’Permeating the Center’, ‘Fortifying from Without’: The Differential Politics of Belonging of Russian Jewish Immigrants and Palestinian Israelis at the Hebrew University.

Our study explores how marginalized groups at the university read and utilize academic knowledge in locating themselves in relation to the dominant collective. It regards the university as an sociocultural and political arena that hosts different ethnic groups, who are differently positioned in relation to its social and cultural ethos and national narratives. The students’ processes of location are triggered especially in the encounter with Social Sciences and Humanities -- subject areas that are shaped by cultural and social power relations. Our main postulation is that within higher educational institutions, social power relations hierarchize the positioning of minority and majority groups. Learning and the experience of university life are organized by power relations, and students construct identities within and against this power structure. To understand how different minority groups construct identity, position themselves as educated but also as distinct collectives, we must take into account how power relations order academic learning and how groups react/act within it. Our case study probes into the situation of marginalized groups at the Hebrew University, a university based on a strong national ethos. Founded both on the basis of the European model and emphasizing full Jewish life in the Land of Israel, the Hebrew University combines a desire for the pursuit of universal knowledge with a project of strengthening the particular Jewish nation. Among the groups hosted by the Hebrew University are not only indigenous and immigrant Jews and visiting Jews from the Diaspora, but also foreign non-Jews and local Palestinian Israeli citizens. Our study focuses on two noticeable, contrasting marginal groups, each located differently in relation to the national ethos and who bring with them different cultural capital regarding knowledge and academic learning. Palestinian Israeli women that are not part of the nation building project. These women also enter the university with cultural models of ways of knowing that are different from their Jewish Israeli counterparts. The second group is of Russian Jewish students, who are invited to join the Jewish collective and be part of the homeland. They enter the university with Western, appropriate cultural models of ways of knowing that largely correspond the dominant model at the university. For them, university studies are part and parcel of their welcomed immigration process. The aim of this research is to compare how students of two different minority groups locate themselves as educated elites in society. We try to understand how pre-university social positioning guides the ways in which cultural minority groups use knowledge. The comparison between these two minority groups helps highlight the different ways academic knowledge can be used to reframe and rework identities as minority educated elites. Embarking from the literacy approach to reading as a subjective practice of identity construction, we use personal narratives to reveal how meaning and collective national identity are constructed in the postcolonial context of institutionally represented power relations. Particularly, we study how members of the two groups read and utilize academic knowledge to locate themselves in relation to the Israeli-Jewish collective. Facing the unknown and the non-familiar sharpens the student’s reflexivity and obliges her to read and reflect on newly encountered knowledge. Immigrant groups often use academic knowledge as an arena for cultural reading and the inclusion in collective identity, yet when a group is excluded by the knowledge itself, as in the case of Palestinian-Israelis, their reading of it will bear different fruits. Through juxtaposing the groups of Palestinian and Russian students at the Hebrew University, we study how the two groups differently interpret national and cultural messages transmitted in the classroom to re-design their marginality in relation to the collective. The Russians take for granted the zionist messages in academic knowledge and utilize the knowledge to join hegemonic groups in Israeli society and culture. Resisting these same messages, the Palestinians utilize the same academic knowledge to elaborate themselves as part of a Palestinian ethno-national collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]