ABSTRACT
The study of activism as a social field, which both articulates and valorizes localized notions of “activist action” and “activist identities”, provides a particularly rich opportunity for exploring the entanglements of language and action in the semiotic economy of contemporary cultural groups. The simultaneous valuation and de-valuation of language in activist discourse speaks to larger issues related to the cultural construction of language and action in modern Israeli culture and in the Western tradition from which Zionism has drawn some of its basic tenets. Israel’s hegemonic linguistic ideology, which has been termed ‘revivalism,’ considers modern Hebrew as a revival of Classical Hebrew whose various historical layers include Biblical Hebrew, Talmudic Hebrew and later rabbinical sources. Activist discourse marks an ambivalent juncture between these two non-commensurate linguistic ideologies that activists must navigate as they mount their struggle to bring about social and political change.
