Calls for Papers

CALL FOR PAPERS: ISRAELI PERSPECTIVES ON GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE

The journal Israel Studies Review is planning a special issue to be published in 2025 to mark the 30th anniversary of the declaration that gender-based violence constitutes a violation of human rights in the Beijing Platform for Action at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. The special issue will center Israeli perspectives on gender-based violence and will be guest-edited by Prof. Madelaine Adelman (Arizona State University) and Prof. Dalit Yassour-Borochowitz (Max Stern Academic College of Emek Yezreel).

Gender-based violence, broadly defined, is not a new social problem. It takes place in virtually all societies around the world, but only in the last several decades has it become recognized across sectors as a major issue to be addressed. Despite its ubiquity, local definitions and manifestations of, mechanisms developed to disrupt, and movements against gender-based violence vary by locale, context, and time period.

Researchers and front-line workers alike have demonstrated not only that gender-based violence is embedded in varying patterns of kinship, marriage, and family structures, but also that it is shaped by contemporary political and economic arrangements. Violence in intimate relationships and other forms of gender-based violence are inseparable from social conflicts, violence, and injustice. Gender-based violence and structural violence – poverty, hunger, scapegoating, social exclusion and humiliation – are deeply connected.

The special issue editors invite scholars conducting research on various aspects of gender-based violence in the Israeli context to submit paper proposals. We seek papers from across the social sciences and humanities, including law, public health, and social work. The editors acknowledge that many studies have been published on the subject. Our aim is neither to sum-up nor repeat what has already been published. Rather, we seek new and nuanced perspectives that may originate from disciplines lacking much engagement in the topic, cross-disciplinary analyses that generate new inquiries or insights, re-examinations of long-held scholarly knowledge, or community (or advocacy) based insights that reveal how the Israeli case converges, complicates, or confirms contemporary assumptions about or understandings of gender-based violence. Proposed papers may be empirically based case studies, comparative analyses, and/or theoretical or conceptual investigations.

The special issue editors will also consider proposals for non-peer reviewed content such as creative works, roundtable-type conversations or individual essays, narrated photos, “from the field” reflections, and books reviews. When submitting a proposal for such content, please provide relevant details so as to ensure full consideration.

Possible themes to be considered include, but are not limited to:

  • Advocacy strategies and/or sustainable social movements
  • Anti-LGBTQ violence as gender-based violence
  • Boundaries and borders of identity, intersectionality, and belonging
  • Boys and men as victims and/or anti-gender-based violence activists
  • Circulations of knowledge and resources
  • Community-based interventions and nongovernmental organizations
  • Contested categories of difference
  • Domestic and/or transnational human rights frameworks for addressing gender-based violence
  • Gender-based violence and “culture”
  • Generations of violence
  • Intersectionalities of gender-based violence at the margins
  • Innovations in family law
  • Intimate partner violence
  • Israel in comparative perspective
  • Languages and silences
  • Masculinities and gender-based violence
  • Micro- and macro approaches to ending gender-based violence
  • New epistemological and methodological frameworks
  • Occupation, militarism, and war
  • The promises and pitfalls of state-based interventions, including criminalization
  • Palestinian and Israeli nationalisms
  • Policing ourselves and Others
  • Political economy
  • The politics of communal and family life
  • Religion, religious institutions, and religiosity
  • Restorative and/or transformational justice
  • Sexual violence in the family
  • Transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people as victims and/or changemakers
  • Trauma and/or Post-Traumatic Growth
  • Visions for a world free of gender-based violence
  • Waves of feminist organizing against gender-based violenc

Timeline

Scholars wishing to contribute should submit a paper proposal abstract of 300 words (plus references) to ISR.GenderBasedViolence@gmail.com.

  • Proposal Abstracts: December 15, 2022
  • Acceptance/Rejection Decisions: January 15, 2023
  • Drafts of Full Papers Submitted: October 15, 2023
  • Peer and Editor Review of Drafts of Full Papers: January 15, 2024
  • Final Submission of Accepted Manuscripts: June 15, 202

Drafts of Full Papers must include:

125 – word abstract and 6-8 key terms

Paper length: 6,000-7,000 words (including references) written according to The Chicago Manual of Style format. 

Authors are responsible for following ISR guidelines and submitting a complete and original manuscript.

Contact

Please contact the special issue co-editors with any questions and/or send paper proposal abstracts to ISR.GenderBasedViolence@gmail.com.

ISRAEL – Special issue, The Right-Wing

The rise of authoritarian leaders and right-wing regimes in various parts of the world in the present era has led the research literature to focus its attention on the “new right” phenomenon, which emphasizes the decline of liberal democracy (Crouch 2004) and the rise of populist and nationalist politics (Enzo, 2019).

Right-wing Zionism, which has ruled Israel almost continuously for the last five decades, has gained interest in the research as well, but its researchers seem to disagree, and it is difficult to point to a uniform trend in its examination.

Shumsky returns to the roots of the revisionist ideology to point out the changes that have taken place over the years. Thus, for example, his emphasis on the preference of the autonomous model for resolving the plight of the Jews in the “early” writings of Jabotinsky’s undermines the “well known” linkage between the right and the claim to a Jewish state over the Greater Israel (Shumsky, 2019). On the other hand, Tamir (2018) emphasizes the formation of a Hebrew fascism, already in the days of the Yishuv, which was partially influenced by what was happening in Europe at the same time, but had developed its own unique characteristics. Others predate the linkage between the right and Jewish religion to the days of Jabotinsky in the 1930s, contrary to the common knowledge that it was Menachem Begin who led his movement to the alliance with the religious-traditional camp (Shilon, 2020).

Even with regard to the current right-wing developments, opinions are divided: some seek to understand it in relation to the conservative worldview since the days of Abba Ahimeir and the “Brit Ha’biryunim underground (Bergamin, 2021); Some emphasize the major difference between the American-conservative view and right-wing thought of today (Sagiv, 2021), and some see the current right as a new phenomenon, “neo-Zionist”, resulting from the internalization of neo-liberal logic into Israeli society (Dayan, 2022). On the other hand, it can be argued that the Zionist racist right arose in response to the radicalism that has developed within the progressive left in the United States since the 1960s (Magid, 2022). Others seek to discuss the politics of identity in order to refute the familiar identification between the Mizrahim and the Likud (Levy, Sporta and Rosenthal, 2022).

These are different schools of thoughts, some of which conflicted with the others, which also raise a methodological question: should we expand the discussion on the current Zionist right to a global theoretical context, or should we return to the Zionist archives to look for its sources?

Is there a continuum from Jabotinsky up to the days of Netanyahu, or are changes that have taken place in the history of the right should be at the center of the research?

A special issue of “Israel” – multidisciplinary journal, published by the Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel at Tel Aviv University – seeks to broader the discussion about these options, and more.

We invite studies regarding the origins of the right (Messianic? Nationalist? Religious? Secular?); its current patterns of politics and ideology (Neo-liberal? Anti-establishment?); and its relations to external influences and ideologies (Conservatism? Populism? Middle Eastern?). In doing so, we also encourage social/cultural examination of it, including its relationship with the “non-ideological” center parties and perceptions. We also seek to understand its sociological composition, as it has shaped and changed over the years, and the impact of it on current right-wing politics. 

Out of a preference for comparative research, we encourage scholars to dive into other angles derived from the issue of right-wing Zionism: The relationship between the original right and the Canaanite movement; The attitude of the right to the Islamic world and to the Palestinians; Right-wing leadership; Right-wing opposition to the right (Israel Eldad and Hillel Kook, for example); The right and the media; The settlers; The geography of the right; Right-wing literature and more.

The articles will be published in Hebrew, and should be between 5,000 and 8,000 words in length. Relevant essays of about 2000 -3000 words can also be offered. The articles will be peer-reviewed.


Dmitry, Shumsky, 2018. Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Tamir, Dan, 2018. Hebrew Fascism in Palestine, 1922-1942, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke.

Shilon, Avi, 2020. “More than Poetry and Music: How and why the secular Jabotinsky adopted religiosity as a solution to the crisis of the liberal”, Jewish Studies Quarterly, Vol. 27, No.3, pp 288-297

Bergamin, Peter, 2021. The Making of the Israeli Far-Right, London: Bloomsbury Publishing

Sagiv, Asaf. “The weird case of radicle conservatism”, Hazman Hazeh, Van-Leer Institute, on-line, May 2020. 

Dayan, Hilla. “Neo-Zionism: Portrait of a Contemporary Hegemony”, Theory and Criticism, 52, 2020, pp 87-103.

Magid, Shaul, 2021. Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical. Princeton University Press.‏

Levy, Gal, Rosenthal, Maoz and Ishak Sporta, 2022. “Ethnic Demons and Class Specters: An Update on Ethnic and Class Voting in Israel”, The Elections in Israel, 2019-2021, Israel Democracy Institute and Routledge, (forthcoming)