This study investigates how two North American Jewish overnight summer camps responded to the 2024 Israel–Gaza conflict by implementing distinct educational strategies proposed here as “aboutism” and “virtuism.” At the Pennsylvania-based camp (PBC), the aboutism approach guided programming: Israeli-led expert sessions emphasized knowledge transmission about Israel’s geography, institutions, and conflict context. In contrast, at the Maryland-based camp (MBC), the virtuism approach prevailed: staff facilitated dialogue-based activities aimed at moral and identity development, valuing camper perspectives and peer discussion over structured fact-delivery. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork during the 2024 summer season, the analysis explores how each camp’s culture, staff composition, and perceptions of campers shaped these differing strategies. Findings show that while aboutism offered structured content and clarity, it limited opportunities for reflection and camper agency, and that virtuism promoted discussion and belonging, but often lacked shared foundational knowledge and concrete learning outcomes. The study argues that an integrated model—beginning with factual framing through aboutism, then transitioning to facilitator-led reflection via virtuism—could strengthen experiential learning in informal education contexts such as camps. These results contribute to understanding how informal, culture-rich settings can support experiential learning, identity formation, and cross-cultural dialogue.
This paper challenges the conventional classification of Gə’əz as a uniformly “dead” language by demonstrating that its vitality varies dramatically across religious communities. While Gə’əz ceased to function as a vernacular in the thirteenth century, its status ranges from robustly vital among Ethiopian Orthodox Christians to advanced attrition among the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jewish) community now primarily residing in Israel. Among Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, Gə’əz functions as a sacredly living language with tens of thousands of clergy and annual production of new liturgical poetry (qene). Among the Beta Israel, Gə’əz has undergone rapid attrition following mass migration to Israel, surviving as a postvernacular heritage language sustained by symbolic identity, limited ritual use among aging elders, and the holiday of Sigd, but lacking intergenerational transmission. Drawing on 42 sources published between 1955 and 2025, the study critiques Eurocentric frameworks that equate vitality solely with conversational use. The paper’s primary focus is Gə’əz within the Beta Israel context, using the Christian case as comparative contrast. It advances a community-differentiated definition of vitality and introduces the term sacredly living for high-vitality cases while applying postvernacular and heritage language attrition frameworks to the Beta Israel case. The paper demonstrates that a single language can occupy different vitality statuses across different religious and national contexts.
This article examines why some ideologically motivated migrants choose not to naturalize in their host country, focusing on Jewish migrants living in Israel who remain noncitizens despite long-term residence and eligibility for citizenship under the Law of Return. The Israeli case presents a particularly revealing sociological puzzle: migrants who are legally welcomed and often motivated by ideological or religious attachment to Israel nevertheless refrain from formal citizenship. Drawing on qualitative interviews, the article argues that non-naturalization in this context reflects not a lack of belonging but ambivalent forms of attachment shaped by the symbolic meaning attributed to citizenship. Interviewees frequently described Israeli citizenship as something that must be earned through sacrifice, contribution, cultural integration, or participation in collective national experiences. Their hesitation to naturalize, therefore, reflected a perceived lack of entitlement to full membership rather than detachment from Israeli society. By analyzing citizenship as a symbolically charged form of belonging, the article contributes to scholarship on naturalization, transnational migration, and the sociology of belonging. The article shows that non-naturalization may emerge not only from exclusion or weak attachment, but also from migrants’ perception that citizenship represents a deeper form of collective belonging for which they do not yet feel fully legitimate.
