Sigal Nagar-Ron questions in her essay the halo surrounding the concept of periphery. She explores how the concept is adopted by groups that wish to challenge the existing order and how it continues to carry a connotation of resistance to the social hegemony even when it is adopted by that very hegemony itself. Peripherality is celebrated not only in critical studies; it is also the key concept in the main social inequality index used by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics – the Peripherality Index. This can be seen as a seeping of critical insights into the heart of the official public regulations, but Nagar-Ron argues that such seeping empties the concept of critical meaning and exposes its conservative bias. She traces the sources of the Peripherality Index, examines its presumptions, and shows how it defines periphery solely geographically, and primarily by the distance of localities from the center. Such a definition provides a flat and unifying concept of periphery: a concept that stands solely in relation to a single center, a concept that cannot distinguish between communities of different kinds with diverse populations, that ignores the history that led to that geography and its different routes, so that the meaning of distance from the center – of a development town, a kibbutz or an “individual farm,” in the 1950s or today – remains identical. Especially, argues Nagar-Ron, the index erases the internal Jewish ethnic difference, and thereby becomes an ideological tool for the denial of the inequality between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim.

https://doi.org/10.70959/tac.54.2021.135147