Liora Gvion

This article looks at Palestinian cuisine in Israel as revealing negotiations over inclusion and self-identification of Palestinians in Israel. By sustaining culinary practices and transmitting them from one generation to the next, Palestinians become active agents who construct and negotiate their cultural differentiation and entitlement to ethnic distinctiveness. This course of action is taking place in two complementary spheres. By applying their culinary “know-how” knowledge in the domestic sphere, Palestinian women narrate modernity and construct their form and modes of participation in Israeli culture. Simultaneously, men, who cook in the public sphere, deliberately uphold traditional knowledge. Thus, they sustain traditional images of Palestinian cooking, establish forms of resistance to the appropriation of their culinary assets into the Jewish culinary repertoire, and negotiate positioning in Israeli society.

This article claims that leisure activities are major vehicles for promoting nostalgia, expressing and propagating cultures whose practitioners are gradually decreasing in numbers. It underlies the meanings, which middle‐class senior citizens in Israel assign to sing‐along nights in Yiddish. These evenings indicate the extent to which structured leisure activities have turned into social worlds, which allow longing for those old experiences replaced by new ones. Through singing, senior citizens intertwine personal and collective narratives and disseminate their vision of Yiddish culture both inside and outside of their community. Singing in Yiddish is one among various leisure activities, which enhances the call to all factions of society to refresh their cultures and speak out their unique voices. The propagation of Yiddish through organised leisure makes it possible to create and aggregate stocks of popular knowledge easily spread to consumers, experiencing nostalgia and simultaneously longing and expressing the right for cultural recognition.

This article focuses on the strategies that Israeli parents of children with high functioning communication disorders apply in their negotiations with municipal placement-committees, in order to realize their right to be fully involved in matters concerning their children's schooling. Our claim is that the parents introduce into the negotiation process alternatives to the professional discourse inherent in the committee's working culture. The alternative discourse rests on the self-awareness of the parents to their cultural capital and their understanding of a democratic culture, which reinforces their perception of city officials' duties to grant them educational services which accord with their world view. Our study distinguishes between formal and informal strategies of action that assist the parents turning from passive subjects who accept the committee's decisions into active individuals who establish a culture of resistance.

This article examines the meaning Israeli female dancers assign to extra-thin bodies. It claims that dancers interpret extra-thinness as an essential tool for the making of an ideal body-machine which allows entrance to a professional world of dancers. Working in a demanding professional world, anorexic bodies are seen by dancers as indicators of success and commitment. It is a means to win recognition from significant others and make the most out of a short-term and risk-embedded career. An haute-ecole of dance was chosen as a location for this study because it is a social setting that sets its own rules of transforming the body into an instrument of training. This study allows us to understand why certain professional and age groups tend to develop anorexia and helps understanding how anorexia, once embedded in a professional ideology, is hard to overcome.