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Despite growing interest in promoting environmental education (EE), as in other countries, its status within the formal education system in Israel is still ambiguous and its effectiveness questionable. Proceeding from the view of structure-agent interdependency, the present study focuses on teachers' identity as key to understanding the situation in their professional field. Analysis is based on in-depth interviews with ten EE teachers in ten public elementary-schools in Israel, to investigate their occupational self-perception as part of the system in which they operate. Findings reveal an ambivalent professional identity and a weak sense of agency as EE teachers. Teachers' impaired occupational self-image have implications for their potential role in advancing EE in particular and for the educational field in Israel in general.

Recent approaches to professions and professional identity question the premise that professionalization is the ultimate generator of status, showing that the classical model of professionalization does not always coincide with workers' creative construction of professionalism and professional dignity. Extending these approaches, and focusing on workers' identity discourse, this study examines how private child-care workers in Israel claim professional status precisely by avoiding formal professionalization and promoting a counter-professionalization ethos. Drawing on field observations and interviews, we analyze nannies' tacit occupational community dynamics, by which they establish professional rules and boundaries and discursively construct a respected professional self. Their identity-talk reveals a vocational self-imaging based on personal charisma, one that resists training and credentials. This vocational self-imaging allows rebuttal of the nanny stereotype as a low-class uneducated workforce, associated with their ethnicized backgrounds, by symbolically transforming it and using it as a high-value identity resource. This counter-professionalized identity-talk prevails despite the social distinction between senior and junior nannies. Thereby, nannies gain professional status while the professionalization of child care is rejected. The analysis of these cultural dynamics provides a stronger perspective on professions as spheres of identity construction—specifically those ranked lower as unskilled labor—and on workers' agency behind their ostensibly passive compliance with under-professionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BeTipul, the first Israeli TV series purchased by American television, and its American adaptation, In Treatment, provide an intriguing case of bidirectional (peripheral-global) cultural transfer. Focusing on the psychotherapy content of the show, this article examines the effect of foreignness versus compatibility it generated in the two different reception spaces. In America, the adaptation strategies and critics’ response to the remake reveal a smooth naturalization in the target setting, whereas in the (source) Israeli setting critics’ commentaries and anonymous online comments to the original series reveal that it was conceived from the outset as an American-like production made in Israel – evaluated either positively, as matching international standards, or negatively, as a cultural pretense. The antagonism between Israeli viewers of this show illustrates the powerful ‘foreignness effect’ associated with psychotherapy images in the local culture, inciting a social contest between elitist and mass audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proceeding from the assumption that emotional competencies are vital components of identity work, this article focuses on emotion talk in interactions as conducive to the speaker's maintaining dignity and forming desired relatedness with their counterpart. We compare the same speaker's emotion-identity management in two different yet related encounter types: (1) an aggressive bargaining, where his dignified self is threatened and (2) his reflexive account of this event. Thereby we aim to identify alternating emotion-talk strategies as cultural resources in coping with specific encounters' constraints and tasks. Materials are drawn from a study on talk-in-interaction of young Israeli men. Extensive discourse analysis is conducted of the speaker's performance throughout the two encounters. Findings reveal two sets of emotional-discursive strategies in constructing the speaker's self-in-relations and in retrospectively positioning himself vis-à-vis his own past experience. The speaker's competence of maneuvering between two self-in-interaction models—aggressiveness and detachment—is demonstrated, using or avoiding emotion talk in accordance with his different encounters' tasks, eventually producing a coherent, morally justified image of himself throughout the sequence of events. Linking emotion talk to the construction of a dignified self, analysis points at the ambivalent status of emotion-discourse as a resource of identity-work, hinging on specific encounter rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criticisms of the concept of the habitus put forward its disregard of the multiplicity and variability of same-group individuals' dispositions and question its potential to account for differences and change. In this connection I find problematic the disregard of individuals' intentions and self-perception in conceptualizing the habitus. Both of these topics are central concerns of identity research. In this article I propose the integration of the notions of identity work, particularly as inspired by Erving Goffman and the American micro-sociology traditions, within the discussion of translators' habitus, to elaborate on the micro-level, situation-dependent ongoing negotiations of translators' role and translators' competence by the individual actors. Focusing on the question of status and self-worth, this perspective helps better accounting for Bourdieu's idea of the logic of practice and the cultural capital as crucial for understanding not only translators' construction of their professional role-image(s) but also their tendency to employ translation norms in their work performances. Looking at identity talk allows tracing the interplay between actors' habitual tendencies and professional self-images, that is, between their background cultural baggage and the repertoire imposed by the field, as identity resources that form these actors' occupational habitus. Examples are based on findings from my research on the field of Israeli translators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An article on German immigrants to Palestine in the 1930's is presented. The author discusses the social conditions surrounding the integration of German Jews into Palestinian society, examines the culture shock of German immigrants arriving in Palestine, and offers information on the heterogeneous nature of German immigrants to Palestine. Other topics of discussion include the settling of German immigrants in kibbutzim and the allegedly increased levels of social mobility of Jews in Palestine.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one on the effectiveness of translator certification by Andy Chan, a survey of translators by David Katan, and self-representation of conference interpreters by Cornelia Zwischenberger.

This article examines strategies of detachment and engagement in the ongoing struggles over defining a collective sense of ‘Israeli identity’ that take place in contemporary Israeli everyday discourse, and which is intended for insiders alone. The analysis compares material from two different samples of voluntary formulations of ‘how Israelis behave’ offered by anonymous Israelis in domestic public forums: one is a collection of about 300 folkloric aphorisms in a popular newspaper column, and the other includes over 1700 on-line talk-backs to 14 Internet reports about the bad reputation of Israelis abroad. These miscellaneous materials reveal a heated contest for the right to condemn a generalized collective image of ‘an Israeli person’. Mobilizing alternatively two value-paradigms, that of ‘European codes of civilized behaviour’ (an outside perspective) and that of ‘local patriotism’ (an inside perspective), a negative collective image of ‘misbehaved person’ is established, towards which conflicting group-attitudes are formed. Four main strategies are observed in disputing or confirming this negative image: a total personal alienation; patronizing engagement; a variety of denial tactics; and a provocative identification with ‘uncivilizedness’ as an ‘authentic Israeli mindset’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the encounter of the German Jewish immigrants with the crystallizing of local Jewish community in British-ruled Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that their accepted image as cultural aliens, based on their allegedly incompatible European-like bourgeois life-style, was propagated by both parties in this encounter, causing their marginalization and at the same time serving them as an important socio-cultural resource. Focusing on the field of the legal profession, it analyses the 1930's and the already emerging and highly-accepted patterns of a local middle-class civic culture (despite its rejection by the political discourse), which facilitated the advancement of an elite group of German-born lawyers in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on translators as a cultural-professional group, this article mobilizes the Bourdieusian concepts of field and habitus for explaining the tension between the constrained and the versatile nature of translators’ action, as determined by their cultural group-identification and by their position in their specific field of action. Emphasizing the basic parameter of status contests and struggle for symbolic capital, it elaborates on three important aspects of translators’ differentiating self-images and strategies of action, using examples from the field of Hebrew translation in contemporary Israel: (1) the variability of strategies translators employ while playing either conservative or innovative roles, as cultural custodians or cultural importers, in specific historical contexts; (2) the dynamic construction and stratification of the field of translation, which results from the endeavor to establish its autonomous source of prestige, oscillating between impersonal professional status and an artistic-like personal “stardom”; and (3) translators’ preferred models of self-fashioning, according to which they select and signify the facts of their life-conditions and use them for improving their status and terms of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the construction of a sense of Israeli identity which is not deducible from the public political discourse. It analyses common verbal representations of 'being an Israeli person', namely, what people in contemporary Israeli culture repeatedly say about Israelis, and how they position themselves vis-à-vis the commonsensical agreements they exchange, assuming that the massive use of such clichés in certain contexts creates a discursive routine that has 'a life of its own', through which people constantly negotiate their self-images and their sense of belonging. It investigates the ways these representations create solidarity or demarcation and how such current popular representations relate to canonical veteran images of Israeli identity, notably that of the pre-state 'Native Israeli' (Sabra) archetype. The analysis is based on 295 anonymous open responses to the question 'What makes one an Israeli' published weekly in the Weekend Supplement of Maariv, the second largest newspaper in Israel, between 1996 and 1998. The analysis has led to the following observations: (1) Instead of the most expected grand ideological (ethnic, national, religious, etc.) issues of conflict, the responses reveal a 'pursuit of culturedness', using an implied scale of mastering good manners and possessing a 'genuine culture' which form the dominant parameter of judging the 'Israeli person'. (2) A tension between mainstream and marginalised groups is shaped by a 'chase and flight' dynamic of embracing and rejecting the mythological Sabra image (in asymmetry with these groups' assumed political stances), which image is believed to be a symbol of the once hegemonic veteran elite. (3) This tension paradoxically contributes to the persistence of the canonical image of the Sabra that is currently delegitimised by much intellectual discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]