Contemporary Jewry最新文献

This paper addresses an aspect of cultural transfer and transformation by immigrants, focusing on the case of Israeli baseball, brought to Israel by Jewish migrants from the USA. As such, it examines cultural transfer as part of the transnational activities of transnational migrants. The analysis is based on interviews with 20 Jewish migrants from the USA to Israel who are engaged In Israeli baseball - as players, coaches, administrators, etc. - as well as five Israeli-born players who are also engaged in the sport. This study contributes to our understanding of transnational migration by drawing attention to the ways in which the experiences of transnational migrants are shaped by recreational activity and how transnational migrants' activities affect their host county. This occurs via transnational cultural diffusion, mediated in this case by a "critical community" of American Jews. Israeli baseball provides Jewish migrants from the USA with a means to identify with Israel as well as a sense of transnational belonging and, counter-intuitively, eases their acculturation to Israeli society.

The Haredi (or Ultra-Orthodox) sector is the fastest growing population in Israel, but the ability to study their working world is limited, and as far as we know, the work values of Haredi women (who are usually the main breadwinners) have not been studied to date. This unique study compares their work values with those of secular and traditional Jewish-Israeli women. The Meaning of Work (MOW) questionnaire was administered to 467 employed Jewish-Israeli women (309 Secular, 138 Traditional, and 120 Haredi), addressing values, attitudes, and aspirations at the workplace. The findings indicate that, while secular women ascribe more importance to individualistic values related to interesting work and variety than do traditionalist and Haredi women, no significant differences exist among the three groups concerning the interest in good pay, autonomy, interpersonal relations, or job security. In addition, a higher level of religiosity was associated with the importance of convenient hours and inversely associated with the importance of learning new things. Further, Haredi women attribute more importance to promotion and congruence between their personal abilities and experience and the job requirements than did women from the other two groups. Overall, the background demographic variables had little impact on work values. The findings can be explained by the different cultural values (collectivism versus individualism) and the obstacles Haredi women experience in the labor market.

The subjects of Jewish identity and Jewish communal vitality, and how they may be conceptualized and measured, are the topics of lively debate among scholars of contemporary Jewry (DellaPergola 2015, 2020; Kosmin 2022; Pew Research Center 2021; Phillips 2022). Complicating matters, there appears to be a disconnect between the broadly accepted claim that comparative analysis yields richer understanding of Jewish communities (Cooperman 2016; Weinfeld 2020) and the reality that the preponderance of that research focuses on discrete communities. This paper examines the five largest English-speaking Jewish communities in the diaspora: the United States of America (US) (population 6,000,000), Canada (population 393,500), the United Kingdom (UK) (population 292,000), Australia (population 118,000), and South Africa (population 52,000) (DellaPergola 2022). A comparison of the five communities' levels of Jewish engagement, and the identification of factors shaping these differences, are the main objectives of this paper. The paper first outlines conceptual and methodological issues involved in the study of contemporary Jewry; hierarchical linear modeling is proposed as the suitable statistical approach for this analysis, and ethnocultural and religious capital are promoted as suitable measures for studying Jewish engagement. Secondly, a contextualizing historical and sociodemographic overview of the five communities is presented, highlighting attributes which the communities have in common, and those which differentiate them. Statistical methods are then utilized to develop measures of Jewish capital, and to identify explanatory factors shaping the differences between these five communities in these measures of Jewish capital. To further the research agenda of communal and transnational research, this paper concludes by identifying questions that are unique to the individual communities studied, with a brief exploration of subjects that Jewish communities often neglect to examine and are encouraged to consider. This paper demonstrates the merits of comparative analysis and highlights practical and conceptual implications for future Jewish communal research.