Intolerance of "Others" among Palestinian and Jewish Students in Israel

This study analyzes intolerance against diverse sociopolitical groups and compares the social and political attitudes of two distinct and highly differentiated groups: Jewish and Palestinian high-school students in Israel. It examines their perceptions of the political context that structurates their "reality," and aims to find the factors that influence the extremity of their intolerance. The proposed model is more applicable to Jewish students than it is to Palestinians and shows that intolerance toward out-groups is influenced by religiosity, the salience of national and civic identity, national security issues, and political ideology.     

Agency of internal transnationalism in social memory

The article examines the limitations of methodological nationalism in the studies of social memory through a case study of memory of Stalinist repression in Belarus. It analyses how various social agencies – national and local activists, religious organisations, and international foundations – use the memory of repression for constructing post‐Soviet Belarusian identity by embedding their national representations in larger transnational frameworks. Drawing on the concept of ‘internal globalisation’, this article develops the idea of ‘internal transnationalism’ that suggests the importance of wider transnational configurations for the definition of nation. Internalized transnationalism does not make a national memory concept less nation‐centred, but it affects the choice of its cultural, political and civilizational framing. In contrast to methodological cosmopolitanism that implies rediscovering of the national as an internalized global, methodological transnationalism emphasizes the multiplicity of co‐existing transnational networks that can be invoked by social actors in their national mnemonic agenda. Using the case of the Kurapaty memorial site the article analyses how multiple framings of memory representations – the Belarusian national memory, liberal anti‐communist memory, contesting memories, such as Polish, Baltic and Jewish – compete and juxtapose in the space of social memory of political repression.     

Perceptions of the narrative of the ‘other’ among Arab and Jewish adolescents in Israel: between peace talks and violent events

One of the major challenges for the process of peace building is to overcome the rigid structure of the socio‐psychological repertoire that accompanies it. Our longitudinal study examined one element of this repertoire among Jewish and Arab adolescents in Israel: the cognitive legitimacy and the emotional reactions toward the historical narrative of the opponent. We focused our question on the impact of the socio‐political context and the role of the violent reality in the development of these perceptions among youth. Data were collected in four stages (1999–2000, 2002, 2004, and 2007) among various samples of Arab and Jewish high school students (10th and 12th graders). The results showed that among the Jewish adolescents, the readiness to legitimate Palestinian narratives significantly decreased during violent periods. Among the Arab students, the impact of their difficult status as a Palestinian minority in the State of Israel is reflected in their relatively high level of readiness to accept both narratives. The results are discussed from social, cultural, and developmental perspectives with a focus on the role of the conflictual reality itself in the development of the socio‐psychological repertoire among youth.     

Feeling close from a distance: peace encounters via Internet technology

In regions of intractable conflicts, daily circumstances and overall reality allow very narrow opportunities to bring members of conflict groups together in order to modify their social relationships. Internet-based communications were the backbone of a three-month program designed to address the Jewish-Arab conflict between Israeli Jewish youth and Arab youth to enable students to discuss issues such as equality, democracy, tolerance, and peace.     

Reconsidering identity: the ethnic and political dimensions of hybridity among majority and Turkish youth in Germany and England1

Sociological research has hitherto largely focused on majority ² and minority ethnic identities or citizenship identities. However, the social connections between youth are not simply ethnic dynamics but also political dynamics involving citizenship categories. This article argues that in postmodern societies, it is important to reconsider the ways we think about youth identities. Drawing upon qualitative data from a study into the political identities of majority (German and British) youth and Turkish youth, educated in two Stuttgart and two London secondary schools, the research found that fifteen‐year‐olds had no singular identity but hybrid ethno‐national, ethno‐local and national‐European identities as a result of governmental policies, their schooling and community experience, social class positioning, ethnicity and migration history. In working‐class educational contexts, many majority and Turkish youth privileged the ethnic dimension of hybridity whereas majority and Turkish youth in the two middle‐class dominated schools emphasized the political dimension of hybridity. The article demonstrates that social class and schooling (e.g. ethos and peer cultures) have a considerable role to play in who can afford to take on the more hybridized cosmopolitan identities on offer.     

“Oh,language of exile – woven of sorrow and mockery”: the Kalevala centennial jubilee as a bone of contention between Hebraists and Yiddishists

The article explores contacts between eminent Jewish Zionists and the Finnish cultural and political elite using the Kalevala centennial jubilee as a case study. The article shows how Finnish nationalists sympathised with the cause of Zionists propagating the use of modern Hebrew: members of the Kalevala Society warm‐heartedly invited the Hebrew poet Saul Tchernichowsky from Palestine to the centennial jubilee in 1935. The article also deals with the exclusion of the Yiddish representative, Hersh Rosenfeld, recommended by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna, and discusses the possibility of anti‐communism and anti‐cosmopolitanism behind his omission from the centennial jubilee. The Jewish community of Helsinki, which was experiencing a rapid Finnification process, was involved in inviting the Hebrew representative to Finland. The article ends by analysing a Yiddishist poem that can be interpreted as an individual’s protest about the exclusion of the Yiddish language from the Kalevala centenary.     

The development and evolution of Reclaiming Futures at the ten-year mark: Reflections and recommendations

Reclaiming Futures has been a successful national demonstration project, initially funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which seeks to improve a system-wide response to young people in the juvenile justice system with substance abuse issues. The initiative is a multiyear effort that has included complex simultaneous community and cross-system planned change efforts. The intention of the initiative is to develop, test, and disseminate a response to unmet needs and to extensive gaps and fragmentation in the availability and quality of services and opportunities that would have a positive impact not only on the lives of individual youth, but on community capacity to engage and encourage youth success as well. This article summarizes the developmental trajectory of the initiative, with a focus on elements of the planned change process. How change efforts were conceptualized, sequenced, executed, and evaluated are discussed and their implications explored. Now adopted in 29 communities around the nation, this article describes two federal and state dissemination efforts as examples of its continued expansion.     

The impact of the political context on discourse characteristics in Jewish–Arab encounters in Israel: between peace talks and violent events

Research in the field of intergroup relations has developed considerably over the last two decades, influenced by events and by the historical zeitgeist. We suggest applying an interactional way of dealing with intergroup encounters, which emphasizes the situational macro‐context (political, historical and social) in which the contact takes place. Employing this approach, the impact of the social‐political context on the characteristics of two encounters in which Jewish and Arab Israeli students met to deal with the Israeli–Arab political conflict was examined. The workshops took place within two completely different political contexts. The first workshop was at the time of peace talks, following the Oslo Accords (1996–1997), the second during the al‐Aksa Intifada (2001–2002). The discussions were recorded and fully transcribed. The two workshops were compared using a typology for classification of the developmental process of discourse between groups. The analysis revealed that during the peace talks ‘ethnocentric discourse’ was the dominant speech category, characterized by two monologues that do not meet. In the second workshop dialogic categories characterized by sharing of feelings, listening to the ‘other’ and making an effort to understand how reality looks from his/her perspective were salient. The research findings are discussed with regard to the paradoxical impact of the political–social context on discourse in small groups. The findings give a new understanding of the role of small intergroup meetings against the background of violent reality in an intractable conflict.     

Conflicting Holocaust narratives in Moldovan nationalist historical discourse

The effort to build a patriotic, usable past for Moldova has led important Moldovan post‐Soviet historians of the pan‐Romanian school to de‐emphasize and rationalize the Holocaust for fear of it staining a national myth grounded in Romanian victimization narratives. Much of this strategy has been focused on the Jewish connection to Soviet communism in interwar greater Romania, which supposedly undermined the Romanian state and thereby warranted a public outcry against the Jews. The construction and use of this interwar “mismemory” has been mimicked by post‐Soviet historians in recent years, whereby greater social, political and economic problems are glossed over in preference for a specifically threatening Jewish anti‐Romanianism. One’s position on this historical debate is seemingly important enough to influence one’s national credentials in the public forum.     

Manufacturing national attachments: gift-giving, market exchange and the construction of Irish and Zionist diaspora bonds

This article explores nation building as an organizational accomplishment and uses the concept of boundary object to explain how the groups that compose the nation cooperate. Specifically, the article examines the mechanisms devised to secure a flow of money from the Irish-American and Jewish-American diasporas to their respective homelands. To overcome problems associated with conventional philanthropy, Irish and Jewish nationalists issued bonds and sold them to their American compatriots as a hybrid of a gift and an investment. In the Irish case, disagreements about the entitlement to the proceeds resulted in the termination of the bond project. In the Jewish case, the bond served as a boundary object allowing American and Israeli Jews to cooperate despite ongoing tensions. The Israeli bond provided Jewish-Americans with an additional way to invest themselves financially and emotionally in Israel. This bond is an example of a socio-technical mechanism used to create national attachments.     

The interrupted chain: traditional receiver countries,migration regimes,and the East European Jewish diaspora, 1918–39

This article focuses primarily on countries that had been, prior to 1914, among the most favored destinations for East European Jewish migrants: chiefly the United States, Canada, Palestine, Brazil and Argentina. In the inter-war years, these ceased to be the only ports of final entry for Jewish migrants. However, despite restrictive migration regimes and unfavorable economic conditions, traditional receiver countries continued to absorb the largest share of such migrants (the U. S. and Palestine, between them, accounting for over 800,000). Jewish migration to countries other than the United States peaked around 1933; was just about equal to the U. S.-bound migrant stream by 1938; and fell off in 1939–1940. The Jewish case raises several theoretical and methodological issues, including the definition of migrant motivation as well as the framing of immigration policy as products of mixed factors – both political and economic.     

The politics of erased migrations: Expanding a relational,intersectional sociology of Latinx gender and migration

Sociologists of gender and Latina/o migration and Chicana feminist scholars in Chicana/o Studies have made extensive interventions in the academic project of recovering the experiences of women in migration studies across disciplines. I consider these contributions and advocate for an interdisciplinary research agenda that continues expanding relational scholarship by developing the concept of the politics of erased migrations, an analytical tool to theorize why and how the embodied experiences of Latinas are marginalized and misrepresented in academic research. Latinas experience various physical and symbolic migrations—across and within national borders, social and political contexts, identities, academic disciplines, methodologies, and social movements. Yet Latina feminist experiences, knowledge, and political movement largely remain at the margins of these borders. Through a review of prominent research on gender and migration centered on heteronormativity, reproduction, and the nation‐state, I demonstrate the possibilities of the politics of erased migration as a theoretical intervention in expanding a relational, intersectional sociology of Latinx gender and migration. This paper carries implications for shifting the field of Latinx gender and migration from a focus on current oppressive conditions to one that also imagines new avenues for social justice and alternative social worlds.     

Internal Migration of Ethno‐national Minorities: The Case of Arabs in Israel

Recent scholarship emphasizes differences among ethnic groups' internal migration patterns. Yet, with few exceptions, research has focused on the Anglo‐American world, neglecting experiences from other regions. This paper is part of a larger research project that studies mobility among the Arab minority in Israel and its driving forces. In this paper we examine patterns of internal migration by analysing the propensity to migrate as well as migrants' individual and social characteristics. First, we survey the theoretical backdrop that is suggested by recent geographic literature on internal migration among ethnic and racial minorities, including native groups. Second, we contextualize the group studied, providing necessary background information on the political, socio‐economic and demographic conditions of Arabs in Israel. We briefly discuss attributes that are – or have been – potential hindering factors to Arab mobility in the Jewish state. Finally, we analyse 1995 national census data at the micro scale and provide a basis for future explanations of the phenomenon. We conclude by outlying some future directions in the study of internal migration of minorities in Israel.     

How statelessness can force refugees to redefine their ethnicity: what can be learned from Russian émigrés dispersed to six continents in the inter-war period?

This article explores how approximately 400 Russian émigrés living in fifty-eight countries during the inter-war period redefined Russian ethnicity. In responses to an amateur nation-building project, they provided a wide variety of either organic or voluntaristic definitions of Russianness, despite the fact that they were a fairly homogenous group in terms of their political views and their social background. Most of their criteria for determining Russianness were dissimilar to pre-revolutionary conceptions. Yet one overarching feature united their conceptions of Russianness: they were all intent on excluding entire groups of would-be Russians, even though it was in their interests to expand the size of the Russian diaspora. This article argues that statelessness forced Russian émigrés to refine their ethnicity and that the process of defining members of their diaspora nation paralleled their endeavour to create a Russian émigré ethnicity separate from that of Soviet Russians. The criteria they developed to exclude groups and sometimes individuals they encountered abroad mirror the criteria that used to disassociate themselves from Soviet Russians.     

Police harassment and the politicization of Jewish youth in interwar Bessarabia

The article analyzes how regionalist antagonism and ideological bias mediated Romanian police officials’ surveillance of the Jewish community in interwar Bessarabia. It compares the characterizations of Jewish politics found in police files from Bessarabia with those in Yiddish-language autobiographies by Bessarabian Jewish young people. Because officials attributed subversive, conspiratorial intent to movements across the Jewish political spectrum, they were never motivated to acquire more than a cursory understanding of the complex Jewish political arena they were surveilling. Had their intelligence not been hampered by lack of relevant language skills, mistrust of all Bessarabians regardless of ethnicity, and antisemitic stereotypes, officials might have seen that the young people they found so threatening were involved in highly ineffective and powerless politics. Instead, Romanian officials and Bessarabian Jewish youth were caught in a cycle of intractable cultural misunderstanding: police harassment exacerbated frantic and ideologically incoherent political activity among Jewish youth, which in turn reinforced suspicions of a Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy. I argue that this dynamic conforms in some respects to regional patterns, but that those patterns alone are insufficient for understanding this case. Rather, the encounter between Romanian officials and Bessarabian Jews is reminiscent of a colonial encounter, one in which cultural misunderstandings have hardened into intractable distrust.     

The rising importance of local government in the United States: Recent research and challenges for sociology

Local governments have gained increasing responsibilities for public well‐being according to a variety of social science literatures. The rise of the local state is often seen as a part of a broader process of state‐rescaling or downward shift in national governance under neoliberal development. Yet attention to local government lags in political sociology, which conventionally elevates the national federal state as its object of interest. I summarize four recent bodies of literature that address the new role of local governments. Taken together, these literatures speak to different sides of the debate about whether the rise of local government is detrimental to citizens' well‐being. I explain how greater sociological attention to the local state can contribute to this debate as well as inform political sociologists' understanding of the U.S. nation‐state itself and provide directions for future research.     

Non-governmental organisations and philanthropy: The case of Argentina

The social, cultural and political activities of non-profit organisations in Argentina have a long history. They existed prior to the creation of the nation state. With a very strong religious influence, they expanded throughout the nineteenth century. National state provision of collective goods only started to develop at the end of the nineteenth century as a result of what Salamon (1987) has referred to as ‘voluntary failure’. The social, political and economic changes that have taken place in Argentina during the last decade had not only had an impact on non-profit organisations, but also on the traditional roles and responsibilities in the development of the state, the market and civil society. The political democratisation which started in 1983, along with the economic stability of the 1990s, were the two most relevant factors to affect non-profit organisations. The new social movements which had emerged during the previous decade (1976–1983) tended to disappear, leaving behind a wide array of organisations concerned with youth, women, human rights and neighbourhoods. With a focus on poverty issues, several state agencies now prioritise new strategies and mechanisms which involve the participation of civil society in social policies. The extent to which these will develop, how large the resources devoted to these programmes will be, and what kinds of controls over NGOs the state will implement are some of the main topics which will demand close attention.     

Exodus from the Babylonian Captivity: The Jews of Modern Iraq

The solving of the Eastern Question during the twentieth century ended the existence of the oldest Jewish Diaspora community; modern political, social, and economic phenomenon marginalized a significant ethnic minority that resided in Iraq for over two millennia. Much of this breakdown of relations with the Muslim majority, and the further marginalization of the Iraqi Jewish community can be traced to several events after the turn of the century that occurred during the inter-war period and extending to the creation of Israel in 1948. A rise in Arab nationalism, Germanophilia, British colonialism, and more importantly the answering of the Palestine Question effectively marginalized, and subsequently lead to the expulsion of the Iraqi Jewish community. The Iraqi Jews were marginalized in part by religio-cultural differences in language, which were exacerbated by Jewish economic preeminence in international commerce, which had expanded since the European Capitulations in the 1800s. Furthermore, Jews were denied full cultural inclusion by their exclusion from the military, which served as a cultural and political force in the period of Iraqi state-formation. Coupled with Zionism's rise in Palestine, and Europe, and its regional impact, the Iraqi Jews became viewed as a fifth column and a Trojan horse of European and Zionist imperialism by the Iraqi Muslim majority. Tensions came to a head in the Farhud of June 1941, an anti-Jewish uprising, which followed a pro-Nazi coup lead by Rashid Ali al-Gaylani. The Farhud came to symbolize the breaking point for the Iraqi Jewish community; because of a disproportionately privileged socio-economic status that was based on a different cultural existence, and regional political factors, the Jews of Iraq had been rejected by their host society of two millennia.     

Between martyrology and historiography: Elias Tcherikower and the making of a pogrom historian

This article examines the dialectical relationship between martyrology and historiography, religion and secularism in the works of the Russian‐Jewish historian and communal activist, Elias Tcherikower. Tcherikower, although a disciple of Shimon Dubnov, who maintained a commitment to a positive portrayal of Jewish life in the Diaspora, championed what Salo Baron called “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” the view that understood Jewish history as consisting primarily of a series of persecutions. From World War One onward, Tcherikower romanticised Jewish martyrs and argued that religious and cultural renaissance followed on the heels of persecution and martyrdom. This preoccupation with the relationship between Jewish martyrdom and cultural creativity inspired Tcherikower first in his role as an historian of the pogroms of the Russian Civil War and then as a leader of YIVO. Until the eve of World War Two, Tcherikower believed that modern Yiddish scholarship served the same transcendent purpose as had Torah study in the past and that Jewish historiography could inspire the Jewish people in the same manner as had pre‐modern martyrology. Tcherikower’s work thus provides a fascinating case study of the persistence of traditional religious conceptions in twentieth‐century East European nationalist Jewish historiography.