On doing ‘being ordinary’: women's accounts of BRCA testing and maternal responsibility

Abstract

In recent months, genetic testing for the breast and ovarian cancer genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, has again hit the headlines in the UK press. Four women, all from families with a strong breast cancer pedigree, have asked the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority for permission to screen their embryos for BRCA1/2 mutations. Although this may be a dramatic example of parental responsibility, other studies have shown that women at risk of BRCA-related cancers frequently cite responsibility to others as an important influence on their testing and treatment decision making. In this paper, I explore the decision-making explanations that women at risk of BRCA-related breast and ovarian cancer provide when accounting for their decision to undergo genetic testing. In doing so, I treat women's accounts critically, and examine how and why the women verbalize their explanations in the manner that they do.     

Multicultural society and everyday cultural racism: second generation of Ethiopian Jews in Israel's ‘crisis of modernization’

Abstract

The core of this article sets out to examine the extent to which a multicultural society can prevent cultural racism, which, like multiculturalism, is by definition based on a culture of diversity and separation. The ‘first modernity’ was organized along national lines, with a centralist state that opted to create an essentialist and uncontested national identity. Immigrants, especially those who came from ‘third world’ countries, were expected to undergo a process of assimilation, and to integrate into the dominant culture by relinquishing their particular past and tradition. Multiculturalism, which emerged historically as a criticism of that perspective, aims at creating a kaleidoscope of associations and cultural communities, which inevitably presents a challenge to the one ‘truth’ of the nation-state with the argument that this ‘truth’ favours some groups over others. Within the multicultural model, identity politics of various groups is perceived as a means to achieve recognition, acceptance, respect and even public affirmation of differences. However, do multicultural society and identity-related differences provide a solution to cultural racism as well?

Investigating the second generation of the Ethiopian Jews, who migrated to Israel during its transformation from ethno-national republicanism to a neo-liberal, multicultural society, can help answer this question. By presenting their patterns of association, character of protest activities and the newly formed hybrid identity that Ethiopian youth have developed as a means to liberate themselves from a discriminating reality, and by examining the Others’ reaction to that challenge, this article uncovers certain mechanisms and methods of action through which a multicultural society, having a thin and mild version of multiculturalism, does not diminish cultural racism, particularly its everyday non-institutional version, but in fact augments it.     

The racial formation of medieval Jews: a challenge to the field

Social science discourse on race and racism has limited itself through processes of periodization and temporal constructions of racial differences, and recent scholars continue to posit race and racism as effects of modernity rather than investigating its development prior to modernity. This article looks to present a challenge to contemporary understandings of the phenomena of race and racism through a historical investigation of Jews' relationship to medieval Christendom. Through the framework of racial formation (Omi and Winant [1986] 1994) I look to show how race as a marker of both corporeal difference and socio-political consequence was formulated over time through a rearticulation of Church doctrine which first positioned the inferiority of the Jew within their religious practices, to one which located their inferiority as inherently part of their soul and manifest upon their bodies – from fixable through conversion to incurable and diseased.     

Gender and ethnicity in the Zionist nation-building project: the case of Hannah Helena Thon

According to Nira Yuval-Davis some of the most important ways in which women are involved in national projects concern their capacity as biological and cultural reproducers of the nation and guardians of its boundaries. In this article I argue that Jewish women in Mandate Palestine not only guarded and reproduced national boundaries, but also redefined them. Middle-class women's organizations acted as agents of ‘nationalization’ and westernization among Mizrahi (lit. Oriental) Jewish communities, who were largely excluded from the imagined community of the nation by Ashkenazi Zionists. I explain the conjunction of gender and ethnicity in the Zionist nation-building project through the life and letters of journalist and social activist Hannah Helena Thon. Two main factors serve as an explanation: the countries from which the leaders of the organizations emerged and their traditions of social work; and the position of middle-class women in the Jewish social field.     

Making Technology Familiar: Orthodox Jews and Infertility SUPPORT, Advice, and Inspiration

This paper examines how orthodox Jews use traditional strategies and new media simultaneously to cope with infertility in the age of new reproductive technologies. Not only have they used the Internet to establish support, information, and educational networks, but also they have created frameworks for unique professional collaborations among rabbis, doctors, and clinic personnel in order to ensure that their fertility treatments are conducted with strict attention to Jewish legal concerns, particularly with regard to incest, adultery, and traditional practices regarding bodily emissions. Throughout these processes, they have innovated a hybrid language for describing and explaining infertility treatments that blends Hebrew prayers, Yiddish aphorisms, English slang, Gematria (numerology), and biomedical terminology. By using idiomatic language and folk practice, orthodox Jews construct a unique terrain that shapes and makes familiar their experience and understanding of fertility treatment. Biomedicine in this context is understood as a set of tools and strategies that can be readily appropriated and harnessed to a particular set of individual and collective goals.     

Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Comparing Mental Illness Narratives of Haredi Male Patients and their Rabbis

By comparing versions of mental illness narratives – told by Haredi (Utraorthodox Jews) male patients of a mental health clinic in Israel and by their rabbis – this paper relates to two distinct, yet interrelated, theoretical questions: the place and agency of narrators, and the tension between experience and representation. A pair of narratives exemplifies a pattern in which the patients (Talmudic students) tell a narrative of a sudden breakdown related to a dramatic meeting with a non-human figure (often, a woman) or force. Their rabbis, by contrast, tell a narrative that emphasizes their students' mundane symptoms, ``abnormal' and ``immoral' behavior, and use a local adaptation of a Western psychological explanatory model. A dynamic of inclusion and exclusion emerges as students are seeking legitimization and avoidance of stigma, while their rabbis are silencing themes that challenge social and cultural orders. The different narratives are further interpreted in the context of the micropolitics of the interviews and of identity politics between the Haredim and secular Israelis. This social dynamics shows how differently placed social actors-narrators-interpreters construct differently contested and diverse cultural narratives of a seemingly shared reality.     

Ideologies of discrimination: personhood and the ‘genetic group’

‘Ideologies of Discrimination’ considers the implications of the new genetics for understandings of personhood and for understandings of the relationship between people in groups. In particular, the essay delineates and examines the emerging notion of a ‘genetic group’ and considers the social implications of redefining families, racial groups and ethnic groups through express, and often exclusive, reference to a shared genome. One consequence of such redefinition has been the justification and elaboration of stigmatizing images of and discrimination against such groups—especially those, such as Jews and African-Americans, that have long been identified with specific somatic characteristics. A few worrisome trends begin to emerge in the response of the American legal system to the notion of genetic groups. Among these is a shift in the locus of privacy and identity from the autonomous individual to the genetic group. This shift challenges (and threatens) long-standing Western values (including equality and liberty) that depend upon the ideological centrality of autonomous individuality.     

A socioeconomic analysis of secular trends in isonymy in the Jewish community of Gibraltar: 1820 to 1939

This study examines secular trends in the magnitude of inbreeding in the Jewish community of Gibraltar over a 120 year period. Analysis of isonymous unions by socioeconomic status revealed distinctive differences between high versus mid/low status unions. Factors responsible for the elevated rate of inbreeding among the professional/mercantile class and its secular trend are discussed.     

Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated the 14th century

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