Mimi Ajzenstadt

This article traces the construction of poverty in case reports produced by social workers, who investigated the needs of nearly 500 clients of soup kitchens in Palestine during the 1930s. Ideas expressed in the reports reflected both the tenets of Zionist ideology and dominant social work thinking in the Weimar Republic, where most of the social workers were trained. The reports offer rich evidence of the ways in which notions about the poor, poverty and the role of social workers were historically and culturally constructed and designed.

The paper explores the evolution of rehabilitative, rights and economic discourses, and their effect on the development of juvenile justice policies in Israel during the last two decades. Israel has adopted the main features of a neo-liberal regime and severe cuts were made to major social welfare programmes, including those dealing with juvenile offenders. However, the neo-liberal ideas of individualisation and responsibilisation did not penetrate the area of juvenile delinquency. A renewed welfarist discourse in Israel was created instead. This strongly relied on traditional beliefs in rehabilitation and treatment based on a child-centred culture, incorporating concepts of rights and embedded in practical economic considerations.

This paper attempts to reveal the ways in which criminal courts in Israel constructed foreign workers brought to trial as ‘others’. Individual foreign workers were framed as being irrelevant as bearers of rights while, in a parallel process, foreign workers as a group were constructed as symbolically relevant to discussions regarding the state governance of social risk. The study spans the years 1994–2011, when Israel adopted a new neo-liberal regime. The paper shows that the complex penal construction of the ‘other’ was used as a platform to justify and supportthe fuelling of the country’s globalized neo-liberal economy with cheap migrant workers.

The paper analyses a moral panic mobilized by the Israeli government, targeting single mothers who protested against a new economic plan that led to dramatic cuts in their welfare benefits. The moral panic occurred during a period of political and economic transition when Israel was moving toward a market-oriented mode of government. By incorporating issues concerning new modes of penal rationalities and practices into the analysis of the dynamics of moral panics, the paper shows that the Israeli campaign was shaped and supported by ideologies and beliefs central to the working of the political economy of neo-liberalism. The analysis shows that the moral panic was similar to other moral scenarios in its external form, but not in its internal content, which was conditioned by the wider context of neo-liberal regime and its techniques of rules and governance.

Allan Borowski, Mimi Ajzenstadt; A Solution Without A ProblemJudges’ Perspectives on the Impacts of the Introduction of Public Defenders on Israel’s Juvenile C