Language and Communication in Israel


Book Description

This volume presents a broad range of the various approaches and questions that preoccupy Israel's sociologists of language and communication. It covers the relation of language and communication to daily life, to social and cultural pluralism, and to politics and elections.







Mass Communication In Israel


Book Description

Mass communication has long been recognized as an important contributor to national identity and nation building. This book examines the relationship between media and nationalism in Israel, arguing that, in comparison to other countries, the Israeli case is unique. It explores the roots and evolution of newspapers, journalism, radio, television, and the debut of the Internet on both the cultural and the institutional levels, and examines milestones in the socio-political development of Hebrew and Israeli mass communication. In evaluating the technological changes in the media, the book shows how such shifts contribute to segmentation and fragmentation in the age of globalization.




Communal Webs


Book Description

This book brings together insights derived from a detailed exploration of Israeli cultural patterns of communication, highlighting their role in the processes of culture formation, maintenance, and change. Katriel's ethnographic examples provide a richly-textured account of Israeli cultural experience, illustrating the potential of a cultural analysis grounded in the study of ideologically-informed communicative practices. The author addresses central issues in contemporary anthropology and human communication studies such as the identification of cultural communication patterns in ethnographic research, conceptualizations of the notions of culture and community, the rhetorical force of cultural communication forms, the role of ritualization in communication and social processes, the critical potential of ethnographic work, and the ethnographer's stance in studying one's own culture.







Language Education Policy: The Arab Minority in Israel


Book Description

In this book we will explore in more detail some aspects of the Arab-Jewish divide, which raise fundamental questions regarding the place of the Arabs and Arab language education in the Jewish State. More specifically, the aim of this book is to describe and analyze language education in the Arab society in Israel from the establishment of the state in 1948 until today. For this purpose, internal processes, which are embedded within the Arab population itself were examined, such as the socio-economic condition of the population, the diglossic situation in the Arabic language, and the wide use of Hebrew among Arabic speakers. Furthermore, the book also deals with external processes such as the policy of control and inspection of the Ministry of Education over the Arab education system in general and on language education in particular, the dominance of Hebrew, and the definition and perception of Israel as a Jewish State. The influence of both internal and external processes on language education and learning achievements will also be extensively discussed.




Language, Identity, and Social Division


Book Description

The shift to Hebrew as a national language is at the root of the creation of Israel, yet many Jewish immigrants still use the language of their country of origin. Ultra-orthodox communities retain their own codes, and the use of Arabic remains a clear marker of the Israeli-Arab town and village. At the same time Israel's position in international affairs has encouraged a wide penetration of the society, along class lines, by languages of world-wide communication. These very same languages, for example English and French, have different values in their local context, and play active and different roles in the formation of social boundaries. In his analysis, Ben-Rafael focuses on linguistic resources and symbols which reflect and reveal the complex structure of class, ethnic, religious, and national identities and cleavages in Israeli society. More generally, he uses the Israeli case to show how sociolinguistic ideas may be related to sociological approaches to test some general sociological propositions about social aspects of language use.







The Languages of Israel


Book Description

The practice and ideology of the treatment of the languages of Israel are examined in this book. It asks about the extent to which the present linguistic pattern may be attribited to explicit language planning activities.




Colloquial Israeli Hebrew


Book Description

There is no written grammar of Colloquial Israeli Hebrew whatsoever. This book is the first written grammar of the spontaneous language spoken in Israel that describes Colloquial Israeli Hebrew from a synchronic point of view, and that is not a text book based on normative Hebrew rules.