Israeli Sociology Research Articles

Transcending the Liberal Grammar of Critical Sociology: The Theoretical Turn in Israeli Sociology

Transcending the Liberal Grammar of Critical Sociology: The Theoretical Turn in Israeli Sociology

Neurotic Fantasy: The Third Temple As a Metaphor in the Contemporary Israeli Art of Nira Pereg and Yael Bartana

In the political reality of Israel, some symbols lie at the heart of the political, religious, national, and historical discourse that characterize the peoples and cultures living on the Israeli-Palestinian soil. Among these, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is one of the most complex and conflictual symbols. The multiple religious claims to the Temple Mount—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—are the subject of extensive study, but this article focuses on their reflection in contemporary Israeli art. In traditional Jewish art, the visual representations of the Temple or of Jews praying nearby expressed the longing of the Jews for generations to return to the Mount. In contrast, Yael Bartana and Nira Pereg view the multiple socio-political currents and religious rituals surrounding the Temple Mount as a reflection of the internal public debate regarding the face of the Israeli society today. This article discusses the contribution of their visual art to a conscious and aware discourse about the Israeli society and the underground currents that shape its contemporary identity. The analysis of their work tracks a “politics of aesthetics”—interpretation of the images within a socio-political context—and draws upon Israeli sociology, art history, and visual culture. In-depth personal interviews with the artists also inform the analysis.

Book Reviews

Edna Lomsky-Feder and Orna Sasson-Levy, Women Soldiers and Citizenship in Israel: Gendered Encounters with the State (New York: Routledge, 2017), 178 pp. Hardback, $149.95.Aviva Halamish, Kibbutz: Utopia and Politics. The Life and Times of Meir Yaari, 1897–1987 (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2017), 496 pp. Hardback, $119. Paperback, $45.Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Julius H. Schoeps, Yitzhak Sternberg, and Olaf Glöckner, eds., Handbook of Israel: Major Debates (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016), 1,304 pp. Hardback, $165.00. Paperback, $81.00.Uri Ram, Israeli Sociology: Text in Context (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 174 pp. e-Book: $54.99.Herbert C. Kelman, Transforming the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: From Mutual Negation to Reconciliation (London: Routledge, 2018), 248 pp. Hardback, $112.00. eBook, $27.48.Charles D. Freilich, Israeli National Security: A New Strategy for an Era of Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 496 pp. Hardback, $39.95. Kindle, $14.57.David Rosenberg, Israel’s Technology Economy: Origins and Impact (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 275 pp. Hardback, $84.95. eBook, $64.95.Lee Perlman, But Abu Ibrahim, We’re Family! (Tel Aviv: Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, 2017), 198 pp. Paperback, $20.00. Shapiro Prize WinnersThis new feature of ISR will present the report of the committee choosing the recipient of the Yonathan Shapiro Prize for the best book in Israel Studies, to be awarded at the annual meeting of the Association for Israel Studies. In 2018, there was a tie, and two books received the prize. The committee members were Raphael Cohen-Almagor, Mikhal Dekel, Tamar Hermann, Sam Lehman-Wilzig, and Ruvi Ziegler.Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, Seizing Jerusalem: The Architecture of Unilateral Unification (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 376 pp. Hardback, $160.00. Paperback, $39.95.Kimmy Caplan, Amram Blau [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi and the Ben-Gurion Institute, 2017), 588 pp. Paperback, NIS116.

Bare Theatre of a Bare Life: a Community-Based Project in Jaffa

In this article Shulamith Lev-Aladgem focuses on The Bride from the Sea, a community performance by three young Israeli-Palestinian mothers, presented in a sand box in a multi-functional kindergarten in Jaffa in 2008. From the beginning of the creative process, the Jewish facilitator and the performers had to struggle to overcome the various barriers erected by the intricate, oppressive daily life of the young Palestinian women. They eventually managed to perform a ‘short, thin performance’, which, despite resembling a misperformance, had an emotional and even exceptional effect on the audience. This performance is examined as a special kind of women-based community theatre, termed here ‘the bare theatre’, to indicate a form that articulates the bare daily life of women trapped between internal and external oppressive power regimes. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem is chair of the Theatre Arts Department at Tel Aviv University, a trained actress, and a community-based theatre practitioner. Her recent publications include Theatre in Co-Communities: Articulating Power (2010) and Standing Front Stage: Resistance, Celebration, and Subversion in Israeli Community-Based Theatre (2010), as well as articles in Research in Drama Education and Israeli Sociology.

Israeli Sociology: Social Thought Amidst Struggles and Conflicts

The basic challenge of Israeli sociology always has been, and continues to be to present days, the designation of its object of study; i.e. ‘Israeli society’. The history of Israeli sociology and its conception of ‘Israeli society’ may be discerned into the five following modules: 1. Proto-sociology. In the pre-state era, sociological thought thrived within the context of the socialist Zionism. The two prominent ‘proto-sociologists' were Arthur Ruppin and Martin Buber, who professed German communal perspectives. 2. Modernization sociology. The formative phase of sociology as a discipline was from 1950 to 1977. It was led by Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, who effected a transition from the German anti-modernist paradigm to an American modernization theory. 3. Critical sociology. The critical phase took place in the 1970s and 1980s. Critical sociology was manifested in elitism, pluralism, Marxism, feminism and colonization approaches. Simultaneously there emerged a robust branch of ‘quantitative sociology’. 4. Post-modern sociology. The turn towards post-modernity started in the 1990s. The three noticeable post-modern perspectives are: post-structuralism, post-colonialism and post-Marxism. 5. Palestinian Arab sociology in Israel. Palestinian Arab sociology is emerging and coming to its own since the 1990s. It reflects integration as well as alienation.

Israeli Sociology's Young Hegelian

In April 2014, the Center for Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) convened a conference titled “The Settler Colonial Paradigm: Debating Gershon Shafir's Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict on Its 25th Anniversary.” This essay emanates from the conference. I first chart the dialectical emergence of Shafir's thought out of Israeli sociology, and then gauge its impact on the growing presence of the settler-colonial framework in the study of Palestine/Israel. The analysis of Shafir's book shows how a powerful hegemony has produced its disavowal. The examination of Palestine/Israel as a settler-colonial situation past and present underscores the benefit of studying this topic comparatively and as part of a global phenomenon.

Public Theatre, Community Theatre, and Collaboration: Two Case Studies

In 1986 professional theatre practitioners working in two underprivileged neighbourhoods in greater Tel Aviv in Israel created in collaboration with the local residents two large-scale productions. In this article Shulamith Lev-Aladgem studies these rare encounters between professional public theatre and amateur, community-based theatre in Israel, employing a method similar to that of the historian who employs micro-history in order to reveal the excluded past of muted groups in a given society. Both productions – including the intentions of their creators and participants, the power struggles, and the results – serve as an historical record rich in information regarding Israeli society; and through the micro-history presented here the social and cultural role of the institutional theatre in general, and in Israel in particular, is also explored. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem is a senior lecturer, researcher, and practitioner, chair of the Faculty MA Program of Expressivity and Creativity in the Arts, and Head of Community-Based Theatre Studies in the Theatre Department of Tel Aviv University. She is also a community-based theatre facilitator/director and a trained actress who uses her acting experience in her research and teaching. Her recent publications include articles in Theatre Research International, Theory and Criticism, Social Identities, Israeli Sociology, and Research in Drama Education, and the full-length studies, Standing Front Stage: Resistance, Celebration and Subversion in Israeli Community-Based Theatre (Haifa University Press, 2010) and Theatre in Co-Communities: Articulating Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies (review)

Reviewed by: Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies Zachary Lockman Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies, by Baruch Kimmerling. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 431 pp. $55.00. In the 1980s a diverse group of young Israeli scholars who eventually came to be called the "new historians" began to publish work that, drawing on recently opened archives in Israel and elsewhere and putting to good use the graduate training they had received in universities outside Israel, effectively challenged [End Page 179] many key elements of the much-mythologized narrative of Zionist and Israeli history that until then had been hegemonic in Israeli scholarly circles and among the Israeli-Jewish public. They were joined in this endeavor by non-Israeli historians (including a growing number of Palestinians) as well as by scholars from a range of other disciplines and fields, among them sociologists and specialists in cultural and literary studies. The cumulative outcome of this evolving project of sociohistorical critique and research over the past two decades or so has been not only the demolition of the old Zionist narrative but the elaboration of a much more complex, nuanced, empirically rich, theoretically sophisticated, historically grounded, and (perhaps most important) non-nationalist understanding of Zionist and Israeli history. This understanding has among other things been characterized (or so I would argue) by an explicit or implicit recognition that neither the character and trajectory of the Zionist project in Palestine nor the development and contours of Israeli society can be adequately understood unless one takes into account how both were profoundly shaped by their interactions (including of course conflict) with indigenous Arab society in Palestine. Baruch Kimmerling played a key role in launching this critical trend. Born in Romania in 1939, Kimmerling immigrated to Israel with his family in 1952 and, despite having to contend with the cerebral palsy he had contracted in childhood, went on to complete a doctorate in sociology at the Hebrew University, where he subsequently spent most of his academic career; he died in 2007. As a young academic Kimmerling grew increasingly dissatisfied with the dominance of modernization theory in academic Israeli sociology and with his former teachers' and mentors' lack of interest in exploring how the ongoing Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine had helped shape Israeli society. As he notes in the autobiographical preface to Clash of Identities, his first two books—Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics and Zionism and Economy—did not draw much attention when they appeared in 1983. But they were in fact ground-breaking for their use of the paradigm of the "frontier" to analyze Zionist land acquisition, land use and economic policies and practices in Palestine, and their sociopolitical consequences for Israeli society. More broadly, these two books helped open up important new avenues for research by showing how much one could learn by not treating Israeli society as utterly sui generis or as simply the product of the dynamics of Diaspora Jewish history. Instead, Kimmerling productively compared Israel with other places in which the societies established by settlers of European origin were deeply marked by their complex encounters and interactions with indigenous peoples and societies, including North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, Algeria, and South Africa. In many [End Page 180] respects, then, Kimmerling's early work helped clear the ground for much of the critical scholarship that would follow, and his own later research would prove equally important in advancing Israeli sociology. Clash of Identities brings together a selection of the very wide-ranging work that Kimmerling published between 1983 and 2005, and in so doing it demonstrates the great breadth and depth of his contribution to his field. Chapters address the formation of Jewish society in Palestine, the development of a Palestinian national identity, contestation about Jewish identity in Israel, militarism in Israel, the impact of conflicting conceptions of national security, peace and citizenship on Israeli politics, society and culture, and much else. Along the way, but especially in the Oslo and post-Oslo years, Kimmer-ling frequently drew on his academic expertise to intervene in, and illuminate, political debates in Israeli-Jewish society, in the hope...

Bourdieu's Reception in Israeli Sociology. The Fragmented Imprint of a Grand Theory

Bourdieu's Reception in Israeli Sociology. The Fragmented Imprint of a Grand Theory

Distributive Justice and a Rising Middle Class: Conflict between MAPAI and White-collar Professionals before the 1955 General Elections in IsraelAvi Bareli is a member of staff at the Ben Gurion Research Institute, Ben Gurion University. Uri Cohen is a member of the School of Education, Tel Aviv University.

‘Absorbers’ and ‘absorbed’ are the terms used in sociological and historical research on Israeli society in the decade that began in 1948, the year Israel gained its independence. These terms refer...

The new Mizrahi middle class: Ethnic mobility and class integration in Israel

This article argues that in recent decades, following the political “turnaround” (mahapakh) in 1977, a distinct new group has appeared on the Israeli scene: the Mizrahi middle class. This social category no longer fits the traditional dichotomies that have steered academic and popular sociological debate in Israel. On the basis of the geographic-spatial changes and the changes in higher education that have taken place in Israel during the past two decades, the article suggests that the Mizrahi middle class is playing a prominent role in the transformations that Israeli society is undergoing, providing a possible source for renewed social integration on a national scale. Israeli sociology is thus called upon to give due consideration not only to the theoretical significance of this group but also to its empirical significance in shaping the collective identity and the ethno-class arena in Israeli society in the coming decades.

The Exhaustion of the Primary Zionist Program: S. N. Eisenstadt between Dynamic Conservativism and Critical Perspectives

This essay analyzes the writings of the prominent sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt on Israeli society, since the late 1940s until today, in comparison with his explorations into General Sociological themes. SNE was the founder of contemporary Sociology of Israel, and for decades stood as a dominant figure in Israeli Sociology. The essay explores how he started with a rigid functionalist approach and passed to search for more flexible paradigms, and how from an entirely uncritical acceptance of the hegemonic-ideological description and analysis of the Israeli society and Zionism, he had moved toward a limited critique of them, absorbing partially the approaches of Critical Sociology.

Immigration to Israel: Sociological Perspectives (review)

Reviewed by: Immigration to Israel: Sociological Perspectives James Armstrong Immigration to Israel: Sociological Perspectives, edited by Elazar Leshem and Judith Shuval. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1998. 569 pp. Selected bibliography. $49.95 (c); $24.95 (p). This is the eighth volume in the Studies of Israeli Society publication series of the Israeli Sociological Society. As in previous volumes, the edition under review gathers together recent articles from a variety of professional journals. The focus of this collection is on recent trends in Israeli immigration covering the period from 1980 to 1995. During this period the most significant wave of newcomers came from the former Soviet Union, with almost 700,000 arriving between 1989 and 1995. Needless to say, this aliya has made a marked impact on Israeli society. Today almost 40 percent of the total Israeli Jewish population are immigrants. Russians have overtaken Moroccans as the largest “ethnic” group. The new immigrants, especially those from the former Soviet Union, have followed a different pattern of integration into the existing social and political framework of Israeli society than previous immigrants have. They brought with them professional skills and political savvy, making an almost immediate impact on the receiving society. Given the magnitude of immigration from the former Soviet Union it is understandable that they would receive the broadest coverage in this volume. Still, other groups, whose immigration and absorption diverge from past trends, such as the Ethiopians and Iranians, receive some coverage. The demographic, cultural, and political impact of recent immigration makes this is a timely contribution and a valuable addition to the libraries of everyone interested in understanding Israeli society. [End Page 129] The essays are grouped in sections by category: two introductory chapters, followed by sections on Migrants in the Occupational Structure, Migration and Health, Formal and Informal Mechanisms of Integration, Ethnic Identities and Processes of Integration, and Processes of Emigration and Their Implications. The two introductory chapters, the only two original pieces, are especially valuable. In the first chapter the editors, Shuval and Leshem, provide a wide-ranging critical assessment of the last twenty years of the sociology of Israeli immigration. They contextualize current scholarship in the history of the development of Israeli sociology and within the theoretical framework of international scholarship on migration. I was pleased that, while not ignoring the uniqueness of some aspects of Israeli immigration patterns and immigrant integration, they acknowledge the comparability of Israel to other immigrant receiving societies. In the second introductory essay, DellaPergola provides a comprehensive view of the context Jewish migration patterns that is both globally comparative and particular to Israel as an immigrant receiving society. These two essays taken together provide a useful framework for the book. As in most volumes of this nature, the twenty-two essays that follow are uneven in quality and usefulness. Some of the articles, because of their specialized subject matter or complex statistical methodology, will be of little interest to anyone but the few who share the authors’ particular expertise. Still, there is enough of general interest to preserve the utility of the volume. I was especially impressed with the section on Ethnic Identities. In particular, I found Kaplan and Rosen’s article on Ethiopian immigrants to be revealing. The authors provide an intriguing analysis of the history of the redefinition of Ethiopian Jewish ethnicity from Beta Israel to Ethiopian Jew in Ethiopia to Ethiopian Jewish Israeli. In this same section Goldstein’s article on how Iranian immigrants are consolidating their ethnicity by using definitional ceremonies is illustrative of the processes of identity formation of immigrant groups. Furthermore, this section provided general comparative data on the integration of a variety of immigrant groups. I believe that American readers will find the section on Israeli emigration of general interest because the articles reveal the barriers to integration of Israelis into the American Jewish subculture. The dilemma of leaving Israel, the motivation for yerida, and the various forms of Israeli ethnicity that emerge in the American context inform the reader about both Israeli and American culture. Taken together they make for an interesting contrast to the previous section on identity formation in the Israeli context. This is especially true of the Shokeid article...

The Dominance of the External: Israeli Sociology

The Dominance of the External: Israeli Sociology

Israeli Society: A Counterview

ONE OF MY FORMATIVE EXPERIENCES as a sociologist took place in my last year as an undergraduate student while attending, for the first time, the annual congress of the Israeli Sociological Association. S.N. Eisenstadt, the keynote speaker of the congress, which was held at Haifa University in 1971, held forth at length on differentiation within Israeli society. It was a member of the audience who respectfully reminded him that just a few months earlier the Black Panthers, a group of Mizrachi youth, mostly from broken homes in the Musrara Quarter of Jerusalem, launched highly visible protests to object to the gap between Mizrachim and Ashkenazim in Israel; Eisenstadt had not even mentioned their existence. Social gap and the attendant social conflict were not part the Eisenstadtian functionalist theory of differentiation which preferred to focus on value consensus and on modernization as an orderly process.' I came away from the congress with an uneasy feeling, realizing that, if indeed I wanted to become a sociologist, I would have to chart my own way. A counterview of Israeli society was required, one in which social conflict and the contenders themselves would be accepted as a legitimate part of social analysis. Only subsequently did I absorb that the Israeli-Arab conflict and its formative impact on Israeli society was an even less legitimate subject within Israeli sociology. The first time I became cognizant of the possibility of incorporating this topic into Israeli sociology was upon reading Baruch Kimmerling's dissertation.2 When he decided to write his thesis, at the Hebrew University's Department of Sociology and Anthropology, he was advised by the senior members of the faculty to abandon the subject because this was a and not a sociological topic.3 But Kimmerling persisted in focusing his research in this general area and the challenge he faced in putting together a coherent framework at that early stage of his career demonstrated to me the obstacles standing in the way of a person asking the hard questions he did. I would have been unprepared to do so had I not been schooled earlier in Yonathan Shapiro's class on political sociology and, subsequently, acted

The Colonization Perspective in Israeli Sociology: Internal and External Comparisons

Abstract Though the characterization of Zionism as a colonial project is probably as old as the Zionist movement, as a specific scholarly sociological perspective in Israeli academia it was formulated only lately, in the wake of the Six Day War of 1967 This article outlines the contours of this new perspective, its theoretical assumptions and its political implications. It examines the historical circumstances which propelled its emergence, and than discerns two distinct sub‐trends in it: Weberian and Marxist Throughout are explored three distinct comparative issues: a comparison of the colonization perspective to other perspectives in Israeli sociology especially the ‘dualist perspective’: a comparison of the case of Israel with other colonization cases. such as the U.S.A.: and a comparison of the two sub‐trends in the perspective itself to each other.

Sociology, Ideology, and Nation-Building: The Palestinians and Their Meaning in Israeli Sociology

The analyticframework that guides research and analysis is often value-laden and conforms to a-hegemonic culture or struggling counter-culture. I discussfive kinds offramework decisions: the sociopolitical boundaries of the collectivity under investigation, the historical periodization of the society, the terminology used to characterize sociological processes and phenomena, the way the research problem is posed, and the subjects deemed appropriate for investigation. In a case study of Israel, I show that the Palestinian minority and Jewish-Arab conflict were characterized by mainstream Israeli sociologists in accordance with dominant Zionist perspectives. Cultural commitments, perceived existential needs, and class, ethnic, and national interests, have shaped the way Israeli sociologists portray the basic features of Israeli society.

Ethnicity, religion and class in Israeli society

Acknowledgements Part I. Theoretical and Empirical Background: 1. Ethnicity and society 2. Divisions in Israeli society 3. Theoretical perspectives in Israeli sociology 4. The sample, its background and its setting Part II. Social Patterns and Behavior: 5. Neighborhoods: synagogues and neighborhood committees 6. Religiosity and secularization 7. Friendship networks Part III. Identities and Images: 8. Ethnic consciousness 9. Class consciousness 10. Religion, ethnic and class division: convergent or cross-cutting? Part IV. The Impact of Stratification: 11. Voting 12. Discrimination 13. Assimilation or ethnic solidarity? Part V. Social Cleavages: An Overview of Israeli Society and Some Theoretical Implications: 14. Cleavages among Jews 15. Jews and Arabs 16. Toward a theory of social cleavages Appendices Glossary Notes References Index.

Civic discourse in Israeli sociological thought

When Alvin Gouldner wrote the Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970) he intended to release sociology from the weight of Parsonian functionalism and to encourage a more reflexive, engaged, and critical sociological praxis. Today, 20 years later, Israeli sociology is just beginning to awaken from its own Parsonian slumber and to experience a crisis of its own. This belated crisis has been generated by the social and political changes which seem about to overwhelm Israeli society. Since 1967, the year of the occupation of Arab territories, and more pointedly after 1977, the year the Labor Party fell and the right-wing Likud gained power, events themselves have exposed the inadequacies of the paradigm that has dominated Israeli sociological thought for about three decades. This article proposes an outline of the contours of Israeli sociology, a critical evaluation of its central tendencies, and a reflection upon its current crisis. Sociological approaches to the study of Israeli society may be classified along two interrelated axes, the analytical and the normative. Along the analytical axis, approaches differ from an order perspective at one pole to a conflict perspective at the other. Along the normative axis, approaches differ from conformity to official ideology and the prevailing ethos of the society, at one pole, to a critique of the latter at the other. From the angle of these two axes six major trends in the interpretation of Israeli society can be discerned. The term "trend" refers here to clusters of sociological practitioners and practices in a way that combines their principal theoretical charge, their norma? tive implications, and their central object-domain. The trends are identified by the following conceptualizations: modernization, elite, pluralism, class, ethnicity, and colonialism. Each is treated here in

Between Two Worlds: Children From the Soviet Union in Israel.

A fascinating collection of essays by top Israeli sociology and psychology scholars that examines the impact of Soviet socialization on the personality, attitudes, and modes of behavior of immigrant children in Israel. The studies indicate that the children internalized the norms and values of the 'Soviet Man' found in their new environment.