Yechezkel Dar

The structure of social justice judgments: a facet approach

This study examines the structure of social justice judgments (SJJ) on the basis of a conceptual mapping of two major facets of SJJ: distributive rules and social resources. We distinguish irreducible classes of rules (e.g., arithmetic equality, effort) and resources (e.g., money, prestige) and examine their affinities and contrasts in an effort to unveil the patterns of relations among them. A similarity space analysis (SSA) reveals that the predicted distinctions and relations among SJJ correspond to actual judgments made by adolescents regarding the relative importance of distributive rules in allocating different social resources

Collectivistic and individualistic motives among kibbutz youth volunteering for community service

About one third of each age cohort of high school graduates in the Israeli kibbutz opt for a year of community service before enlistment into the military. The motives that underlie this volunteering were explored from the perspective of kibbutz youths prolonged transition to adulthood. The analysis revealed a blend of individualistic and collectivistic orientations linked with expectations of satisfying instrumental as well as explorative and expressive needs within a context of moratorial and liminal experience. Particular combinations of motives were also found to vary by the intended field of activity during this year.

The rise and fall of school integration in Israel: research and policy analysis

School integration (desegregation) was introduced in Israeli junior high schools in 1968 with the aim of increasing educational equality and decreasing (Jewish) ethnic divides. While never officially abandoned, a de facto retreat from this policy has been observed since the early 1990s, despite the voluminous research that revealed its positive, though moderate, educational outcomes. This shift in educational emphases reflected profound societal changes, fed by global neo-liberal trends and educational consumerism, which research-based arguments supporting integration were too weak to resist. The ascent and waning of school integration in Israel provide an instructive case for analysing the interconnection of educational policy, educational research, and societal changes, demonstrating the weakness of research in sustaining educational policy in the face of counteracting social and political developments.

Youth in the Military: Gendered Experiences in the Conscript Service in the Israeli Army*

Conscript military service is a pivotal experience for young Israelis of both genders. Juxtaposing conflicting claims concerning women’s military experience—the women’s marginalization claim and the youth moratorial self-enhancing claim—we compare men’s and women’s retrospective evaluations of six aspects of their service in the Israeli army: hardship, adaptation, motivation, investment, service significance, and personal benefits. Military service was found to be as meaningful and benefiting for women no less than for men. However, the dynamics of the moratorium experience differ by gender, in keeping with the differentiated substance and gendered social construction of their military roles.

Communality, Rationalization and Distributive Justice Changing Evaluation of Work in the Israeli Kibbutz

A utopian outlook in the earlier kibbutz has sustained symbolic criteria in the evaluation of work. However, a process of rationalization has enhanced the instrumental importance of work and stimulated individualistic self-fulfilment. Facilitated by changing conceptions of distributive justice, social evaluation of work has become both more materialistic and more differentiated. The increasing praise of talents and of the market value of work output at the expense of manual dexterity and moral virtues jeopardized kibbutz egalitarianism long before the recent period of economic and social crisis. Yet, economic setback has boosted decommunalization and further blurred the distinction between equitarian symbolic and equitarian materialistic rewarding.

Kibbutz Education: a sociological account

Abstract The ideal type of kibbutz education was characterised by six structural traits: unbalanced duality of communal institutions and family, centrality of the peer group in the socialisation process, merging of education and community, a multicoded and multifaceted school, autonomous but task‐orientated adolescence and a short passage to social adulthood. Although possibly taking a toll on individual autonomy, the “hidden curriculum” of this education facilitated the development of a prosocial orientation, emotional moderation and a strong sense of belonging‐‐all important to the fulfilment of the role of kibbutz member. Rapid social change, culminating in the last decade, is eroding the structural uniqueness of kibbutz education and thus jeopardises its capacity for continuing to socialise children to communal life.