Immigrant Acculturation and Transnationalism: Israelis in the United States and Europe Compared

This article examines relations between social integration into host societies, religio‐ethnic acculturation into group belonging, and ties to home country among Israeli émigrés in the United States and Europe. I use data from a 2009–2010 Internet survey into which I incorporated country‐contextual characteristics. The results of multivariate analyses show that a social integration combining duration of residence abroad and local citizenship enhances religio‐ethnic identification. Another measure of integration, social networks, deters group behaviors. All measures of general integration inhibit attachment to the home country, whereas religio‐ethnic acculturation is largely insignificant for transnationalism. The religiosity of the new country does not influence immigrants’ religio‐ethnic patterns or homeland attachment. Insofar as group size is a significant determinant of particularistic behaviors, it weakens them. The more policy‐based opportunities newcomers receive, the more they dissociate from group behaviors and homeland ties. Irrespective of individual and contextual factors, living in the United States encourages group affiliation more than living in Europe does. The results are discussed in reference to four working hypotheses—marginalization, integration, assimilation, and separation—and from a U.S.‐European comparative perspective.     

Exclusive and inclusive protest in Europe: Investigating values,support for democracy,and life conditions

Dissatisfaction with the economic situation and perceived governmental inefficacy in regard to the financial crisis has spawned a widespread feeling of political distrust across Europe. This distrust has been translated into protests against institutional authority that aims at either expanding democratic procedures or supporting xenophobic and populist measures. This research uses European Social Survey data to compare exclusive and inclusive protesters with regard to a number of personal and social values, attitudes toward democratic principles, and different life conditions and socio‐economic resources. It also considers contextual factors to investigate how different protesters' profiles are interwoven with socio‐economic conditions. The results of a multilevel latent profile analysis show that exclusive and inclusive protesters, despite sharing similar levels of political distrust, differ with regard to key values and political attitudes, and these differences are related to individual and collective living conditions. We argue that unfavourable living conditions play a non‐negligible role in increasing the probability of easy (i.e., populist) scapegoat political attitudes. Further support for this hypothesis is provided by the cross‐country analysis, which shows that higher levels of exclusive protest are present in countries that were characterized by worse living conditions before the economic crisis.     

Suggestion,persuasion and work: Psychotherapies in communist Europe

Abstract

This article traces what recent research and primary sources tell us about psychotherapy in Communist Europe, and how it survived both underground and above the surface. In particular, I will elaborate on the psychotherapeutic techniques that were popular across the different countries and language cultures of the Soviet sphere, with a particular focus upon the Cold War period. This article examines the literature on the mixed fortunes of psychoanalysis and group therapies in the region. More specifically, it focuses upon the therapeutic modalities such as work therapy, suggestion and rational therapy, which gained particular popularity in the Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The latter two approaches had striking similarities with parallel developments in behavioural and cognitive therapies in the West. In part, this was because clinicians on both sides of the ‘iron curtain’ drew upon shared European traditions from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, this article argues that in the Soviet sphere, those promoting these approaches appropriated socialist thought as a source of inspiration and justification, or at the very least, as a convenient political shield.     

Orthodox Christianity as a transnational religion: theoretical,historical and comparative considerations

In this article I analyse Orthodox Christianity as a transnational religion. In the first section I develop a theoretical argument concerning the relationship among diaspora, transnationalism and Orthodoxy. Seen through these lenses, transnationalism represents a newfound situation connected to the epochal shift from empires to nation-states. I then give a historical overview of demographic trends which shows that in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries millions of Orthodox emigrated to North America and Western Europe; while large Orthodox groups were created in the USA by the early twentieth century, the majority of Orthodox immigrants to Canada, Australia and Western Europe are post-1945 arrivals. I then offer a brief overview of the situation of Orthodox transnationalism in the post-Soviet space since 1989, and argue that in contrast to that situation, it is the experience of migration that is most accurately captured by the label of religious transnationalism. Lastly, I conduct an initial comparison of North American and European experiences. The current fragmentation of Orthodox jurisdictions reflects the creation of autonomous church organisations or groups of parishes that extend the jurisdictions of Mother Churches into the host states. I contemplate the consequences of religious transnationalism for future developments.     

A virtual training institute in Eastern Europe

This is a short outline of the development of psychoanalysis and of analytic training in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The Han Groen Prakken Psychoanalytic Institute for Eastern Europe was founded by the IPA and the EPF in 2002 to organize and coordinate this. The activity of such an unusual training institute, virtual and time-limited up to the birth of new IPA study groups, is described with the problems it has had to face, from shuttle analysis to research of this unusual training, from initial outreach activity to formation of new analytic groups, from unavoidable plurality of analytic approaches of an international staff to the need for systematic teaching, from criteria for selection of candidates in such a large area with many languages, cultures and histories, to the integration of new analysts and groups in the international analytic community. These problems are part of the challenge implicit in the globalization, with its unavoidable push to enlarge to the whole humanity the psychoanalytic theory and praxis. Such an experience is now used in Latin America, but may also soon have its application in other continents. Freedom of mind is a basic need of all humans and psychoanalysis still has much to say about this.     

Pragmatic Dogma: Understanding the Ideological Continuities in Iran's Response to the Charlie Hebdo Attacks

ABSTRACT

Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie cemented Iran's space within Western discourses surrounding blasphemy and Islam. The fatwa has earned its place within the polarizing debate between free speech and religious tolerance, which fundamentally serves the political ambitions of those involved. This article therefore argues that, in order to understand accusations of blasphemy in Iran, one must address the political concerns in which the accusation takes place since these reveal Iran's tendency towards pragmatic dogma – the practice of meeting the needs of the state in a way that accords with its religious ideology. The responses of Iranian officials to the Charlie Hebdo killings in 2015 provide a useful case study for the analysis of this pragmatic dogma, since the Islamic Republic pursued a different approach to the Charlie Hebdo “blasphemy” from that which it had followed with Rushdie. Instead of condoning the killings, Iran's political and religious elite chose to condemn the actions of both the cartoonists and the gunmen, without outlining a punishment. The article will argue that this case demonstrates many of the continuing themes in Iran's approach to blasphemy, since the Charlie Hebdo cartoons have largely been used to reinforce the Islamic Republic's overall worldview.     

Religion and local politics in Southern Europe: a research agenda

This article brings to a conclusion the series of three special sections published in 2015 and 2016 by Religion, State and Society on ‘Religion and local politics in southern Europe’. We set up a research agenda on the interactions between religion and local politics in Southern Europe. In doing so, we focus on the localisation of religion, including religious debates, and on the impact of the recent economic crisis. More specifically, we address the local as a contested concept, the multilevel governance of religion as a scalar opportunity structure – in relation to the transnational dimension of religious actors – the effects of such changes in the welfare landscape and the impact of the economic crisis on the activities and strategies of religious actors in Southern Europe. Our research agenda focuses on the interactions between two main dimensions: the territorial impact of political and economic changes, and the multiscalar schemes of territorial governance.     

Influences of Adaptation to Communist Rule on Value Priorities in Eastern Europe

The basic value priorities prevalent in Eastern Europe are studied in a cross-national comparison. Analyses of the implications of adaptation to life circumstances under communist regimes lead to the hypotheses that East European samples are likely to attribute especially high importance to conservatism and hierarchy values and low importance to egalitarianism, intellectual and affective autonomy, and mastery values. The same hypotheses apply to differences between countries within Eastern Europe in which there was greater or lesser communist penetration. These hypotheses are largely supported with data both from samples of school teachers and of university students from nine Eastern European and 12 Western European countries. Various possible alternative explanations are discussed: national economic level, religion, earlier shared history, effects of totalitarianism, and distinctiveness of Western Europe.