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.













עיונים בשפה וחברה


Book Description

An interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dealing with the different languages spoken in Israel from a social and cultural aspect. Includes articles on linguistics, sociology, anthropology, communication, education, and translation. Articles may deal with these topics from a theoretical, empirical, descriptive or practical aspect.




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.




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.




Elective Language Study and Policy in Israel


Book Description

This book presents research on the instruction of two heritage languages and two foreign languages in Israeli schools. The authors explore language policy and the way languages are studied from the point of view of students, teachers, schools and curricula. Language in Israel is a loaded concept, closely linked to ideological, political, and social issues. The profound changes in language policy in the West along with two large waves of immigration from the Former Soviet Union and Ethiopia resulted in new attitudes towards immigrant languages and cultures in Israel. Are these new attitudes strong enough to change the language policy in the future? What do students and teachers think about the language instruction at school? Are the teaching materials updated and do they address modern demands? This book provides answers to these and other questions. As well as describing the instruction of two heritage languages, Russian and Amharic, and two foreign languages, French and Spanish, the book also contains an extensive background on the immigration history and acculturation process of the speakers of each of these languages. An in-depth understanding of the case of Israel will serve as a guide for other countries contending with similar issues pertaining to the adjustment of language policies in light of immigration and other challenging circumstances.




Arabic in Israel


Book Description

In Arabic in Israel, Muhammad Amara analyses the status of Arabic following the creation of the State of Israel and documents its impact on the individual and collective identity of Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens. The interplay of language and identity in conflict situations is also examined. This work represents the culmination of many years of research on Arabic linguistic repertoire and educational policy regarding the language of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It draws all of these factors together while linking them to local, regional and global developments. Its perspective is interdisciplinary and, as such, examines the topic from a number of angles including linguistic, social, cultural and political.




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.