Israeli Jews Research Articles

Utilization of ADCCs and quality of life among older adults: ethno-regional disparities in Israel

BackgroundAdult day care centers (ADCCs) are a common service provided for frail older adults in the community. We examined the influence of older adults’ utilization of ADCC’s on their quality of life (QoL), and whether ethno-regional disparities are factors in the gaps found concerning QoL in different regions and between different ethnic groups.MethodsCross sectional data were collected through structured interviews with 360 older adults attending ADCCs. Participants represented three ethnic groups and three regions in Israel. QoL was assessed by SF-36 questionnaire.ResultsThe results revealed a positive correlation between weekly hours at the ADCC, satisfaction with attending ADCC, and QoL. Older adults living in the central region had higher QoL than those living in the southern and northern regions. Veteran Israeli Jews reported higher QoL than FSU immigrants Israeli Arabs in all regions. Connection to one’s residential area was also correlated with QoL. A significant moderating effect of the interaction (ethnicity*area of residence) on QoL was also revealed.ConclusionsAttending ADCC is a vital community services to promote QoL in later life. Gaps in ADCC utilization between ethnic groups and residential region may cause disparities in QoL, specifically, in minority groups and those living in peripheral regions. Service providers should minimize the disparities by improving accessibility and availability for each person regardless of ethnicity and region of residence.

Yehuda Bauer’s Assessment of the US Government and American Jewry During the Holocaust: An Analysis

ABSTRACT Beginning with well-deserved personal praise for Professor Yehuda Bauer celebrating his 95th birthday, this article then examines Bauer's brief but important work Could the US Government Have Rescued European Jewry?, in which he challenges the preferred narrative of American and Israeli Jews: that American Jews were silent, ineffective, divided, timid, self-absorbed, weak, and incapable of bringing a Judeo-centric request to the American political establishment and did not effectively come the aid of their European brethren; that American Jew had the power to do something significant, if only they had tried to use it; and that the American government was antisemitic or, at best, unconcerned about Jews. The article then examines Bauer's contentions regarding the US government's and American Jews' capabilities, interest, and responsibility in saving European Jews. Bauer's consideration is divided into four periods: from 1933 until the Reich's November Pogroms in 1938; from Kristallnacht until the onset of the war in September 1939; from the war until the beginnings of the systematic murder of the Jews, which coincided with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941; and finally during the period of the mass murder, which only ended at the war's end on 8 May 1945. Bauer reconsiders the controversial issue of the bombing of Auschwitz, which he examines from the perspective of the Yishuv in Palestine and the British and American bombing capabilities and wartime priorities as well as the effectiveness of aerial bombardment. The paper also considers Elie Wiesel's challenging of multiple US presidents regarding the decision not to bomb and questions Wiesel's depiction of his discussion with President Jimmy Carter on this issue. Ultimately Bauer's conclusion is that US was not powerful or well-positioned enough to save European Jews, and the Jewish community in the United States did not have the power to impose its will even if it had tried.

An Intervention Program Cultivating Emotional Social Skills in Israeli Arab Adolescents

Arab society in Israel is a traditional patriarchal culture holding collectivistic, interdependent values. Arabs in Israel receive basic human rights and privileges, but the Israeli society treats them as a separate minority group. The basic premise of the current study was that improving the emotional intelligence and the empathy abilities of adolescent Arabs in general – through a uni-national group program – would result in stronger empathy towards Jews in Israel – a change that would improve the Arab participant's attitudes and behaviors towards the Jews in Israel. The research accompanying the implementation of the program was quasi-experimental. The main goals of the current intervention were to improve the intra-personal, interpersonal and inter-group skills and functioning, to strengthen awareness and skills in identifying and understanding emotions in themselves and other people – their causes and effects, to improve emotion regulation and ability to manage other people's emotions, to improve empathy towards members of the in-group (Arabs) and the out-group (Jews), to reduce stereotypes against minority groups, and to improve Jewish-Arab relations. The sample included 172 Arab 10th and 11th grade adolescents in northern Israel. The main research hypotheses were: 1) The participants' emotional intelligence and empathy towards Arabs will be higher at the end of the program than at its beginning; 2) The participants' empathy towards Jews will be higher at the end of the program than at its beginning.

Stereotypes and Immigration Barriers in the Life Stories of French Jews in Israel

Stereotypes and Immigration Barriers in the Life Stories of French Jews in Israel

Adjudicating the spiritual world in Israeli courts: dilemmas of equality of justice

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine how the Israeli legal system grapples with cases involving the spiritual world. Many Israelis do not separate the natural from the supernatural in their understanding of causation or in their attribution of responsibility and culpability, and as a result, they expect the legal system to regulate social life in the spiritual world as well as the natural one. This article examines the ways in which the Israeli legal system confronts three cases culled from the lives of religious Israeli Jews: claims of domestic abuse; ceremonial curses conducted in public; and political parties' appeals to voters with promises of religious salvation and/or threats of damnation. This article raises significant questions regarding legal equality for those citizens whose understandings of justice extend into the spiritual world, when the law fails to follow.

Samson, Unchained � Biblical Undercurrents in the Political Sentiments of Israeli Jews

Samson, Unchained � Biblical Undercurrents in the Political Sentiments of Israeli Jews

Representations of Inter-Faith Couples: “Inevitable Violence” and the Israeli Arab Conflict

In recent years there is a growing concern amongst Israeli Jewish-religious sectors in relation to Jewish-Arab couples whose number is supposedly on the rise. In this article, I will analyze three key representations of such Jewish-Arab couples, all written, published, or performed within Jewish religious sectors. These representations portray the relations of such couples as following an almost identical trajectory, from an optimistic beginning to a tragic and violent end. They expose a Jewish religious explanatory model for these relations and their assumed inevitable failure, which is disguised by non-religious, behavioral, social, and cultural terminology, to convince wider audiences, including secular ones, to avoid them. This model exploits as well as feeds into a wider contemporary representations of Muslim men and culture as violent. At the same time, the model exposes religious assumptions that are prominent also among many secular Israeli Jews, making this discourse appealing to wide sections of Jewish Israeli society.

A Global Pandemic and Particular Needs in a Multicultural World: Differences between Israeli Jewish and Arab Teachers' Metaphors

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the education system around the world. This article examines the perceptions of teachers who are members of the Jewish majority and the Arab minority in Israel, particularly on their e-learning role during the pandemic. Based on analysis of metaphors chosen by 20 Jewish and 14 Arab teachers, results of the study indicate two themes: (1) a collectivist perception prevalent among the Arab teachers and (2) an individualistic perception prevalent among the Jewish teachers. Recommendations to the education system are based on the cultural differences and inequalities between these groups.

Diaspora in the homeland: homeland perceptions regarding diaspora Jews in Israel’s discourse around its collective identity

ABSTRACT Homeland-construed perceptions of the diaspora can yield valuable insights into the discourse around the homeland's collective identity. I illustrate this claim using the debate surrounding the Kotel Compromise, a government plan designed to regulate pluralistic and non-Orthodox Jewish prayer at the Western Wall (Kotel in Hebrew). This plan has recently become a subject of contention between the State of Israel, where Orthodox Judaism has an institutional monopoly, and Diaspora Jews, many of whom identify with non-Orthodox Jewish denominations, such as Reform and Conservative Judaism. Drawing on protocols of the Knesset (Israeli parliament), I show how the different participants in this debate used their perceptions of Diaspora Jews not only to reaffirm external boundaries relating to Jewish peoplehood, but also to reconstruct internal boundaries relating to Judaism as religion. This paper suggests that analyzing homeland perceptions of the diaspora can widen our understanding of the construction of homeland identities and boundaries.

The Interplay of News Production and Journalistic Self-Branding in the Coverage of Celebrity Mixed Marriages

ABSTRACT In October 2018, Lucy Aharish, a Muslim Israeli-Arab journalist, and Tzachi Halevy, a Jewish Israeli actor, were married. In Israel, mixed-marriage, especially between a Jewish-Israeli man and a Muslim-Arab-Israeli woman, is perceived to threaten the social order. This celebrities’ mixed marriage triggered a heated public debate focusing on “assimilation” and arguing the marriage was a threat to the demography of the Jewish state. The high-visibility coverage of the story allows us to examine the role of celebrities in creating mediated public-discourse around complex categories of identity. We ask: How has Israeli journalism framed the issue of mixed marriage through the case of Aharish and Halevy? And what roles have Aharish and Halevy as celebrities played in framing their own story? Based on content-analysis of 149 news items published on digital news-sites, we detected three main news frames: “A love story,” “Advocating inclusion,” and “Fighting assimilation.” Analyzing the prominent role and the agency of the couple in the coverage, the case-study demonstrates how “traditional” news construction by journalists consolidates with self-branding of news-people. It suggests that we examine not only the frames embedded in news, but also the process of framing within the current individualistic news environment – where journalists become celebrified journalists.

Sports and boycott: Attitudes among Jewish Israelis

The controversy about the campaign to boycott Israel in general and Israeli sports in particular suffers from the absence of empirical data about the political character of the Israeli sports sphere, as well as the way Jewish Israelis see a possible boycott. Supporters of the boycott hope, among other things, that the campaign is registered among Israelis, and maybe even contribute to political change. Liberal opposition relies on the argument that sports is a beacon of inter-ethnic tolerance that should be cherished rather than targeted. Through a survey with a representative sample of internet users among the adult Jewish citizens of Israel (N = 600), this study provides the following related observations: (1) there is no evidence that Jewish Israeli sports fans are more likely to question the regime of Jewish supremacy than non-fans. (2) Among Jewish Israelis there is a small, but non-negligible minority who justifies the boycott of Israeli sports, and this minority is even larger among people who attend the soccer stadium and/or are politically active. (3) A significant majority of Jewish Israelis (69%) are concerned about a possible boycott of Israel in general, but this majority is less clear among men who are sports fans. The findings question the liberal expectation that Israeli sports serve as a model for inclusive citizenship and at the same time they indicate the potential of sports to amplify existing political tendencies among fans. These observations should be considered in future debates about sanctions and boycotts.

The influence of the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest on national identity: evidence from Israel

ABSTRACT This study examines the influence the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), on national identity. Taking the case of the 2019 ESC which took place in Israel, this study employed a longitudinal design to examine its impact on different aspects of the national identity of Israeli Jews. The findings showed some substantives differences between those exposed to the contest and those not and conflicting trends in the contest's influence on the public: cultural patriotism and increased chauvinism, on the one hand, and some cosmopolitan affects, on the other. The article discusses these findings in light of theories on national identity and mega-events.

Resource Threat versus Resource Loss and Emotional Well-Being of Ethnic Minorities during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

This paper used Hobfoll’s conservation of resources theory as a theoretical framework to investigate which kinds of resource loss predicted the emotional well-being (EWB) of ethnic minorities and majority populations during a period of crisis. Data were collected from a national representative survey conducted by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample included 1157 respondents, including 174 Israeli Palestinian citizens (ethnic minority) and 983 Israeli Jews (majority population). Measures of EWB, actual losses and threats of losses of economic, social, and health resources were examined. The results showed that the losses of economic, social, and health resources reduced the EWB of individuals. Negative effects of the actual losses of resources on EWB were greater than those of the perceived threats of loss. The largest effect was for economic resources. There were differences in effects between the ethnic minorities and the majority populations. The study revealed that for the ethnic minorities, who are less powerful and more disadvantaged than ethnic majorities, the depletion of already deficient resources during time of crisis is more important for predicting their EWB than for the majority populations.

Health inequalities between Palestinians and Jews in Israel: The role of extreme spatial segregation

AbstractThis paper examines the significance of how spatial inequality explains the health inequalities between Palestinians and Jews in Israel. Israeli policies have created extreme spatial segregation between Palestinians and Jews that is a defining feature of Jewish–Palestinian relations. Furthermore, spatial segregation of Palestinians constitutes a structural condition that limits chances of individual social mobility and socio‐economic achievements. This paper seeks to encourage consideration of how spatial inequalities contribute to health inequalities by examining gaps in life expectancy between Palestinians and Jews in Israel. The findings show that the highest level of life expectancy in Israel is among Jews living in dominantly Jewish regions, where only small numbers of Palestinians reside. In the space shared by Jews and Palestinians, where most of the Palestinians reside, Jews have higher life expectancy than Palestinians, yet lower than Jews in the dominantly Jewish regions. The lowest life expectancy is observed among Palestinians living in the shared space. The paper concludes that the lower life expectancy among Palestinians relative to Jews is a result, in part, to their confinement to segregated, peripheral places, characterised by a low level of socio‐economic development.

Prevalence and correlates of forgone care among adult Israeli Jews: A survey conducted during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Efforts to control the spread of the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic include drastic measures such as isolation, social distancing, and lockdown. These restrictions are accompanied by serious adverse consequences such as forgoing of healthcare. The study aimed to assess the prevalence and correlates of forgone care for a variety of healthcare services during a two-month COVID-19 lockdown, using Andersen’s Behavioral Model of Healthcare Utilization. A cross-sectional study using computerized phone interviews was conducted with 302 Israeli Jewish participants aged 40 and above. Almost half of the participants (49%) reported a delay in seeking help for at least one needed healthcare service during the COVID-19 lockdown period. Among the predisposing factors, we found that participants aged 60+, being more religious, and reporting higher levels of COVID-19 fear were more likely to report forgone care than younger, less religious and less concerned participants. Among need factors, a statistically significant association was found with a reported diagnosis of diabetes, with participants with the disease having a considerably higher likelihood of forgone care. The findings stress the importance of developing interventions aimed at mitigating the phenomenon of forgoing care while creating nonconventional ways of consuming healthcare services. In the short term, healthcare services need to adapt to the social distancing and isolation measures required to stanch the epidemic. In the long term, policymakers should consider alternative ways of delivering healthcare services to the public regularly and during crisis without losing sight of their budgetary consequences. They must recognize the possibility of having to align medical staff to the changing demand for healthcare services under conditions of health uncertainty.

Israeli Law and the Rule of Colonial Difference

Israeli law is an important medium that maintains, perfects, and facilitates the fragmentation of Palestinians. Israeli citizenship figures in this structure of fragmentation as an exceptionalizing legal status that blurs “colonial difference” between Palestinian citizens in Israel and Jewish Israelis. The May 2021 uprising and its aftermath not only highlighted the counter-­fragmentary forces present among Palestinians across different legal ­statuses, it also brought into clearer view a rule of “colonial difference” that crisscrosses the Israeli legal system and pertains to all Palestinians under its control. This essay explores the concept of “colonial difference” as applied to Palestinians through the law, and how this rule has been employed in the context of the May 2021 uprising against Palestinian citizens in particular.

“Yesterday You Slaughtered Animals, Today You Pity Them”: Ambivalence and Resolution Among Jewish Israeli Slaughterers

ABSTRACT This study explored the ambivalence influenced by emotional and moral concerns experienced by Israeli Jewish slaughterers regarding their everyday practices. The findings were based on 35 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Jewish workers in the kosher slaughter industry in Israel. The manifestations of ambivalence found in the interviews were divided into three categories: between action and meaning, between emotions and religious rationality, and between human–animal similarities and differences. I concluded that, while Jewish slaughterers in Israel displayed ambivalent views about nonhuman animals, they had clear resolutions for these inner conflicts based on available moral and religious justifications for animal slaughter.

Unhealthy Immigrants: Sources for Health Gaps Between Immigrants and Natives in Israel.

The study focuses on sources for health gaps between Jewish immigrants and native-born Israelis. Unlike traditional immigrant societies where immigration is viewed as economically motivated, immigrants returning to Israel are viewed as the “returning diaspora”. Because immigrants in Israel are entitled to the same health benefits and medical services as native-born, we expect Israel to attract unhealthy immigrants in disproportionate numbers. The data for the analysis are obtained from the Israeli National Health Interview Survey (2013–2015). The data set provides detailed information on health status and illness, sociodemographic attributes and origin of immigrants. Three major origin groups of immigrants are distinguished: the former Soviet Union, Western Europeans or the Americans (mostly Ashkenazim), and Asians or North Africans (mostly Sephardim). Our findings lend support to the expectations that the health status of all immigrant groups is poorer than that of native-born Israelis. The nativity–illness gap is most pronounced in the case of male immigrants (from Europe or the Americas or South Africa or Australia) and for female immigrants (from countries in the Middle East or North Africa) and least pronounced in the case of immigrants arriving from the former Soviet Union for both gender groups. Decomposition of the gaps into components reveals that some portion of the illness gap can be attributed to nativity status, but the largest portion of the gap is attributed to demographic characteristics. Neither socioeconomic status nor health-related behavior accounts for a substantial portion of the nativity–illness gap for all subgroups of immigrants.

How Do People Cope During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Stay Well? A Salutogenic Longitudinal Study in Israel.

Employing the salutogenic approach, this longitudinal study explored the effects of coping with the COVID-19 pandemic in Israel, as it evolved from an acute to a chronic stress situation, during the first year. We examined the role of individual [sense of coherence (SOC)], social (perceived social support), and national [sense of national coherence (SONC)] coping resources, as well as situational and demographic factors, in predicting mental health and anxiety. Data was collected in five phases between March 2020 and February 2021 via a repeated panel sample and included 198 Jewish Israelis (52% males) age 18–64 (M = 43.5). The results confirmed the expected pattern of moving from acute to chronic stressful situation: levels of general anxiety were higher in the first phase of the pandemic outbreak as compared to the other phases. Levels of social and national coping resources significantly decreased over time. However, as expected, the salutogenic resource of the individual sense of coherence remained stable and was also found as the main predictor of both anxiety and mental health in the 5 phases of the study. Beyond the explanatory factor of SOC, mental health was better explained by the social and national coping resources, while anxiety was explained by situational factors (level of financial risk and gender). The discussion delineates the longitudinal effects of individual, social, and national coping resources on mental health and anxiety during the dynamic process of the long period of 1 year of the pandemic, evolving from acute to chronic phases of the complicated health, economic, social, and political crisis

Passing as a tourist: Exploring the everyday urban geopolitics of tourism

This paper presents a case study of territorial boundary transgression and intergroup encounters mediated by tourism in a volatile and contested urban space. I present the notion of ‘passing as a tourist’ as a prism to investigate the nexus between performative tourism and everyday urban geopolitics. Situated in East Jerusalem's core geographies of colonization and political violence, this paper uses archival news material and a textual analysis of primary questionnaire data to critically examine how Jewish Israeli Jerusalemites visiting the Muslim Quarter in the Old City negotiate encounters in a conflicted space. The study reveals how the performative dimensions of ‘tourism’ in a context of polarized ethnonational division expose the role of embodied, everyday geopolitics in the production of urban spaces of tourism.