Research

This study explores how digital humor functions as a form of critique in contexts where overt dissent is constrained. Focusing on memes shared by members of a Facebook support group for Israeli reservist soldiers’ wives during the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, the study analyzes how humor helps negotiate personal and collective tensions. Using thematic and critical discourse analysis, we identify four spheres of critique—targeting spouses, social circles, institutions, and broader expectations. These memes convey frustration and resistance not through direct confrontation, but via irony and satire, allowing women to express grievances while remaining aligned with hegemonic national narratives. We conceptualize this as quasi-political expression, where personal complaints, framed humorously, subtly challenge and reinforce dominant discourses. By introducing this concept, the study highlights how individuals in ideologically constrained settings use digital culture not only to resist or reproduce power, but to navigate the blurred boundaries between personal and political life.

Sage Journals

Recent studies have explored how social responsibility journalism can serve as an antidote to polarization. This study builds upon mediatized collective memory scholarship to examine how social responsibility journalism can seize upon memorial days as opportunities to employ deliberative principles as guidelines for advancing social norms that counter polarization. Media discourse on Tisha B’Av provides a useful case study, as it is a national memorial day marking historical disasters that befell the Jewish people, attributed primarily to deep internal polarization and “baseless hatred,” a concept comparable to affective polarization. Thematic analysis of radio broadcasts reveals that journalists utilized collective memory scripts to point out the relevancy of Tisha B’Av, to characterize current polarization trends, and to call for public and media action to alleviate polarization, while implicitly referencing deliberative democracy principles. However, deliberative democracy ideals remain at the level of rhetoric. The discussion calls for further research on ways by which social responsibility journalism can utilize collective memory opportunities to counter polarization.

The first translation of this radical novel set at the heart of 1930s Israel/Palestine.

In late 1920s Palestine, Zalmen has just arrived at Jaffa port on his way to a small northern kibbutz. Young and idealistic, he hopes to put down roots and help create a model society. But he soon realizes that the power dynamics between British colonists and Jewish and Arab workers have reached a breaking point. Zalmen, caught in the web of ideological conflicts, violence, and revolution, must decide with whom his loyalties lie.
With frank depictions of political and ethnic tension, sexual freedom on the kibbutz, Labor Zionist politics, and rising Communist influences, Boom and Chains offers a rare glimpse of the Jewish left before the State of Israel and vividly illustrates the physical and mental toll of making a life in Mandatory Palestine. Author Hanan Ayalti's own journey resembles that of Zalmen and reflects his disillusionment with early Labor Zionism. The novel raises important questions around the development of discourse about Israel/Palestine, socialist Zionism and anti-Zionism, sexuality and sexualization, and Jewish left history over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Wayne State  University Press

Israeli policymakers have relied on cumulative deterrence strategies to combat terrorism. However, Israel has consistently failed to deter Hamas’ attacks, not only on October 7 but also in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, and 2021. A critical yet often overlooked observation is that cumulative deterrence strategies coupled with robust denial capabilities can lead to an attrition trap, which serves as a victory strategy for weaker actors, ultimately resulting in deterrence failure rather than success.

INSS The Institute for National Security Studies Strategic, Innovative, Policy-Oriented Research

This volume aims to shed new light on the history of the Jews in Italy between the early modern period and the emergence of a unified Italian state, explicitly placing Jews within the history of the state-building process. It seeks to reconsider Jewish history systematically by stressing the relation of Jews and the state and to trace how Jews and their communities were reshaped in the early modern period.

Volume Editors: Bernard Cooperman, Serena Di Nepi, and Germano Maifreda

BRILL

A new account of racial logics in premodern Islamic literature.

In Black Knights, Rachel Schine reveals how the Arabic-speaking world developed a different form of racial knowledge than their European neighbors during the Middle Ages. Unlike in European vernaculars, Arabic-language ideas about ethnic difference emerged from conversations extending beyond the Mediterranean, from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. In these discourses, Schine argues, racialized blackness became central to ideas about a global, ethnically inclusive Muslim world.

Schine traces the emergence of these new racial logics through popular Islamic epics, drawing on legal, medical, and religious literatures from the period to excavate a diverse and ever-changing conception of blackness and race. The result is a theoretically nuanced case for the existence and malleability of racial logics in premodern Islamic contexts across a variety of social and literary formations.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

This book begins with an audacious question: Has there ever been a better home for Jews than Canada? By certain measures, Canada might be the most socially welcoming, economically secure, and religiously tolerant country for Jews in the diaspora, past or present. No Better Home? takes this question seriously, while also exploring the many contested meanings of the idea of "home."

Contributors to the volume include leading scholars of Canadian Jewish life as well as eminent Jewish scholars writing about Canada for the first time. The essays compare Canadian Jewish life with the quality of life experienced by Jews in other countries, examine Jewish and non-Jewish interactions in Canada, analyse specific historical moments and literary texts, reflect deeply personal histories, and widen the conversation about the quality and timbre of the Canadian Jewish experience. No Better Home? foregrounds Canadian Jewish life and ponders all that the Canadian experience has to teach about Jewish modernity.

Co-edited by Vardit Lightstone, Post-Doc fellow for Jewish Studies

University of Toronto Press

This section was inspired by the 2021 book No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging, edited by David S. Koffman. The book is a collection of eighteen schol-arly essays that explore topics relating to home, diaspora, and belonging within the context of Canadian Jewry. Wanting to further unpack some of the themes the book raised, we asked two groups of select scholars to read and reflect on ways these topics are manifested in their own research and fields of expertise. The first group is made of six scholars who specialize in the study of other minority groups in Canada, the other group  consists  of  five scholars  of  Jewish  diaspora  communities  in  other  countries. 

Vardit Lightstone, Post-Doc fellow for Jewish Studies

Canadian Jewish Studies/ Etudes juives canadiennes vo. 36: Fall 2023

The national security realm poses great challenges to senior military officers and civilian officials. These leaders oftentimes attend designated Joint Professional Military Education (JPME) institutions as a prerequisite for their future appointments. The article examines how these colleges and universities instill in their graduates the intellectual capacity to effectively engage and solve macro-level and acute strategic challenges as well as employ critical thinking skills to ensure intellectual agility and flexibility. 

Taylor & Francis Online Comparative Strategy

This edited volume examines the most pressing social and political issues confronting Israel from a multidisciplinary perspective, focusing on the breakdown of social solidarity and the inability to formulate consensus.

The contributors – encompassing political scientists, historians, communication researchers, sociologists, economists, and educators – focus on specific topics that serve as exemplary cases of various trends of consensus and polarization. These trends are examined in the context of ideological, religious, economic, national, and ethnic cleavages. In addition, this volume analyzes how political actors’ preference for “non-decision” on various issues has resulted in the maintenance of a status quo, with cleavages or conflicts being neither mitigated nor polarized. Together, this collection of articles paints a picture of Israel as a state racked by increasing polarization along ideological and religious lines. It is argued that this difficulty in determining a consensual definition of the state threatens to destroy social solidarity in Israel altogether, a climate in which “the center cannot hold.”

This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the major internal threats to Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish-democratic state and will also appeal to sociologists and political scientists interested in global polarization trends.