBN: 9781124140995

Advisor: Baquedano-Lopez, Patricia

Committee member: Kramsch, Claire J., Boyarin, Daniel

University/institution: University of California, Berkeley

Department: Education

University location: United States — California

Degree: Ph.D.

Source type: Dissertations & Theses

Language: English

Document type: Dissertation/Thesis

Dissertation/thesis number: 3413403

ProQuest document ID: 749359605

Cite: Yaron et al., Analysis of Israel’s Policy Towards African Asylum-Seekers

Yaron, Hadas, Nurit Hashimshony-Yaffe and John Campbell. “‘Infiltrators’ or Refugees? An Analysis of Israel’s Policy Towards African Asylum-Seekers.” International Migration (Early View: Online Version of Record published before inclusion in an issue).

 

URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/imig.12070/abstract

 

Abstract

This article adopts a genealogical approach in examining Israeli immigration policy by focusing on the situation confronting African asylum seekers who have been forced back into Egypt, detained and deported but who have not had their asylum claims properly assessed. Based on immigration policies formulated at the time of Israeli independence, whose principle objective was to secure a Jewish majority state, we argue that Israel’s treatment of African asylum seekers as ‘infiltrators’/economic migrants stems from an insistence on maintaining immigration as a sovereign issue formally isolated from other policy domains. Such an approach is not only in violation of Israel’s commitment to the Refugee Convention, it directly contributes to policies which are ineffective and unduly harsh.

Cite: Harpaz, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Israelis with a European Passport

Harpaz, Yossi. “Rooted Cosmopolitans: Israelis with a European Passport – History, Property, Identity.” International Migration 47.1 (2013): 166-206.

 

URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/imre.12017/abstract

 

Abstract

Over the past decade, a new and intriguing phenomenon developed in Israel: close to 60,000 Israelis applied for citizenship in the Central and Eastern European countries from which their families immigrated. Typically, these new dual citizens have no plans to “return” to Germany or Poland, nor do they feel any identification with their countries of origin. Instead, they are mainly interested in obtaining a “European Union passport” and in gaining potential access to the European common market. The paper presents statistics on this unconventional case of dual citizenship, surveys the historical and legal circumstances that produced it and uses material from interviews to explore the meanings and uses that European-Israeli dual citizens attribute to their European passports. Dual citizenship, the findings show, is used by Israelis in various and sometimes unexpected ways: as enhancer of economic opportunities, “insurance policy,” intergenerational gift, and even as an elitist status symbol. This modality of state belonging can be termed “passport citizenship”: Non-resident citizenship here is stripped of its national meaning and treated as an individual piece of property, which is embodied by the passport and obtained for pragmatic reasons.