Critiquing Israeli Society Through Mirroring in Asaf Hanuka’s “The Realist”

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-180
Author(s):  
Matt Reingold
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Israeli Society ◽  
Foreign Workers ◽  
Societal Change ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
Political Commentary ◽  
Jewish Immigrants

Seven of Israeli cartoonist Asaf Hanuka’s comic strips from his weekly series The Realist make use montage-like elements by juxtaposing distorted mirror images of scenes. While published over the course of Hanuka’s almost 10-year run and addressing radically different topics, the structure and nature of the seven strips is remarkably similar. Each includes the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas to offer a commentary on a different aspect of the Israeli society. These topics include the historical mistreatment of Jewish immigrants to the country, the country’s policies toward foreign workers, and the economic challenges faced by the middle-class Israelis. While Hanuka’s technique provides an opportunity for considering different attitudes toward the topic, these strips consistently take a stance that places blame on Israelis themselves for either their attitudes or their electoral decisions. The comics serve, therefore, as political commentary which through the juxtaposition of images, encourages societal change.

scholarly journals Mockery and Morality in Popular Cultural Representations of the White, Working Class

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jayne Raisborough ◽  
Matt Adams
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Strategic Orientation ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
New Class ◽  
Class A ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Class Distinction

We draw on ‘new’ class analysis to argue that mockery frames many cultural representations of class and move to consider how it operates within the processes of class distinction. Influenced by theories of disparagement humour, we explore how mockery creates spaces of enunciation, which serve, when inhabited by the middle class, particular articulations of distinction from the white, working class. From there we argue that these spaces, often presented as those of humour and fun, simultaneously generate for the middle class a certain distancing from those articulations. The plays of articulation and distancing, we suggest, allow a more palatable, morally sensitive form of distinction-work for the middle-class subject than can be offered by blunt expressions of disgust currently argued by some ‘new’ class theorising. We will claim that mockery offers a certain strategic orientation to class and to distinction work before finishing with a detailed reading of two Neds comic strips to illustrate what aspects of perceived white, working class lives are deemed appropriate for these functions of mockery. The Neds, are the latest comic-strip family launched by the publishers of children's comics The Beano and The Dandy, D C Thomson and Co Ltd.

Book Reviews

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-126
Author(s):  
Wang Zhen ◽  
Alfred Tovias ◽  
Peter Bergamin ◽  
Menachem Klein ◽  
Tally Kritzman-Amir ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Israeli Society ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Indiana University ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Georgetown University

Aron Shai, China and Israel: Chinese, Jews; Beijing, Jerusalem (1890–2018) (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 270 pp. Hardback, $90.00. Paperback, $29.95.Raffaella A. Del Sarto, Israel under Siege: The Politics of Insecurity and the Rise of the Israeli Neo-Revisionist Right (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017), 298 pp. Paperback, $26.94.Dan Tamir, Hebrew Fascism in Palestine, 1922–1942 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 210 pp. Hardback, $99.99.Alan Dowty, Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine: Two Worlds Collide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 312 pp. Hardback, $65.00.Guy Ben-Porat and Fany Yuval, Policing Citizens: Minority Policy in Israel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 250 pp. Hardback, $89.99.Deborah Golden, Lauren Erdreich, and Sveta Roberman, Mothering, Education and Culture: Russian, Palestinian and Jewish Middle-Class Mothers in Israeli Society (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 225 pp. Hardback, $114.25.

“Them Damn Pictures”: Americanization and the Comic Strip in the Progressive Era

1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Yaszek
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Police Officer ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
American Values ◽  
Tammany Hall ◽  
Political Weapon

As William Tweed noted over a century ago, the cartoon, with its combination of graphic and text, can be a dangerous political weapon. Indeed, the Tammany Hall boss's career was destroyed when he was arrested for kidnapping in 1875 — an arrest made by a police officer who recognized Tweed from a newspaper cartoon. Likewise, when comic strips first appeared in the American sensation papers of the 1890s, they too were seen as having important, and potentially threatening, political and social ramifications. Journalists such as Oswald Villard condemned newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst for using the comic strip as a cheap ploy to boost circulation, claiming that it compromised journalistic integrity. Meanwhile, genteel reformers waged their own war against comic strips, worried that the slapstick action and irreverent content would erode middle-class American values and “foster a spirit of disrespect and insubordination… by their glorification of cheeky, iconoclastic urchins.”

Military Conflict and Neo-Liberalization in Israel (2001–2006): A Neo-Gramscian Approach

2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 503-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Avigur-Eshel ◽  
Dani Filc
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Early Years ◽  
First Century ◽  
Israeli Society ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
Second Intifada ◽  
Political Alignment ◽  
Analytical Frameworks

Existing analytical frameworks for the study of Israel’s political sociology and political economy tend to view the Israeli society as polarized into a neo-liberal secular and peace-seeking elite and religious ethno-republican social groups. The turn to ethno-republicanism following the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, and two neo-liberal economic programs in 2002 and 2003, exposed the limitations of those approaches. We suggest that a Neo-Gramscian approach provides a better theoretical framework for the analysis of the early years of the twenty-first century. We argue that during the years 2001–2006 a hegemonic project was constituted which succeeded in combining neo-liberal and ethno-republican elements. This project was based on a relatively stable socio-political alignment of social groups, primarily drawn from the Jewish middle class. In order to establish our argument, we characterize the project and analyze the position of the main social groups in Israeli society relative to it.

“A Beautiful Garden Consecrated to the Lord”: Marriage, Death, and Local Constructions of Citizenship in New York’s Nineteenth-Century Jewish Rural Cemeteries

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-34
Author(s):  
Allan Amanik
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Social Belonging ◽  
Physical Barriers ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
Race And Religion ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter explores immigration, race, and religion through the nation’s first Jewish rural cemeteries of the 1850s. These grounds embodied an important duality for Jewish New Yorkers’ social belonging to an emerging white middle class while also safeguarding Jewish particularity and continuity. Still recent Jewish immigrants eagerly participated in the Rural Cemetery Movement, laying out lavish cemeteries and embracing its universalism by setting those grounds in closer proximity than ever before to non-sectarian Christian counterparts. Conversely, Jews of all stripes made sure to cluster together behind clear physical barriers, and nearly all synagogues and Jewish fraternities prohibited Christian burial and maintained old links between interment rights and intermarriage. Aware of increasing acceptance in the United States, Jewish New Yorkers celebrated their costly new cemeteries as symbols of mobility and belonging. At the same time, they doubled down on physical, ritual, and intangible divisions within them to temper that integration.

Scaffolding spatial literacy: Palestinian-Israeli mothers teach their children to read social relations in Israeli society/spaces

2020 ◽  
pp. 147447402094417
Author(s):  
Lauren Erdreich ◽  
Deborah Golden
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Learning Environment ◽  
University Students ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Israeli Society ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Literacy Studies ◽  
Spatial Literacy ◽  
Parent Child Interactions ◽  
Scaffolding Strategies

This article looks at how Palestinian-Israeli middle-class mothers, who enjoy the advantages of the middle class yet belong to a geographically and socially marginalized minority, educate their children in and about socio-spatial reality. The study brings the field of geographies of parenting into dialogue with relevant insights from literacy studies. Building on the concept of spatial literacy developed through previous ethnographic research with Palestinian-Israeli women university-students, we analyze recent interviews on mothering and education carried out with the same population more than a decade later. Borrowing Vygotsky’s concept of scaffolding, findings reveal three major ‘scaffolding strategies’ used by the women to teach their children to read social relations in Israeli society: shaping the learning environment, directing spatial proficiency and supporting spatial proficiency. Throughout, we juxtapose the women’s elaboration of spatial literacy as students and of scaffolding strategies as mothers. The study contributes to geographies of parenting by elucidating how parent-child interactions may serve as a context for learning about space and social relations.

Marital Stability Among Jewish and Mixed Couples Following Immigration to Israel From the Former Soviet Union

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoav Lavee ◽  
Ludmila Krivosh
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Social Adjustment ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Marital Stability ◽  
Marital Instability ◽  
Factors Associated ◽  
Mixed Marriages ◽  
Marital Outcomes ◽  
Jewish Immigrants

This research aims to identify factors associated with marital instability among Jewish and mixed (Jewish and non-Jewish) couples following immigration from the former Soviet Union. Based on the Strangeness Theory and the Model of Acculturation, we predicted that non-Jewish immigrants would be less well adjusted personally and socially to Israeli society than Jewish immigrants and that endogamous Jewish couples would have better interpersonal congruence than mixed couples in terms of personal and social adjustment. The sample included 92 Jewish couples and 92 ethnically-mixed couples, of which 82 couples (40 Jewish, 42 mixed) divorced or separated after immigration and 102 couples (52 Jewish, 50 ethnically mixed) remained married. Significant differences were found between Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants in personal adjustment, and between endogamous and ethnically-mixed couples in the congruence between spouses in their personal and social adjustment. Marital instability was best explained by interpersonal disparity in cultural identity and in adjustment to life in Israel. The findings expand the knowledge on marital outcomes of immigration, in general, and immigration of mixed marriages, in particular.

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