‘I have two homelands’: constructing and managing Iranian Jewish and Persian Israeli identities

Jaspal, Rusi

doi:10.1080/13537121.2016.1140348

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 32 publications

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“…The individual is, thus, able to order the social environment and anticipate patterns of action and behavior in interactions with these stimuli. For instance, in work on antisemitism in Iran, it has been found that in circumstances where Iranian Jews are categorized by Iranian Muslims as fellow Iranians (that is, in terms of their national identity) they perceived a greater sense of belonging, acceptance and inclusion than when their Jewish identity is rendered salient (Jaspal, 2016). This can be attributed to the fact that people attenuate differences between stimuli within the same category (referred to as "accentuation") and that they accentuate differences between stimuli in different categories (that is "contrast").…”

Section: Social Identity Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Identity Theory

2017

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior

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Political psychology focuses upon a diverse range of contexts, including leadership, policy making, nationalism, racism, political extremism, war, genocide, voting, group mobilization and many others. Given the centrality of the social political group in many of these contexts, theories of intergroup relations have proven to be very useful in political psychology research. In attempting to elucidate the origins and mechanisms of discrimination and ingroup favoritism, the Polish-born British social psychologist Henri Tajfel, in collaboration with John Turner and some other European social psychologists, developed Social Identity Theory (SIT) in the 1970s, which has since become one of the most important theories of intergroup relations in social and political psychology. As a Jewish Holocaust survivor, Tajfel had himself witnessed some of the tragic consequences of social identification, ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation. He returned to his hometown after the Second World War to find that most of his family members had been murdered under the Nazi's genocidal extermination program against the Jews. Tajfel had personally experienced the process whereby people cease to be considered in terms of their individuality in favor of their group membership. In the case of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, their categorization as Jews, a highly stigmatized social group membership in the Nazi ideology, resulted in their demonization and mass murder. The evolution of social identity theory was part of a larger movement in the 1960s and 1970s to establish a European social psychology, distinct from the social psychology of the United States. This was a case of scholars, including Henri Tajfel, Serge Moscovici, and Willem Doise, launching a research movement that was political in intentions: establishing an alternative to what they saw as the 'individualistic' and 'reductionist' social psychology of the United States. In addition to launching the European Journal of Social Psychology in 1971, they published a series of books to develop a distinct European social psychology, starting with a kind of manifesto text entitled 'The Context of Social Psychology' (1972). Henri Tajfel, John Turner, and their associates set out to develop a theory that could explain the processes that can culminate in these extreme actions. Although the Social Identity Approach is often deployed as a theory of identity, he intended to develop a theory of intergroup relations. The theory was intended only to explain one aspect of the self, namely that part of "an individual's selfconcept which derives from his knowledge of his [or her] membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership" (Tajfel, 1978, p. 63). Accordingly, it goes without saying that the Social Identity Approach has proven a very useful tool for examining identification with racial, ethnic and national categories, given that these are social categories, as well as intergroup relations in these contexts. In this entry,...

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Section: Social Identity Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Identity Theory

2017

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior

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Demographic Aspects of Iranian Immigrants’ Integration in Israel

Hakimi¹

2023

Ethnic Religious Minorities in Iran

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Wannabe Israeli: immigrants wrestling with their identity

Dryjanska

Zlotnick

2019

Qual Quant

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While some people have no particular problems stating in a word or two how they selfidentify, others may struggle with this task, as it stirs up emotions, doubts, and deeper reflections. This paper proposes methodology for analysing short free-text comments in relation to immigrants' self-identification. It builds on a quantitative study concerning migration to Israel by English-speakers, concentrating on a qualitative analysis of their self-identification in the light of 249 free-text comments. The constructs of anchoring and objectification from the interdisciplinary theory of social representations guide the interpretation of results obtained in a two-step process: classical qualitative content analysis followed by the Multiple Correspondence Analysis. The findings demonstrate that at least for some immigrants in Israel, self-identification appears to be a complex process, in which single and hyphenated identifications concentrate more on the negative aspects or challenges of acculturation, while self-identifications based on religion and social role focus more on the positive view of giving advice to others.

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‘I have two homelands’: constructing and managing Iranian Jewish and Persian Israeli identities

Cited by 3 publications

References 32 publications

Social Identity Theory

Social Identity Theory

Demographic Aspects of Iranian Immigrants’ Integration in Israel

Wannabe Israeli: immigrants wrestling with their identity

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