פרסומים

This book describes and analyzes developments in the Israeli economy from 1995 to 2017. During this period, inflation was vanquished, the deficit in the balance of payments turned into a surplus, the public debt to GDP ratio sharply decreased, and unemployment declined to an historical low. Nevertheless, the economy still suffers from many maladies: the productivity level is among the lowest in the developed world, and inequality has generally been on the rise. In the face of these threats to future growth and social cohesiveness, the question arises: has the reliance on market forces gone too far, and has the government retreated from its traditional tasks, tasks the private sector cannot (or does not) perform.

This exploratory study focuses on the personal and professional concerns of Israeli social workers in hospitals and community health settings during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Other studies omitted health care social workers’ needs and concerns. Participants included 126 social workers (120 females, 5 males and 1 other gender identity) in hospitals and community health settings who completed an online survey during the height of the first wave of COVID-19 in Israel. Measures included questions on exposure to COVID-19, sense of safety at work, perceived support, and personal and professional concerns. Two open-ended questions about the social workers’ concerns and the perceived concerns of their patients were included. The results showed that 17 per cent reported one of their inter-disciplinary team testing positive for COVID-19. Only one-third of the social workers felt safe from COVID-19 infection in their workplace. Mothers of dependent children were more concerned about income loss and about balancing work and family requirements than mothers of older children. ‘Home–work conflict’ was also a main theme in the qualitative data. In conclusion, the work–home role conflict took an especially heavy toll during the COVID-19 pandemic on social workers who were mothers to dependent children.

Often portrayed as social resistance fueled by authorities' discrimination and legal racism, minorities' noncompliance is considered to undermine the current order and commonly ascribed to distrust in government. To better understand noncompliance as a manifestation of distrust, this article focuses on the well-documented violation of planning, building, and property laws among the Israeli-Arab minority, who consistently exemplify distrust in government. Differing from current research, our analysis explores what facilitates noncompliance on-the-ground, draws on face-to-face interviews with 30 Arab-Israeli offenders who built their houses illegally, and uses the noncompliant behavior as the unit of analysis. In contrast to the common idiosyncratic portrayal of noncompliance, illegal building emerged as depending on a threefold collective effort: institutional, social, and practical. Uncovering collective support mechanisms for noncompliance suggests that distrust in government is compensated by trust in informal arrangements, thus raising new dilemmas around where personal responsibilities end and public ones begin.

Chapter 1, focusing on Katamari Damacy (2004), demonstrates the process of packaging Japanese kitsch culture into a global product, while chapters 2 and 3 go deeper to unveil Japan's exaggerated self-orientalisation and self-image in the two video game examples of Okami (2006) and Karate Champ (1984). While this book does not fill all the gaps in the literature, especially regarding the structure and organisation of the video game industry, it provides a strong cultural analysis of different Japanese video games from different historical and social contexts. Book Review 267 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ssjj/article/24/1/265/6025113 by 81695661, OUP on 19 March 2021 In summary, Japanese Culture through Videogames is an instructive book that presents a welldetailed cultural analysis of video games.

This article presents a Proto-Canaanite inscription written in ink on a jug. It was unearthed in 2019 at Khirbet al-Ra‘i, located 4 km west of Tel Lachish, in a level dated to the late twelfth or early eleventh century BCE. Only part of the inscription had survived, with five letters indicating the personal name Yrb‘l ( Jerubba‘al). This name also appears in the biblical tradition, more or less in the same era: “[Gideon] from that day was called Yrb‘l” ( Judg. 6:31–32). This inscription, together with similar inscriptions from Beth-Shemesh and Khirbet Qeiyafa, contributes to a better understanding of the distribution of theophoric names with the element ba‘al in the eleventh–tenth centuries BCE in Judah.