Inside the language planner's head: Tactical responses to a mass immigration

Abstract

To add a sudden 10% to its population in the form of 0.5 million Soviet migrants, professionalised and wedded to Russian culture, would test any monolingual society. Faced with this, Israel's traditional Hebrew-enforcement policy in the Ingathering of the Diaspora is apparently in retreat. Israel is now officially committing large resources to fostering an immigrant language as a channel of information, education and culture. This study documents and evaluates this policy shift, with particular reference to the procedures and rationales of decision makers themselves. In 1993-94 I conducted interviews across central and local government and quasi-official agencies. Instead of a centralised language policy, I found a multiplicity of individual Russian-language initiatives and creative budgeting within ministries and agencies, made possible by the privatisation of absorption and policy fragmentation. These measures were widely portrayed as an emergency tactic for coping with the scale and alien nature of the influx, while maintaining traditional strategies of hebraisation. Vote-catching and budget-boosting have also played a part, helped by the low level of administrative and public opposition (reflecting the general decline in Hebraic nation-building ideology). This is evidence of a powerful faith in the instrumental motive for acquiring a host language, however low the immigrants' integrative motive may be. However, a positive promotion of Russian culture in some quarters points to changes of a strategic kind.

Learning to be seen: the depiction of encounters between Israeli and newcomer children in children’s literature

“…It is this notion of aliyah as physical and moral ascent that inspired and gave shape to modern, political Zionism (Smith, 1995, p. 12). In spite of a certain shift from a 'melting pot' ideology to one of 'cultural pluralism' over the last few decades, manifest not only in changing discourse but also in some aspects of policy towards newcomers (Glinert, 1995;Kalekin-Fishman, 2004), as we shall see, the idea that settling in Israel requires a physical and moral transformation-a 're-making of the self' (Paine, 1993, 226)-continues to pervade the understandings that Israelis bring to bear on their portrayals and perceptions of newcomers. Just how these processes of 're-making of the self' are depicted in stories of contemporary Jewish immigration to Israel in children's literature is the subject of this paper.…”

Nation and Ethnic Identity Self-Definitions in a Canadian Language Class

“…Glinert (1995) discussed mixed attitudes toward the huge influx of Russian immigrants to Israel as that society dealt with an emergency situation of immigration absorption beginning in the 1980s. Russians were described as moving to Israel because of fear and economics rather than Zionism or an integrative desire to acculturate.…”

Resetting the rules of the game: Language preferences and social relations of work between Russian immigrants and veteran professionals in an Israeli organization

“…Faced with the massive comeback of the Russian language, the Israeli establishment had to adopt (for the first time in recent history) an immigrant language as an official tool of information, education and cultural production. It did so in the hope that this temporary compromise would facilitate the integration of the newcomers (Glinert, 1995).…”