L Erdreich
Biographic Data
| ID | 6313 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Erdreich |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Erdreich |
| SIGNATURE | ERDREICH L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Levinsky College of Education |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5005-1784 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 68 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Learned Family on the Educator‐Kibbutzim—Knowledge, Kinship, and Social Transformation as Historical Legacy
This article explores how educator‐kibbutzim recruit socialist‐Zionist learning traditions to construct new forms of kinship. Bringing communities of practice theory to new kinship studies, we expand on the role of knowledge in bridging the social/biological. Based on ethnographic research and participatory‐archival research, we describe social learning practices drawn from historical repertoire that are utilized to create new forms of family. Th…
Digital Well-Being and Superdigital Citizenship
Using the pandemic as a natural laboratory for exploring edtech, this study is concerned with the changes in parental involvement that the demands of remote-learning elicited and implications for educational justice across classes. Interviews with 25 middle-class and low-income parents revealed classed practices of parental involvement in remote-learning: middle-class parents espouse a digital well-being approach while low-income parents espouse …
Marking and erasing
The purchase of cooperativism
The ‘purchase of cooperativism’ refers to the structure of caring relations created by educator-kibbutzim as an alternative to capitalist forms of work/family separation and neoliberal individualism. Educator-kibbutzim are urban intentional communities living cooperatively and working in social-educational initiatives. This ethnographic study follows how, from within a self-imposed precariously middle-class status, they use organisational learnin…
Social capital practices for the accomplishment of natural-growth
Based on interviews with low-income, Israeli mothers about their experience supporting children's remote-learning during COVID, this study offers theoretical insights about the accomplishment of natural-growth. The accomplishment of natural-growth is a theoretical concept coined by Lareau to describe the logics of low-income childrearing. Though concerted cultivation, which describes the logics of middle-class childrearing has garnered theoretica…
Scaffolding spatial literacy
This article looks at how Palestinian-Israeli middle-class mothers, who enjoy the advantages of the middle class yet belong to a geographically and socially marginalized minority, educate their children in and about socio-spatial reality. The study brings the field of geographies of parenting into dialogue with relevant insights from literacy studies. Building on the concept of spatial literacy developed through previous ethnographic research wit…
Class, education and parenting
Over three decades ago (in a paper published in this Journal), Brown discerned the emergence of a ‘parentocracy’, in which a child’s education is ‘increasingly dependent upon the wealth and wishes
Mediating intimacy
This study deals with perceptions of ‘proper intimacy’ disseminated through digital parent-teacher communication in early-childhood education and the implications for parents’ reflexive projects of self. The article brings sociological understandings about perceptions of proper parenting and intimacy together with research on digital communications. Qualitative data was collected from an on-line discussion of early-childhood educators on their us…
Keeping mum
The article examines how Israeli Palestinian and Jewish middle-class mothers mediate military conflict to young children, through silence and talk. This mediation is underpinned by dissonance between the mandate to protect children from the adult world and to ready them for it, and between the idea of children as individuals and conflict as collective engagement. The article explores the discourses and practices used for managing this twofold dis…
Managing the Risks of Schooling, Securing Middle-Class Belonging
A major sphere of action in which parents engage in the management of risk on behalf of their children-primarily through the gendered work of mothering-is that of education and schooling. This article explores the endeavors on the part of middle-class Israeli mothers hailing from three social-cultural groups-immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Palestinian Israelis, and Jewish Israelis-to manage the risks of schooling, as they perceive these …
Creating class-B
This article addresses teacher training as a process of becoming literate in educational discourse. Through ethnographic research of a project for training science and math lecturers in educational practice, I follow how participants created a concept they called ‘Class-B’ to symbolise progressive educational discourse. Bringing the concept of key symbol and a New Literacy Studies approach to the analysis, I show how literacy in educational disco…
Spirituality in Teacher Training at an Islamic College in Israel
This article looks at an Islamic teacher training college in Israel in an attempt to understand how religious revival shapes women’s understandings of being Muslim women professionals in Israel. The college grew out of Islamic revival in Israel; its teacher training program reflects the sensibilities that Islamic revival hopes to foster in women who study there and in the children they will teach. The article is based on ethnographic research at …
The cultural shaping of parental involvement
This paper presents a theoretical argument regarding the power of school to shape parental involvement in culturally informed ways. The paper emerges out of preliminary fieldwork among Jewish middle-class parents in a town in northern Israel, during which our attention was drawn to the intense activity in and around their children’s transition to primary school. This activity became a lens for the exploration and articulation of a theoretical cla…
Sacralized citizenship
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an Islamic teachers’ college in Israel and interviews with women lecturers, this article explores how the women combine education and religion to create a revitalized self and sense of belonging despite lived experiences of structural racial, national, and gender inequalities. The women’s experience is understood through the lens of various social theories that are informed by religious or spiritual epistemologi…
Mothering and the work of educational care – an integrative approach
This article, through looking at mothers' modes of engagement with their children's education, proposes an integrative analytical approach to the study of the making of mothers, mothering, and motherhood. The article presents and brings into dialogue four different bodies of anthropological and sociological literature: mothering as a form of care work, anthropological work on child-rearing in different cultural settings, sociological studies of t…
Instructive Ritual
In spite of state efforts to limit public nationalist ritual of the Palestinian Israeli community, one ritual system, as this article details, is kept intact by the Arab Student Union (ASU). Based on an ethnographic study of the Hebrew University ASU, I show how this ritual system is instructive in a specific, educated Palestinian Israeli identity. Instruction revolves around the root paradigms of a specifically Israeli Palestinian-ness and of th…
Strategies Against Patriarchy
Based on a study of Palestinian Israeli women student activists, non-western models are used for negotiating patriarchy. The public nature and visibility of activism brings these women face-to-face with patriarchal conceptions of sexuality, forcing them to struggle against them in order to continue their political activities. The article explores how Palestinian Israeli women students develop a multiplicity of strategies, based on liberal partici…
Degendering the Honor/Care Conflation
On the basis of ethnographic research of Palestinian Israeli women at Hebrew University, I explore how cultural models of independence are used to reshape Arab conceptions of male and female selves and their communal positions. I claim that Arab models of family honor conflate honor and care differently in social expectations for men and women. Men insure family honor through care for women's bodies and women do the same through being modest and …
Reading the Power of Spaces
Our ethnographic study of Palestinian Israeli women at the Hebrew University explores how these women construct space into place as they construct themselves. Tracing the women's experiences in the dormitories, Jerusalem, and Israel/Palestine, we show how the women acquire knowledge of the gendered and national organization of space and develop practices for using this knowledge to negotiate power relations. Using an analytical understanding of s…
Marriage talk
In feminist anthropological studies of Palestinian women gender change is often interpreted as contributing to the national struggle. Based on research of Palestinian Israeli university women's marriage talk, I look at how gender change articulated through liberal discourses can reproduce state national hegemony. Palestinian educated women are forbearers of gender change in that they re-create women's role in courtship and marriage from one of ob…
Reproducing Nation, Redesigning Positioning
This paper discusses the reproduction of hegemony and social hierarchy through education. It brings together two case studies of marginal groups at a university—Russian Jewish immigrants and Palestinian Israeli women—who make sense of their position in social hierarchies and power relations through constant interpretative work on the various dimensions of university knowledge. The article reveals how marginal actors' interpretations of knowledge …
Elaborating Ethnonational Awareness via Academic Literacy
Building on a poststructuralist theory of literacy, we delve into the "black box" of Palestinian Israeli women's encounters with academic knowledge. Through interviews and observations, we disclose practices the women used to unearth the construction of dominant Jewish Israeli knowledge and to reconstruct gender in the Palestinian Israeli ethnonational discourse. Our study takes a new angle on the New Literacy Studies by looking at unprogrammed l…
Degendering the Honor/Care Conflation
On the basis of ethnographic research of Palestinian Israeli women at Hebrew University, I explore how cultural models of independence are used to reshape Arab conceptions of male and female selves and their communal positions. I claim that Arab models of family honor conflate honor and care differently in social expectations for men and women. Men insure family honor through care for women's bodies and women do the same through being modest and …
Reading the Power of Spaces
Our ethnographic study of Palestinian Israeli women at the Hebrew University explores how these women construct space into place as they construct themselves. Tracing the women's experiences in the dormitories, Jerusalem, and Israel/Palestine, we show how the women acquire knowledge of the gendered and national organization of space and develop practices for using this knowledge to negotiate power relations. Using an analytical understanding of s…
Class, education and parenting
Over three decades ago (in a paper published in this Journal), Brown discerned the emergence of a ‘parentocracy’, in which a child’s education is ‘increasingly dependent upon the wealth and wishes
Mothering and the work of educational care – an integrative approach
This article, through looking at mothers' modes of engagement with their children's education, proposes an integrative analytical approach to the study of the making of mothers, mothering, and motherhood. The article presents and brings into dialogue four different bodies of anthropological and sociological literature: mothering as a form of care work, anthropological work on child-rearing in different cultural settings, sociological studies of t…
Marriage talk
In feminist anthropological studies of Palestinian women gender change is often interpreted as contributing to the national struggle. Based on research of Palestinian Israeli university women's marriage talk, I look at how gender change articulated through liberal discourses can reproduce state national hegemony. Palestinian educated women are forbearers of gender change in that they re-create women's role in courtship and marriage from one of ob…
Elaborating Ethnonational Awareness via Academic Literacy
Building on a poststructuralist theory of literacy, we delve into the "black box" of Palestinian Israeli women's encounters with academic knowledge. Through interviews and observations, we disclose practices the women used to unearth the construction of dominant Jewish Israeli knowledge and to reconstruct gender in the Palestinian Israeli ethnonational discourse. Our study takes a new angle on the New Literacy Studies by looking at unprogrammed l…
The cultural shaping of parental involvement
This paper presents a theoretical argument regarding the power of school to shape parental involvement in culturally informed ways. The paper emerges out of preliminary fieldwork among Jewish middle-class parents in a town in northern Israel, during which our attention was drawn to the intense activity in and around their children’s transition to primary school. This activity became a lens for the exploration and articulation of a theoretical cla…
Strategies Against Patriarchy
Based on a study of Palestinian Israeli women student activists, non-western models are used for negotiating patriarchy. The public nature and visibility of activism brings these women face-to-face with patriarchal conceptions of sexuality, forcing them to struggle against them in order to continue their political activities. The article explores how Palestinian Israeli women students develop a multiplicity of strategies, based on liberal partici…
Keeping mum
The article examines how Israeli Palestinian and Jewish middle-class mothers mediate military conflict to young children, through silence and talk. This mediation is underpinned by dissonance between the mandate to protect children from the adult world and to ready them for it, and between the idea of children as individuals and conflict as collective engagement. The article explores the discourses and practices used for managing this twofold dis…
Managing the Risks of Schooling, Securing Middle-Class Belonging
A major sphere of action in which parents engage in the management of risk on behalf of their children-primarily through the gendered work of mothering-is that of education and schooling. This article explores the endeavors on the part of middle-class Israeli mothers hailing from three social-cultural groups-immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Palestinian Israelis, and Jewish Israelis-to manage the risks of schooling, as they perceive these …
The purchase of cooperativism
The ‘purchase of cooperativism’ refers to the structure of caring relations created by educator-kibbutzim as an alternative to capitalist forms of work/family separation and neoliberal individualism. Educator-kibbutzim are urban intentional communities living cooperatively and working in social-educational initiatives. This ethnographic study follows how, from within a self-imposed precariously middle-class status, they use organisational learnin…
Social capital practices for the accomplishment of natural-growth
Based on interviews with low-income, Israeli mothers about their experience supporting children's remote-learning during COVID, this study offers theoretical insights about the accomplishment of natural-growth. The accomplishment of natural-growth is a theoretical concept coined by Lareau to describe the logics of low-income childrearing. Though concerted cultivation, which describes the logics of middle-class childrearing has garnered theoretica…
Mediating intimacy
This study deals with perceptions of ‘proper intimacy’ disseminated through digital parent-teacher communication in early-childhood education and the implications for parents’ reflexive projects of self. The article brings sociological understandings about perceptions of proper parenting and intimacy together with research on digital communications. Qualitative data was collected from an on-line discussion of early-childhood educators on their us…
Spirituality in Teacher Training at an Islamic College in Israel
This article looks at an Islamic teacher training college in Israel in an attempt to understand how religious revival shapes women’s understandings of being Muslim women professionals in Israel. The college grew out of Islamic revival in Israel; its teacher training program reflects the sensibilities that Islamic revival hopes to foster in women who study there and in the children they will teach. The article is based on ethnographic research at …
Sacralized citizenship
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an Islamic teachers’ college in Israel and interviews with women lecturers, this article explores how the women combine education and religion to create a revitalized self and sense of belonging despite lived experiences of structural racial, national, and gender inequalities. The women’s experience is understood through the lens of various social theories that are informed by religious or spiritual epistemologi…
Elaborating Ethnonational Awareness via Academic Literacy
Building on a poststructuralist theory of literacy, we delve into the "black box" of Palestinian Israeli women's encounters with academic knowledge. Through interviews and observations, we disclose practices the women used to unearth the construction of dominant Jewish Israeli knowledge and to reconstruct gender in the Palestinian Israeli ethnonational discourse. Our study takes a new angle on the New Literacy Studies by looking at unprogrammed l…
Reproducing Nation, Redesigning Positioning
This paper discusses the reproduction of hegemony and social hierarchy through education. It brings together two case studies of marginal groups at a university—Russian Jewish immigrants and Palestinian Israeli women—who make sense of their position in social hierarchies and power relations through constant interpretative work on the various dimensions of university knowledge. The article reveals how marginal actors' interpretations of knowledge …
Instructive Ritual
In spite of state efforts to limit public nationalist ritual of the Palestinian Israeli community, one ritual system, as this article details, is kept intact by the Arab Student Union (ASU). Based on an ethnographic study of the Hebrew University ASU, I show how this ritual system is instructive in a specific, educated Palestinian Israeli identity. Instruction revolves around the root paradigms of a specifically Israeli Palestinian-ness and of th…
Strategies Against Patriarchy
Based on a study of Palestinian Israeli women student activists, non-western models are used for negotiating patriarchy. The public nature and visibility of activism brings these women face-to-face with patriarchal conceptions of sexuality, forcing them to struggle against them in order to continue their political activities. The article explores how Palestinian Israeli women students develop a multiplicity of strategies, based on liberal partici…
Degendering the Honor/Care Conflation
On the basis of ethnographic research of Palestinian Israeli women at Hebrew University, I explore how cultural models of independence are used to reshape Arab conceptions of male and female selves and their communal positions. I claim that Arab models of family honor conflate honor and care differently in social expectations for men and women. Men insure family honor through care for women's bodies and women do the same through being modest and …
Reading the Power of Spaces
Our ethnographic study of Palestinian Israeli women at the Hebrew University explores how these women construct space into place as they construct themselves. Tracing the women's experiences in the dormitories, Jerusalem, and Israel/Palestine, we show how the women acquire knowledge of the gendered and national organization of space and develop practices for using this knowledge to negotiate power relations. Using an analytical understanding of s…
Marriage talk
In feminist anthropological studies of Palestinian women gender change is often interpreted as contributing to the national struggle. Based on research of Palestinian Israeli university women's marriage talk, I look at how gender change articulated through liberal discourses can reproduce state national hegemony. Palestinian educated women are forbearers of gender change in that they re-create women's role in courtship and marriage from one of ob…
Sacralized citizenship
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an Islamic teachers’ college in Israel and interviews with women lecturers, this article explores how the women combine education and religion to create a revitalized self and sense of belonging despite lived experiences of structural racial, national, and gender inequalities. The women’s experience is understood through the lens of various social theories that are informed by religious or spiritual epistemologi…
Mothering and the work of educational care – an integrative approach
This article, through looking at mothers' modes of engagement with their children's education, proposes an integrative analytical approach to the study of the making of mothers, mothering, and motherhood. The article presents and brings into dialogue four different bodies of anthropological and sociological literature: mothering as a form of care work, anthropological work on child-rearing in different cultural settings, sociological studies of t…
Creating class-B
This article addresses teacher training as a process of becoming literate in educational discourse. Through ethnographic research of a project for training science and math lecturers in educational practice, I follow how participants created a concept they called ‘Class-B’ to symbolise progressive educational discourse. Bringing the concept of key symbol and a New Literacy Studies approach to the analysis, I show how literacy in educational disco…
Spirituality in Teacher Training at an Islamic College in Israel
This article looks at an Islamic teacher training college in Israel in an attempt to understand how religious revival shapes women’s understandings of being Muslim women professionals in Israel. The college grew out of Islamic revival in Israel; its teacher training program reflects the sensibilities that Islamic revival hopes to foster in women who study there and in the children they will teach. The article is based on ethnographic research at …
The cultural shaping of parental involvement
This paper presents a theoretical argument regarding the power of school to shape parental involvement in culturally informed ways. The paper emerges out of preliminary fieldwork among Jewish middle-class parents in a town in northern Israel, during which our attention was drawn to the intense activity in and around their children’s transition to primary school. This activity became a lens for the exploration and articulation of a theoretical cla…
Mediating intimacy
This study deals with perceptions of ‘proper intimacy’ disseminated through digital parent-teacher communication in early-childhood education and the implications for parents’ reflexive projects of self. The article brings sociological understandings about perceptions of proper parenting and intimacy together with research on digital communications. Qualitative data was collected from an on-line discussion of early-childhood educators on their us…
Keeping mum
The article examines how Israeli Palestinian and Jewish middle-class mothers mediate military conflict to young children, through silence and talk. This mediation is underpinned by dissonance between the mandate to protect children from the adult world and to ready them for it, and between the idea of children as individuals and conflict as collective engagement. The article explores the discourses and practices used for managing this twofold dis…
Managing the Risks of Schooling, Securing Middle-Class Belonging
A major sphere of action in which parents engage in the management of risk on behalf of their children-primarily through the gendered work of mothering-is that of education and schooling. This article explores the endeavors on the part of middle-class Israeli mothers hailing from three social-cultural groups-immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Palestinian Israelis, and Jewish Israelis-to manage the risks of schooling, as they perceive these …
Class, education and parenting
Over three decades ago (in a paper published in this Journal), Brown discerned the emergence of a ‘parentocracy’, in which a child’s education is ‘increasingly dependent upon the wealth and wishes
Scaffolding spatial literacy
This article looks at how Palestinian-Israeli middle-class mothers, who enjoy the advantages of the middle class yet belong to a geographically and socially marginalized minority, educate their children in and about socio-spatial reality. The study brings the field of geographies of parenting into dialogue with relevant insights from literacy studies. Building on the concept of spatial literacy developed through previous ethnographic research wit…
Social capital practices for the accomplishment of natural-growth
Based on interviews with low-income, Israeli mothers about their experience supporting children's remote-learning during COVID, this study offers theoretical insights about the accomplishment of natural-growth. The accomplishment of natural-growth is a theoretical concept coined by Lareau to describe the logics of low-income childrearing. Though concerted cultivation, which describes the logics of middle-class childrearing has garnered theoretica…
Digital Well-Being and Superdigital Citizenship
Using the pandemic as a natural laboratory for exploring edtech, this study is concerned with the changes in parental involvement that the demands of remote-learning elicited and implications for educational justice across classes. Interviews with 25 middle-class and low-income parents revealed classed practices of parental involvement in remote-learning: middle-class parents espouse a digital well-being approach while low-income parents espouse …
Marking and erasing
The purchase of cooperativism
The ‘purchase of cooperativism’ refers to the structure of caring relations created by educator-kibbutzim as an alternative to capitalist forms of work/family separation and neoliberal individualism. Educator-kibbutzim are urban intentional communities living cooperatively and working in social-educational initiatives. This ethnographic study follows how, from within a self-imposed precariously middle-class status, they use organisational learnin…
Learned Family on the Educator‐Kibbutzim—Knowledge, Kinship, and Social Transformation as Historical Legacy
This article explores how educator‐kibbutzim recruit socialist‐Zionist learning traditions to construct new forms of kinship. Bringing communities of practice theory to new kinship studies, we expand on the role of knowledge in bridging the social/biological. Based on ethnographic research and participatory‐archival research, we describe social learning practices drawn from historical repertoire that are utilized to create new forms of family. Th…
Sociology (19 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Political science (12 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Ethnography (9 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works) · Social science (7 works)