Michael Keren

Blogging and Mass Politics

In an attempt to understand the political implications of online life writing, or blogging, I construct a typology of modes of expression by politically engaged bloggers who are conceptualized as public intellectuals. I then propose the hypothesis that once the public dialogue in society is held almost exclusively online, it can be expected to follow more closely modes of expression associated with mass politics than with Aristotles rules of civic discourse.

Economists and economic policy making in Israel: The politics of expertise in the stabilization program

This study analyzes the involvement of economists in the making of Israels stabilization policy of 1985. The economists who participated in the policy process are conceptualized as political actors engaged in a struggle over material and symbolic resources, and their impact in the polity process is related to their definition of policy outcomes as political assets to the profession.

The original position in José saramago's Blindness

Following the tradition of social contract theories of the early modern age, John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice , renewed the notion of the “original position,” that is, a set of behavioral assumptions from which general principles of justice are deduced. Jose Saramagos novel Blindness enriches Rawlss normative theory by adding behavioral assumptions that help clarify some of the problems raised by the theorys critics and enhance its application to social and political settings.

Barriers to Communication Between Scientists and Policy Makers David Ben-Gurion and Amos DeShalit

An analysis of David Ben-Gurions correspondence with a leading scientist over the nature of knowledge brings to light an underlying philosophical conflict between them. It is then demonstrated how competing views over the nature ofknowledge significantly constrained Ben-Gurions communication with scientists in the policy-making process.

Science vs. Government: A Reconsideration

A content analysis is made of arms control arguments made in the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and its Subcommittee on Disarmament by five groups: government scientists, academic scientists, politicians, military persons and citizens.It is found that government scientists are closer in their argumentation to other government persons than to their fellow scientists. It is argued that access rather than professionalism is the important independent variable to consider in predicting policy-related behavior.

National Icons and Personal Identities in Three Israeli Autobiographies

This analysis of autobiographies by three Israeli military and political leaders--Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, and Yitzhak Rabin--explores how the three mens status as national icons affected their life writing, and how the different ways in which they negotiated a compromise between the iconicity attributed to them in their youth and their identities as mature human beings affected some of their political attitudes, especially toward Arab-Israeli coexistence.

THE JEWISH LEGIONS IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR AS A LOCUS OF IDENTITY FORMATION

Based on life‐writing material, this article sheds light on the process by which the Jewish Legions in the British Army in the First World War, composed in large part of Jewish volunteers from Canada and the United States, contributed to the development among its legionnaires of a sense of belonging to their respective North American countries. The notion that formerly displaced immigrants were fighting for the Promised Land, and the consistency of this notion with the overall aims of the allies in the First World War, promoted the development of a unique identity as Jewish “citizen‐soldiers”.

POLITICAL ESCAPISM IN CONTEMPORARY ISRAEL: LESSONS FROM DAVID GROSSMAN'S TO THE END OF THE LAND

This article discusses escapist tendencies identified in contemporary Israel and, based on David Grossmans 2010 novel To the End of the Land (published in Hebrew in 2008), raises the question of whether these tendencies may be associated with the construction of a new narrative for Israeli society.

Absurdity and Revolt in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Camus’ notions of absurdity and revolt remain relevant today, especially with respect to very recent developments in the growing role of electronic and digital mass media. Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road , describing a father and child’s journey after the world as we know it has been destroyed, is used to highlight the nature of absurdity and revolt in their updated early 21 st century version.

Shimon Peres: The Biography (review)

While in the end, for diplomatic reasons, no anti-missionary legislation passed the Knesset, the Israeli bureaucracy served to hamper missionary activity by restricting the number of missionaries who could enter Israel and limiting the number of Christian missionary schools it would permit to be registered. In sum, this is a very rich book, and one that greatly adds to our knowledge of Israeli diplomacy in the 1948–1967 period. My only quibble, and it is a minor one, is that Bialer may have credited the Catholic Church with too much world influence in the 1948–1961 period, given the fact that both the Truman Administration (1945–1953) and the Eisenhower Administration (1953–1961) paid relatively little attention to the Papacy other than to secure its services in the conflict against International Communism, a service the Popes were only too willing to provide. Robert O. Freedman Baltimore Hebrew University and Johns Hopkins University