New Article: Dori-Hacohen and Livnat, The Use of Irony in Israeli Political Radio Phone-In Programs

Dori-Hacohen, Gonen, and Zohar Livnat. “Negotiating Norms of Discussion in the Public Arena: The Use of Irony in Israeli Political Radio Phone-In Programs.” Journal of Communication (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12186

 

Abstract

Phone-in radio programs are part of the public sphere and thus require open access, rationality, and practicality. Simultaneously, they are a media product, which requires entertaining content. We demonstrate these demands through the analysis of interactional irony in Israeli political radio phone-ins. From an emic perspective, callers see irony as detrimental to the discussions, yet hosts and regular callers use it to make entertaining interactions. Irony is a critical tool that points to violations of norms: the norm of a clear 2-sided interaction; norms akin to the Habermasian public sphere; and at the content level, irony is used to reject racist positions. Being indirect, irony can be used to create an entertaining yet critical discussion in the public sphere.

 

 

New Book: Raviv, Falafel Nation

Raviv, Yael. Falafel Nation. Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel, Studies of Jews in Society. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

 

When people discuss food in Israel, their debates ask politically charged questions: Who has the right to falafel? Whose hummus is better? But Yael Raviv’s Falafel Nation moves beyond the simply territorial to divulge the role food plays in the Jewish nation. She ponders the power struggles, moral dilemmas, and religious and ideological affiliations of the different ethnic groups that make up the “Jewish State” and how they relate to the gastronomy of the region. How do we interpret the recent upsurge in the Israeli culinary scene—the transition from ideological asceticism to the current deluge of fine restaurants, gourmet stores, and related publications and media?

Focusing on the period between the 1905 immigration wave and the Six-Day War in 1967, Raviv explores foodways from the field, factory, market, and kitchen to the table. She incorporates the role of women, ethnic groups, and different generations into the story of Zionism and offers new assertions from a secular-foodie perspective on the relationship between Jewish religion and Jewish nationalism. A study of the changes in food practices and in attitudes toward food and cooking, Falafel Nation explains how the change in the relationship between Israelis and their food mirrors the search for a definition of modern Jewish nationalism.

Yael Raviv is the director of the Umami food and art festival in New York City. She has a PhD in performance studies from New York University and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at NYU. Her work has appeared in Women and Performance, Gastronomica, and elsewhere.

New Article: Kohn, Mehubarot: A Peep without a Show

Kohn, Ayelet. “Mehubarot: A Peep without a Show.” Jewish Film & New Media 3.2 (2015): 170-92.

 

URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jewish_film_new_media_an_international_journal/v003/3.2.kohn.html

 

Abstract
The Israeli television series Mehubarot (Connected, 2009) follows five Israeli women who use their performance before the camera—through both visual and spoken texts—as a means of biographical representation which blends public and private aspects of their daily lives. This article examines the use of spoken language as a central tool for signaling sincerity and closeness on the series’ visual stage, focusing on the unique setting of Israeli society and the exclusive genre of a televised diary in its written and spoken modes.

Unlike blogs or videos uploaded to the internet, which are contemporary precedents for this kind of intimate exposure in the public arena, the genre under discussion relies on established conventions of television and cinema to convey intimacy. Mehubarot is inspired by documentaries and films that use voiceover as an established device for informing the viewers of the characters’ thoughts. In its methods of presenting the “diaries,” the series also adopts patterns of confession and exposure commonly used in televised platforms that follow ongoing projects of identity construction, and frequently present them as journeys of self-discovery and personal development. Following a discussion of the series’ unique features, the article’s second part focuses on the journalist Dana Spector and the contradictory readings of her private-public identity, social and family identity, and “celebrity” identity in their transfer from the newspaper column to the television arena.

 

 

New Article: Amihay, Color Photography and Self-Outing in Jewish Women’s Comics

Amihay, Ofra. “Red Diapers, Pink Stories. Color Photography and Self-Outing in Jewish Women’s Comics.” Image & Narrative 16.2 (2015): 42-64.

URL: http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/811

 

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze the function of color photography in autobiographical comics through a comparative analysis of confessional works of comics by two Jewish women artists, Jewish-American cartoonist Dianne Noomin’s 2003 comics spread “I Was a Red Diaper Baby” and Israeli cartoonist Ilana Zeffren’s Pink Story (written in Hebrew). While exploring the tensions evoked in these works between comics and photography and between black-and-white and color representations, I highlight an important difference in the nature of the images used in each work, evoking yet another tension: that between private and public. I demonstrate that these works by Noomin and Zeffren represent the array of private and public photographs available to any autobiographer, ranging from public images taken from posters, magazines, and video screenshots to intimate family snapshots. I argue that the choice between personal and public photographs in these works poetically determines the path of self-outing in each work, thus representing the two key options for such an act of self-outing, namely, using the personal sphere as a path to the public one or vice-versa. Finally, I address the role of Jewish identity in these two self-outing comics. I posit that while Jewish heritage is not a major factor in either work, the fact that in both cases the community of reference is a minority group within a Jewish community plays a significant role, introducing specific dilemmas into the already complicated identity struggle. By shedding light on the unique function of color photography in autobiographical comics about ethnographically charged self- outing experiences, the analysis of these specific works introduces to a wider audience two important yet insufficiently explored voices of women cartoonists.

 

Symposium: Private Sphere as Public Policy in Israel (Berkeley, Feb 17, 2015)

THE PRIVATE SPHERE AS PUBLIC POLICY?:

A Symposium on Law and Society in Israel

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2015

RECEPTION: 2:30; SYMPOSIUM 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM

GOLDBERG ROOM (297 BOALT HALL), BERKELEY LAW

INTRODUCTION

Jonathan Simon, Adrian A. Kragen Professor of Law; Director, CSLS

PRISON PRIVATIZATION

Hila Shamir, Associate Professor, Buchman Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University

JUDGING IN THE SHADOW OF THE LAW: PRIVATE FORUMS AND PRIVATIZED ADJUDICATION IN ISRAEL

Ori Aronson, Assistant Professor, Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law

‘I’VE GOT NO ONE TO LEAN ON’: THE NEGOTIATION OF NETWORK RELATIONS AMONG LOW-INCOME MOTHERS IN ISRAEL UNDER A NEOLIBERAL DISCOURSE

Shira Offer, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University

THE (LEGITIMACY) PRICE OF PRIVATIZED WELFARE

Avishai Benish, Assistant Professor, Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

RESPONDENT

Malcolm Feeley, Claire Sanders Clements Dean’s Professor of Law

 

 

Click here for a PDF of the flyer.

New Article: Jobani & Perez, Women of the Wall: A Normative Analysis of the Place of Religion in the Public Sphere

Jobani, Yuval and Nahshon Perez. “Women of the Wall: A Normative Analysis of the Place of Religion in the Public Sphere.” Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 3.3 (2014): 484-505.

 

URL: http://ojlr.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/3/484.abstract

 

Abstract

The place of religion in the public sphere is a controversial issue, and scholarly opinions differ, from insisting on a public sphere that reflects the religion of the majority, to those who insist on it being religion-free. Using the method of inquiry of contextual political theory, we examine the struggle of the Women of Wall (WoW) to pray collectively at the Western Wall. Their struggle began in 1988, and by 2013 includes many Courts decision, social struggles, public committees, and the involvement of many politicians and organizations, both in Israel and the USA. As this struggle takes place at the holiest place for observant Jews, it raises questions beyond its geographical location. The article describes three main normative approaches to state–religion relations (privatization, evenhandedness, and ‘dominant culture view’—DCV), examines them, and attempts to consider their application to the WoW case. Our conclusion points to the advantages of the privatization model, the permissibility of the evenhanded model and points to major shortcomings of the DCV.

New Article: Englander, The Image of the Male Body in Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodox Thought in Israel and Corresponding Strategies for Forging an A-feminine Public Sphere

Englander, Yakir. “The Image of the Male Body in Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodox Thought in Israel and Corresponding Strategies for Forging an A-feminine Public Sphere.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 29.3 (2014): 457-70.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13537903.2014.945729

 

 

Abstract

This article deals with the increasingly severe attitude in Jewish Ultra-Orthodox society in the State of Israel regarding the relationship between the sexes. I seek to trace the philosophical roots of this attitude, as a product of existential thinking within the male contingent of the Ultra-Orthodox (Lithuanian) world itself, and I propose that the growing separation between the sexes is a direct result of rabbinic efforts to re-structure this world from within. The image of the Ultra-Orthodox public sphere is considered to be an exact reflection of the male individual and the way of life that is required of him. Ultra-Orthodox thought requires men to stop the flow of life, causing a ‘disconnect’ between the reflective self and the world in which the self exists as an object without reflexivity. According to Ultra-Orthodox thought, inability and failure to live all of life as reflective are linked to the human person as an ‘embodied being’. I explain the Ultra-Orthodox solution to the ‘problem of the body’ and how it influences the structure of the yeshiva as a ‘safe haven’. This mode of dealing with the body entails the exclusion of femininity from male life in the yeshiva context and is also increasingly reflected in the public domain. In recent years, Ultra-Orthodox rabbis have designed the public sphere using the model of the yeshiva as a space that is a-feminine. This is supported by readings from new Ultra-Orthodox Musar writings, directed to men, which deal with women’s sexuality and create a new definition of modesty.

Cite: Fenster and Hamdan-Saliba, Gender and feminist geographies in the Middle East

Fenster, Tovi and Hanaa Hamdan-Saliba, “Gender and Feminist Geographies in the Middle East.”

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0966369X.2012.709826

Abstract

This article aimed to review the research carried out in the Middle East
primarily on gender and feminist geography and also on place formation,
urban space, movement and mobility in the social and political
sciences. This aim turned out to be challenging primarily because of the
colonial and post-colonial history of the region that continues to have
a profound effect on the development of academic knowledge among Middle
Eastern scholars as well as a restricted accessibility to material
published inside the Middle East. Despite this, the article primarily
focuses on feminist research on Middle Eastern women done by Middle
Eastern scholars and published in Middle Eastern journals and books
primarily in Arabic (and Hebrew in Israel). However, during the process
of reviewing a large variety of articles, book chapters and books that
exist on Middle Eastern women, we realized that it is sometimes
difficult and rather artificial to review the material with only this
division in mind. In the end, we reviewed the literature on gender and
feminism in the Middle East mainly highlighting local published research
and also briefly referring to research published in the West by both
Westerners and local researchers. The article begins with presenting its
research methodology. It then analyzes the website and literature
review that we carried out on the contexts, frameworks and themes of
gender and feminist geography and spatial research in the Middle East
with particular attention on the research carried out in
Israel/Palestine. We focus on the private–public spheres; migration and
diaspora and the veil as key concepts in analyzing the literature in
this section. In the last section, we explain the reasons for the
limitations on gender and feminist research in geography inside the
Middle East and mention some general conclusions.