Suchergebnisse

"The book argues that the state of Israel's political and intellectual elites have failed to formulate a coherent concept of what it means for the state to be "Jewish." As a result, Israel is conceived primarily in demographic terms - as a state the majority of whose population is Jewish. The definition of who is Jewish, however, is left entirely up to Orthodox authorities. Although most observers of Israel attribute the disproportionate power of these authorities to coalition politics, Yadgar claims that the state needs to outsource the determination of Jewishness to them because the state has developed no alternative definition. Yadgar illustrates this dilemma through in-depth examination of controversies over conversion, the recently-passed Nation State law, school programs for the strengthening of "Jewish identity," and claims to an "Israeli" as opposed to "Jewish" nationality. Yadgar's elegant presentation of the intertwining of halakhic and ethnic conceptions of Jewishness, and the inability to separate "being Israeli" from "being Jewish," nicely illustrates the fallacy of clear distinctions between the realms of the religious and the secular in modern societies"--

Traditionism and choice -- Method, consistency, and guilt -- Traditionism and observance -- Cross-pressures and traditionist solitude -- Traditionism, ethnicity and gender -- Traditionists, images of the orthodox and the secular -- Rabbis, halachic reform, and the non-orthodox movements.

Examines the role of secularism and religion in Jewish society and politics. This book also examines issues of religion, tradition and secularism in Israel, giving a fresh approach to the widening theoretical discussion regarding the thesis of secularisation and modernity and exploring the wider implications of this identity.

I argue here for the relevance and importance of the study of nostalgia for political analysis. Focusing on the case of Israel, I propose that a study of nostalgia can yield, at least in the case at hand, insightful views of political reality that other approaches to the study of politics may fail to expose. Specifically, I focus on a nostalgia prevalent among the dominant Ashkenazi ethno-class, accompanied by a Mizrahi 'counter' nostalgia. I argue that these nostalgias tell us volumes – like other nostalgias can do – about the ways people and their socio-political groups understand their world and their place within it in the present and formulate their hopes for the future. In this, nostalgia proves to be an important part of the toolkit of the study of politics, alongside the study of political myth and symbols.

This essay seeks to explicate a tension that lies at the very root of our discourse on Israel as a Jewish state. I argue that the academic and political fields tend to confuse and conflate two different, often contradictory understandings or constructions of the very meaning of Jewish politics. Schematically labelling these as Jewish politics versus the politics of Jews (and derived from these, the outlook of Israel as a "Jewish state" versus the notion of it being solely a "state of Jews"), I argue that the conflicting political and ideological constructions are nourished by different readings of Jewish identity and authenticity, which were first developed in Europe by leading (self-identified secular) Zionist ideologues, and later shaped mainstream readings of Israeli politics. The essay outlines the basic contours of this conceptual distinction, traces its roots in Zionist ideology (as developed in Eastern and Central Europe), and concludes with a consideration of the playing out of the tension at hand in contemporary Israeli politics.

One of the most profound changes to have engulfed the interdisciplinary study of religion, society, culture and history has been what is now commonly termed the "post-secular" turn. This intellectual development, which has been gaining a growing momentum during the last two decades, offers a "revisionist" reconsideration of the "orthodox" paradigm of secularization. In this article, the author uses such a post-secular perspective not for the study of religion or secularism, but rather for the study of tradition, as well as the attitudes toward it, which underlie the image of both religioisity and secularism. It is argued that the narrative of secularization imposes a one-dimensional view of both tradition itself and the nature of our relations toward tradition. Adapted from the source document.

This article studies the transformations of the narrative of 'the Vision of the New Middle East' as a political myth in Israel from its conception in the early 1990s to this date. Borrowing its analytic framework from Georges Sorel's concept of political myth, the article opens by offering a narrative analysis of the paradigmatic vision, as formulated by Shimon Peres (then Israel's Foreign Minister). The article goes on to trace the reception of this narrative and the uses made of it in two of the main arenas of the Israeli political and public spheres: the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) and the mainstream Hebrew press. The article argues that, while 'the New Middle East' has become an idiomatic phrase synonymous to peace, a closer look at its appearances in the Israeli public and political spheres suggests that the uses and transformations of 'the New Middle East' in effect signal its failure to become a politically mobilizing myth or image. Instead, this notion has become an icon of a utopian, abstract, and rather apolitical notion of peace in the Middle East. This case study thus suggests an interesting lesson as to the potential and limitations of using peace as a mobilizing political myth.