No abstract

This paper examines the role of African Initiated Churches (AICs) in the lives of African migrant laborers in Israel. Its aim is to attain a deeper understanding of religion and church affiliation among African migrant laborers in Israel from the perspective of the Africans themselves. It traces the creation and development of the AICs in Israel, including the various services and activities that the churches provided for their members in the social, economic and political arenas. It argues that the African churches in Israel occupied a particularly large and central place in their members' lives compared to migrant churches in other western diasporas, taking on roles of other traditional social, economic, political and civil actors in Africa. The paper examines the AICs' multiple adaptations to unique conditions in Israel and to the needs of their membership. Though many of the patterns identified are similar to those found in other diaspora communities, certain features of Israel and its society, mainly those connected to the Jewish identity of the State of Israel and the limited civic horizon open to non-Jews, made for substantial differences. These features forced Africans to create their own Afro-Christian space to fulfill their needs and became the key anchors in the spiritual, emotional and practical lives of the African migrants in Israel. Finally this article argues that the churches became the main space for the production of a sense of belonging within the Israeli civic context, in spite of the fact that the migrants' religious identities and institutions were not used as vehicles for recognition or channels for gaining legitimacy in Israel's public sphere.

The religious arena created in Israel by sub-Saharan African migrants from 1990-2008 was an expanded and flexible one which touched on complex questions related not only to what some may term "purely" religious themes but, among other issues, to identity and rights. The present paper compares two waves of migration, 1 the first arriving in Israel by air as tourists or pilgrims throughout the 1990s, mainly from West Africa, part of a larger worldwide expansion of African international labour migration; and the second, which started in 2005, of predominantly Sudanese and Eritreans, who entered the country illegally in search of asylum or work opportunities across its lax border with Egypt. While the former cohort deployed a religious rhetoric of attachment to the Holy Land, the latter invoked international human rights to claim their rights as refugees in addition to religious rhetoric. The paper considers the context and grounds for this shift in political tactics and rhetoric of migrant discursive stance vis-à-vis the state.

This article seeks to introduce a more complex understanding of family change in Israel, through the case study of Israeli blended families. Going beyond the research on blended families in Israel and elsewhere, we wish to focus our analysis on how blended families are displayed in contemporary Israeli society. The analytical stress on displaying enables us to discern the fluidity and creativity in contemporary family life in Israel, as well as the boundary work through which family members present their family, to themselves and to other audiences. By analyzing data from over 40 in-depth interviews with parents who formed a blended family unit, we argue that family members embody a fuzzy mindset, which does not confine to a state of either/or, and at the same time negotiates traditional nuclear models of the “natural” family inherent in Israeli society.

This article addresses ethical dilemmas linked to using in-depth interviews while researching blended families in Israel, mainly during the analysis phase and while getting interviewees' final written approval, prior to publication. Amongst the dilemmas presented are: should we publish statements that we thought might harm the interviewee even though we got their approval? Or those including pejorative statements on members of the interviewee's extended family who weren't asked for consent as they weren't interviewed? We bring several types of changes our interviewees requested and demonstrate how we responded, not always successfully. Finally, we rethink dilemmas related to the complex issues of confidentiality and consent and raise questions-still open-these dilemmas generate. We discuss our own frustrations vis-à-vis the power vested with our interviewees that might affect the quality of any research when too many requests for substantial changes are done as a precondition for a written approval.