This book presents a communications approach to the biblical story of Esther and the ritual that it anchors, the Jewish carnival of Purim. Esther, the second-most written about book of the Bible, is thought to be based on a tale that circulated around 400 BC, and was later transcribed and brought before the Jewish Sages with the request that it be canonized. It was, though God is not mentioned in it, with its focus instead on glamour, drinking, sex, violence, and genocidal plots. Despite the reservations of many at its inclusion in the canon, Esther formed the basis for an extremely popular Jewish ritual: the holiday of Purim. This book discusses how story and holiday combine all of the elements of a communication process – production of content, choice of medium, seal of approval, diffusion over time and space, and promotion of various forms of reception and reaction. It is a case study of "how culture works" and how the text itself is about communicating. It will appeal to all researchers of communication and religion, communication and the Bible, and communication and Judaism, and more generally to readers who are interested in communication or fascinated by culture.

Digital media constitute a key space for the negotiation of public opinion. Despite long-standing research on public opinion climates on digital media, little theory exists that considers their emergence and discursive dynamics. In this article, we conceptualize public opinion negotiations in a digital media ecosystem as a discursive process aimed at delimiting the latitude of normatively acceptable opinions. Building upon theoretical work on predigital media, we distill five enduring aspects to characterize digitally mediated public opinion negotiations as (a) the public expression of (b) normative opinions upon public issues by (c) positioned speakers, resulting in (d) the public negotiation of acceptable stances (e) within digitally mediated public arenas governed by institutional and sociotechnical media logics. Discussing how digital media shape this discursive process, we propose a theory of public opinion negotiations in a digital media ecosystem, flagging operational implications for the empirical study of public opinion processes on digital media.

While North American Olim continue to arrive in Israel, many of them face challenges in adjusting to life in Israel and finding their place in Israeli society. Previous research has examined the challenges Olim face in adjusting to a new culture and has indicated that being far from the familiarities of home often leads to lifestyle changes and the development of multiple identities. Female immigrants may find it particularly challenging to find a sense of social belonging, while those from ultra-Orthodox communities are faced with unique challenges of their own as they are exposed to different sociocultural expectations in their newly expanded social circles. This study explores, through qualitative research methods and in-depth interviews, the challenges, experiences, dilemmas, and conflicts faced by ultra-Orthodox women as they journey through finding their identity both culturally and religiously following their move to Israel. The findings shed light on the motivations of these women for making aliyah, and the development of new social, cultural, and religious identities that follows.

Political language is deeply intertwined with social identities. While social identities are often shaped by specific cultural contexts and expressed through particular uses of language, existing datasets for group and identity detection are predominantly English-centric, single-label and focus on coarse identity categories. We introduce HebID, the first multilabel Hebrew corpus for social identity detection: 5,536 sentences from Israeli politicians' Facebook posts (Dec 2018-Apr 2021), manually annotated for twelve nuanced social identities (e.g. Rightist, Ultra-Orthodox, Socially-oriented) grounded by survey data. We benchmark multilabel and single-label encoders alongside 2B-9B-parameter generative LLMs, finding that Hebrew-tuned LLMs provide the best results (macro-$F_1$ = 0.74). We apply our classifier to politicians' Facebook posts and parliamentary speeches, evaluating differences in popularity, temporal trends, clustering patterns, and gender-related variations in identity expression. We utilize identity choices from a national public survey, enabling a comparison between identities portrayed in elite discourse and the public's identity priorities. HebID provides a comprehensive foundation for studying social identities in Hebrew and can serve as a model for similar research in other non-English political contexts.

While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting. Here, we investigate politicians’ positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behavior and compare politicians’ theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using data from face-to-face interviews with nearly one thousand politicians in 11 countries, together with corresponding surveys of more than twelve thousand citizens, we show that politicians overwhelmingly hold thin, minimalist, “democratic realist” theories of voting, while citizens’ theories are more optimistic and policy oriented. Politicians’ theoretical tendencies—along with their theoretical misalignment from citizens—are remarkably consistent across countries. These theories are likely to have important consequences for how politicians campaign, communicate with the public, think about public policy, and represent their constituents.

This study examines the discourse surrounding shame in Israeli-Hebrew online peer-advice forums. Employing a discursive psychology approach, we analyze how shame is mobilized in advice requests and addressed by commentators in these sites characterized by increased emotional exposure and disinhibited communication. Drawing on a corpus of posts from a leading Israeli advice forum containing explicit expressions of shame, our findings reveal distinct peer support patterns that often challenge the poster’s emotional experience and perspective, frequently using blunt, face-threatening language. This approach aligns with ‘dugri empathy’, a care discourse style rooted in the direct, action-oriented Israeli communication ethos. Peer responses typically aim to reframe shame-inducing situations, normalize experiences, or dismiss the relevance of shame, reflecting cultural norms of directness in emotional support. In contrast, responses from trained NGO volunteers adhere to Western therapeutic practices, emphasizing validation and exploration of emotions. This disparity highlights a tension between cultural support norms and professional approaches to mental health in online spaces. Our study contributes to understanding how cultural communication styles shape emotional discourse and support strategies in anonymous online communities, offering insights into the complex interplay between emotion, cultural norms, and digital communication.

Despite cultural associations with lighthearted social media interactions and humor, the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) now appears in serious contexts as a legitimate form of online news, serving as a tool for documenting disasters, violence, and tragedies. The GIF’s repetitive, silent nature diverges from traditional visual news formats, offering narrative potentials different from the “decisive moment” of still photographs or the linear duration of videos. This article investigates the GIF’s unique storytelling format in tragic news coverage, leveraging insights from photojournalism and visual storytelling literature. Through visual analysis and in-depth interviews with Israeli news editors, this article explores the GIF’s centrality in Israeli news organizations’ adaptation to social media and the attention economy. Furthermore, the Israeli digital media ecosystem—characterized as a news-saturated environment of continuous negative news and high online news consumption—reveals the GIF as an emerging storytelling format with distinctive narrative strengths and constraints. Taken together, this context illuminates the ways in which GIFs’ production surfaces critical ethical considerations in contemporary visual journalism.

Interpersonal diplomatic incidents play a significant role in generating negative interpersonal relations between statespersons. Yet despite the obvious impact on international relations, thus far scholars have not systematically studied interpersonal interactions that have gone astray. In this paper, we discuss such incidents, identifying their causes and consequences. To this end, we collected stories about such incidents from interviews with fifty statespersons, fifteen autobiographies, and high-profile reports in the news media. We then applied the conceptual framework of politeness theory, an approach focusing on the management of social relations, to classify six types of offenses that lead to interpersonal diplomatic incidents: degradation, minimization, marginalization, unfriendliness, uncollegiality, and alienness. We further highlight the potential and actual consequences of these incidents and the factors that can curb their negative impact. In the conclusion we discuss the contribution of our findings to current IR theory, specifically the relational approach and the micro foundations of IR.

Traditional agenda-setting research often focuses on the most urgent problems that dominate present public agendas. Challenging the prevalent conflation of importance with urgency in agenda-setting research, this article proposes a shift from a singular to a layered temporal conceptualization of public agendas. The suggested framework distinguishes between the immediate agenda, which addresses problems perceived as most urgent, and the delayed agenda, which focuses on issues deemed most important for the future. Enriching agenda-setting theory with insights from construal level theory, the study examines the psychological and media-related factors shaping the placement of topics on these agendas. Drawing upon original survey data and a large-scale news content analysis from the French 2022 Presidential Elections, as well as survey data from the 2023 to 2024 war in Israel and Gaza, the findings provide empirical support for the proposed framework. The results indicate that participants prioritize psychologically proximate issues on the immediate agenda, whereas psychologically distant issues gain importance on the delayed agenda. Additionally, we identify media agenda-setting effects that extend beyond the immediate temporal layer. Specifically, both studies provide evidence for a media priming effect, where news exposure increases issue salience without affecting temporal layering. The Israeli case reveals additional initial evidence for an urgency effect, where news exposure boosts issue salience of some issues primarily on the immediate agenda. Overall, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of public agendas and news media effects, introducing a temporally nuanced perspective that enriches classical approaches to agenda-setting research.

Citizens’ political behavior is shaped within a social context. In the course of their everyday lives, people interact with others and talk to them about politics, and these discussions are among the most common forms of political engagement (Pew Research Center, 2018). According to decades of research, political conversations between citizens are not only prevalent but also influential: they shape people’s political preferences, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors (Carlson, 2019; Eveland, 2004; Huckfeldt & Sprague, 1995; Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955; Lazarsfeld et al., 1948; Sinclair, 2012). When using the term interpersonal communication, researchers typically describe conversations about politics – broadly defined – between ordinary citizens. The discussion can take place face-to-face, but it may also be technically mediated through telephone, video chat, social media, and the like. The participants are two or more individuals whose relationship prior to the conversation can vary in strength: they can be closely related (e.g., Mutz & Mondak, 2006), mere acquaintances (e.g., Eveland & Kleinman, 2013), or even strangers who have just met for the first time (e.g., Levendusky et al., 2016).