DOCSLIB.ORG

ED125271.Pdf

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
ED125271.Pdf DOCUMENT RESUME ED 125 271 FL 007 660 AUTHOR Andersson, Theodore, Ed. TITLE The Teaching of Modern Languages. Problems in Education-X. INSTITUTION United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, Paris (France). PUB DATE 55 NOTE 294p.; A volume of studies deriving from the international seminar organized by the Secretariat of Unesco at Nuwara Eliya, Ceylon, in August 1953. AVAILABLE FROM Unesco, 9 Place de Fontenoy, Paris 7e, France EDRS PRICE MF-$0.83 HC-$15.39 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Adult Students; Audiovisual Aids; Cultural Awareness; Educational Radio; Educational Television; Fles; Humanistic Education; *Language Instruction; Language Teachers; Migrants; *Modern Languages; *Second Language Learning; Seminars; Teacher Education; *Teaching Methods; Textbooks ABSTRACT This collection is prefaced by a discussion of the Ceylon seminar from which the papers included here derived. The papers are grouped into 12 chapters:(1) "The Hu,1:4nistic Aspect of the Teaching of Modern Languages," (2) "The Teaching of Modern Languages as a Key to the Understanding of Other Civilizations and Peoples," (3) "The Methodology of Language Teaching," (4) "Audio-Visual Aids,"(5) "The Psychological Aspects of Language Teaching," (6)"The Training of Modern Language Teachers," (7) "Textbooks," (8) "The Teaching of Modern Languages by Radio and Television," (9) "Modern Language Teaching in Primary Schools," (10) "Sped:al:Was-to International Understanding," (11)"Teaching Modern Languages to Adult Migrants," and (12) "Special Problems of Language." A list of the members of the seminar concludes the book. (RH) *********************************************************************** Documents acquired by ERIC include many informal unpublished * materials nct available from other sources. ERIC makes every effort * * to obtain the best copy available. Nevertheless, items of marginal * * reproducibility are often encountered and this affects the quality * * of the microfiche and hardcopy reproductions ERIC makes available * * via the EBIC Document Reproduction Service (EDRS). EDRS is not * responsible for the quality of the original document. Reproductions * * supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original. * *********************************************************************** FROILEMS IN EDUCATION - X THE TEACHING OF MODERN LANGUAGES ,c\J OF HEALTH. U.S. DEPARTMENT 14.1 EDUCATION &WELFARE NATIONAL INSTITUTEOF EDUCATION HAS BEENREPRO- THIS DOCUMENTAS RECEIVEDFROM DUCED EXACTLYORGANIZATION ORIGIN- THE PERSON OR VIEW OR OPINIONS ATING IT POINTS OF NECESSARILY REPRE- STATED DO NOT NATIONAL INSTITUTEOF SENT OFFICIAL OR POLICY EDUCATION POSITION "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS COPY. RIGHTED MATERIAL HAS SEEN GRANTED By TO ERIC AND ORGANIZATIONS OPERATING UNDER AGREEMENTS WITH THE NATIONAL IN. STITUTE OF EDUCATION FURTHER REPRO. DUCTION OUTSIDE TNE ERIC SYSTEM FE. QUIRES PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT OWNER," s 2 Titles in the series Problems in Education I. War-Handicapped Children; by Therese Browse. II. Adult Education: current trends and practices. III. Vagrant Children. IV. Universities in Adult Education, by Cyril 0. Houle, S. G. Raybould, E. A. Corbett, Baldwin M. Woods and Helen V. Hammarberg. V. Women and Education: Chile, India, Yugoslavia, by Amanda Labarca H., K. L.Joshi, P. D. Shulda, Mitra Mitrovich and Vida Tomsich. VI. The Education of Teachers in England, France and the U.S.A., by C. A. Richardson, Helene Brille and Harold E. Snyder. VII.The Training of Rural School Teachers, by M. B. Lourenco Filho, L. A. Creedy, E. A. Pires and Isidro Castillo. VIII. Education of Women for Citizenship: a few practical suggestions, by Marjorie Tait. IX. Mental Hygiene in the Nursery School, report of a joint WHO-Unesco expert meeting. X. The Teaching of Modern Languages. Studies deriving from the Inter- national Seminar organized by Unesco at Nuwara Eliya, Ceylon, in August. 5953. 3 THE TEACHING OF MODERN LANGUAGES A volume of studies deriving from the International Seminar organized by the Secretariat of Unesco' at Nuwara Eliya, Ceylon, in August 1953 UNESCO 4 Unesco has a deep regard for the diversity oflanguages, which arc among the most subtle and the most individual instruments for the expression of genius... Unesco has set itself to promote familiarity with the most widely spoken languages,so that laiger sections of the world's populationmay communicate with one another. In so doing, the Organization is strivingto make it easier for all the peoples to acquaint themselves withthe world's civilization as a whole, while at thesame time safeguarding and indeed developing the essential individuality of eachone of them. Luther H. Evans (From the message of the Director-General ofUnesco read at the opening session of the Ceylon seminar on3 August 1953) Published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 9, place de Fontenoy, Paris -7' 1st impression, June 1955 Printed by Drukkerij Holland N.V., Amsterdam, Holland 2nd impression, July 1958 Printed by I.F.M.R.P., Paris. (C Unesco 1955 Pined in France ED.58. IV. no A 5 PREFACE In August 1953 an International Seminarwas held at Nuwara Eliya, in Ceylon, on 'The Contribution of the Teaching of Modern Languages towards Education for Living in a World Community'. Over a period of four weeks, participants from a countriesnot only discussed the relationship between modern language teaching and international understanding in general but alsocame to grips with a great many of the purely pedagogical aspects of the problem of the most effective teaching of languages of wide communication. It was the consensus that unless teachers of modern languagesand educational authorities are constantly aware of theprogress made and the experience gained in other parts of the world, the broader ultimate goal will remain largely unattainable. To continue the work begun at Nuwara Eliya, the Unesco Secretariat undertook certain specific tasks. Among therewas the publication of two companion studies, the presentone and a bibliography on modern language teaching. The present volume follows closely, in outline and in substance, the plan of the Ceylon seminar. The first six chapters correspond to the six general topics discussed at that seminar; the last six develop ancillary themes which the participantsat the seminar considered to be of special importance. In each chaptera brief preliminary section introduces the topic, summarizes the views expressed at the seminar and presents selected documents. These documents were chosen from workingpapers prepared for the seminar, from preparatory studies made by Unesco National Commissions in certain countries, and from communications made to the seminar by national delegations or individual participants. The volume includes also a few papers specially written afterthe seminar by participants or by members of the Unesco Secretariat. The volume has been edited jointly by the Secretariat of Unesco and by Professor Theodore Andersson, of Yale University,who served as director of the Ceylon seminar. It is lived that the material here presented will befound helpful to those concerned with curriculum developmentas well as to educational administrators and practising teachers. 6 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION. The Ceylon Seminar 11 CHAPTER I.The Humanistic Aspect of the Teaching of Modern Languages 16 The Seminar Report 19 The Basic Educational Assumptions, by the Committee on Language in the College (United States) . 20 Modern Languages and the Training of the Mind, by Emmanuel Handrich (France) 21 CHAPTER IL The Teaching of Modern Languages as a Key to the Understanding of Other Civilizations and Peoples 29 The Seminar Report 32 The Study of the Civilization of Foreign Countries in Modern Language Classes in France, by Henri Kerst (France) . 33 The Cultural Aim, by Fr. Closset (Belgium) . 36 CHAPTER III.The Methodology of Language Teaching 46 The Seminar Report 49 Teaching Spanish in Mexico to Students from the United States, by Elena Picazo de Murray (Mexico) . 51 Teaching English as a Foreign Language, by P. Gurrey (United Kingdom) 61 An Outline of General Principles as Applied to the Teaching of English as a Second Languag (Report of an ad hoc Committee of the Ceylon Seminar) 78 CHAPTER IV.Audio-Visual Aids. 82 The Seminar Report 84 A Report on Audio-Visual Aids, by Paul F6raud (France) 87 7 CHAPTER V.The Psychological Aspects of Language Teaching 96 The Seminar Report 98 Psychological Pitfalls found in Classical Western Methods of Language Teaching, by Manich Jumsai (Thailand) . 101 Adolescents and Modern Languages, by Fr. Closset (Belgium)106 Tests and Examinations, by P. Gurrey (United Kingdom) . 110 Tests and Measurements in Foreign Language Teaching, by W. D. Wall (Unesco) 116 CHAPTER VI.The Training of Modern Language Teachers 124 The Seminar Report 125 Notes on the Training of Language Teachers in Turkey, by E. V. Gatenby (United Kingdom) 128 The Aims in Teacher Training, by Fr. Closset (Belgium) 130 Training Modern Language Teachers for Secondary Schools in Western Germany, by Elisabeth Winkelmenn (German Federal Republic) 136 CHAPTER VII.Textbooks . 150 The Seminar Report 151 Local Factors in Vocabulary Selection, by P. Gurrey (United Kingdom) 154 English Textbooks and Teachers' Manuals for Thailand, by Manich Jumsai (Thailand) 157 CHAPTER VIII.The Teaching of Modern. Languages by Radio and Television 160 Exporting a Language, by the English-by-Radio Department of the British Broadcasting Corporation (United Kingdom) 162 Importing a Language,
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Introduction Really, 'Human Dust'?
    Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Peck, The Lost Heritage of the Holocaust Survivors, Gesher, 106 (1982) p.107. 2. For 'Herut's' place in this matter, see H. T. Yablonka, 'The Commander of the Yizkor Order, Herut, Shoa and Survivors', in I. Troen and N. Lucas (eds.) Israel the First Decade, New York: SUNY Press, 1995. 3. Heller, On Struggling for Nationhood, p. 66. 4. Z. Mankowitz, Zionism and the Holocaust Survivors; Y. Gutman and A. Drechsler (eds.) She'erit Haplita, 1944-1948. Proceedings of the Sixth Yad Vas hem International Historical Conference, Jerusalem 1991, pp. 189-90. 5. Proudfoot, 'European Refugees', pp. 238-9, 339-41; Grossman, The Exiles, pp. 10-11. 6. Gutman, Jews in Poland, pp. 65-103. 7. Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors, pp. 39-71. 8. Slutsky, Annals of the Haganah, B, p. 1114. 9. Heller The Struggle for the Jewish State, pp. 82-5. 10. Bauer, Survivors; Tsemerion, Holocaust Survivors Press. 11. Mankowitz, op. cit., p. 190. REALLY, 'HUMAN DUST'? 1. Many of the sources posed problems concerning numerical data on immi­ gration, especially for the months leading up to the end of the British Mandate, January-April 1948, and the first few months of the state, May­ August 1948. The researchers point out that 7,574 immigrant data cards are missing from the records and believe this to be due to the 'circumstances of the times'. Records are complete from September 1948 onward, and an important population census was held in November 1948. A parallel record­ ing system conducted by the Jewish Agency, which continued to operate after that of the Mandatory Government, provided us with statistical data for immigration during 1948-9 and made it possible to analyse the part taken by the Holocaust survivors.
    [Show full text]
  • Aliyah and Settlement Process?
    Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel HBI SERIES ON JEWISH WOMEN Shulamit Reinharz, General Editor Joyce Antler, Associate Editor Sylvia Barack Fishman, Associate Editor The HBI Series on Jewish Women, created by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, pub- lishes a wide range of books by and about Jewish women in diverse contexts and time periods. Of interest to scholars and the educated public, the HBI Series on Jewish Women fills major gaps in Jewish Studies and in Women and Gender Studies as well as their intersection. For the complete list of books that are available in this series, please see www.upne.com and www.upne.com/series/BSJW.html. Ruth Kark, Margalit Shilo, and Galit Hasan-Rokem, editors, Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel: Life History, Politics, and Culture Tova Hartman, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and Accommodation Anne Lapidus Lerner, Eternally Eve: Images of Eve in the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, and Modern Jewish Poetry Margalit Shilo, Princess or Prisoner? Jewish Women in Jerusalem, 1840–1914 Marcia Falk, translator, The Song of Songs: Love Lyrics from the Bible Sylvia Barack Fishman, Double or Nothing? Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society Shulamit Reinharz and Mark A. Raider, editors, American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism Farideh Goldin, Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman Elizabeth Wyner Mark, editor, The Covenant of Circumcision: New Perspectives on an Ancient Jewish Rite Rochelle L.
    [Show full text]
  • ACROSS the CULTURAL DIVIDE: IMMIGRANT ORIENTAL JEWISH CHILDREN MEET ISRAELI FOLKSONG Shai Burstyn
    URBAN PEOPLE | LIDÉ MĚSTA 17 | 2015 | 2 ACROSS THE CULTURAL DIVIDE: IMMIGRANT ORIENTAL JEWISH CHILDREN MEET ISRAELI FOLKSONG Shai Burstyn Abstract: Many songs created in pre-State Israel incorporated certain Oriental elements, but their overall stylistic slant, like that of other contemporaneous local cultural products, was largely Occidental. The radical demographic change caused by a massive immigration of Jews from Middle Eastern and North African countries to the new state created enormous pressure to absorb the newcomers both physically and culturally. The ensuing melting pot policy declared by the young state as its supreme national task proved unsuccess - ful. This failure had many reasons, not least of them the condescending attitude of the absorbing establishment and its inability to fathom the socio- cultural processes involved in such a colossal national project. Against this background, I examine in this article the encounter of immigrant Oriental children with Israeli folksong, mainly from the perspective of musical percep - tion and cultural conditioning. In the 1930s and 1940s, ingrained musical perceptual habits made European-oriented audiences insert variants into the newly composed modal, mildly Oriental songs they used to sing. In the 1950s, however, the musical perceptual habits of immigrant Oriental children hindered them from embracing Israeli folksongs created mainly by composers of Eastern European origin. Keywords: Israeli folksong; immigration; melting pot; cross-cultural music perception 317 ARTICLES מִ חּזְרָ ָאבִ יא זַרְ עֶ ָך ּומִ מַ ּעֲרָ באֲ קַ בְ ּצֶ ָךּ (ישעיה מג:ה) I will bring thy seed from the east And gather you from the west (Isaiah 43: 5) These words of the prophet Isaiah reverberated in Israel for over a decade after the establishment of the state in 1948.
    [Show full text]
  • Camp Evolution and Israel's Creation
    Camp evolution and Israel’s creation: Between ‘state of emergency’ and ‘emergence of state’ Irit Katz, Centre for Urban Conflicts Research, The Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, Girton College, UK. Political Geography 2016 ***Please do not circulate and do not cite without the permission of the author*** ABSTRACT This paper examines the central role of the camp in the early Israeli state period and its spatial and geopolitical evolution. Unlike official Israeli history, which presents the immigrant transit camps as an inevitable improvised response to the unexpected problem of mass immigration, I examine the camp as a strategic modern biopolitical instrument that allowed for the state’s profound geopolitical changes and was itself altered according to them. The paper analyses the ways in which the camp facilitated the creation of Israel as a state formed by two seemingly contradictory, but in fact complementary, conditions: on one hand, a product of a chaotic ‘state of emergency’ and a form of ‘ordered disorder’ created by mass immigration, and on the other hand, a product of a comprehensive, tightly controlled modernist project combining physical planning and social engineering. This duality reveals the role of these camps as spatial ‘black holes’ which swallowed the contradiction between the radical geopolitical transformation and the rational self-image of the Israeli state-building project. The evolving and hybrid typologies of the camp in Israel’s pre-state and early-state periods expose it as a versatile instrument, highlighting the need for informed spatial and geographical genealogies of the camp in order to illuminate its various transformations.
    [Show full text]
  • Ethnicity and Education: Nation-Building, State-Formation, and the Construction of the Israeli Educational System
    ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION: NATION-BUILDING, STATE-FORMATION, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE ISRAELI EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM GAL LEVY A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR PHD DEGREE THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 2002 2 ABSTRACT The dissertation is about the ethnicisation of social relations in Israeli society and its reflection and manifestation in education. My main aim in this study is twofold: first, to offer a critical account of the development of ethnic relations in Israeli society and to examine the role ethnicity has played in the processes of nation-building and state-formation; and, second, to propose a history of the educational system in Israel which accounts for the role of education in creating and perpetuating ethnic identities. The first part of the dissertation consists of a critical reading of existing analyses of ethnicity in Israel. Its aim is to bring the state into the analysis of ethnic relations and demonstrate that such an approach is vital to the understanding of ethnic relations and identities. In the following part, I trace back the processes of nation-building and state-formation demonstrating how governments and major political actors became involved in the formation and re-production of ethnic boundaries within Israeli society. In these two parts, I am arguing against both functionalist and critical accounts of ethnicity in Israel, which tend to ‘essentialise’ ethnic categories and thus deny the political nature of ethnicity and its power as an organising basis for political action. In the third and major part of the dissertation, I seek to re-construct the history of the Israeli educational system within an understanding of ethnicity as a structural feature of state-society relations.
    [Show full text]
  • Gouverner Ou Être Gouverné? Une Approche Par Les Échelles De La
    Gouverner ou être gouverné ? Une approche par les échelles de la transformation du pouvoir et de l’autorité de l’État à travers de la politique publique d’immigration et d’intégration de quatre villes frontières en Israël Amandine Desille To cite this version: Amandine Desille. Gouverner ou être gouverné ? Une approche par les échelles de la transformation du pouvoir et de l’autorité de l’État à travers de la politique publique d’immigration et d’intégration de quatre villes frontières en Israël. Géographie. Université de Poitiers; Tel Aviv university, 2017. Français. NNT : 2017POIT5007. tel-02094509 HAL Id: tel-02094509 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02094509 Submitted on 9 Apr 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. THESE Pour l’obtention du Grade de DOCTEUR DE L’UNIVERSITE DE POITIERS (Diplôme National - Arrêté du 25 mai 2016) U.F.R. : Géographie Ecole Doctorale : Sociétés et Organisations Laboratoire : Migrinter Présentée par : Amandine Desille Governing or being governed? A scalar approach of the transformation of State power
    [Show full text]
  • Palestinian Refugees This Page Intentionally Left Blank Palestinian Refugees Challenges of Repatriation and Development
    Palestinian Refugees This page intentionally left blank Palestinian Refugees Challenges of Repatriation and Development Edited by Rex Brynen and Roula El-Rifai International Development Research Centre Ottawa · Cairo · Dakar · Montevideo · Nairobi · New Delhi · Singapore Published in 2007 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd and the International Development Research Centre 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com International Development Research Centre PO Box 8500 Ottawa, ON KIG 3H9 Canada [email protected]/www.idrc.ca ISBN (e-book) 978–1–55250–231–0 In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan a division of St. Martin’s Press 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © International Development Research Centre 2007 All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN 978 1 84511 311 7 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset by Jayvee, Trivandrum, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by T J International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Contents List of figures and tables vii List of contributors x Preface and acknowledgements xvi Glossary xix 1 Introduction: Refugee
    [Show full text]
  • Forsaken HBI Series on Jewish Women
    Forsaken HBI Series on Jewish Women Shulamit Reinharz, General Editor Sylvia Barack Fishman, Associate Editor Th e HBI Series on Jewish Women, created by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, publishes a wide range of books by and about Jewish women in diverse contexts and time periods. Of interest to scholars and the educated public, the HBI Series on Jewish Women fi lls major gaps in Jewish tudiesS and in Women and Gender Studies as well as their intersection. Th e HBI Series on Jewish Women is supported by a generous gift from Dr. Laura S. Schor. For the complete list of books that are available in this series, please see www.upne.com Sharon Faye Koren, Forsaken: Th e Menstruant in Medieval Jewish Mysticism Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, editors, Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust Julia R. Lieberman, editor, Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora Derek Rubin, editor, Promised Lands: New Jewish American Fiction on Longing and Belonging Carol K. Ingall, editor, Th e Women Who Reconstructed American Jewish Education: 1910–1965 Gaby Brimmer and Elena Poniatowska, Gaby Brimmer: An Autobiography in Th ree Voices Harriet Hartman and Moshe Hartman, Gender and American Jews: Patt erns in Work, Education, and Family in Contemporary Life Dvora E. Weisberg, Levirate Marriage and the Family in Ancient Judaism Ellen M. Umansky and Dianne Ashton, editors, Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook Carole S. Kessner, Marie Syrkin: Values Beyond the Self Ruth Kark, Margalit Shilo, and Galit Hasan-Rokem,
    [Show full text]
  • The Subversive Action of the Urban Camp Irit Katz Feigis
    Resourceful Cities Berlin, 29-31 August 2013 From Exclusion to Co-operation – The Subversive Action of the Urban Camp Irit Katz Feigis Paper presented at the International RC21 Conference 2013 Session 24.1 Encapsulating, including, excluding: urban camps from a global perspective Draft version. Please do not circulate and do not cite without the permission of the author. PhD Candidate The Department of Architecture University of Cambridge 1-5 Scroope Terrace, Cambridge, CB2 1PX, UK [email protected] 1 Abstract1 Since the early decades of the 20th century camps have been used as an instrument in order to suspend, control and administer land and population in Israel/Palestine. In a state of emergency, when the normal law is suspended, the camp is a quick translation of a political agenda or a humanitarian crisis into an ad-hoc act of construction where civic life and military action interacts. Within a specific context, the paper will analyse two neighbouring settlements in the southern Negev desert; Yerucham - created in the 1950s by the Israeli government as a Jewish immigrant absorption camp and eventually turned into a minor development town, and the neighbouring Rachme, an ‘unrecognised village’ which was created in the 1960s as an informal camp by the indigenous Bedouin population and is now struggling for government recognition. The paper will examine the relations between Yerucham and Rachme, which in opposition to the Israeli policy of ethnic segregation manage to act together in order to improve their own difficult reality. The paper will argue that camps have become a site for the emergence of new subjectivities which use legal, spatial and political actions to resist the oppressive power of the state, and that the abandonment and suspension of these two populations has expedited their resourceful co- operation in challenging the modes of traditional governance.
    [Show full text]
  • Where Community Happens. the Kibbutz and the Philosophy Of
    WHERE COMMUNITY HAPPENS WHERE COMMUNITY HAPPENS In reaction to the spread of globalization, recent years have seen considerable growth in the number of intentional communities established across the world. In this collection of articles and lectures, many of them previously unpublished in English, the author analyzes various aspects of the philosophy of the kibbutz W THE KIBBUTZ AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMMUNALISM and draws parallels with other societies and philosophical trends, in the hope that a close look at the ways of thought of the kibbutz – arguably the best- HERE established communalist society – may help other communalists crystallize their own social philosophies. Utopian thought and communal experience are brought to life through the extensive use of the voices of some of the most influential thinkers and kibbutz members of the past hundred years, including CO Martin Buber and David Ben Gurion. “Henry Near has spent a lifetime studying utopianism and intentional MMUNIT communities, with a special focus on the kibbutzim of Israel, of which he is the leading historian. This book brings together his thoughtful reflections on the kibbutzim and related topics. It will long be a benchmark in its field.” Tim Miller, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Kansas “As a distinguished scholar and long-time kibbutznik, communal historian and Y H philosopher Henry Near offers that all too rare combination of passion and balance, vision and realism. This timely book is an invaluable case study of the kibbutz in a broader, comparative perspective including Christian monasteries, APPENS Hutterite colonies, and New Age communes. It offers a goldmine of new evidence and mature wisdom, of value to historians, social scientists, humanists, and partisans of gender equality, youth empowerment, and cooperative alternatives for the twenty-first century.
    [Show full text]
  • Religion and Nation Building: Two Generations of Israeli Experience1
    RELIGION AND NATION BUILDING: TWO GENERATIONS OF ISRAELI EXPERIENCE1 Charles S. Liebman The establishment of the state of Israel in May, 1948 confronted the political leadership with security problems of the first order -- the very existence of the state and the lives of its citizens were threatened by invading Arab armies. However, even at the moments of greatest peril to its existence, and more forcefully within a year of its establishment, Israeli political leaders felt obliged to deal with the challenge of nation building.2 The problems were political as well as ideological. During the prestate period it was possible to allow population subgroups, organized into distinct political camps to develop their own network of symbols and parochial loyalties without hampering the basic unity of the Jewish population. The leadership of the various political camps interrelated through a network of quasi-governmental or secondary political institutions (the British Mandatory authority exercised ultimate political control), compromising on some disputed issues and principles and ignoring many others. Since many of the quasi-governmental institutions were built on the basis of voluntary support, and the Yishuv, the Jewish settlement in Palestine, lacked the ultimate power to enforce its decisions, compromise was necessary. Available resources, money and jobs were distributed by the political leadership according to a negotiated formula. Each political camp received an allocation based roughly on its voting strength. The creation of the state of Israel and the tripling of its population in three years led state leaders to feel that the country must be completely integrated; that the value-belief- symbol system separating the various camps must be abolished and replaced by a unified symbol system uniting the entire Jewish population in support of the state and its institutions.
    [Show full text]
  • Ari Ariel FOODWAYS and the ETHNICIZATION of YEMENI
    Mashriq & Mahjar 6, no. 2 (2019), 130–149 ISSN 2169-4435 Ari Ariel FOODWAYS AND THE ETHNICIZATION OF YEMENI IDENTITY IN ISRAEL Abstract The transformation of Yemeni food practices in Israel illustrates two contradictory processes. Yemeni Jewish immigrants used food in the process of becoming Israeli, but also to reimagine and preserve Yemeni-ness. To do both, they had to negotiate western stereotypes and pressure to assimilate into “modern” Israeli culture, while creating a single, homogenous Yemeni ethnic identity. Additionally, Yemeni food narratives evince a critique of Israeli absorption policies, and challenge aspects of Zionist ideology, while at the same time calling for inclusion in Israeli society and declaring their Zionism. INTRODUCTION This article argues that Yemeni Jewish immigrants used foodways as part of a strategy of integration into Israeli society.1 In the process their food practices were radically altered, as they adopted new foods and adapted themselves to modern Israeli manners, as defined by the hegemonic Ashkenazi population. At times, engagement with European Jews required negotiating their assumptions about the biblical nature of the Yemenis. While this biblical-ness marked the Yemeni Jews as primordial, even primitive, it could also be used to claim full inclusion in Israeli-ness, via an “authentic” link to the period of ancient Israel, the national golden age of Israeli historiography. Yemeni Jews, therefore, used traditional religious practice to make such claims. Nevertheless, they came under immense pressure to assimilate modern culture, including food practices. This necessitated the homogenizing of Yemeni cuisine(s), and changes in ingredients and cooking methods. After a brief overview of Yemeni Jewish immigration to Palestine and Israel from the late nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries, this paper will focus on the 1950s, the period following the establishment of the State of Israel and the largest wave of Yemeni Jewish migration.
    [Show full text]