Does spontaneous contact between individuals from different ethnonational groups affect their social resilience, specifically their ability to avoid escalation and radicalization following eruptions of ethnic violence? To address this question, we conducted a series of studies in mixed Jewish–Palestinian cities and academic settings. Study 1, based on data collected through large-scale online surveys of residents in both mixed and non-mixed cities in Israel (n = 944), reveals that Jewish and Palestinian residents living in mixed cities exhibit higher social resilience than residents of homogeneous cities. This heightened resilience is manifested through more favorable attitudes toward the outgroup and reduced feelings of tension during and following episodes of intercommunal violence. We propose that the underlying mechanism explaining this resilience to the disruptive effects of violence is the higher prevalence of spontaneous intergroup contact enabled in mixed settings compared to more homogeneous ones. This explanation is supported by Study 2, which involved two rounds of surveys completed by Jewish and Palestinian students (n = 6467) at a heterogeneous campus in a mixed city in Israel. The findings demonstrate that positive attitudes toward the outgroup following incidents of intercommunal violence were more durable among students exposed to spontaneous intergroup contact. We discuss the implications of our findings for deepening our understanding of conflict and conflict management in ethnically mixed and conflicted settings.

This study focuses on a major sector in the Jewish–Israeli society that has a significant and growing influence on Israeli political and policy decisions: the ultra-Orthodox society. It investigates, within the context of the 2023–2025 Israel–Hamas war, factors explaining ultra-Orthodox Israeli–Jews support for a regional agreement that includes Israel, the Palestinians and Arab and Muslim states. Our analysis is based on a representative sample of ultra-Orthodox Israeli–Jews (N = 202) obtained through public opinion polling. In line with our expectation, empathy toward Palestinians and consumption of mainstream news each made a significant contribution to explaining ultra-Orthodox support for a regional agreement. In addition, as anticipated, hawkishness provided an added significant contribution to the overall explanatory power of the model. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Intermingling new and old media, this article introduces the concept of phonographic theatricality to explore the performativity of human-machine vocality. It jointly discusses the theatricality of historical and new sound media: media principles that characterized the phonograph in its emergence are still evident in the speech of contemporary AI-voice agents. Phonographic theatricality is a cross-media concept describing the conditions, playfulness, contingencies, and implications of the actualization of pre-recorded voices. It covers a broad range of cases in which a machine injects a human sounding voice into a situation, usually acousmatic in its detachment from a human body, yet performing as a theatrical agent. The analysis demonstrates how sound media theatricalize truthfulness, fidelity, illusion, and trickery as part of their mediation of voices, and how humans and machines mingle in producing phonographic theatricality. Three historical dramas, as well as contemporaneous newspaper articles, caricatures and ads, unveil the rise of phonographic theatricality as a media principle, inviting and affording a discussion on the performativity of AI voices. When machines speak and laugh in human voices, they become actors, vocally reshaping the space in which they operate, charging it with theatricality.

Using data from the 2012–2020 European Social Survey and Schwartz’s theory of basic values, this article maps the values of tech-workers, in order to assess and understand their uniqueness and homogeneity. Consistent with prior, mostly US-focused research, we find that European tech-workers hold a liberal worldview, which values openness to change, individualism, and universalism and devalues conservatism. However, our findings challenge the notion of tech-workers as being a completely distinct or a homogeneous group in terms of their values. While developers appear to be substantively different from other occupations and non-developers working in tech, non-developers hold values similar to those of other occupational elites, such as professionals and managers. The study offers takeaways for research, policy, and education.

This deprivation study leverages the smartphone’s absence to understand its presence, exploring a one-week smartphone deprivation experience of 80 Israeli adolescents aged 13-18. The data was primarily qualitative, derived from field journals, interviews, and focus groups. However, the most important and least expected finding was quantitative: all participants but one completed the week. This could be due to gratifications from nonuse that kicked-in. Analysis of the meaning of the abstention, and hence of the smartphone, focused on the cellular’s 3Ps: portable, personal, and prosthetic. The portability aspect showed that the device, with its user’s social world collapsed into it, stands as a meta-social entity, providing security and embeddedness. The personal aspect highlighted the significance of smartphone-enabled: (a) hyperconnectivity, (b) rituals, emphasizing its liminality and role as a Winnicottian transitional object, (c) existential significance of the user-smartphone amalgam. The prosthetic aspect pointed to the importance of the device’s physical and psychological “presence,” interpreted through the concepts of McLuhan’s “extension,” Aaron and Aaron’s “expansion,” and Schweiker’ “enhancement” of self. The relatively benign nature of the withdrawal experience suggests that re-balancing space and time orientations and an altered media-ecology equilibrium was experienced as gratifying.

It is commonly argued that factual knowledge about a political issue increases attitude polarization due to politically motivated reasoning. By this account, individuals ignore counter-attitudinal facts and direct their attention to pro-attitudinal facts; reject counter-attitudinal facts when directly confronted with them; and use pro-attitudinal facts to counterargue, all making them more polarized. The observation that more knowledgeable partisans are often more polarized is widely taken as support for this account. Yet these data are only correlational. Here, we directly test the causal effect of increasing issue-relevant knowledge on attitude polarization. Specifically, we randomize whether N = 1,011 participants receive a large, credible set of both pro- and counter-attitudinal facts on a contentious political issue – gun control – and provide a modest incentive for them to learn this information. We find evidence that people are willing to engage with and learn policy-relevant facts both for and against their initial attitudes; and that this increased factual knowledge shifts individuals towards more moderate policy attitudes, a durable effect that is still visible after one month. Our results suggest that the impact of directionally motivated reasoning on the processing of political information might be more limited than previously thought.

But There Was Love—Shaping the Memory of the Shoah proposes a new paradigm for Shoah remembrance in today’s cultural and political reality. It derives from the four-year workings of a group of researchers and artists at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute led by Michal Govrin. The group positions the extraordinary Jewish and non-Jewish human struggle in facing dehumanization and extermination as the essence of the Shoah, challenging us with a profound ethical call.

This article examines how Nazi-era film footage shaped Holocaust memory in post-war German film documentaries. From the mid-1950s, filmmakers began using previously unreleased archival footage to document the persecution of European Jews, a subject that had been largely suppressed until then. These films often relied on unpublished records from propaganda units, soldiers and Nazi officials. As a result, they contain ‘contagious images’ that either had served as propaganda or concealed violence, and often reflected the perpetrators’ detached and cold perspective. Despite these challenges, directors repurposed this footage to expose Nazi crimes and emphasize Jewish suffering, shifting focus away from the perpetrators’ perspective. By analyzing films such as Den BlodigaTiden/Mein Kampf (Bloody Times/My Struggle, 1960, Erwin Leiser) and Auf den Spuren des Henkers (On the Trail of the Hangman, 1961, Peter Schier-Gribowsky), this article explores strategies used to reframe these ‘contagious images’ and analyses how they contributed to a collective memory of the Holocaust. These documentaries countered post-war silence, allowing audiences to engage with repressed histories and fostering a collective reckoning. The use of archival footage not only established and shaped a visual language that underscored the atrocities but also emphasised the importance of memory preservation.

This essay aims, first, to expose the failure of post-Holocaust cinema, as well as Western trauma and genocide research on the Age of Testimony, to take into consideration non-Western survivors' accounts of twentieth century's collective traumas. Second, and consequently, it aims to analyze Chinese independent director Wang Bing's 2007-2018 (mostly documentary) hexaptych - He Fengming (2007), Brutality Factory (2007), The Ditch (2010), Dead Souls (2017), Traces (2009), and Beauty Lives in Freedom (2018) - on the still taboo issue of the re-education-death-camp Jiabiangou and the Maoist chaos. Wang represents the subject positions of victims, collaborators, followers, cadres, and dissidents as well as the extraordinary form of un-witnessing (my term) Jiabiangou. The hexaptych constitutes a major epistemological-cinematic breakthrough by depicting the inevitable negation of all forms of working-through, while simultaneously proposing unique cinematic memorialization-based mourning rituals. Hence, it paves the way to re-theorizing the ethics entailed in current trauma cinema studies.

An investigation of the connections between the parallel rise of modern Hebrew and modern media After lying dormant for two millennia as a mainly written language, Hebrew awoke from its literary slumber to become a living modern vernacular. This revitalization is unique and unprecedented in world history, and its success has been studied in fields from linguistics to cultural history. However, the role of modern technologies in mediating this revival has not yet been considered.What happens when an ancient language meets modern technology? Lingua Ex Machina explores such a moment in its investigation of the role media technologies—including typewriters, phonographs, and computers—played in the revitalization and modernization of Hebrew from the end of the nineteenth century into the present day.Ido Ramati examines the role sound recording technologies played in shaping the reemergence of modern Hebrew speech, reveals how the Hebraized typewriter pushed for the modernization of writing in Hebrew, and ultimately argues that these media—whose development and adoption paralleled the revitalization of Hebrew—were an active force in shaping the language as a modern communicative medium. This case study of Hebrew furnishes researchers with a rare opportunity to investigate the complex relation between language, its speakers, and technology at a decisive moment, and sheds new light on the study of media technologies and their theoretical, lingual, and social implications.