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.

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.

Meet the “JewToks.” A squad of Jewish-American TikTokers who have decided to dedicate their accounts to combatting antisemitism online and creating a different kind of digital atmosphere. They are part of the emerging #JewishTikTok community in the United States, transforming TikTok into a space to communicate and educate on Judaism. This chapter explores JewTok’s unique ways of translating Jewish traditions and customs into TikTok’s vernaculars using memes, dance, challenges, and multiple communicative features. Those performative strategies facilitate dialogic modes that enable users to encounter and learn about the JewTok’s community’s burning day-to-day issues. However, TikTok’s playful environment that allows the celebration of Judaism comes with a price as the JewToks face two significant threats: (1) Human—TikTok’s dark side in which hate trolls are attacking JewToks accounts and spreading hate content. “Haters are hijacking Jewish content and giving it an antisemitic remix,” said one of the JewToks interviewed for this chapter; (2) Algorithm—TikTok’s moderation system constantly blocks JewToks’ responses to discriminating and humiliating content. The fight against antisemitism on TikTok might be a double-edged sword, but the JewToks believe their harness of the platform’s creative, engaging, and highly visible tools can change the toxic environment of hate speech, racism, and antisemitism in the digital realm.

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.

This article aims to contribute to the growing academic debate on the transnational drivers and patterns of contemporary populism. As populist leaderships expand both politically and geographically, the very nature of the populist phenomenon is changing, as it is increasingly being projected on the international stage. Contemporary populist leaders show a growing willingness to transfer the discursive construction of a struggle between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ to the regional and global levels as a way of obtaining internal and external legitimation. In so doing, they exploit the symbiotic two-level game that links national and international (de-)legitimation dynamics, seeking to gain ‘abroad’ the kind of legitimacy that they cannot obtain ‘at home’. This article suggests three mechanisms that explain the populist ‘way out’ from various legitimation traps based on the traditional distinctions between input, throughput, and output legitimacy. The article’s argument is illustrated with reference to prototypical cases of populism in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The incorporation of the literature on international legitimacy enhances our understanding of the strategic activation of populist attitudes through the transnational articulation of empty signifiers, the global diffusion of this phenomenon, and the possibilities for its contestation and mitigation.