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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.

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.