Israel Studies Review

We are appreciative of the supportive feedback we received on our inaugural issue as editors. The positive response to the roundtable on COVID-19 has been heartening, bolstering our commitment to bring forth scholarly forums and debates from multiple disciplines on the most pertinent issues facing Israeli society. We would like to encourage further involvement of our readers. Please send us ideas regarding themes for forums, roundtables, and special issues. Moreover, a short commentary section, in the form of “letters to the editors,” will be introduced in an upcoming issue. This new section will allow academic comments on articles that have been published and thus facilitate scholarly debate on current research.

This article introduces a new dataset to study Israeli politics. Taking an agenda-setting approach, the dataset includes longitudinal series of political outputs—legislative, executive, judicial, and public opinion—as a measure of policy attention in Israel from 1981 to 2019. Each item in each series is hand-coded using the coding scheme of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), providing a unified longitudinal overview of the Israeli political agenda. The dataset enables scholars interested in Israeli policy and politics, as well researchers from communication, economy, and law to study agenda dynamics within specific venues, between venues over time, and across countries. It also enables comparative studies that situate Israel among other countries and provides empirical evidence to assess whether, in what, and to what extent Israel is exceptional.

Ideational change in the self-characterization of a state is bound to have repercussions on its domestic and foreign policy behavior. Consequently, the gradual but radical change that has been ongoing in Turkey in the past two decades has had a wide-ranging impact on the way Turkish foreign policy has been conducted. Whereas survival and protection of territorial integrity as well as a Western orientation were traditionally the main concerns of Turkish policy-makers, under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) (since 2002), there has been a partial Islamization of Turkish foreign policy especially with regard to liaisons with Israel and Palestine. This shift can be explained by the replacement of the Western Turkish state identity with an Islamic conservative outlook.

This article is the product of a study, conducted over one academic year, that followed ultra-Orthodox women students working toward Bachelor's degrees at a secular teacher training college with the goal of getting accredited to work at Education Ministry-supervised schools and thereby improving their employment prospects. It finds that a process that began as technical and instrumental emerged as one that, under certain conditions, could affect all of a student's various identities. During the learning process, students faced contradictions between the realities conveyed to them in an unfamiliar academic language and their experiences in the ultra-Orthodox world. The clash produced a multifaceted resistance that testified to the degree of access the women had to power, support, and resources, and that in certain instances helped to forge multifaceted identities.

This article examines Mizrahi theater artists who portray the little-known history of Middle Eastern Jews to Israeli youth, focusing on two productions: Palms and Dreams (1983) and Scapegoat (1987), both of which are based on well-known novels about the immigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel. In ‘performing history,’ these plays shape an assertive Mizrahi image and a Mizrahi historical narrative that contests the Orientalism of the Israeli education system. In addition, although both plays convey the Mizrahi narrative to a youth audience, compared to similar plays aimed at adults, they are conservative in their adherence to the conventional Zionist narrative.

This article examines six modes of operation on, in, and within a place in Israeli conceptual art and landscape architecture. These modes—action-in-place; intervention; place-making; representation; readymade; and second-nature—maintain landscape architecture's conception of a genius loci, the spirit of the place. They also attend to place as a new and critical means of operation in the 1970s emerging field of conceptual art. This article explores diverse attitudes and motivations for operating with/in place, as it became a fundamental issue in the international arena in the 1970s, in relation to Israeli cultural, political, social, and environmental concerns. In the context of the period's sociopolitical turmoil and ideological controversy, the article's two focal points—the six-mode perspective and the disciplines’ attitude toward place—complement each other and attend to the manifold aspects of place (ha-Makom) in Israel, while highlighting its intricacy.

Nir Kedar, David Ben-Gurion and the Foundation of Israeli Democracy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021), 253 pp. Paperback, $35.00.

Naphtaly Shem-Tov, Israeli Theatre: Mizrahi Jews and Self-Representation (London: Routledge, 2021), 202 pp. Hardback, $128.00.

Mira Sucharov, Borders and Belonging: A Memoir (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 183 pp. Paperback, $44.99.

Lori Allen, A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 432 pp. Paperback, $30.00.

Yael S. Aronoff, Ilan Peleg, and Saliba Sarsar, eds. Continuity and Change in Political Culture: Israel and Beyond. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 257 pp. Hardcover, $105.00.