Florida Senate Bill 266 set a legal precedent in 2023 by establishing governmental controls on the process by which general education is managed by universities in the United States. It limited the ability of universities to include principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in general education requirements and instituted other limitations on the offering of courses and programs related to "identity politics." This essay reviews the repercussions of such legal efforts to not only change general education in the United States but also to alter the dominant educational philosophy of "the liberal and human tradition" of colleges and universities toward one of vocational ends. As a case study, the essay discusses the author's experience as Dean of a College of General Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in a process of general education reform pushed by legislators and employers as well as internal oppositional pressure from faculty members and students. Based on this experience, the author advocates for emphasizing the past and future as well as the ethnographic present in their many social and cultural forms that demonstrate the altruistic function of higher education to be community engaged, globally aware, leadership minded, and-most of all-innovative. Thus, general education might be reimagined beyond a means to "make a living," to connected learning that provides a cultural and intellectual foundation for living.

Abstract Although many disciplines dropped the use of “vernacular” in the 21st century because of the term’s connotations of primitivism, classism, and marginalization arising from 19th-century colonialism, the term has risen in usage among folklorists and ethnologists in the early 21st century. Three distinct streams of usage are identified and analyzed for their nuanced meaning: linguistics, religion, and architecture. Folkloristic and ethnological usage is traced to concern whether ‘vernacular’, despite its problematic historic context, is preferable to ‘folk’ as a modifier of areas of inquiry, many of which are into fluid, non-objectified categories such as belief, faith, and play. A rhetorical shift coinciding with social change from analog to digital communication is apparent to binaries of official/unofficial and formal/ informal in cultural analysis. A further and possibly fringe development has been an ideological strategy represented by the compound term ‘stigmatized vernacular’ that embraces rather than repudiates cultural hierarchy. The evaluation of the problematic adoption by 21st-century folklorists and ethnologists of ‘vernacular’ is that it reifies the very problems that the users intended to resolve.

The inspiration for and significance of field-based Jewish folklore and ethnology studies as a distinct branch of learning devoted to the understanding of tradition in relation to diasporic Jewish studies and folkloristics is traced back to the Talmudic directive to "Go out and see what the people do." The shapers of the field include S. An-Ski, Max Grunwald, Yoysef-Yehude Lerner, and Dov Noy along with theoretical influences of Franz Boas and Erving Goffman heralding a shift from textual sources to analyses of practice and performance. The characteristic definition, content, method, and theory of Jewish folklore and ethnological studies since the nineteenth century are analyzed as growing out of a concern for change and continuity to Jewish community and identity amid the force of modernization. Future trajectories of research and goals for the field are considered in the digital age in which new definitions of community and culture are emerging.

Yahrzeit … Haya Bar-Itzhak (1946–2020) Simon J. Bronner (bio) Haya Bar-Itzhak was a driving force behind this journal and a shaper of the global study of Jewish folklore and ethnology. In her teaching, writing, and editing, she brought into relief the long lineage of work in periodicals devoted to Jewish folklore beginning in the nineteenth century (Bar-Itzhak 2010, 16–26) and inspired the editors of Jewish Folklore and Ethnology (JFE) with a vision for a journal that would go beyond an audience of Jews to become indispensable for all folklorists and ethnologists. The JFE editors, indeed all who care about understanding tradition, lost a friend and mentor when she died at her home in Haifa, Israel, on October 25, 2020. An organizer par excellence, one of her last projects was bringing together fieldwork-oriented scholars from around the world in 2013 to forge connections in a conference around the Talmudic directive to "Go out and see what the people do" (BT Eruvin 14B) as a folkloristic rallying cry. The conference occurred the same year that her Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions in two volumes was published, which she took over from Raphael Patai. And now the editors of Jewish Folklore and Ethnology find themselves similarly continuing a trajectory from her to a new generation of scholars and readers. With health issues mounting for Haya, the book based on the "Going to the People" conference came out in [End Page 210] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Haya Bar-Itzhak, August 2007. Photograph by Simon J. Bronner. 2016 under the editorship of Jeffrey Veidlinger, but Haya's influence on the work is clearly evident, as it is on every page of this volume of the journal and many more in several languages across several continents. Haya was born in Berlin, Germany, on August 17, 1946 to Polish Holocaust survivors. After emigration to Israel, she received her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Haifa and finished her PhD in 1987 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a dissertation on "The 'Saints' Legend' as a Genre in Jewish Folk Literature" under the supervision of renowned folklore [End Page 211] professor Dov Noy. She returned to the University of Haifa as a professor and in 1992, became chair of the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature and in 1994, head of folklore studies and the Israel Folktale Archives. A peripatetic teacher and scholar who attracted admiring students and colleagues wherever she went, she held visiting professorships at Indiana University, University of Michigan, Penn State University, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California–Berkeley. In addition, she was a fellow of the Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig, Germany. She received numerous grants and awards for her work from organizations such as the Koret Foundation, Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, S. O. Sidore Foundation, and the Council for Higher Education of Israel. She had broad interests in folklore that spanned Eastern Europe, northern Africa, Israel, and North America, and having taken on the Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions, in many ways her parting gift—and challenge—to the field, her scope of work extended to the far-flung corners of the world. She maintained specialties in folk narrative, particularly legend and women's culture from ancient times to the present. Her research and publications in English, Hebrew, German, Polish, and Yiddish earned her renown globally for a conceptualization of ethnopoetics informed by the Jewish experience. Her authored books in English include Jewish Poland—Legends of Origin (2001), Israeli Folk Narratives: Settlement, Immigration, Ethnicity (2005), and with Aliza Shenhar, Jewish Moroccan Folk Narratives from Israel (1993). Her edited books include Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions, 2 volumes (2013), Pioneers of Jewish Ethnography and Folkloristics in Eastern Europe (2010), and with Idit Pintel-Ginsberg, The Power of a Tale: Stories from the Israel Folktale Archives (2019). In Hebrew, she edited Folklore and Ideology: Studies Dedicated to Prof. Aliza Shenhar (2014), Legends of Poland: Ethnopoetics and Legendary Chronicles (1996), and with Aliza Shenhar, Folktales from Beth-She'an (1981) and Folktales from Shlomi (1983). She also was the editor of...

The concept of cognition arose with the beginnings of European folklore scholarship. Debate concerned whether the creation of folklore in modern life is an embodied cultural response or an intentional mindful action. The folkloristic move away from cognition can be attributed to a philosophical empiricism in which only knowledge of externalized evidence gained through observation and collection is valid. The essay surveys alternative folkloristic philosophies and approaches oriented toward cognition.

The ubiquitous practice of opening emails with "I hope you're well" has sparked public debate on whether it is mindless or folkloric (i.e., mindful and purposeful). This essay addresses the issue by analyzing the cognition behind this and related expressions. Drawing on the concept of Einfache Formen and practice theory, the essay hypothesizes that the verbal enactment of hoping and wishing is psychologically significant in its framing of magical thinking at the core of folklore.

The study of regions and borders in American folklore and folklife is essentially about the cultural significance of place and land. It has been of political interest more widely because of the implication of the way that national feeling developed after the establishment of a New Republic in the nineteenth century despite sectional division born out of cultural differences. It has been of folkloristic significance because of region as an important marker of cultural identity, in some places more than others. Along both these lines, folklorists have asked about the relative stability of regional cultures in the United States and the use of regional folklore as an expression of social belonging in relation to others, including race, ethnicity, occupation, family, and religion. Objective and subjective approaches to investigating these issues are presented. For the former, historical-geographical surveys of folk items that demonstrate diffusion and hybridization are covered, and for the latter, rhetorical criticism of narrative and visual expressions and frame or situational analysis of cultural scenes are discussed. The essay introduces the concept of regional “homelands” in a mobile society such as the United States—social constructions that are often imagined in folklife rather than in the reality of a cultural landscape. Addressing the view that place and region carry less cultural meaning with the advent of the digital era of the twenty-first century, the essay closes with research trajectories for assessing the continued need for “sense of place” in a modern context of heightened mobility, globalization, and digital communication.

In the twenty-first century, the study of folklore and particularly folk art has given increasing attention to the individual as an agent of tradition, but has avoided psychological approaches, and especially psychoanalytic interpretation, to locate cognitive sources for cultural practices. Discourse on the value of psychoanalytic interpretation is traced to Ernest Jones’s 1928 presentation to the Folklore Society (the major international learned organization for folklore study founded in London in 1878), but the consideration of folk art as a projection of anxieties onto expressive material forms did not become prevalent until the late twentieth century. This essay argues for more of a “psychological ethnology” in the twenty-first century to achieve more insightful explanation, rather than mere description, of folk art and artists with their symbolization of the touch-oriented world aroused by the hand and handiwork. Using examples of whirligigs and carved wooden chains as examples, the essay proposes the need for a goal to address a symbolist theory of mind centered on developmental ideas of play and art as human strategies of coping and adapting. Such a theory would incorporate concepts of frame, practice, and projection in work with individual folk artists.

This chapter is a case study of a state-declared "Year of Folklore" program in the Netherlands to provide a comparison with American views of public heritage. The program addressed a legacy of multicultural tolerance in the Netherlands that had been challenged by a rising refugee crisis. Questions arose as to how cultural presentations meant to increase nationalism could also be inclusive with rapid social change.

This chapter talks about the behaviour of 'playing on the computer' that primarily involved sharing jokes in the 1990s. It mentions folklorist Paul Smith who dubbed the computer as the 'Joke Machine' and predicted the exponential growth of its humour-generating function. It also discusses how the internet brandishes the expressive, interactive features or cultural functions of folklore that frequently lodge as commentary on popular culture. The chapter contends how joking became associated with digital transmission and how it serves emotionally and psychologically to respond to anxieties concerning diminished human control and competency for users. It cites Jewish Orthodox groups that claim that the internet and computerized devices should be used for work, and not play.

In the digital age, the twentieth-century definition of folklore as "artistic communication in small groups" is problematic. This chapter cites a need for a practice-oriented definition to account for various phenomena involving tradition that are not limited to small groups or face-to-face communication.It proposes "traditional knowledge drawn from and put into practice" to draw attention to thesource of cognition for repeated, variable activities, or practices.

Although acknowledged as being central to the study of folklore and folklife, tradition has been difficult to conceptualize.This chapter identifies a characteristic of tradition that can help-its metaphor of the hand rooted in its Roman customary origins.Whether "handed down," "handed over," or "handed up," tradition into the present day critically conveys the instrumental quality of keeping in touch.

This chapter suggests a paradigm shift in folklore and folklife studies in the twenty-first century following the "era of communication" and "professionalization of time and space" in the twentieth century. Characterized as a "hyper era" represented by keywords of convergence, practice, and frame informed by digital culture rather than the previous period's analog signification of performance, symbol, and structure, the new epoch signals a turn toward an understanding of social praxis anticipated by intellectual movements in Europe and Asia. The American contribution is theorizing of individualism and organization in everyday life.

During the 1970s the folk, or open-air, museum was hailed as a revolutionary change in museology and a great opportunity for folklorists to exert influence on public education about regional-ethnic-occupational traditions and a changing historical profession. With the advent of the digital age these museums are struggling to bring visitors in and folklorists have had an uneasy relationship with predominantly rural museums. This chapter advocates for a different kind of folk museum that is action rather than object focused, looks to industrial and post-industrial interpretation, and engages integrative programming to respond to needs of local communities.

Building on the landmark Supreme Court case Dukes v. Wal-Mart (2011), which involved the issue of whether folklore provided evidence of a corporate culture affecting managerial decision making, this chapter addresses the context of organizations and networks that are distinguishable from communities and groups. Following the typology of sociologist Max Weber, organizations and networks are defined by their strategic formation and usually are formalized, in contrast to the fluid nature of communities and groups. Folklorists often avoided analyzing folklore of organizations and the traditional praxis of organizing because of the formalism of organizations and networks, frequently associated with businesses, but this chapter argues that as social entities they rely on folklore internally to create an identity for participants and externally to convey a cultural character. Organizations and networks vary in their use of folklore, often in relation to whether they are “high context” and fostering ritual and narrative or “low context” and therefore less conducive to cultural formation. Historically, organizational folklore and folklife have become more pervasive in American society with the dominance of a service and information economy and an “organizational society” since the late twentieth century. This chapter discusses the similarities and differences in the kinds of folklore and folklife in three major types of organizations and networks: unions and advocacy groups, corporations and businesses, and voluntary organizations and support groups. Research on organizations and networks often has an applied aspect to reform organizations and improve the lives of Americans who necessarily engage them.