Cultural Ethnicity in Israel: The Case of Middle Eastern Jews' Religiosity
National myths and public policies in Israel long assumed that the country's diverse Jewish immigrant groups would all eventually, and indeed within a short span of time, be absorbed and fused into a unified social, economic, political, and cultural entity, but this expectation is now giving way to widespread doubts as to its feasibility. Some of these doubts were expressed during the 1970s in a series of studies which demonstrated not only that there were still gaps between Israelis of Middle Eastern and North African extraction (often called Sephardim or Oriental Jews) and those of European extraction (Ashkenazim), as regards occupational and residential mobility, income and educational achievements, political representation and social prestige, but that the gaps were widening.1 The growing disillusionment on the part of Middle Eastern Jews (North Africans included) was dramatically revealed in the 1981 general elections by the emergence of a new ethnic party, Tami, which seemed to have better prospects of success and survival than any previous ethnic party. Moreover, the results at the polls obtained by most of the other parties seemed to reflect an intensifying ethnic polarity.
The Varieties of Abandonment of Religious Symbols
Taking the Weberian use of the term "secularization" as a point of departure, the author has questioned the identification of the term with the abandonment of religious beliefs per se. He distinguishes between two kinds of abandonment, namely eradication and effacement. These two concepts refer to distinct phenomena growing out of very different social conditions and circumstances. Eradication is an abandonment of religious rituals, symbols, or beliefs that reflects a loss of faith in underlying religious values, whereas effacement is an abandonment that does not reflect such a loss. Three cases of symbolic change which occurred in a Djerban synagogue in Israel are discussed and the analysis is extended through a comparison with a Lele ritual. The three Djerban examples in the Israeli environment and the Lele ritual were found to be instances of effacement. In all four cases the very act of abandonment of the religious symbols, which was due to the fact that the particular symbols in question no longer conform with the experiential situation of the actors, actually led to a reaffirmation of the symbols.
Same Same But Different - also in Europe! A New Methodological Approach in Cross-Country Analysis of Communication Structuresapplied to five EU member states
The EU still lacks a truly European public sphere. On this level, there is still a clear lack of integration between individual member states. This means that national public spheres and cultures are still of great importance for European communication and media professionals. Comparative research into the similarities and differences between different nations is therefore valuable for cross-border PR communication activities. This paper lays out the methodological foundation for such research, discussing possible approaches and difficulties associated with comparative research. The author then introduces a potential heuristic framework for comparative analysis: the International Corporate Communication Compass. This framework is applied to five case-study EU countries (Denmark, Germany, France, Poland and the UK), showing the differences and similarities in a range of different contexts that affect public communication in all its forms. The conclusion examines how the results of such studies could be used in order to compare communication identities of different countries. This can potentially help in the development of a European public identity on the long run and in a first step can led towards a better, more adapted communication structure about European citizenship. Ultimately, communication structures within the EU might become more Europeanized than they