Israel Studies Review

The past decade has witnessed a growing number of theoretical and empirical studies analyzing the components of innovation; the ways in which it filters into political, social, and cultural systems; how it accelerates; what drives its existence; and its advantages and disadvantages (Seeck and Diehl 2017). This special issue, a joint initiative of the Israel Political Science Association (ISPSA) and Israel Studies Review, seeks to examine innovation in the Israeli political and societal sphere. Rooted in different disciplines, the articles are diverse yet connected to the political world, offering a distinctive preliminary mosaic that highlights the theme of innovation in Israel as it unfolds between politics, society, and culture.

The provision of personal social services in Israel has recently changed, with many services now outsourced to non-governmental organizations. This shift requires the strengthening of regulatory mechanisms, yet the unique characteristics of personal social services make it difficult to create an efficient regulatory framework. By linking insights derived from the literature on regulation to the specific features of these services, this article presents a conceptual model for their regulation. The model incorporates aspects of innovation in the public sector, including a more comprehensive learning and collaborative process and a new rhetorical language. The proposed regulatory approach consists of three stages: mapping, the design of regulatory instruments, and implementation and evaluation. Applied to the Israeli experience here, this approach may also be relevant for other countries.

What innovative policy tools can be introduced so that the provision of local services will mitigate inequality among residents of different localities? Based on the ‘new localism’ approach, this article examines one such tool—a mandatory national standard for services provided by local authorities (a ‘service basket’)—and suggests that the implementation process should consider local variation and autonomy. The novelty of our approach lies in including both objective and normative considerations in the methodological instrument that we developed to capture these two dimensions. This innovative methodology also enabled us to estimate existing service gaps among local authorities and the burdens some will face upon instituting a mandatory service basket.

Classic Western democracies (those of Western Europe and the Anglophone world) view the teaching of civics as a policy instrument through which liberal values, democracy, and even globalization are introduced to future citizens, thus expecting to assure the persistence of democracy. In present-day democracies in general, and mainly in non-Western democracies, however, civics assumes other forms, including the study of nationalism. This article analyzes innovations in the teaching of civics in Israel by examining the changes in school textbooks that accompany changing national leaderships. We highlight the current Israeli high school civics textbook, written under a significantly rightist-religious government. Assuming that civics textbooks express the political credo of ruling elites, our findings suggest similarities between trends in Israel and non-Western democracies, hinting at the fragility of democratization in general and chiefly outside the West.

Given the surplus of Arab teachers and the shortage of Jewish teachers in Israel, the government has adopted the policy of employing Arab teachers in Jewish schools, contrary to the dominant nationalistic agenda. We argue that this low-cost solution meets the criteria for disruptive innovation in that it flies under the radar and has the potential to proliferate and change the existing social order. Through surveys and interviews with boundary-crossing Arab teachers, this article finds that teachers circumvent power structures in three social fields. In the Arab community, work in Jewish schools helps teachers bypass nepotism and provides a new path for upward mobility. In the education system, boundary-crossing teachers disrupt segregation. And at the state level, this innovation may improve Jewish-Arab relations.

Since the 1990s, organizations formed by Israelis of Ethiopian origin (IEO) have criticized the government's policy toward them. This article deals with the development of, and innovation in, those organizations’ activities. Our research question looks at the elements of innovation that helped these organizations improve the effectiveness of their work with the government and in the public sphere. We base our study on interviews with IEO activists who participated in the community's protests in the 1990s, 2015, and 2020. Our theoretical overview incorporates a global perspective on innovation in policymaking and the effects of NGO networks on government policy. The article describes the development and innovation of NGOs in Israel alongside similar cases in other countries.

In 2014, Israel changed its electoral rules, requiring political parties to obtain at least 3.25 percent of the popular vote to gain a seat in the Knesset. We investigated the role that this change played in the creation of joint lists of several parties in the four ensuing elections, and found that the platforms and statements of joint lists were less ideological than those of their constituent parties. Our argument is that the trend of inter-party alliances characterized by unifying rhetoric is a political innovation in the Israeli context. We suggest that, as a result of such joint parties, Israeli politics—once known to be extremely ideological—has become dominated by non-ideological pragmatism.

Scholars have pointed to the alarming decline in the participation of young people in the institutional political activities underlying representative democracy, such as voting, joining political parties, or running for office. Solutions previously proposed have dealt with participatory democracy rather than representative democracy. Based on in-depth interviews, this article shows that, since 1998, the involvement of Young Adults Lists (YALs) in Israel's local elections have successfully and consistently engaged young adults as a descriptive constituency in local representative democracy. The YALs’ extraordinary electoral success derives from their ability to construct and carry out an innovative campaign strategy tailored to the preferences of young adults. This strategy has compensated for the YALs’ minimal financial resources and their lack of political experience and significant ties to national parties or similar organizations.

Derek Penslar, Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 256 pp. Hardback, $26.00.

Sharon Geva, Women in the State of Israel: The Early Years [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes Publishing House, 2020), 304 pp. Paperback, $20.00. eBook, $13.00.

Vered Kraus and Yuval P. Yonay, Facing Barriers: Palestinian Women in a Jewish-Dominated Labor Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 298 pp. Hardback, $99.99.

Rachel Rojanski, Yiddish in Israel: A History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 338 pp. Hardback, $95.00. Paperback, $40.00. eBook, $19.99.

Shalom Goldman, Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped American Passions about Israel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 256 pp. Hardback, $28.00. eBook, $21.99.