Consumerism as a Civilizing Process: Israel and Judaism in the Second Age of Modernity

Modern post-emancipatory Jews have long been associated with cosmopolitanism, mostly as a bad thing. They've been anathematized as rootless cosmopolitans so often that cosmopolitan, used as a noun, is in some circles an anti-Semitic code word. During the heroic moments of Zionism, as with other liberation movements, this cosmopolitan strand of Judaism was de-emphasized in favor of conceptions that emphasized separateness and self-consciousness. There exists a side of Jewish identity that Zionism consciously suppressed, namely its urban, pleasure-loving, shopping-oriented cosmopolitanism. This exists also in social theory: Consumerism and modernism are joined at the hip because consumption is an indispensable part of the civilizing process. The process of consumption, of expressing our identity through tastes and possessions, changes the entire field of interaction. It makes possible new kinds of social identity. And it makes possible new forms of social integration, based on individuation and sympathy.     

The 1996 Split of the Islamic Movement in Israel: Between the Holy Text and Israeli-Palestinian Context

This article aims to explain the causes and meaning of the formal split of the Islamic Movement in Israel into two factions—following the decision to participate in the elections to the fourteenth Knesset (Israeli parliament) on May 29, 1996—while locating these in a larger theoretical framework. This split resulted from a delicate combination of doctrinal-ideological controversies relating to secular electoral competition and historical-political-tactical controversies that are rooted in the Israeli-Palestinian context. Specifically, the split of the Islamic Movement in Israel derived from two interpretations of the Islamic belief: a more literal or concrete interpretation and a more abstract one.     

Poetics of Disaster: Nationalism, Gender, and Social Change Among Palestinian Poets in Israel After Nakba

Following the 1948 Nakba (disaster) and collapse of Palestinian society, its national project and cultural sites, a residue of 170,000 Palestinians became citizens of the emerging state of Israel, which existed under a strict military rule until 1966. This residue was mainly illiterate villagers who were left without national and intellectual leadership. After a few years of frightened silence, a new intellectual stratum of young poets from this group began to publish reflections on their national situation. Intentionally simple, direct, and mainly easily memorized, their poetry became the ultimate cultural channel to create and disseminate a Palestinian version of the 1948 war, its subsequent state, and the vision of a desired future. These young poets gradually became the leading producers of Palestinian culture in Israel and abroad. Their poetry became the ultimate reference point for Palestine’s national ethos and myths. Palestinians abroad named them the “poets of resistance” and their poems were composed into inflaming national songs. But while this new intellectual strata became active cultural producers, intervening in “the nation building process,” their social role remained ambivalent and problematic. Despite their national enthusiasm and appeal for social change, they were unable to transgress the patriarchic rule that was hegemonic in Palestinian society. This hegemonic narrative was interwoven in three themes: (1) using the lexicon of natural disaster to conceptualize the 1948 events, presenting them as an irresistible natural disaster (even by God who appeared during the events as pathetic and useless); (2) representing the Palestinian defeat in 1948 through patriarchal language of “collective shame,” “land rape,” and “honor lost;” and (3) articulating the national liberation project as masculine, promising to liberate the “captured land-woman” and to recover the collective honor of the nation.

Globalization, Culture, and Identities in Crisis

Culture in its various forms now serves as a primary carrier of globalization and modern values, and constitutes an important arena of contestation for national, religious, and ethnic identity. Although reactions in Europe, Japan, and other societies where modern values prevail, tend to be symbolic, in areas of the developing world, especially in Muslim countries where traditional values and radically different notions of identity and society predominate, reactions tend to be very intense and redirected at external targets through forms of transference and scapegoating. Ultimately, this is not so much a clash between civilizations as a clash within civilizations.     

Exile and globalization in the poetry of Tanure Ojaide: a case study of When it no longer matters where you live

Abstract

The twin concepts of exile and globalization are of great significance to contemporary African literature, as some African writers live and write in exile, while others deploy themes and styles that they believe make their works relevant to the global community. Since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of the cold war at the end of the twentieth century, there has been a triumphalism of liberal democracy, free-market economy and other norms of the capitalist world order. Consequently there appears to be an increasing tendency among scholars to homogenize or globalize the practices and values canvassed by the advanced countries of the West.

In Ojaide's When It No Longer Matters Where You Live, the poet acknowledges the inevitability of some African elites living in exile in Western cosmopolitan centers, but rejects the uncritical notion inherent in globalization that western culture and values were synonymous with universal norms or superior to those of the Africans.     

当前土以外交危机的原因及其影响分析

土以关系是中东地区重要的双边关系之一。作为中东地区比较另类的两个国家,双方长期保持着良好的双边关系,甚至还缔结了军事同盟协议。但是,马尔马拉事件引发了两国之间的外交危机。2011年9月,联合国有关马尔马拉事件的报告出炉,进一步恶化了双边关系。土以危机的背后隐含了双方对巴以冲突不同态度的深层次矛盾,彰显出两国之间战略合作基础的不牢固。同时体现出以色列在中东地区追求绝对安全和土耳其东进政策之间存在着战略分歧。土以外交危机不仅给两国关系带来负面影响,同时在阿拉伯之春的背景下,土以外交危机对美国的中东战略造成不利影响,对中东地区的力量格局产生一定的冲击。     

Cultural associations,clothing and food as markers of cultural identity in testimonies of Cameroonian forced migrants in Johannesburg

Abstract

The article examines the construction of cultural identity and the expression of cultural exclusivity in the testimonies of Cameroonian forced migrants in the metropolitan city of Johannesburg. It also explores the way the social conditions of Cameroonians have forged a process of culture integration as a survival mechanism, subverting their impassioned attachment to cultural roots and claims of cultural exclusivity. Here, the article addresses three mediums for the formation of cultural identity, namely cultural associations, clothing and traditional cuisine and one main signifier of integration – intermarriage. It draws on the premise that because of the discrepant political ideologies of Cameroonians in Johannesburg, the construction of identity within this community of migrants has tended to fracture along cultural lines. It also draws on the theoretical underpinning that the upsurge in global migration has increased the chances of culture hybridization.     

Sex, Maids, and Export Processing: Risks and Reasons for Gendered Global Production Networks

Increasing numbers of women have become sex workers, maids, or employees in export production networks—all largely female sectors—to earn incomes in the restructured global economy. Many must migrate domestically and internationally. Women encounter many risks and much insecurity in these sectors: low wages, no benefits, long hours, harassment, health hazards, and lack of rights or legal recourse. By examining work in these three sectors simultaneously, we find that, as a result of globalization, economic restructuring, and crises, 1) women have increasingly been forced into such income-earning activities and 2) many governments have been pushed into strategies that foster these occupations.     

The political agenda and policy-making: the case of emigration from Israel

The article examines the process of introducing the complicated phenomenon of emigration from Israel on the Israeli political agenda, the place of this phenomenon on the agenda, its effect on public policy making in this sphere, and its being delegated from an important item to a pseudo item. Based on one of the models of Cobb and Ross - the Outside Initiative Model - an analysis is being made of the trends of development and stages of the raising of the topic of emigration on the political agenda and the strategies, procedures and frameworks that have led to its inclusion on the agenda. The article discusses whether the mere existence of the topic of emigration on the political agenda is likely to guarantee the determination of a systematic and comprehensive governmental policy and for the adoption of practical measures in this sphere. The article surveys the stresses and changes which have led to the alteration of the place of emigration from a major topic on the Israeli political agenda to a pseudo-item. An examination and analysis is being made of attitudes which have recently been arguing an explicit negation of the existence of the topic.

It seems that this phenomenon is accumulating a normative momentum that finds expression in an increased understanding of the phenomenon as such, in refraining from its disapproval, and in the increase of the number of those who regard themselves as potential emigrants. There is also an increase in the Israeli communities abroad and infrastructure is being created for the absorption of additional Israelis seeking their fortune abroad. The continuing existence of this situation is likely not only to prevent a reversal of the tendency, but to keep the phenomenon of emigration permanently as a pseudo-item on the Israeli political agenda and perhaps even totally to remove it from this agenda.

Although the presumptive processes and factors that have been raised might explain the alteration of the place of the phenomenon of emigration on the Israeli political agenda, it seems that they are also capable of explaining the conversion of other topics from real ones to pseudo ones.     

Shifting the Risk: New Employment Patterns, Informalization, and Women's Work

The paper argues that the processes of informalization of jobs observed during the past decades have affected both high and low income countries. Starting at the micro level of the firm, the emphasis is on how economic restructuring and globalization have generated the growth of informal activities—resulting in the vicious circle of poverty and economic insecurity for an important proportion of the population. The second part of the paper analyzes the growth of women's participation in informal activities, emphasizing that there are contradictory forces at work regarding women's employment. Despite a stubborn persistence of gender discrimination and obstacles to women's advancement, progress has taken place on several fronts, such as in the education field and in the absorption of female labor in many production processes. The paper concludes by pointing out that poverty eradication programs must emphasize the need to generate decent jobs without which these programs will continue to be ineffective. In addition, re-distributive mechanisms and different forms of social protection are needed to counteract the forces and policies generating economic insecurity.     

Tyrone Grainger and the dilemma of blackness in London

Europe as terminus of Black dispersal holds much significance for the study of Black identity in the Diaspora due to its role in colonizing the African continent. More specifically, England was a major contender in the race to take control of human and natural resources in Africa and the Caribbean prior to and after the European slave trade. During the first 50 years of the twentieth century, Great Britain successfully lured Black West Indians to its shore with hopes of social, cultural, and economic freedom denied them in their homelands. This article explores the dilemma of Blackness and formation of African Diasporan identities in London during the twentieth century. It also examines the complexities of transnationalism and the impact of cultural memory and globalization on identity formation in Beryl Gilroy's novel Boy Sandwich (1989) through the experiences of Tyrone Grainger.     

The Military as a Split Labor Market: The Case of Women and Religious Soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces

A conflict between religious male soldiers and secular female soldiers has emerged since the 2000s within the Israel Defense Forces. This clash has gradually taken the form of religious rhetoric, articulated by rabbis and other religious activists, that has moved from refraining from publicly questioning the fitness of women as combatants to discourse that gradually delegitimized women’s service. Based on the theoretical theme of the split labor market, I will argue that there is a link between the extent to which the growing introduction of women into field units threatens to devalue the religious youth’s symbolic rewards and the escalation in anti-feminist rhetoric, whose ultimate goal is to exclude women from the military.     

Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification

This essay explores the ethical and political dimensions of what I have elsewhere called “prosthetic memories” (Landsberg, Prosthetic memory: The transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture, Harvard University Press, 2004), focusing on those that are produced and disseminated cinematically. I argue that cinematic technology, by which I mean also to include the dominant cinematic conventions and practices used in the Hollywood style of filmmaking, is an effective means for structuring vision. Through specific techniques of shooting and editing, films attempt to position the viewer in highly specific ways in relation to the unfolding narrative. Sometimes, in such films, viewers are brought into intimate contact with a set of experiences that fall well outside of their own lived experience and, as a result, are forced to look as if through someone else’s eyes, and asked to remember those situations and events as both meaningful and potentially formative. By engaging specific strategies intended to elicit identification, films can force viewers to engage both intellectually and emotionally with another who is radically different from him or herself. This complicated form of identification across difference might condition viewers to see and think in ways that could foster more radical forms of democracy aimed at advancing egalitarian social goals.