CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES AT THE MARGINS: Masculinities and Citizenship in the Israeli Army

This article examines the construction of multiple gendered and national identities in the Israeli army. In Israel, hegemonic masculinity is identified with the masculinity of the Jewish combat soldier and is perceived as the emblem of good citizenship. This identity. I argue, assumes a central role in shaping a hierarchal order of gendered and civic identities that reflects and reproduces social stratification and reconstructs differential modes of participation in, and belonging to, the Israeli state.
In-depth interviews with two marginalized groups in the Israeli army—women in "masculine" roles and male soldiers in blue-collar jobs—suggest two discernible practices of identity. While women in "masculine" roles structure their gender and national identities according to the masculinity of the combat soldier, the identity practices of male soldiers in blue-collar jobs challenge this hegemonic masculinity and its close link with citizenship in Israel. However, while both identity practices are empowering for the groups in question, neither undermines the hegemonic order, for the military's practice of "limited inclusion" prohibits the development of a collective consciousness that would challenge the differentiated structure of citizenship.     

American Moralism,the Good,and Psychoanalysis

This brief comment introduces a panel on Abelove’s classic contribution to psychoanalysis. The papers were recruited for the journal following a heated discussion between panelists and audience debating whether their psychoanalytic work could be considered free of ideas of the Good, or Ideology.     

The emergence of the emergence-based approach in community practice

Community practitioners are often challenged to work in complex environments and situations that naturally occur in communities. This article focuses on the theoretical and practical use of the Emergence-Based Approach that is relevant for work in complex community situations. Using this approach, the practitioner encourages the emergence of novel ideas and initiatives, and engages a decentralized network of activists, helping them develop their initiatives. Using a field study, we compare this approach to the traditional Outcomes-Based Approach. Although their mindsets are very different, and even contradict one another, we suggest practical ways to combine the two in an effective way.     

Suzi and Mr. S.: Gender role stereotyping in social workers' court reports in custody and access cases.

This paper analyzes the “gender strategies” of a sample of Israeli women social workers as evidenced in the recommendations that they write for the courts on custody and visiting rights for divorcing couples. Textual analysis of these reports reveals what Hochchild terms a “traditional gender strategy,” manifested in a consistent pattern of gender stereotyping. There are clear differences in the way the social workers present the husband and wife as persons, both separately and in relation to one another, and in the roles that they expect them to fulfill, with the man being assigned the provider role and the woman the parent role. Even the way they collect information about the two parents' relationships with their children is different. The paper concludes with a discussion of the practical implications of the findings.     

Divorced mothers' self‐perception of their divorce‐related communication with their children

This is a qualitative study of divorce‐related communication between mothers and children, as recounted by 20 Jewish Israeli mothers. We adopt the communication privacy management theory, focusing on mothers' subjective experiences of communication, their management of dialectic tension between concealment and disclosure – namely, not only what mothers choose to disclose to and hide from their children, but also the feelings, concerns and perceptions that drove their communication. The mothers' reports convey the challenges and dilemmas they faced when communicating with their children about their divorce and its repercussions; the main one being their obligation to maintain a good father image and their wish to preserve a strong maternal figure. The ‘child's well‐being’ was the dominant criterion in the mothers' decision to reveal or conceal divorce‐related information. Clinical suggestions are made.     

A Different Kind of Whiteness: Marking and Unmarking of Social Boundaries in the Construction of Hegemonic Ethnicity

This article proposes a new theoretical approach to the analysis of hegemonic ethnicity through an examination of the construction of white ethnicity among Ashkenazim (Jews of European origin) in Israel. Contrary to the theory of symbolic ethnicity, I argue that “Ashkenaziness” in Israel is not an optional, voluntary identity; rather, it is constituted by employing narratives that continually establish cultural, color‐based, and ethnic boundaries between Ashkenazim and Mizrahi Jews. In certain social and ideological circumstances, however, boundary marking is not enough to maintain a privileged status. From the narratives of Ashkenazi Jews—the Israeli version of whites—it emerges that not only do they demarcate social boundaries between themselves and other groups, thereby preserving the ethnic hierarchy, but they are constantly engaged in blurring or erasing these same boundaries, allowing Ashkenazim to remain a transparent, unmarked social category. This dual practice of marking and unmarking is a result of the tension between the Jewish‐Zionist and Western‐secular images of the state. While Israel's Jewish discourse supposedly negates intra‐Jewish ethnic conflicts, the Western ideal identifies Ashkenazim with the state, thus solidifying their power and preserving their privileged status.     

Love Has No End: Ghada Amer

Art, like psychoanalysis, is a site for cultural transmission and its critique. The work of Ghada Amer, an Egyptian living in New York, speaks to issues that beleaguer contemporary psychoanalysis, particularly the relationship between individuals and their cultural/political surrounds. Her gorgeous paintings, often combining brushwork and embroidery, are infused with concerns such as the submission of women to the tyranny of domestic life, sexuality and pleasure, and the incomprehensibility of love. Amer tackles in a candid and personal way the mystique and impasse between the Western gaze and Islam, inviting us to examine the foolishness of war and violence. The different elements in Amer's paintings speak to the multiplicity of identities that confuse our postmodern existence. They share a life on the canvas, creating a sequence of interpellations, each hailing a different self-state yet allowing us to examine how ideologies work to imprison us.     

Military,Masculinity, and Citizenship: Tensions and Contradictions in the Experience of Blue-Collar Soldiers

This article seeks to problematize the relationship between military service, masculinity, and citizenship, from the perspective of lower-class soldiers who serve in blue-collar roles in the Israeli military. Introducing class and ethnicity into the “taken for granted” equation of men, military, and the state reveals counter-hegemonic conceptions of masculinity and citizenship, and exposes tense and often contradictory relationships between them.

Based on in-depth interviews, I argue that blue-collar Israeli soldiers simultaneously accept and challenge the hegemonic Zionist conceptions of both masculinity and citizenship. Unlike the combat soldiers, blue-collar soldiers demonstrate gender and national identities that are not anchored in military life. Rather, these soldiers present an alternative version of “home-based masculinity,” which grants the family superiority over the military and the state. This masculinity is expressed through two recurring themes: ongoing resistance to military discipline and authority, and an emphasis on the role of the provider over the role of the soldier. Through these daily military practices, the soldiers express their rejection of the republican “principle of contribution” as a criterion to one's belonging to the collective. However, their conception of citizenship emphasizes a militant ethno-national discourse. The discrepancy between their antimilitaristic practices and their militant patriotism reflects their ambivalent socio-political location in Israeli society between their preferred location as Jews and their marginal location as Mizrachim of lower classes. These ambivalent identities reveal that a mutual affirming connection between the military, masculinity, and the state exists only for hegemonic groups. For non-hegemonic groups, the relationship between masculinity, military, and citizenship is ridden with conflicts and inner contradictions.     

URBANIZED PERIPHERIES: A REGIONAL STUDY OF CRIME IN ISRAEL

This study explores the regional patterns of crime in Israel for the first time. It examines crime rates and interregional crime by comparing the home region of offenders and the region of the offense. In a society small in size and population, urbanization has a limited impact on crime rates. This analysis, based on variables drawn from a national census and police crime statistics, stresses three types of peripheral region: regions that "attract" property offenses, regions that "export" property offenders, and regions of a "typical" peripheral nature. However, the findings indicate that some urban characteristics serve to shape the crime situation in peripheral regions. It is suggested that regional variations in crime are best explained by a multicausality approach.     

Estimating Increment-Decrement Life Tables with Multiple Covariates from Panel Data: The Case of Active Life Expectancy*

A fundamental limitation of current multistate life table methodology-evident in recent estimates of active life expectancy for the elderly-is the inability to estimate tables from data on small longitudinal panels in the presence of multiple covariates (such as sex, race, and socioeconomic status). This paper presents an approach to such an estimation based on an isomorphism between the structure of the stochastic model underlying a conventional specification of the increment-decrement life table and that of Markov panel regression models for simple state spaces. We argue that Markov panel regression procedures can be used to provide smoothed or graduated group-specific estimates of transition probabilities that are more stable across short age intervals than those computed directly from sample data. We then join these estimates with increment-decrement life table methods to compute group-specific total, active, and dependent life expectancy estimates. To illustrate the methods, we describe an empirical application to the estimation of such life expectancies specific to sex, race, and education (years of school completed) for a longitudinal panel of elderly persons. We find that education extends both total life expectancy and active life expectancy. Education thus may serve as a powerful social protective mechanism delaying the onset of health problems at older ages.