Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article focuses on portrayals of recent women migrants from the (former) Soviet Union in Israel, as these found expression in jokes and in articles in the press. Analysis of these portrayals suggests that the ubiquitous association of the newcomer women with prostitution served to construct them as morally and socially fragmented. Loosened from the moral bounds of familial and, by implication, national ties, the newcomer women were located beyond the boundary of the Israeli Jewish collective. As the mirror image of the 'loose' newcomer women, mother‐like, Israeli Jewish women were seen as eminently suited to the task of 'domesticating' the newcomers – bringing them in from the street into the familial, and national, home. The discussion suggests that the portrayals of the women as prostitutes served as 'national cautionary tales', which not only instructed their audience (newcomers and oldtimers alike) in fundamental tenets of Israeli Jewish national identity, but also warned those who might seek to undermine the ethno‐national attachments and loyalties that lie at the heart of the Israeli polity.

This article addresses the links between national identity, temporal order, and the re-socialization of migrants. Anchored in an ethnographic account of encounters between Israeli Jews and recent migrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union, it looks at ways in which temporal re-ordering was rendered crucial to the moral transformation required of the newcomers. These encounters reveal not only the ways in which Israeli oldtimers endeavored to persuade the newcomers to bracket off their present circumstances in favour of a shared, imagined future, but also how the newcomers sought to contest the use of the future for making meaning of the present. Finally, the paper examines how a more general argument about the modern state's control over time, and the challenges currently being posed to such control, is worked out in the Israeli case [Israel, Soviet migrants, Israel, nationalism, time, future].

This case is based on our cross-cultural study of Israeli middle-class mothers engagement in their childrens education. The mothers in our study belong to three social-cultural groups: Palestinian Israeli, Russian immigrants, and Israeli-born Jewish. These three groups participate today in the Israeli middle class, albeit with different relationships to major social institutions and resources, as well as to access to educational goods and services. Our study, based on ethnographically informed interviews with mothers, shows that while the mothers share certain ideas about mothering, their modes of engaging with their childrens education are also shaped by their different positionings in Israeli society, by distinct cultural models of both mothering and education, as well as in response to broader changes in the wider society. By ethnographically informed interviews, we mean that our study is based on the principle of ethnographyextended participation in the field in an endeavor to understand how cultural ideas and practices are shaped and reproduced in a specific context, together with the use of in-depth interviewing to create data for comparison. This case study provides a behind-the-scenes account of the research process, with a focus on what choices were made along the way and why. The case illustrates how the research process is shaped by a combination of intellectual concerns and personal interests and demonstrates the ways in which its emergent design is tailored in relation to various resources at the disposal of the researchers. Finally, the case presents the complexities of research as a collaborative process.