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In 73 A.D., legend has it, 960 Jewish rebels under siege in the ancient desert fortress of Masada committed suicide rather than surrender to a Roman legion. Recorded in only one historical source, the story of Masada was obscure for centuries. In The Masada Myth, Israeli sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda tracks the process by which Masada became an ideological symbol for the State of Israel, the dramatic subject of movies and miniseries, a shrine venerated by generations of Zionists and Israeli soldiers, and the most profitable tourist attraction in modern Israel. Ben-Yehuda describes how, after nearly 1800 years, the long, complex, and unsubstantiated narrative of Josephus Flavius was edited a...
When political geography changes, how do reorganized or newly formed states justify their rule and create a sense of shared history for their people? Often, the essays in Selective Remembrances reveal, they turn to archaeology, employing the field and its findings to develop nationalistic feelings and forge legitimate distinctive national identities. Examining such relatively new or reconfigured nation-states as Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, India, and Thailand, Selective Remembrances shows how states invoke the remote past to extol the glories of specific peoples or prove claims to ancestral homelands. Religion has long played a key role in such efforts, and the contributors take care to demonstrate the tendency of many people, including archaeologists themselves, to view the world through a religious lens—which can be exploited by new regimes to suppress objective study of the past and justify contemporary political actions. The wide geographic and intellectual range of the essays in Selective Remembrances will make it a seminal text for archaeologists and historians.
Ben-Yehuda presents an in-depth inquiry into the nature and patterns of political assassinations and executions by Jews in Palestine and Israel. Extensive empirical evidence is used to analyze the social construction of violent and aggressive human behavior, using a sociology of deviance perspective. Political assassinations and executions are placed within their particular cultural matrix to describe how this specific form of killing has been conceptualized as part of an alternative system of justice. "The taking of a human life is generally regarded as the ultimate evil. Given this fact, it is important to examine and understand how it is explained, justified, and cloaked in a 'vocabulary ...
The state of Israel was established in 1948 as a Jewish democracy, without a legal separation between religion and the state. Ever since, the tension between the two has been a central political, social, and moral issue in Israel, resulting in a cultural conflict between secular Jews and the fundamentalist, ultra-orthodox Haredi community. What is the nature of this cultural conflict and how is it managed? In Theocratic Democracy, Nachman Ben-Yehuda examines more than fifty years of media-reported unconventional and deviant behavior by members of the Haredi community. Ben-Yehuda finds not only that this behavior has happened increasingly often over the years, but also that its most salient f...
A clear-eyed examination of research misconduct, and how efforts to expose and prevent it affect scientists and universities
Packed with new examples and material, this second edition providesa fully up-to-date exploration of the genesis, dynamics, and demiseof moral panics and their impacts on the societies in which theytake place. Packed with updated and recent examples including terrorism,the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Towers, school shootings, flagburning, and the early-2000s resurgence of the “sexslave” scare Includes a new chapter on the media, currently regarded as amajor component of the moral panic Devotes a chapter to addressing criticisms of the first editionas well as the moral panics concept itself Written by long-established experts in the field Designed to fit both self-contained courses on moral panics andwider courses on deviance
Betrayal and Treason examines betrayals as violations of both trust and loyalty. It offers a typology based on membership in or out of collectives within the contexts of secrecy/non-secrecy. The book shows that betrayals include such categories as espionage, whistle-blowing, infidelity, political turncoating, conversions, collaboration with occupying forces, informers, mutinies, defections, strike-breakers, professional, intellectual, and international betrayals, human rights violations, surveillance, assassinations, and state sponsored terror. Each one of the categories is presented with enticing, stimulating, and appropriate real-life illustrations and narratives.The book focuses on treaso...
European, US, and Israeli historians and social scientists try to skirt the political controversies involved in the origin of Israel to offer academic perspectives on Jewish nationalism, of which Zionism comprised a prominent alternative beginning in the late 19th century. They look in particular at aspects that have been undervalued in examining J.