Malka Muchnik

The Gender Challenge of Hebrew

The Gender Challenge of Hebrew is the first book to delve in depth into gender representation over the 3,000-year history of Hebrew. Malka Muchnik analyses the grammatical characteristics of gender, reveals social and cultural issues reflected, and presents challenges for achieving change.

Discourse strategies of maxzirim bitshuva: The case of a repentance preacher in Israel

Abstract This study deals with special discourse strategies used to lead Jewish mass audiences to repent and return to the faith. The characteristic shared by all these audiences is their desire to embrace religious observance. The function of the speaker is to encourage them to do just that. The examples presented in this article were taken from live appearances made by Rabbi Amnon Itzhak, one of the most famous maxzirim bitshuva(the Jewish equivalent of revivalist preachers) in Israel. The preacher is familiar with the cultural background of his audience, and he skillfully wields this knowledge when choosing his rhetorical means of persuasion. By doing so, he adapts himself not only to the audience, but also to other persons or entities—especially the media—and tries to convince them of his view. One of his strategies is presenting quasi-scientifi;c arguments as facts that seemingly lead to unequivocal conclusions. An additional technique is denying the legitimacy of explanations given to the same phenomena by scientists and secular people. In order to reinforce his arguments, Rabbi Itzhak ridicules those representing an opposing viewpoint. Among other linguistic means, he makes intensive use of word plays and prosodic devices, namely special intonation and stress, rhyme, and alliteration.

Personal names in Modern Hebrew: A morphosyntactic and gender analysis

Abstract The article presents a morphosyntactic analysis of personal names in Modern Hebrew, with emphasis on gender characteristics. In fact, Hebrew uses existing words for personal names, and we would expect grammatical rules to apply to names in the same manner as they apply to other words. Almost all words in the language are gender distinguished, meaning that they must be either masculine or feminine, with no neuter form, and full syntactic agreement for gender is required. While masculine words are unmarked, feminine nouns, adjectives, and participles are marked by the suffixes -a or -(V)t. Verbs and inflected prepositions present a gender differentiation as well. However, although personal names originate from these parts of speech or a combination thereof, it appears that they are not subject to all grammatical rules. Semantic differentiations for gender that were used once are now no longer evident. The most salient finding of the present study is that the new trend for personal names is to use less diversification regarding parts of speech. It mostly uses masculine nouns for both sexes, without gender markers or formal syntactic agreement. Consequently, morphosyntactic differentiations tend to disappear, turning masculine nouns into generic names and implying a process of masculinization.

Interviews with Students and Teachers

This chapter summarizes the interviews conducted in different schools. Students are generally satisfied, but differences were found in the motivation of the students of Russian and Amharic and that of the students of French and Spanish. While for the first group it is important to maintain the family language, the others study the language because they were exposed to its popular aspects.

Teaching the Four Languages in Israel

This chapter discusses the history of teaching the four languages in Israeli secondary schools and the official instruction policy. Russian was previously taught as the mother tongue for newcomers, but this situation has changed over the years. About 8000 students currently attend classes in middle and high schools. Most of the students of Amharic were born in Ethiopia, while some arrived after childhood, and the number of students has gradually increased to 700 annually.

The Present Research

The purpose of the research was to examine the study of elective languages in Israeli schools. An increased motivation for languages study was assumed, whereby students will try to maintain family languages or study languages considered important for communication. Another assumption was that the results will differ for the heritage languages, as compared to the foreign languages.

The Status of the Four Languages in Israel

Over one million of Russian-speaking people immigrated to Israel and became the largest Jewish ethnic group in the country. Immigration from Ethiopia to Israel culminated in a community of approximately 137,000. Most Spanish speakers in Israel, about 100,000, are Latin American immigrants who arrived since the establishment of the state. Israel absorbed over 400,000 Jews from French-speaking countries, and emigration from France is increasing nowadays.

Hebrew Learning and Identity Perception among Russian Speakers in Israel

nationales 12.3 (1996): 173–188; Narspy Zilberg, Elazar Leshem, and Moshe Lissak, “Imagined Community and Real Community: Russian-Language Press and the Renewal of Community Life among FSU Immigrants,” Society and Welfare 19 (1999): 9–37 [in Hebrew]. 14 Avraham Ben-Yakov, “Russian-Language Press in Israel,” Kesher 24 (1998): 2–15 [in Hebrew]. 15 Nelly Elias, Coming Home: Media and Returning Diaspora in Israel and Germany (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008.) 16 Elias and Caspi, “From Pravda to Vesty: The Russian Media Renaissance in Israel.” 17 Majid Al-Haj and Elazar Leshem, Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union in Israel: Ten Years Later. Research Report (The Center for Multiculturalism and Educational Research, University of Haifa, 2000.) 18 Mutagim, FSU Immigrants’ Media Consumption Survey (Tel-Aviv, 2000) [in Hebrew]. 19 Hanna Adoni, Dan Caspi, and Akiba A. Cohen, Media, Minorities and Hybrid Identities: The Arab and Russian Communities in Israel (New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2006). 20 Caspi and Elias, “Being Here but Feeling There...”; Hefetz, “The Russian Press in Israel”; Wartburg, “The Russian-Language Press in Israel—Two Generations”; Zilberg and Leshem, “Russian-language Press and Immigrant Community in Israel.” 21 David Deacon, Michael Pickering, Peter Golding, and Graham Murdock, Researching Communications: A Practical Guide to Methods in Media and Cultural Analysis (London: Arnold, 1999.) 22 See, for example, Meenakshi Gigi Durham, “Constructing the ‘New Ethnicities’: Media, Sexuality and Diaspora Identity in the Lives of South Asian Immigrant Girls,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21.2 (2004): 140–161; Myria Georgiou, Diaspora, Identity and the Media: Diasporic Transnationalism and Mediated Spatialities (New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2006); Baohui Hwang and He Zhou, “Media Uses and Acculturation among Chinese Immigrants in the U.S.A,” Gazette 61.1 (1999): 5–22; Nelly Elias and Dafna Lemish, “Spinning the Web of Identity: Internet’s Roles in Immigrant Adolescents’ Search of Identity,” New Media & Society 11.4 (2009): 533–551; Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change; Vikki Mayer, “Living Telenovelas/Telenovelizing Life: Mexican American Girls’ Identities and Transnational Telenovelas,” Journal of Communication 5.3 (2003): 479–495. 23 Arthur A. Berger, Media and Communication Research Methods: An Introduction to Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2000.) 24 The terrorist attack on the Dolphinarium discothèque will be recalled in the collective Israeli memory as a “Russian” terrorist attack, as most of the 21 youngsters killed were immigrants from the FSU. 25 See Julia Lerner, By Way of Knowledge: Russian Migrants at the University (Jerusalem: Shain Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1999) [in Hebrew]; Fran Markowitz, A Community in Spite of Itself: Soviet Jewish Émigrés in New York (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993); Tamar Rapoport and Edna Lomsky-Feder, “Intelligentsia as an Ethnic Habitus: The Inculcation and Restructuring of Intelligentsia among Russian Jews,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 23.2 (2002): 233–248; Larissa Remennick, Russian Jews on Three Continents (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2007.) 26 Dependence on news broadcasts in Hebrew was particularly high among participants who had been interviewed in 2001, before the establishment of the Israeli channel in Russian, Israel Plus. 27 See, for example, Burgess, “The Resurgence of Ethnicity: Myth or Reality?”; Georgiou, “Crossing the Boundaries of the Ethnic Home: Media Consumption and Ethnic Identity Construction in the Public Space: The Case of the Cypriot Community Centre in North London”; Hargreaves and Mahdjoub, “Satellite Television Viewing among Ethnic Minorities in France”; Marzolf, The Danish-language Press in America. 28 Caspi and Elias, “Being Here but Feeling There...”; Chaim Herzog Institute for Media, Politics and Society, Media Influence on the Collective Identity Construction amongst the Russianspeaking Community in Israel. Public discussion, Tel-Aviv, March 17, 2004 http://www.tau. ac.il/institutes/herzog/russien_press.doc [in Hebrew]; Isakova, “Not a Ghetto, Not a Mafia”; Kimmerling, “The New Israelis: A Multiplicity of Cultures without Multiculturalism”; Wartburg, “The Russian-Language Press in Israel—Two Generations.” Between Russianness, Jewishness, and Israeliness

Gender stereotypes in the language of Be my knife by David Grossman

Abstract Research on Hebrew and other languages points to a stereotype-based view of gender identities as reflected in language. Some stereotypes related to use of the language and gender reveal that women are more conservative than men and use a more standard version of language. One of the stereotypical claims, which is not always borne out by empirical research, relates to the use of normative and prestigious forms versus nonstandard and vernacular ones. The present article focuses on Be my knife (Grossman, Shetihi Li Hasakin, Hakibutz Hameuhad, 1998), a novel written by the highly acclaimed Israeli author, David Grossman. The book is a classic example of the perpetuation of gender stereotypes, where the author makes clear a distinction between the linguistic features of the novels main characters, a man and a woman. Not only are the characters themselves portrayed stereotypically, but the linguistic features the author attributes them are determined by gender. While the woman uses prestigious, standard and precise language, both in morpho-phonemic terms and in terms of syntax and discourse, the man generally uses a nonstandard vernacular. This reflects the prejudices Israeli society holds with respect to gender; language and literature are merely the means to emphasize this.