This study investigates mainstream U.S. newspaper discourses concerning the dividing wall that Israel built as a separation barrier from the West Bank. In so doing, it ultimately seeks to further explore news media’s role as agents of social control and influence. Findings indicate that in invoking the nationalism dimension, the news did not handle the primordial element adequately, and that emphasis on violence and revenge as well as the tragedy of child victimization was particularly prominent. The study argues that while the media’s role in social control and influence may be significant, the adequacy with which they perform this role is questionable.

This article examines the motivation behind bounded groups’ creation of digital enclaves online. Through in-depth interviews with 19 webmasters and staff of selected Israeli Orthodox websites three critical areas of negotiation are explored: (1) social control; (2) sources of authority; and (3) community boundaries. Examining these tensions illuminates a detailed process of self-evaluation which leads religious stakeholders and internet entrepreneurs to form these digital enclaves in order to negotiate the core beliefs and constraints of their offline communities online. These offer spaces of safety for members within the risk-laden tracts of the internet. Examining the tensions accompanying the emergence of these religious websites elucidates community affordances as well as the challenges to the authority that integration of new media poses to closed groups and societies.

Consumer compulsive buying is an important area of inquiry in consumer behavior research. The importance of studying compulsive buying, stems, in part, from its nature as a negative aspect of consumer behavior. Specifically, exploring negative consumption phenomena could provide modified or new perspectives for the study of positive consumption behaviors. Moreover, research on negative facets of consumption is useful because it can potentially contribute to society’s wellbeing, an important criterion for usefulness of any research. This paper builds on earlier papers to propose a model of compulsivity antecedents. Gender, consumers’ tendency to make unplanned purchases, and their tendency to buy products not on shopping lists, serve to predict compulsive tendencies in a sample of Israeli consumers. The findings suggest that these antecedents affect compulsive tendencies.