The historical parallels between Jews and Armenians have long been widespread in both popular and academic spheres: two diasporic, ‘middlemen minorities’ with distinctive religious, cultural, and socio-economic traits whose repeated marginalization and oppression during the nineteenth century culminated in genocide during the twentieth.Footnote2 Throughout history, both peoples have drawn upon their ties to sacred lands to establish some of the most deeply rooted narratives of ethnic identity: the Jews, as biblical dwellers of the land of Israel; the Armenians as guardians of Mount Ararat, where Noah's Ark is said to have come to rest. As Anthony D. Smith wrote, ‘we might think of first-century-C.E. Jews and fifth-century Armenians as approximating to the ideal type of the nation’.Footnote3 It is also this distinctive ethno-religious identity that simultaneously strengthened their diasporic networks of trade, and often singled them out for discrimination in the territories they inhabited.

The personal and professional life of Bruno Kreisky (1911–1990), Austria's long-serving Socialist chancellor from August 1970 to May 1983, has been the focus of many books and articles. However, his ambiguous and complex relationship to his Jewishness, the State of Israel, and Zionism, as well as his connections to his overall political project and global aspirations, remain only partially researched. This book studies and analyzes these more systematically and comprehensively and places Kreisky in a comparative perspective with other twentieth-century European Jewish politicians who attained similar pinnacles of power. At the same time, the book will show that Bruno Kreisky was among the most influential and controversial political leaders since World War II. The book revolves around understanding and illuminating the myriad ways in which Kreisky's Jewishness was―or was not―a formative factor in his treatment of "Jewish" questions within Austrian politics, Austrian-Israeli relations, and his active engagement in Middle Eastern affairs. This deeper understanding mainly emerges through examining Kreisky's actions during several pivotal events like the Kreisky-Peter-Wiesenthal affair, the Waldheim affair, the 1973 Marchegg incident, and his overall relationship to Zionism, the State of Israel, and the Palestinian Arab world. This book is not a comprehensive biography of Kreisky. Instead, it attempts to document and place Kreisky's fraught engagement with his Jewishness and the related sensitive issues that touched upon it in a historical, political, ideological, and personal context. This mainly comes down to the entangled and always-ambiguous politics of identity, especially his understanding of his Jewishness.

Every city has large public spaces that are accessible to everyone. City life is what happens in these spaces, this is where its spirit emerges and evolves. Being freely accessible to everyone, these spaces offer opportunities for spontaneous encounters between inhabitants. This communication, albeit mostly indirect, determines the very character of the city. Urban public spaces tend to develop their own rules of conduct, their own dynamics and atmosphere. Recognizing their central role in cities, courts identify urban public spaces as quintessential “public fora.”

The visual design of urban public spaces (hereinafter “cityscape”) has an important impact on city life – it can channel interpersonal communication into certain directions while excluding others; it can powerfully communicate notions of what is important, what is acceptable, and what the right order of things in society is. While everyone may access urban public spaces, cityscapes are created by a very limited social group, consisting predominantly of property owners, politicians, and commercial enterprises. Real estate developers and municipal authorities decide which entities will occupy the key locations in our city, what information city billboards will communicate to us, and what kind of public art we will encounter on a daily basis. Non-surprisingly, this results in cityscapes highlighting the power of property, the importance of mainstream politics (such as elections), and, perhaps most conspicuously, the dominance of consumption in our lives. Indeed, as urban public spaces increasingly turn into sites of consumption, advertising occupies growing portions of cityscapes, demanding ever-larger portions of our attention. Art adorning urban spaces largely conforms to widespread aesthetic values and accepted social norms.

These hegemonic cityscapes confront tireless resistance. Graffiti – uncommissioned painting and writing on city surfaces – disrupts the integrity of the official visual narratives, relentlessly claiming its own right to the city and offering alternative, unofficial cityscapes.

Protecting official cityscapes, the legal system fights back. Local authorities remove the uncommissioned paintings and restore the official cityscapes. They define graffiti as a serious “epidemic” and declare “wars on graffiti.” Legislators toughen the “war on graffiti” by increasing existing penalties and introducing new ones, extending police search powers, and restricting various graffiti-related activities. The police expends substantial efforts to eliminate graffiti, spotting and arresting the writers. Finally, courts frequently issue remarkably high penalties for graffiti, expressing their dismay with what they see as a meaningless attack on property.

These legal players are joined by property owners, who report graffiti cases to the police, sometimes remove the painting themselves, and sometimes take private measures to prevent graffiti. An additional significant force in this arena is the media that usually picture graffiti writers as “vandals” and “hooligans,” creating and fortifying social hostility toward them.

This “war on graffiti” is commonly framed in terms of protecting property against paint. Yet, as this paper will reveal, the actual war is fought in battleground of narratives. Not all graffiti pieces are treated the same way. Messages that conform to the dominant narratives are usually met with sympathy and not punished. For instance, during the current Covid-19 outbreak, the media praises graffiti messages asking people to wash their hands or thanking the medical staff, while property owners and local authorities frequently chose not to remove such pieces. At the same time, non-conformist messages, such as “corona will kill us” are quickly removed, most severely condemned by the press, and reported to the police.

The same is true for paintings: legal players protecting the official cityscape tend to accept pieces that conform to prevailing aesthetic standards, especially if made by famous artists. Thus, illegal works of a renowned graffiti artists are sometimes safeguarded by protective casting, and even restored by local authorities if “vandalized” by subsequent writers.

In other words, the real war on graffiti a war fought over urban narratives. Property owners and authorities put great efforts into preserving the official cityscapes from disrupting messages, but readily accept illegal paintings that conform to their narratives. This policy reinforces the hegemony of the official urban narratives and suppresses alternative voices. In this paper, we will identify the narratives that enjoy a privileged position in the cityscapes and are constant winners in the battlefield over the narratives dominating our shared visual environment. We will argue that these highly one-sided cityscapes latently obstruct the efforts of making cities more inclusive, democratic, and multi-voiced.

This paper proceeds as follows. Part I describes legal conflicts over the placement of various expressive elements into the cityscapes and their removal therefrom. Analyzing conflicts over expressions that seek their way into the cityscapes, as well as expressions, whose presence in the cityscapes encounters objections, we will identify the narratives that constantly prevail in such conflicts. These permanent winners represent the official narratives conveyed by the cityscapes. Part II focuses on unofficial cityscapes created by graffiti. It demonstrates that the legal treatment of graffiti is greatly dependent on the narratives it conveys, whereas illegal pieces that conform to the official narratives enjoy a highly privileged position. Part III will criticize the current state of affairs, in which official urban narratives occupy a hegemonic position, controlling our cityscapes and, consequently, largely dominating the dynamics of city life itself. It will conclude the discussion with a vision of an alternative legal order, one in which urban narratives emerge in a free and uncontrolled social discourse.

In less than a year, the trending short-video platform TikTok transformed from a primarily entertaining environment for lip-syncing, dancing, and other self-performances into an interest-based platform for sharing information about politics, sexuality, identity, history, and other topics. This development was accompanied by the rise of a format that we describe as “serious TikTok.” In such videos, users communicate socio-political affairs in engaging ways through digital storytelling while harnessing the platform’s features, aesthetics, and dialects, allowing them to playfully unpack complex topics, contextualize and provide information. Following a controversy about TikTok users who performed as fictional Holocaust victims in a #POVHolocaustChallenge in August 2020, as well as the increase in antisemitic harassment and hate speech on the platform, ways of seriously dealing with the complex history of the Holocaust on TikTok gained particular attention. In the following, we explore the specific modes individual and institutional TikTok creators use to address the history and memory of the Holocaust in their short video-memes and their ways of using TikTok’s memetic vernaculars to produce more stimulating historical storytelling formats.

This article attempts to engage the burgeoning research on the transnational dimensions of populism with recent theorization on legitimation strategies in international politics. Focusing on the performative practices of the wave of Pink Tide neo-populist leaders in Latin America (also called “Chavista” or “Bolivarian”), this work identifies three main strategies of legitimation – affective, normative, and institutional – and tracks their transnational resonance. Indications of these strategies include the extrapolation of strong emotional attachments with supporters abroad, the empowerment of identity-based solidarities, and the reconstruction of regionalist projects. Their drive to mobilize transnational support has been complemented by a normative flipside – the discursive attack on rival “anti-national” elites and the readiness to use national revenues for demonstrating solidarity with international allies. Analysis details how these strategies projected the populists’ legitimacy onto the regional and global arena. This inquiry may contribute policy-oriented hindsight on the rise of populists worldwide and their potential effects on transnational practices of cooperation and defiance, primarily on regional integration, global governance, and international conflicts.

The visual design of urban public spaces (hereinafter “cityscape”) has an important impact on city life – it can channel interpersonal communication into certain directions while excluding others; it can powerfully communicate notions of what is socially acceptable or important. Yet, while everyone may access urban public spaces, cityscapes are designed by a very limited social group. This paper focuses on the narratives embedded in the cityscapes. Analyzing legal conflicts arising around expressions that seek their way into the shared visual environment, as well as expressions whose presence in the cityscapes is disputed, we trace the dynamics of battles over urban narratives. The discussion of legal rules is complemented by photographs. Rather than illustrating the text, the photographs will relate to the discussed topics in their own way, enriching the discussion and broadening its perspective.

In this article, we locate a tendency to revert to ‘Western,’ ‘national,’ and/or ‘racial’ times during periods of intense uncertainty or ‘crisis’ when individuals and societies seek to make sense of the present through the past, drawing upon the concept of a ‘time-border.’ We suggest this tendency is a ‘conventional’ pull in temporal thinking that has recurred in modern time cultures. In our own present, this reversion appears to be occurring despite novel approaches to time and periodization in historical research over the past thirty years, prompting a radical reformulation of how historians study the past (in terms of the influence of the global turn or Deep Turn and big history on notions of historical time, or new periodizations of the Anthropocene and posthumanism). This innovative approach to time jostles uneasily against the pull towards ‘conservative,’ linear, and national/racialised time often found in public discourse — highlighting the tension, as well as the reciprocity, between linear and cyclical approaches to time in lived experience and historiography. Throughout the essay, the urgency to reconsider notions of historical time and periodization in view of the coronavirus pandemic is a key theme tying together an analysis of time, periodization, and historiography.

Higher education organizations in countries where English is not the native tongue must function in a multilingual mode, using English as their primary language for scientific exchange and academic publication and relying on the native language for instruction and administration. When operating in a multilingual mode of communication and identity expression, a higher education organization runs the risk of becoming a “tower of Babel”; however, by operating solely in single-language mode, it may become an “ivory tower.” Investigating Israeli higher education organizations and focusing specifically on their mission statements, we analyzed the built-in tension of this multilingual self-identification through how they introduce themselves in the lingua franca of global academe, namely English, and in the local language, Hebrew. In our analysis, we found: (a) differences between the English- and Hebrew-language mission statements in length, style, and context; (b) differences in thematic emphases and thus in the narration of organizational identity; and (c) that such thematic differences patterned according to the three categories of state-mandated higher education organizations and, to some degree, time. We conclude that multilingualism serves both as an arena for the negotiation of organizational identity and as a state of being for higher education organizations in non-English-speaking countries.

While the sociological theories of world sociey and glocalisation have different intellectual emphases, both conceptual and empirical, they are highly compatible and mutually supportive. The aim of this chapter is to explore this link between world society theory and the study of cultural glocalisation. To this aim, we review the principal concepts, core claims and exemplar studies of world society theory and relating this theory to the issues of the variation and differentiation that are accentuated by glocalisation studied and, according to world society theory, are inherent to global institutional dynamics. After explaining the synergy between these two theoretical research programs on such matters, we propose four lines for fruitful research at the nexus of the two theoretical and research traditions.

Israeli immigration to Berlin has increased significantly over the past decade, giving rise to a nascent Hebrew culture. Consequently, Hebrew letterforms, once seldom found outside the traditional context of synagogues, cemeteries or memorials, are nowadays also found in public spaces and restaurants across the city. While research on Israeli immigration to Germany has greatly increased in recent years, the visual characteristics of this community have, however, yet to be researched. Using two Israeli cafés in Berlin’s Kreuzberg and Neukölln districts as case studies, this article will examine the expression of Israeli cultural identity in the German capital through letterforms. I will argue that the logo designs of both cafés express a connection to Israeli culture in two contrasting ways: on the one hand, a nostalgic connection echoing traditions from the past, and on the other hand, an attempt to maintain a distance from this very culture. Based on interviews with the café owners and a visual analysis of their logos, this article will show how both the café owners strove to express a personal stance in regard to their identity as Israelis through the typefaces and designs used to represent their businesses.