Demographic behaviour of adults of mixed ethnic ancestry: Jews in Israel

We examine demographic behaviour of Jewish adults of mixed ethnic ancestry, relative to those of the two major Jewish ethnic groups in Israel. Research has shown that for measures of socioeconomic status, such as educational attainment, outcomes for multi-ethnics are in between – and very close to the middle of – those associated with the two major ethnic groups. We find that, in contrast, the marriage and fertility behaviour of multi-ethnic adults is nearly identical to that of the more socially advantaged ethnic group and quite distinct from that of the less advantaged ethnic group. Through multivariate analyses, we explore factors associated with families of origin, including socioeconomic status and cultural indicators of family norms, which are associated with these patterns. We discuss interpretations of our findings.     

Ecological memory at millennial time-scales: the importance of data constraints,species longevity and niche features

Ecological memory describes how antecedent conditions drive the dynamics of an ecological system. Palaeoecological records are paramount to understand ecological memory at millennial time-scales, but the concept is widely neglected in the literature, and a formal approach is lacking. Here, we fill such a gap by introducing a quantitative framework for ecological memory in palaeoecology, and assessing how data constraints and taxa traits shape ecological memory patterns. We simulate the population dynamics and pollen abundance of 16 virtual taxa with different life and niche traits as a response to an environmental driver. The data is processed to mimic a realistic sediment deposition and sampled at increasing depth intervals. We quantify ecological memory with Random Forests, and assess how data properties and taxa traits shape ecological memory. We find that life-span and niche features modulate the relative importance of the antecedent values of the driver and the pollen abundance over periods of 240 yr and longer. Additionally, we find that accumulation rate and decreasing pollen-sampling resolution inflate the importance of antecedent pollen abundance. Our results suggest that: 1) ecological memory patterns are sensitive to varying accumulation rates. A better understanding on the numerical basis of this effect may enable the assimilation of ecological memory concepts and methods in palaeoecology; 2) incorporating niche theory and models is essential to better understand the nature of ecological memory patterns at millennial time-scales. 3) Long-lived generalist taxa are highly decoupled from the environmental signal. This finding has implications on how we interpret the abundance-environment relationship of real taxa with similar traits, and how we use such knowledge to forecast their distribution or reconstruct past climate.     

When the past matters: memory politics and ethnic relations in Poland

This article identifies the conditions under which the interplay of past and present enables or constrains political action in the Polish public sphere. Using data from the Polish quality broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza, I account for the puzzles in the Jewish, German and Ukrainian minorities' memory work. The study reveals that history empowers ethnic groups differently, in the function of the certification by external allies, diverse salience of the arguments raised and the state's distinct memory projects. Namely, the high resonance of the Jews' claims that seize on the Holocaust narrative and official acknowledgement of their past allow the group to escape the limits of their narrow organizational capacities. In contrast, the state's rejection of the Germans' and Ukrainians' interpretations of the past has the effect of channelling minority claims towards the fight for acknowledgement.     

Minority status in an ethnic democracy: The status of the Arab minority in Israel

It is commonly assumed that democracy in deeply divided societies takes either a majoritarian or consociational form. While the state in both types is ethnically neutral, there are some countries that combine viable democratic institutions with institutionalized ethnic dominance. The article introduces this third, so far not recognized, general type of ‘ethnic democracy’ and demonstrates its utility for Israel in treating its Arab minority. The tensions and contradictions in Israel's dual character as a Jewish democratic state give rise to five Arab demands that the Jewish majority reject: making Israel non‐Jewish and non‐Zionist, accepting Palestinian nationalism, lifting all restrictions on Arab individual rights, granting Arabs certain national collective rights and incorporating Arabs into the national power structure. Each Arab demand is discussed in detail and the rationale for Jewish objections is spelled out. The problem can be reduced, but not resolved, by establishing a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for the Palestinian people and by according Israeli Arabs the status of a Palestinian national minority within the Jewish state. These issues are not unique to Israel but rather common to ethnic democracies. It is concluded that the Israeli experience is becoming increasingly relevant to states which are democratizing but keeping appreciable ethnic dominance.     

Issues in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis

Abstract

Whereas in many instances the use of ethnic and religious categories as well as assumptions about the proclaimed homogeneity of populations in the context of biobanks have spurred discussions and public debates in other Western countries, these categories have not been problematized publicly in Israel. This paper argues that this is due to the important function of ethnicity, religious affiliation and family origin in structuring the public sphere. It should be seen in a political context in which the maintenance of clear boundaries between population sub-groups portrays itself as a necessary means for the survival of the Jewish collective. Israeli biobanks, although they do not create new collective identities, serve as important tools to ‘preserve’ the boundaries of existing ones. In this light, biobanks can be seen as repositories for the ‘genetic components’ of the collective body.     

The offspring of interethnic marriage: Relations of children with paternal and maternal grandparents

Over the last decades 15 to 20 per cent of all Jewish marriages in Israel were between members of the two different ethnic groups, the Orientals and Ashkenazis. At present at least 15 per cent of the school population is of mixed ethnic origin. This article gives an account of a study involving 136 children in sixth to eighth grade belonging to this group (boys and girls, hypergamous and hypogamous marriages in equal numbers) and tries to answer questions as to their distance or proximity to either ethnic group by probing the children's knowledge about and relations with their paternal and maternal grandparents and their attitudes towards them. The results of the investigation show that there seems to be a small inclination in favour of the Ashkenazi side, but that generally the children maintain close connections with both sides of the family and the outstanding finding, given the higher status of the Ashkenazis in Israeli society, is how small the difference is in the relationship of the children with either side. It is concluded that this finding is an indication of the increasing integration within Israel"s Jewish society.     

Bayesian inference for identifying interaction rules in moving animal groups

The emergence of similar collective patterns from different self-propelled particle models of animal groups points to a restricted set of "universal" classes for these patterns. While universality is interesting, it is often the fine details of animal interactions that are of biological importance. Universality thus presents a challenge to inferring such interactions from macroscopic group dynamics since these can be consistent with many underlying interaction models. We present a Bayesian framework for learning animal interaction rules from fine scale recordings of animal movements in swarms. We apply these techniques to the inverse problem of inferring interaction rules from simulation models, showing that parameters can often be inferred from a small number of observations. Our methodology allows us to quantify our confidence in parameter fitting. For example, we show that attraction and alignment terms can be reliably estimated when animals are milling in a torus shape, while interaction radius cannot be reliably measured in such a situation. We assess the importance of rate of data collection and show how to test different models, such as topological and metric neighbourhood models. Taken together our results both inform the design of experiments on animal interactions and suggest how these data should be best analysed.     

Self-organization of collective escape in pigeon flocks

Bird flocks under predation demonstrate complex patterns of collective escape. These patterns may emerge by self-organization from local interactions among group-members. Computational models have been shown to be valuable for identifying what behavioral rules may govern such interactions among individuals during collective motion. However, our knowledge of such rules for collective escape is limited by the lack of quantitative data on bird flocks under predation in the field. In the present study, we analyze the first GPS trajectories of pigeons in airborne flocks attacked by a robotic falcon in order to build a species-specific model of collective escape. We use our model to examine a recently identified distance-dependent pattern of collective behavior: the closer the prey is to the predator, the higher the frequency with which flock members turn away from it. We first extract from the empirical data of pigeon flocks the characteristics of their shape and internal structure (bearing angle and distance to nearest neighbors). Combining these with information on their coordination from the literature, we build an agent-based model adjusted to pigeons’ collective escape. We show that the pattern of turning away from the predator with increased frequency when the predator is closer arises without prey prioritizing escape when the predator is near. Instead, it emerges through self-organization from a behavioral rule to avoid the predator independently of their distance to it. During this self-organization process, we show how flock members increase their consensus over which direction to escape and turn collectively as the predator gets closer. Our results suggest that coordination among flock members, combined with simple escape rules, reduces the cognitive costs of tracking the predator while flocking. Such escape rules that are independent of the distance to the predator can now be investigated in other species. Our study showcases the important role of computational models in the interpretation of empirical findings of collective behavior.     

The Multiple Meanings of Jewish Genes

This article addresses contemporary social challenges created by new genetic research on Jews and by Jews, and its implications for the meanings of Jewish identity, on both the individual and the collective levels. The article begins with a brief overview of selective genetic studies of Jewish populations and the controversies they have generated. It continues with an examination of the emerging field of Jewish genetic demography, which employs genetic tests to identify lineages, claim kin, and support Jewish historical and political claims. Here the article explores how Jewish genetic demographers interpret genetic studies to reinforce oral tradition and Biblical prophecy about the origins of the Jews and their experience in the Diaspora. This research is then juxtaposed with debates that emerge from contemporary rabbinic deliberations over the appropriate uses of new reproductive technologies, debates that, contrary to the assertions of Jewish genetic demographers, suggest genes are believed to possess limited ability to confer or create Jewishness in the traditional rabbinic imagination. In the final section of this article, a debate is staged about contemporary biomedical practices that allow for the exchange and transfer of body parts and bodily substances, as a strategy for challenging genetic notions of Jewish identity.     

Re-making the majority? Ethnic New Zealanders in the 2006 census

Abstract

The national census is often seen as a site of struggle for minorities seeking recognition and equality. Much less is known about the conditions under which ethnic majorities are galvanized to stake identity claims in the census. This article examines recent trends in New Zealand where an increasing number of people from the dominant New Zealand European group are redefining themselves as ethnic New Zealanders. Drawing from the literature on ethnic boundaries, we theorize the factors underlying the surge in New Zealander identification, and present census data to demonstrate its selective appeal. We also review patterns of national naming in North America and Australia to show that the New Zealander phenomenon reflects a broader shift by settler state majorities to reimagine their identities. The implications for ethnic counting in other contexts are briefly considered.     

Ethnic identity on display: West Indian youth and the creation of ethnic boundaries in high school

The black immigrant population in New York City has grown exponentially since 1990, such that West Indians now compose the majority of the black population in several neighbourhoods. This article examines how this ethnic density manifests among youth in high school, and how it has influenced ethnic identity formation among second-generation West Indians. My findings are based on twenty-four interviews and eight months of participant observation in two Brooklyn high schools from 2003 to 2004. The results show that in both schools, Caribbean island identities have become a ‘cool’ commodity within peer groups. Further, although it was important to express pride in one's island identity, these young people often blurred their national origin boundaries by drawing on Jamaican popular culture as way of projecting a unified ‘West Indian identity’. The research also uncovers evidence of a de-stigmatization of Haitianness as a way to incorporate them as cultural insiders into the larger Caribbean collective.     

Making sense of Jewish ethnicity: Identification patterns of New Zealanders of mixed parentage

Modern social life is sometimes characterized as ‘post‐traditional’, an environment where personal identity is continually reconstructed. Concepts of ethnic identity on the other hand usually evoke some notion of tradition, continuity with the past, and intersubjectivity. This article discusses the personal accounts of Jewishness given by a sample of New Zealanders with ‘mixed’ (Jewish and gentile) backgrounds. It explores and analyses their use of themes that come from both modernity and Jewish tradition and defines the different types of identification implicit in their accounts. Particular attention is paid to how these kinds of identification are transmitted, because the literature (on both Jewishness and ethnicity in general) contains debates about the persistence of different expressions of identity. I conclude that a substantial dispersal of Jewish identity has occurred in New Zealand which apparently contradictory theoretical positions are useful in explaining. This suggests that a more holistic perspective is required to account adequately for the diversity of ethnic identity in contemporary society.     

From social network (centralized vs. decentralized) to collective decision-making (unshared vs. shared consensus)

Relationships we have with our friends, family, or colleagues influence our personal decisions, as well as decisions we make together with others. As in human beings, despotism and egalitarian societies seem to also exist in animals. While studies have shown that social networks constrain many phenomena from amoebae to primates, we still do not know how consensus emerges from the properties of social networks in many biological systems. We created artificial social networks that represent the continuum from centralized to decentralized organization and used an agent-based model to make predictions about the patterns of consensus and collective movements we observed according to the social network. These theoretical results showed that different social networks and especially contrasted ones--star network vs. equal network--led to totally different patterns. Our model showed that, by moving from a centralized network to a decentralized one, the central individual seemed to lose its leadership in the collective movement's decisions. We, therefore, showed a link between the type of social network and the resulting consensus. By comparing our theoretical data with data on five groups of primates, we confirmed that this relationship between social network and consensus also appears to exist in animal societies.     

Quantifying and tracing information cascades in swarms

We propose a novel, information-theoretic, characterisation of cascades within the spatiotemporal dynamics of swarms, explicitly measuring the extent of collective communications. This is complemented by dynamic tracing of collective memory, as another element of distributed computation, which represents capacity for swarm coherence. The approach deals with both global and local information dynamics, ultimately discovering diverse ways in which an individual's spatial position is related to its information processing role. It also allows us to contrast cascades that propagate conflicting information with waves of coordinated motion. Most importantly, our simulation experiments provide the first direct information-theoretic evidence (verified in a simulation setting) for the long-held conjecture that the information cascades occur in waves rippling through the swarm. Our experiments also exemplify how features of swarm dynamics, such as cascades' wavefronts, can be filtered and predicted. We observed that maximal information transfer tends to follow the stage with maximal collective memory, and principles like this may be generalised in wider biological and social contexts.     

Ethnic cohesion and division among American Jews: The role of mass‐level and organizational politics

Mass‐level and organizational politics contribute both to ethnic cohesion and division among American Jews. Political cohesion at the mass level, measured by location on the liberal side of the mass political structure, serves as a structural source of ethnic cohesion for many American Jews who are not characterized by alternative structural and cultural sources of ethnic cohesion, as measured by embeddedness in structural and cultural networks of interaction. However, political divisions among American jews converge with religious divisions and with variations in structural and cultural cohesion and assimilation; consequently, politics provides one of several reinforcing cleavages in the American Jewish community. Individual‐level data from the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey are used to support these claims. A strong linkage exists between patterns of ethnic cohesion and division and the role of politics at the mass and organizational levels. Jewish organizations involved in politics share consensus across a wide range of political issues, contributing to political cohesion. However, political conflicts emerge among organizations representing different Jewish denominations, leading again to reinforcing religious and political divisions. These claims are supported by data collected from the published reports of an umbrella agency which seeks to coordinate political positions among American Jewish organizations     

Defining null expectations for animal site fidelity

Site fidelity—the tendency to return to previously visited locations—is widespread across taxa. Returns may be driven by several mechanisms, including memory, habitat selection, or chance; however, pattern-based definitions group different generating mechanisms under the same label of ‘site fidelity’, often assuming memory as the main driver. We propose an operational definition of site fidelity as patterns of return that deviate from a null expectation derived from a memory-free movement model. First, using agent-based simulations, we show that without memory, intrinsic movement characteristics and extrinsic landscape characteristics are key determinants of return patterns and that even random movements may generate substantial probabilities of return. Second, we illustrate how to implement our framework empirically to establish ecologically meaningful, system-specific null expectations for site fidelity. Our approach provides a conceptual and operational framework to test hypotheses on site fidelity across systems and scales.     

Religion,ethnicity and identity: former Soviet Christian immigrants in Israel

The social construction of ethnic and religious identities of Christian immigrants from the former Soviet Union (FSU) arriving in Israel under the Law of Return after 1990, and the role of churches in their social integration, are examined. As Israeli citizens actively involved in Christian churches, they challenge the Jewish character of the state, and the dynamics of their ethnic and religious identity should be understood in this unique context of reception. The analysis sheds light on the complex relationship between ethnic and religious identities and illustrates how different religious organizational configurations (Russian Orthodox and Greek churches) prompt immigrants to forge different patterns of identity along ethnic lines.     

Dentofacial pattern of two Jewish ethnic groups compared with accepted norms

The population of immigrant communities is often composed of various ethnic groups who may differ in their dentofacial pattern. The objective of this study was to define the dentofacial pattern of Jewish adolescents of Kurdish origin, and to compare it with another ethnic group and with accepted cephalometric norms. Lateral cephalograms of 20 individuals of both sexes, aged 11–13 years, with normal occlusion in the early permanent dentition, were chosen from the Jerusalem Growth Study material. The cephalograms were traced twice and were processed by means of a computer aided cephalometric program. Downs' as well as some other common cephalometric measurements were used for the analyses. Several comparisons were made: a) with an Ashkenazi (East-European Jewish) group; b) with the findings on non-Jewish Iranian youths of similar geographic background as our Kurdish group; c) with classical cephalometric standards. Close similarity was found with the Ashkenazi group and almost identical pattern of the non-Jewish Iranian youths of similar geographic background. The comparison with the classical cephalometric standards indicated a higher FMA, a more convex profile, accompanied by a mild skeletal Class II tendency and mandibular incisor proclination in our sample. Therefore it stands to reason that the classical North American cephalometric standards for its white population are not applicable in their totality for the clinical evaluation of the two Jewish ethnic groups examined. Thus establishment of specific norms for specific groups within a heterogeneous community is indicated. In addition, a tendency to accept a more convex profile as normal, as apparent from the review of the contemporary orthodontic literature, may suggest the desirability for a revision of the accepted strict norms for a harmonious dentofacial pattern. Based on a thesis submitted to the graduate faculty, Hebrew University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the DMD degree.