This publication, the first of its kind, analyzes the new evolving middle class among professional Bedouin women in the Negev. It examines the paradox that arises from this class category mainly as it encounters the ethno-colonial and collective-male hegemonies within both Arab and Jewish labor markets. Simultaneously, it reveals the power and contribution of this class category to the domestic spheres of marital, family and community circles. Dr. Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder 's study is based on interviews with dozens of Palestinian-Bedouin women who have obtained economic and human capital recognized by their communities but not by the hegemonic labor market. The Emergence of a Class Identity unveils colonial and patriarchal practicalities which do not acknowledge the women’s professional identity, implementing cultural, religious and collective signifiers that create a paradox of class marginality.

The public discourse in Israel relates to girls mainly in connection to their body and associates their body with appearance, sexuality, vulnerability and victimization. The book Girls and their Bodies calls attention to the social construction of girls' bodies in Israel which tend to disavow, disregard, objectify and expose them simultaneously. This is the first time a book about the developing field of Girlhood Studies is published in Hebrew. The book chapters, written by a group of researchers and professionals who work with girls and are interested in advancing the understanding and support of girls, create a fascinating interdisciplinary mosaic regarding girls' bodies in Israel. They investigate from a critical gendered perspective, how the body is present, active, confined and silenced within cultural, educational, social, health and legal arenas. This collection illustrates a possible roadmap for future research in this field that will enrich the academic discourse and professional knowledge about girlhood, and in this way facilitate social action with and for girls.

Restorative justice is a social Mechanism used to replace or complement the criminal, legal process. It is designed to bring together offenders and victims, to meet in a safe and respectful environment in order to discuss the crime, the pain and suffering that it entailed - and look together for ways to repair these harms. Restorative Justice Conferences operate under state supervision and control. For over twenty years, restorative justice conferences have been practiced in Israel. Changes in the Israeli Youth Criminal Law have increased the number of such offender-victim conferences in recent years . Recent reforms in adult criminal justice law are also likely to encourage greater use of restorative justice conferences in cases of crimes conducted by adult, confessing offenders. Restorative justice theory and practices have facilitated and encouraged the emergence of Restorative Discourse programs. Such developments are important as they facilitate effective discussions and decision making among the different, sometime conflicting groups in Israel. Furthermore, restorative discourse promotes understanding between these groups and local and national authorities. Restorative Discourse enables people to discuss their exigencies, their wishes and preferences not only among themselves but with government agencies and officials as well. Such discourse is helpful and effective in improving the quality of life of individuals and communities in Israel. From wrongdoing to righting the wrong is the first book addressing theoretical and practical aspects of Restorative Justice and Restorative Discourse in a unique Middle East context. The different chapters in this book were written by prominent scholars, practitioners and professionals who lead restorative justice and discourse programs in Israel.

The Martin Buber Society of Fellows explores how individuals, groups, and societies in a variety of cultural contexts, political settings, and time periods respond to the perpetration of injustices. Approaching the concepts of revenge, retribution, and reconciliation from interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives, it opens a fruitful discussion among scholars of history, literature, psychology, biology, political science, communications, sociology, religious studies, law, and philosophy. The book investigates how social groups reach and maintain an equilibrium between an emotional thirst for an immediate and unmediated response to injustices and societies’ need to adjudicate measures and sanctions that seem proportional to the breech of justice. This volume is the third in the Martin Buber Society of Fellows Notebook Series .

Jewish thought and rhetoric may have dominated the Jewish people's way of life for years, but what happens when a Jewish state is established, whose laws and authorities are not necessarily based on that same Jewish tradition? Jewish-Israeli Political Thought is a collection of studies exploring the tension between Israeli and Jewish political philosophy, the relationship between the Jewish people's collective and personal past and present, individual identity and its place in the traditional Jewish collectiveness, and the intermediary role of the ancient Hebrew language in the dialogue between the past and the present. The chapters in this book were written by young scholars of different religious, and sometimes cultural and lingual backgrounds; however, they all live in modern-day Israel, and they all question the relation between traditional-Jewish and modern-Israeli political thought. The diversity of the writers enables a broad and unique perspective on the status of Jewish tradition in contemporary political thought in Israel. The book provides a window into various spatial and temporal horizons in the course of a Jewish tradition that is constantly being re-examined and re-discovered.

This book is an edited collection of papers, in Hebrew, addressing the unique phenomenon of the collection of testimonies from child survivors of the Holocaust while they were still children or teenagers in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. The instructions for these interviews go as far back as 1945. The book maps the collecting, publication and filming of testimonies and addresses issues of authenticity, methodology dissemination and reception. Who interviewed the children and how? What is the correct way to read these interviews and what can be studied from them? Do the existing interviews faithfully reflect the children's experiences and feelings? What was the cultural and social background of these interviews and their publication? These testimonies teach the strategies Jewish families used to save themselves and especially the children: not passively like 'sheep to the slaughter' but coping with changing situations by struggling . The testimonies also teach us about the relationship between Jews and gentiles; rescue and sacrifice on the part of non-Jews on the one hand, and the persecution and murder on the other. Some of the papers are adapted translation of papers published in English and some were written for this volume by historians, linguists and literati. Included is also contemporary material from the period. Participating researchers: Boaz Cohen, Joanna Michlic, Gabriel Finder, Beate Muller, Rita Horvath, Zuzanna Schnepf-Kolacz, Sharon Geva, Emunah Nachmani-Gafni and Yvonne Kozlovski-Golan

The book deals with the formative years of Israel's evolving symbolic landscape. The research covers the story of a few dozen Jews who passed away in the Diaspora and later their remains were taken to be buried for the second time (and sometimes for the third) in Israel. These were Zionists and politicians, writers and poets, heroes and public activists whose common denominator was that they all passed away in the Diaspora, far and detached from the national homeland that they fought for before their tragic death. Only later, in an act of repair, their coffins were sent to be buried in the "sacred" Zionist soil, in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Dgania. These graves became pilgrimage sites and contributed to the design of Israel's symbolic landscape. The book was published in English in cooperation with De Gruyter Oldenbourg and can be found here .

The book focuses on the deviant behaviors of troubled Israeli youth, including juvenile delinquents, their accounts for their behaviors, and the steps taken by the agencies responsible for their treatment. The articles were written by experts in the various fields and academics who have an intimate familiarity with the reality of the subjects about which they write.

In the ongoing flood of studies of memory in its manifold forms and meanings, the no less powerful subject of forgetting tends to be forgotten. We often think of forgetting as a passive process, something that simply “happens” to us and to other living beings; but many of the studies in this inter-disciplinary volume reveal the active and even creative nature of forgetting, its positive features, and its varied roles in a wide series of cultural and intercultural templates. Neuroscientists joined with historians, philologists, a linguist, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists, an archaeologist and an artist in the two joint workshops that generated this volume, under the auspices of the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz and the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The lively exchanges in the workshops are reflected in the comments and discussion that follow many of these experimental, meditative essays.

This book describes the urban, academic, and political causes that led to the establishment of Tel Aviv University and to its consolidation as a research university before the independence of the state of Israel and during the first two decades after its independence. The attempts to establish a stable academic framework to the residents of Tel Aviv and its surroundings took shape when Chaim Levanon, the Mayor of Tel Aviv, announced the establishment of Tel Aviv University on 1 June 1956. This included the merger of three academic institutions that acted in the city: the University Institute for Natural Sciences, which replaced the Biological-Pedagogical Institute under the management of Dr. Heinrich Mendelssohn and Dr. Yaacov Galil, the Institute for the Israeli Culture under the management of Professor Israel Efrat who was appointed Rector of the University, and The School for Law and Economics of Tel Aviv which was managed by Dr. Augusto Levi and Judge Ze’ev Zeltner. In time there would be a discussion whether to determine the day of the establishment of the University as the date when the Urban University was formed or when it became an independent institute with the appointment of George Wize as President of the University in 1963. An expression for that could be found in the words of Professor Shlomo Simonsohn, the Rector of the University between 1971 and 1977: “It is inconceivable [to understand] the development of the university in its second decade without the infrastructure of the first decade and even of the period beforehand. The academic and public breakthrough which was achieved then entailed much work by the founders of the university. Despite this, there is no doubt that in the second decade the pace of development of the university was accelerated compared to the first decade.” Tel Aviv University was constructed as a ‘bottoms-up university’ – a local university that grew out of urban entrepreneurship with civil characteristics, which had to conduct a long struggle in order to achieve academic and state-wide legitimacy. This struggle led the academic personnel, including academics that were still in their early stages of their academic career, to become more involved in the management of the institute, involvement which led to dramatic decisions and moves, including the removal of the first Rector, Professor Israel Efrat. The leading academic personnel included Ben-Zion Katz, Zvi Yavetz, Shlomo Simonsohn, Meshulam Grol, Andre De Vries, Chaim Sheba, Heinrich Mendelssohn, Yaacov Galil, Alfred Klopstock, Joshua Jortner, and Yuval Ne’eman. These intellectuals were the creators, distributors and those that implemented the academic culture that developed in the new institute, as well as those who struggled for legitimacy from the Israeli political establishment.

The book The Israeli Sovereign: The Novel and the Discourse 1967 – 1973 explores Israeli sovereignty, nationality and space as represented and constructed in a range of Israeli novels published between 1967 and 1973, in their historical and geographical context and in light of the public discourse between the 1967 and 1973 wars. The research aims to characterize the Israeli sovereign subject and Israeli space represented and constructed in literature, in the context of the public discourse of the period. Some of the questions the study deals with are: What kind of Israeli subject emerges from the novels of the period? What kind of Israeli space is created in these texts? What is the relation between that space and the various points of view that were prominent in Israeli discourse at the time? These issues and others are discussed in light of the historical spatial situation of occupation and massive territorial expansion.