New Article: Lubin, American Studies, the Middle East, and the Question of Palestine

Lubin, Alex. “American Studies, the Middle East, and the Question of Palestine.” American Quarterly 68.1 (2016): 1-21.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/aq.2016.0002

 

Abstract

This essay examines the intellectual history of American studies programs and departments in the Middle East, especially the relationship of these programs to US State Department efforts at cultural diplomacy or “soft power” after the Cold War. Through this examination, the essay theorizes the relationship of transnational American studies scholarship in the Middle East to the internationalization of the field. In their efforts to understand the United States, American studies programs in the Middle East have foregrounded the question of Palestine in ways that make these programs distinct from US-based American studies programs that still often regard Palestine as “America’s last taboo.” In their insistence on centering the question of Palestine within their vision of American studies, American studies programs in the Middle East demonstrate the unruly consequences of the internationalization of the discipline in political geographies where American primacy and exceptionalism are contested.

 

 

 

New Article: Amit & Bar-Lev, Transnational Identity among French Immigrants Employed in French-Speaking Companies in Israel

Amit, Karin, and Shirly Bar-Lev. “The Formation of Transnational Identity among French Immigrants Employed in French-Speaking Companies in Israel.” International Migration (early view; online first).

 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/imig.12239
 
Abstract

This study focuses on the formation of a transnational identity among immigrants from France who are employed in French-speaking companies in Israel (mostly call-centres). The preliminary qualitative analysis shows that this unique employment pattern contributes to the formation of their transnational identity, which is a combination of their francophone, Jewish and Israeli identity. The findings obtained from a larger-scale online survey indicated that French immigrants employed in French-speaking companies are more ethnically, socially and culturally segregated, and less fluent in Hebrew than French immigrants who are not employed in such companies. However, no significant differences were found between these two groups in their Israeli identity and sense of belonging to Israeli society. In general, the French immigrants feel at home in Israel, are satisfied with their life in Israel and plan to remain there. The implications of these findings for policymakers are discussed.

 

 

 

New Article: Dekel, Immigrant Women Artists from the FSU in Contemporary Israel

Dekel, Tal. “In Search of Transnational Jewish Art: Immigrant Women Artists from The Former Soviet Union in Contemporary Israel.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 15.1 (2016): 109-30.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2015.1120432

 

Abstract

The article explores the subject of contemporary Jewish identity through the case of young immigrant women artists from the former Soviet Union in Israel, with particular emphasis on an analysis of the gendered aspects of their religious identity. Drawing on an interdisciplinary method, the research is based on in-depth interviews with artists, artwork analysis, and various theories from the social sciences and humanities. The article’s main argument is that an analysis of the artistic practices of this and similar understudied social groups, particularly those practices undertaken in moments of conflict or times of deep social change, produces a more subtle understanding of the shifting modes of Jewish identity in the age of globalization and transnationalism, whose phenomenon of mass migration has led to the construction of new multi-hyphenated, hybrid identities.

 

 

 

New Article: Feniger & Kallus, Expertise in the Name of Diplomacy: The Israeli Plan for Rebuilding the Qazvin Region, Iran

Feniger, Neta, and Rachel Kallus. “Expertise in the Name of Diplomacy: The Israeli Plan for Rebuilding the Qazvin Region, Iran.” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 5.1 (2016): 103-34.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ijia.5.1.103_1

 

Extract

After the September 1962 earthquake in the Qazvin region of Iran, Israel sent planning experts to assist Iranian relief efforts. A small project, the reconstruction of one village, led to a larger project initiated by the United Nations, in which a team of experts from Israel were sent to survey and plan the region devastated by the quake. This resulted in a comprehensive regional plan, and detailed plans for several villages. Israeli assistance to Iran was also intended to reinforce bilateral relations between the countries. The disaster offered an opportunity for demonstrating Israeli expertise in a range of fields including architecture, and to consolidate Israel’s international image as an agent for development. This article examines transnational exchange via professional expertise, using the participation of Israeli architects in the rebuilding of Qazvin as a case study, in order to demonstrate that architects were agents of Israel’s diplomatic goals. The architects had professional objectives, namely the creation of a modern plan for the region and its villages. At the same time, these objectives were intertwined with the Shah of Iran’s national modernization plan, and with Israel’s desire to become Iran’s ally in this drive for change and modernization, in the hope of promoting a different, more modern, Middle East.

 

 

 

New Book: Baron, Obligation in Exile

Baron, Ilan Zvi. Obligation in Exile: The Jewish Diaspora, Israel and Critique. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2015.

 

Combining political theory and sociological interviews spanning four countries, Israel, the USA, Canada and the UK, Ilan Zvi Baron explores the Jewish Diaspora/Israel relationship and suggests that instead of looking at Diaspora Jews’ relationship with Israel as a matter of loyalty, it is one of obligation.

Baron develops an outline for a theory of transnational political obligation and, in the process, provides an alternative way to understand and explore the Diaspora/Israel relationship than one mired in partisan debates about whether or not being a good Jew means supporting Israel. He concludes by arguing that critique of Israel is not just about Israeli policy, but about what it means to be a Diaspora Jew.

 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface

• Introduction
• 1. the Limits of Political Obligation
• 2. Power and Obligation
• 3.Between Zion and Diaspora: Internationalisms, Transnationalisms, Obligation and Security
• 4. From Eating Hummus to the Sublime
• 5. Obligation and Critique
• Conclusion: Obligation in Exile, Critique and the Future of the Jewish Diaspora

Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index

 

 

New Article: Pasquetti, West Bank and Israeli Palestinians between Closeness and Distance

Pasquetti, Silvia. “Entrapped Transnationalism: West Bank and Israeli Palestinians between Closeness and Distance.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38.15 (2015): 2738-2753.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1077984

 

Abstract

Studies of transnationalism typically frame it in opposition to the entrapping effects of borders. Yet, for many people, transnationalism is negotiated in contexts marked by forced separation and differential mobility. Drawing on long-term fieldwork among West Bank and Israeli Palestinians, this article explores transnational ties and orientations in relation, not in opposition, to the entrapping effects of borders. Specifically, I examine the two-way traffic in emotions and perceptions that marks family, social and symbolic relationships between West Bank and Israeli Palestinians. I show how entrapping and transnational processes combine to generate a tense interplay between closeness and distance, solidarity and estrangement. The paper calls attention to complex transnational formations among people prone to entrapment such as detained and deported migrants, refugees and minorities divided by rigid borders, and it suggests that a focus on emotions and perceptions is critical if we are to understand such formations.

 

 

New Article: Gold, Adaptation and Return among Israeli Enclave and Infotech Entrepreneurs

Gold, Steven J. “Adaptation and Return among Israeli Enclave and Infotech Entrepreneurs.” In Immigration and Work (ed. Jody Agius Vallejo; Bingley: Emerald, 2015), 203-29.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S0277-283320150000027022

 

Abstract

Purpose

Since the widespread adoption of the concept, transnational theorizing has attended to inequalities with regard to legal status, education, travel, and access to capital to understand the experience of migrant populations. This issue has become especially pertinent in recent years, as a growing body of journalistic and scholarly attention has been devoted to a new group of transnationals who work as entrepreneurs, professionals, and financiers involved in high tech and other cutting-edge economic activities. Regarded as among the world’s most powerful engines of economic growth and innovation, these entrepreneurs enjoy unprecedented levels of income, state-granted privileges (including permission to work), and access to elite institutions. Because of their level of resources, some observers contend that this group represents a fundamentally new category of immigrants distinct not only from labor migrants but also from merchants, professionals, and technicians.

Methodology/approach

To better understand their experience, this chapter draws on in-depth interviews and ethnographic research to compare two groups of Israeli immigrants living in Western societies: high-tech entrepreneurs and enclave entrepreneurs. Focusing on their economic and collective lives, it identifies similarities and differences among the two.

Findings

Conclusions suggest that the mostly male high-tech migrants do enjoy incomes, contacts, and access to travel that far exceed those available to labor and skilled migrants. Moreover, infotech immigrants are not dependent upon contacts with local co-ethnics that are vital for the survival of most other migrant populations. However, the communal, identity-related and familial concerns of infotech migrants are not completely amenable to their considerable resources. Accordingly, as they address these matters, their experience reveals significant similarities to those of migrants bearing a less privileged status.

Research implications

Collective, familial and identificational issues play central roles in shaping patterns of work and travel among high-tech transnational entrepreneurs. As such, these issues deserve continued attention in studies of global migration and work.

Originality/value

Research is based on a multi-sited ethnographic study of Israeli enclave and infotech entrepreneurs.

 

New Article: Lim, Transnational Migration of Filipino Caregivers to Israel

Lim, Anna. “Networked Mobility in the ‘Migration Industry’: Transnational Migration of Filipino Caregivers to Israel.” Asian Women 31.2 (2015): 85-118.

 

URL: http://www.dbpia.co.kr/Journal/ArticleDetail/NODE06362705

 

Abstract

This article examines how labor migration is facilitated and shaped within the neoliberal economy system, focusing on the case of Filipino migration to Israel. For Filipino women who seek to find economic opportunities abroad but lack skills, Israel has emerged as one of the most popular destinations since the mid-1990s, since it is a destination in which they are allowed to work as paid caregivers. In Israel, the caregiver sector occupies the greatest part of the overseas labor market, while providing local senior citizens with live-in caregivers at a cheap cost. In investigating the migration flow of Filipino caregivers to Israel, I draw a special attention to the informal operations of intermediary networks and their roles in initiating and sustaining Filipino migrant flow to Israel. In this article, the intermediary networks involve all those who engage in the migration process such as agents/sub-agents, family, friends, and the friends of their friends. In the context of Israel, where a relatively higher wage is assured for foreign caregivers yet where entry conditions require an exorbitant placement fee, the migration is operated through the complementary roles of a wide range of formal and informal intermediaries. Significantly, such privatization of overseas labor recruitment, characterized by a binding system and an overseas recruitment scheme, contributes to producing power to private agencies, enabling them to impose excessive placement fees on the migrants and control the employment. It is within this context that Filipino women are channeled into the Israel labor market, shaping the current migration flow.

New Article: Kislev, Multicultural Policies on Migrants’ Identification: Israeli Diaspora in the USA

Kislev, Elyakim. “The Transnational Effect of Multicultural Policies on Migrants’ Identification: The Case of the Israeli Diaspora in the USA.” Global Networks 15.1 (2015): 118-39.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/glob.12043

Abstract

While it is difficult to gauge the effect of multicultural policies within countries, it is even more difficult to measure them across countries. In this article, I use fundamental multicultural changes that have occurred in Israeli society in recent decades as a case study, and track their effect on how Israelis who reside in the USA identify with Israel. Analysing the US census and the American Community Survey, I have focused my research on three groups of Israeli-born migrants in the USA – Israeli Arabs, ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Jewish majority. Findings indicate that originating from a minority community in the homeland predicts not only a different rate, but also different longitudinal trends of Israeli identification. I offer several possible explanations for these variations, but an in-depth analysis of the Israeli case indicates that the transnational effect of the changing multicultural agenda in Israel is the leading mechanism at play.

New Article: Tsapovsky and Frosh, Television Audiences and Transnational Nostalgia: Mad Men in Israel

Tsapovsky, Flora and Paul Frosh, “Television Audiences and Transnational Nostalgia: Mad Men in Israel.” Media, Culture & Society 37.5 (2015): 784-99.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0163443715587872

 

Abstract

Nostalgia is a transnational condition. It not only describes temporal displacement from a vanished past but also spatial dislocation from a lost dwelling place: home. What happens, then, when the spatio-temporal dimensions of nostalgia are realigned by media globalization? Can the transnational consumption of media texts create memory-structures that allow viewers to feel ‘at home’ in a past that is not ‘theirs’? What might such a reconstitution of nostalgia tell us about practices of interpretation, recollection, and identification among media audiences? Addressing these questions, this article investigates the responses of Israeli television viewers to a purportedly nostalgic US drama series, Mad Men. In the process, it reemphasizes nostalgia’s spatial axis, while reframing nostalgia as a construct of viewer engagement rather than as a feature of media texts. Ultimately, it proposes that contemporary transnational nostalgia possesses a double structure: it is selective, acting as an emotional and cognitive resource consciously used by audiences to examine their present personal and socio-political realities; that very use, however, depends on a ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ in which the mediated pasts of distant societies are seamlessly experienced as a part of viewers’ proximate lifeworlds.

New Article: Mann, Palestinian Memory in the Israeli Landscape

Mann, Barbara E. ” ‘An Apartment to Remember’: Palestinian Memory in the Israeli Landscape.” History and Memory 27.1 (2015): 83-115.

 

URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/histmemo.27.1.83

 

Abstract

This essay offers a site-specific reading of Jaffa Slope Park, a newly opened public space on the city’s coastal border, in relation to both Ajami, the largely Arab neighborhood upon whose ruins it was built, and Ayman Sikseck’s memoiristic novel, To Jaffa (Hebrew, 2010). The park is analyzed in relation to Hebrew literary history. Analyzing the production of Palestinian memory within Israeli culture allows us to rethink memory in a transnational setting, and to consider how the Nakba is remembered across different discursive realms shaped by geography, history and language.

 

New Book: Ben-Rafael et al, eds. Reconsidering Israel-Diaspora Relations

Ben-Rafael, Eliezer, Judit Bokser Liwerant, and Yosef Gorny, eds. Reconsidering Israel-Diaspora Relations, Jewish Identities in a Changing World, 22. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012.

 

 

Table of Contents

 

Introduction
PART I. JEWISH PEOPLEHOOD: CHANGING PATTERNS OF ISRAEL-DIASPORA RELATIONS

1. Sergio Della Pergola: Jewish Peoplehood: Hard, Soft, and Interactive Markers
2. Jonathan D. Sarna: From World-Wide People to First-World People: The Consolidation (fn. concentration) of World Jewry
3. Shulamit Reinharz: The “Jewish Peoplehood” Concept: Complications and Suggestions
4. Yosef Gorny: Ethnicity and State Policy: The State of Israel in the Intellectual and Political Discourse of the US Jewish Press
5. Ephraim Yuchtman-Ya’ar and Steven M. Cohen: Close and Distant: The Relations between Israel and the Diaspora

PART II. RELIGIOSITY AND ETHNICITY

6. Yael Israel-Cohen: The Reform and Conservative Movements in Israel: Strategies of Peripheral Movements in a Monopolized Religious Market
7. Shlomo Fischer: Two Orthodox Cultures: “Centrist” Orthodoxy and Religious Zionism
8. Margalit Bejarano: Ethnicity and Transnationalism: Latino Jews in Miami
9. Nissim Leon: Strong Ethnicity: The Case of US-born Jews in Israel

PART III. GENDER AND GENERATION

10. Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz: Orthodox Jewish Women as a Bridge Between Israel and the Diaspora
11. Florinda Goldberg: Gender, Religion, and the Search for a Modern Jewish Identity in “La Rabina” by Silvia Plager
12. Erik H. Cohen: Global Jewish Youth Studies – Towards a Theory
13. Sylvia Barack Fishman: Generational and Cultural Constructions of Jewish Peoplehood

PART IV. ISRAELOPHOBIA, ANTI-ZIONISM AND “NEO”-ANTISEMITISM

14. Shmuel Trigano: Debasing Praise: Hatred of the Jews in a Global Age
15. Chantal Bordes-Benayoun: Integration and Antisemitism: The Case of French Jewry
16. Julius H. Schoeps: How Antisemitism, Obsessive Criticism of Israel, and Do-Gooders Complicate Jewish Life in Germany
17. Leonardo Senkman: Anti-Zionist Discourse of the Left in Latin America: An Assessment.
18. Uzi Rebhun, Chaim I. Waxman, Nadia Beider: American Jews and the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process: A Study of Diaspora in International Affairs

PART V. CONFIGURATIONS OF WORLD JEWRY AND THE STATE OF ISRAEL

19. Judit Bokser-Liwerant: Jewish Diaspora and Transnationalism: Awkward (Dance) Partners?
20. Lars Dencik: The Dialectics of Diaspora in Contemporary Modernity
21. Gabi Sheffer: Reflections on Israel and Jerusalem as the Centers of World Jewry
22. Eliezer Ben-Rafael: Israel-Diaspora Relations: “Transmission Driving-belts” of Transnationalism

Epilogue: One – After All….for the time being

 

Cite: Shenar, Bollywood in Israel: The Aesthetics of Diaspora Transnational Audiences

Shenar, Gabriele. "Bollywood in Israel: Multi-Sensual Milieus, Cultural Appropriation and the Aesthetics of Diaspora Transnational Audiences." Ethnos – Online first, 29 pp.

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URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.2011.651483

–

Abstract

Research on Bollywood cinema’s increasingly global presence identifies the genre as a significant cultural domain for the articulation of diasporic Indian identity and its constitution. Focusing on the appropriation of Bollywood cinema and its filmi song and dance, regarded as a multi-sensual media, the article investigates Bollywood’s popularity among Bene Israel immigrants in Israel and explores the aesthetics of diaspora, understood as a politics of consumption, embodied performance of identity and claims to ownership of tradition shaped by commercialized popular culture imported into Israeli society. I suggest that a sentient anthropology may provide insights into cultural identity as emerging out of material, social and aesthetic practices. The participatory culture and multi-sensual milieus inspired by Bollywood’s sensorium are constitutive, the paper argues, of diasporic identity and community through their potential to evoke shared emotions and a sense of place and subjectivity, mediated by the qualities of objects, performance styles and etiquette.

Cite: Yonah, Reclaiming Diaspora: Ethnonationalism in the Global Era

Yonah, Yossi. “Reclaiming Diaspora: The Israeli State, Migration, and Ethnonationalism in the Global Era.” Diaspora 16.1-2 (2012): 190-228.

 

URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diaspora_a_journal_of_transnational_studies/v016/16.1-2.yonah.html

 

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of Israel’s migration policies toward Soviet Jews and argues, based on patterns it reveals, that “the compression of relations of time and space” characterizing the global era do not necessarily render the nation-state weaker, let alone idle or irrelevant. It discusses Israel’s attempts to construct these potential Jewish migrants, while they were still in the Soviet Union, as its conationals, and to facilitate their arrival in Israel. Israel’s migration policies and practices vis-à-vis this particular population provide a case study of the nexus connecting the nation-state, globalization, diaspora, migration, and ethnic belonging. The article shows that while during the 1970s and 1980s the patterns of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union were less rigid and considerably defied the wishes of the Jewish nation-state, from the end of the 1980s through the 1990s, at a time of accelerating globalization, the patterns of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union heeded the dictates of the nation-state more rigidly. The changing patterns of emigration from the USSR and immigration to Israel provide a compelling case showing that the nation-state may exert more power under global conditions than it was supposed to exert before the ascendance of hyper-globalization that is alleged to dominate the world today. This article contributes to accumulating research on “the state of the state” under global conditions, and argues that the state does not necessarily become weaker in this era—as many contend—but may even grow stronger, at least with respect to some important affairs within its sphere of governance.