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This paper discusses the case of missing persons in Israel, to show how the category of "missingness" is constructed by the people who have been left behind, and how this may threaten the life-death dichotomy assumption. The field of missing persons in Israel is characterized not only by high uncertainty, but also by the absence of relevant cultural scripts. Based on a narrative ethnography of missingness in Israel, I claim that a new and subversive social category of "missingness" can be constructed following the absence of cultural scripts. The left-behinds fluctuate not only between different assumptions about the missing person's fate; they also fluctuate between acceptance of the life-death dichotomy, thus yearning for a solution to a temporary in-between state, and blurring this dichotomy, and thus constructing "missingness" as a new stable and subversive ontological category. Under this category, new rites of passage are also negotiated and constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the creation of women‐only organizational spaces as a diversity practice and assesses their potential to facilitate the workforce inclusion of religious women from gender‐conservative groups. Based on longitudinal fieldwork in two ultra‐Orthodox‐Jewish women‐only colleges in Israel and interviews with students and staff, we demonstrate how this practice constitutes three types of liminality—spatial, social, and epistemic—that enable ultra‐Orthodox women to move unimpeded between a familiar, religious environment and a secular one. In this protected and carefully curated environment, they feel safe and are able to develop new identities relevant to the secular labor market while maintaining or even enhancing their traditional, religious sense of self. The liminal space of the college reinforces their sense of belonging to a space of their own and serves as a bridge that helps them cope with the secular world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Together with the numbers of refugees rising globally, those seeking asylum have increased dramatically, as more countries grant temporary status to those awaiting determination of their refugee petitions. As asylum seekers, they dwell in legal liminality, having neither the civil rights or service access of citizens nor the rights of those officially recognized as refugees. In countries like Israel, where immigration policies indefinitely prolong such legal liminality, asylum seekers are afforded only "temporary collective protection" without entitlement to services. To the extent that aid is available, it is provided by an informal network of NGOs. Within this context, a semi-formal network of "mediators" has arisen from among asylum seekers. Having acquired the host country's language, they are employed by NGOs and volunteer in their own communities, providing not only language translation and interpretation assistance, but also intercultural translation. Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews of 14 mediators, this study explores the professional, communal and personal impacts on mediators of prolonged legal liminality. It shows how language can be a significant tool that can alter perceptions of civic status and challenge legal liminality. Formally leveraging the skill set of mediators by cooperating with and directly employing them in government offices, can help to stabilize an especially vulnerable and transient community, benefiting both the state and asylum seekers. • The number of asylum seekers globally has increased significantly. • In some countries, they experience prolonged legal liminality, with limited rights. • Informal language and cultural mediators bridge the community-state space in Israel. • Interviews with mediators in Israel explore the impacts of legal liminality. • Language alters the perception of civic status, challenging legal liminality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Parents' collective involvement in their children's education takes the form of holding leadership positions in schools. Employing the concept of liminality, which is used in anthropological and sociological approaches, the purpose of this paper is to explore the features of parent leadership in schools (PLS). Design/methodology/approach: Interviews were conducted with 18 individuals: 11 chairpersons and 7 members of the parent leadership of 11 primary schools in Israel attended by students of high socioeconomic backgrounds. Findings: Data analyses disclose PLS as a liminal framework, which constitutes both formal and informal dimensions, whether these be its in-school limited activities or out-of-school actions in introducing change and supporting the institutions. PLS's functions are restricted by school principals, but simultaneously enhance school principals' position. Practical implications: The study's findings carry implications for school collaboration with external entities. School principals need to support PLS and keep encouraging entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation. There is a need for acknowledging the value of PLS's contributions whereas policy makers must provide more guidelines and support to parent leaders. Originality/value: The study focuses on exploring the position of collective parental involvement in schools. This issue is of significance in a time where parents gain more responsibility over their children's education and schools support more collaborative relationships with external agencies. The study highlights the benefits of parents in leadership positions for school benefits and for school principals' legitimacy, from the approach of liminality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Israeli army widows from the religious-Zionist sector and the Bedouin sector. We show how these women are compelled by their cultural context to either suffer liminal identity or to invest in exhausting Emotional Labor and fake their authentic selves. The surrounding society expects much more Emotional Labor of religious-Zionist widows than of their Bedouin counterparts; in contrast, the societal status of Bedouin widows remains liminal, as compared to that of the religious-Zionist widows, who anchor their identity relatively quickly. The findings highlight the need to sensitively assist army widows with the Liminality and Emotional Labor that hinder their personal and familial rehabilitation. The findings are analyzed critically within the framework of the Zižekian approach, which investigates the elusive power of ideology over the agency of the individual's self in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue that eating disorders constitute a form of social suffering, in which sufferers embody liminality as a response to, and a reflection of, oppressive sociality, structural violence, and institutional constraints. Based on the illness narratives of people with anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and their subclinical variants in Israel, the analysis draws the experiential, the social, and the structural into critical focus. These narratives, which delineate lived experiences of self-starving, bingeing, and purging, and the attendant viscerality of hunger, fullness, and emptiness, reveal how participants developed an embodied drawing inward and away, being at once within and without society for extended periods of time, through eating disordered practices. This liminal positioning, I argue, was a mode through which participants cultivated alternative (if temporary) personal spaces, negotiated identities, and anesthetized pain: processes many deemed essential to survival. Embedding the participants’ narratives of eating disordered experiences within familial, societal, and political-economic forces that shaped their individual lives, I examine the participants’ striving for liminality as at once intimately embodied and structurally mapped. The analysis suggests that policy initiatives for eating disorder prevention must address the social suffering that eating disorders manifest: suffering caused by structures and institutions that reinforce social inequality, violence, and injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic neoliberal ableism has considerable negative implications for all disabled academics, but specifically for the marginalization, liminality, and weakness of disabled graduate students. This is particularly true for the understudied and underrepresented disabled graduate students who are not native English speakers and who live in regions that are geographically and culturally distant from the English-speaking academic hegemony. This article addresses this gap by presenting a collaborative autoethnography of two disabled Israeli doctoral students. The analysis raised two themes. The first includes the complex aspects of learning to perform new academic roles – teachers, conference presenters and researchers – as disabled academics. The second includes our marginality in two contexts, namely our studied disciplines, which fail to see disability as a critical object, and the developing Israeli community of disability studies in which disabled scholars are underrepresented. On the basis of these themes, we identify four combined environments that mirror the intersection between global neoliberal ableism and the specific ableist culture found in Israel, which exacerbate our weakness, marginality, and liminality: The Israeli disability studies community, our discipline, the Israeli academy, and the English-speaking academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes extending the empirical sociological debate regarding the complex ways social classifications construct scenarios of subjectivity. Based on the case study of the Boarding School for the Gifted Disadvantaged in Israel, the article describes how a new cultural order created a new scenario of subjectivity ('gifted disadvantaged') that had not been known before. This scenario was shaped in relation both to the ethnic classification in Israel, as well as to two social categories that were well-known in the educational field ('gifted' and 'disadvantaged'). To understand the institutional dynamics involved in the construction of a new scenario of subjectivity, content analysis of the organizational documents that accompanied the founding of the school was carried out, and in-depth interviews with graduates of the school were conducted in order to understand how those who populate the new scenario experience their subjectivity years after its construction. The findings indicate a specific connection between classifications, subjectivity, and personal visibility. Specifically, the study reveals a number of phenomenological aspects that enhance the experience of visibility: the cognitive identification of two types of self; the experience of cognitive liminality; and the consciousness of having a subjectivity deserving of special nurturance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Located on the southernmost tip of Israel, at the meeting point of the Negev desert and the Red Sea, Eilat was occupied in March 1949 in the last military operation of Israel's War of Independence. Notwithstanding official notions of Eilat as a strategic asset and efforts to sustain Israeli presence there in the form of a permanent settlement, in Israeli popular culture Eilat, which later evolved into a thriving tourist resort, has had from the outset the reputation of being 'different, special, distinct'. This article explores the unique position of Eilat in Israeli popular culture. The underlying argument is that this unique position of Eilat both evinced and reflected a dynamic interplay of liminal conditions and phenomena that rendered Eilat an exceptional experience. Furthermore, being situated at the southernmost tip of Israel, the location of Eilat at the geographical margin of Israel was productive of its image as an extraordinary place and sustained its prominence in popular imagination. The article charts and analyses a variety of liminal phenomena in their social and cultural contexts in different periods of Eilat's history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]