Joshua Guetzkow

Hebrew University of Jerusalem | HUJI · Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Institute of Criminology

The emergence of COVID-19 has led to numerous controversies over COVID-related knowledge and policy. To counter the perceived threat from doctors and scientists who challenge the official position of governmental and intergovernmental health authorities, some supporters of this orthodoxy have moved to censor those who promote dissenting views. The...

CDC scores own goals with Novavax. ACIP members fear another confusing label will add to dose errors, question high myocarditis rates and seek direction on Omicron boosters. Ongoing issues with inadequate vial labelling with now three Covid-19 vaccines described as “not acceptable” by ACIP members. threaten patient safety. High myocarditis rates w...

The controversy over vaccines has recently intensified in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, with calls from politicians, health professionals, journalists, and citizens to take harsh measures against so-called “anti-vaxxers,” while accusing them of spreading “fake news” and as such, of endangering public health. However, the issue of suppre...

Objectives To examine the effect of prison visits on prisoners’ levels of anger, hostility, and positive feelings and examine which prisoner and visit characteristics moderate visits’ emotional impact. Method A pretest-posttest study involving 110 male inmates from two maximum security prisons in Israel was conducted. Prisoners were surveyed about...

The accuracy of any data purporting to show covid 19 vaccine effectiveness or safety is critically dependent on the accuracy of four measurements: (1) people classified as having the disease; (2) vaccination status; (3) reported deaths; and (4) the population of vaccinated and unvaccinated (the so called 'denominators'). Errors in any of these coul...

The risk/benefit of Covid vaccines is arguably most accurately measured by comparing the all-cause mortality rate of vaccinated against unvaccinated, since it not only avoids most confounders relating to case definition but also fulfils the WHO/CDC definition of "vaccine effectiveness" for mortality. We examine two of the most recent UK ONS vaccine...

A third open letter to Dr. Grace Lee, ACIP Chair - Oral Comments: David Wiseman ACIP Jan 5 2022 The last wackamole of boosting in an omicron environment of negative quasi-vaccine efficacy and possible immunological addiction. Transparency concerns remain. David Wiseman PhD, MRPharmS (Synechion@aol.com)Jessica Rose, PhD, MSc., BSc. Josh Guetzkow Ph...

Dear ACIP Chairperson Dr. Lee, We refer to the letter to you from one of us (DW) of November 19, submitted to the docket (once a number had been assigned) and published as on Trial Site News.(1) DW remains in anticipation of the pleasure of your reply to that, and this letter, as to your proposed actions. We welcome an honest discussion of our ana...

This paper has been updated and the new version can be found here: Official mortality data for England suggest systematic miscategorisation of vaccine status and uncertain effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccination UPDATED WITH ONS DECEMBER DATA RELEASE & HEALTHY VACCINEE/MORIBUND ANALYSIS http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.28055.09124 https://www.re...

Objectives We examine whether, on average, plea bargaining encourages guilty pleas among defendants who are factually innocent. Methods We develop a formal theory of plea bargaining in which defendants take into account the possibility of false convictions or acquittals when making plea-bargain decisions. We use an incidentally truncated bivariate...

The controversy over vaccines, which has recently intensified following the COVID-19 pandemic, provokes heated debates, with both advocates and opponents raising allegations of bias and fraud in research. Researchers whose work raises doubts about the safety of certain vaccines claim to be victims of discriminatory treatment aimed at suppressing di...

Social scientists and humanists alike are fond to state that race is a social construction, but they often assume that racism is experienced similarly across different social contexts. With the goal of examining this topic empirically, the three of us jumped, with four other colleagues, into what turned out to be a ten-year adventure to produce an...

This article advances our understanding of the well-documented trade-off between welfare and prisons by analyzing US congressional hearings on welfare and criminal justice policies in two periods: the “Great Society” of 1961–67 and the “neoliberal” era of 1981–96. Comparing policymakers’ conceptions about the causes of poverty and crime, about poor...

Racism is a common occurrence for members of marginalized groups around the world. This book illuminates their experiences and responses to stigmatization and discrimination by comparing three countries with enduring group boundaries: the United States, Brazil and Israel. The book delves into what kinds of stigmatizing or discriminatory incidents i...

This chapter examines the experiences and responses of Arab Palestinians, Ethiopian Jews, and Mizrahi Jews in Israel to stigmatization and discrimination. It first explains the historical and socioeconomic context for the three groups, taking into account the legacy of Zionism that shapes their experiences, the status of Arab Palestinians in the Je...

This chapter examines how African Americans residing in New York experience specific incidents of stigmatization and discrimination. It first provides an overview of the background conditions and the place of African Americans in U.S. society in general and in the New York metropolitan area in particular, citing the latter's history of racial tensi...

This chapter examines the experiences and responses of Black Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro to stigmatization and discrimination. It first provides background information to place the interviewees in their historical and socioeconomic context, taking into account race relations in Brazil as well as the legacy of slavery, the rise and fall of racial d...

This chapter describes the multidimensional framework used to explain the quotidian experiences and responses of ordinary people to ethnoracial exclusion. The framework analytically distinguishes between three dimensions to make sense of how they influence the ways in which each ethnoracial group (from Brazil, Israel, and the United States) experie...

This book has examined the nature of stigmatization and discrimination by documenting the experiences and responses of ordinary people who belong to variously stigmatized ethnoracial groups. It has explored how African Americans, Black Brazilians, Arab Palestinians, Ethiopian Jews, and Mizrahi Jews make sense of their predicaments and mold their si...

Research on violence in US prisons frequently finds higher rates of violence among ethnic minorities compared to whites. Explanations focus on a "subculture of violence," sometimes referred to as an honor culture or code of the street, whereby minorities import a deeply internalized, violent subculture into prison. Subcultural theories of violence...

This paper summarizes key findings of our research on peer review, which challenge the separation between cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of evaluation. Here we highlight some of the key findings from this research and discuss its relevance for understanding academic evaluation in the humanities. We summarize the role of informal rules, the imp...

Symbolic boundaries, understood as the conceptual distinctions used to demarcate in-groups and out-groups, are fundamental to social inequality. While we know a great deal about how groups and individuals construct and contest symbolic boundaries along lines of class, race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality, less attention is given to (a) nation...

This article examines the consequences of prison overcrowding litigation for U.S. prisons. We use insights derived from the endogeneity of law perspective to develop expectations about the likely impact of overcrowding litigation on five outcomes: prison admissions, prison releases, spending on prison capacity, prison crowding, and incarceration ra...

The Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 and the Ghost Dance movement that preceded it offer a compelling sociological case for understanding legitimation, elite framing, and repression. Building on the social movements literature and theoretical insights on power, institutions, and inequality, we engage in multimethod, in-depth analyses of a rich body of...

Much of the research explaining the generosity of antipoverty programs has focused on the perceived deservingness of the poor. While the notion of deservingness is useful in explaining the scope and general outlines of policy, it does not help us understand the development and change of the specific policy instruments that constitute antipoverty po...

Epistemological differences fuel continuous and frequently divisive debates in the social sciences and the humanities. Sociologists have yet to consider how such differences affect peer evaluation. The empirical literature has studied distributive fairness, but neglected how epistemological differences affect perception of fairness in decision maki...

This chapter provides an overview of state budgeting for corrections. As such it addresses the following questions: How much do states spend on corrections? To what degree has state corrections spending grown over time? How does that spending vary across the states and over time? What factors account for this variation? Finally, does rising spendin...

Employers have experimented with three broad approaches to promoting diversity. Some programs are designed to establish organizational responsibility for diversity, others to moderate managerial bias through training and feedback, and still others to reduce the social isolation of women and minority workers. These approaches find support in academi...

This paper examines how panelists serving on interdisciplinary funding panels produce evaluations they perceive as fair, drawing on 81 interviews with panelists serving on multidisciplinary fellowship competitions. We identify how peer reviewers define “good” interdisciplinary proposals and the rules they follow: respect for disciplinary sovereignt...

Drawing on interviews with peer-review panelists from five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions, this paper analyzes one of the main criteria used to evaluate scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences: originality. Whereas the literature in the sociology of science focuses on the natural sciences and defines originality as the prod...

This paper investigates the questions of whether and how the evaluation of merit in academic disciplines changed between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. We analyze letters of recommendation written for prospective graduate students who applied to the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Program during the periods 1951–1955 and 1967–1971, in the discipline...

As private and public agencies seek innovative ways to employ the arts to improve and strengthen communities, they have become increasingly interested in assessing the impact of their investments. In this context, arts advocates and researchers have made a variety of ambitious claims about how the arts impact communities. These claims, however, are...