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May 11, 2005
Sabra
While at CEU, Nitsan and I had a brief conversation about the Sabra Jews and their form of talk - which I didn´t recall then is specifically called dugri. I can’t remember exactly how it came up; I think Nitsan must have said something about Israeli directness in comparison with either Hungarian or U.S. modes of talk. I asked her, “Sabra?” And she said, “No, that was a way of making a distinction at a particular historical moment. We’re all Sabra now.” She went on to explain that the term was used to distinguish the first generation of Jews born in Israel after the state was established from those who emigrated there. I don’t recall her words, but the meaning I took – what I remember – is that sabra was related to a sense of being (if I remember accurately) untainted or uncontaminated by exposure to the world out there, the gentile world, I guess, and its violence, discrimination, prejudice, etc. In other words it implied a certain sense of purity.
When we read and discussed Tamar Katriel´s article on Sabra dugri talk for Donal´s class (2-3 years ago), the conception that stayed with me was one of the Sabra Jews being a particular “group” – a subset, almost like an ethnicity or other more permanently marked-off subculture. I’ve been meaning to share this with the social interaction folk at UMass, and am motivated to finally get to it because of reading Jan Blommaert’s critique of both Conversation Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis (see previous post for more details). He’s focused on how each addresses notions of power (or fails to), noting:
“Certain discourse forms only become visible and accessible at particular times and under particular conditions…which tells us a lot about our societies and ourselves, and which necessarily situates particular discourses in the wider sociopolitical environment in which they occur. The stories have a particular ‘load’ which relates to (and indexes) their place in a particular social, political, and historical moment. Removing this load from the narratives could involve the risk of obscuring the reasons for their production as well as the fact that they are tied to identifiable people and to particular, uniquely meaningful, circumstances that occasioned them” (66).
Here´s a recent study on Israeli self-conceptions in relation to sabra that might counter Katriel´s conclusions? I´m not sure, as I don´t have access to her article for review, and I´ve only seen the abstract for this study by R Sela-Sheffy - who has written something else on canon formation!!!
[Written 31 May and backdated.]
Posted by Steph at May 11, 2005 12:50 AM
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