Elana Shapira discusses the tangled relationship between Austrian Nationalism and Zionism in Viennese Modernism Berta Zuckerkandl grew up witnessing her father, publisher of the newspaper Neues Wiener Tagblatt, Moritz Szeps’s stormy career and political engagements. Moritz Szeps was a close advisor to the liberal Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf and a supporter of an Austria-France alliance through his connections with liberal French politicians such as Léon Gambetta and Georges Clemenceau. Clemenceau’s brother, Paul, married Szeps’s eldest daughter Sophie. Berta also became involved in political causes. Learning about the “Dreyfus affair” at her sister’s salon, Zuckerkandl supported the fight to recognize his innocence. For Berta Zuckerkandl, the city of Vienna would become hers to form. Among the guests in the early days of Zuckerkandl’s renowned salon were non-Jewish cultural critic and Zionist Hermann Bahr. Other members in her salon associated with the Zionist movement were authors Richard Beer-Hofmann and Felix Salten of the literary group “Jung Wien” (Young Vienna), and who also played critical roles in shaping Viennese modernism. Working with her colleagues Bahr and the critic Ludwig Hevesi, Zuckerkandl raised the flag for modern Austrian art within a conservative and provincial cultural climate. She promoted modern design as part of constructing a progressive Austrian national identification. This talk aims to explore the antisemitic background and the pluralistic character of Austrian nationalism and Zionism, as they developed in the early years in relation to each other within and in relation to Zuckerkandl’s cultural networks. Speaker Bio: Elana Shapira is cultural and design historian and project leader of the Austrian Science Fund research project “Visionary Vienna: Design and Society 1918–1934” (2017-2021). She is a senior postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in Design History and Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Shapira is the author of Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture and Design in Fin de Siècle Vienna (Brandeis University Press, 2016). She is the editor of Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture and Viennese Modernism (Böhlau, 2018) and of the forthcoming anthology Designing Transformation: Jews and Cultural Identity in Central European Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2021). Shapira is further the coeditor of the following anthologies based on the proceedings of International Symposiums she has co-organized Freud and the Émigré (Palgrave, 2020) and of Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture(Bloomsbury, 2017). Her forthcoming symposium organized together with Anne-Katrin Rossberg is “Gestalterinnen. Frauen, Design und Gesellschaft im Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit” will take place at the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts in May 2021.

Israel Studies Seminar

Reconsidering Early Jewish Nationalist Ideologies Seminar: Elana Shapira: Berta Zuckerkandl and Her Circle: Austrian Nationalism and Zionism in Viennese Modernism

Maya Gildin Zuckerman discusses a 1897 tour from London to Palestine as a moment in the Zionist meaning making process. Zionist emergence and its early developments have often been told either as a person/organisation-centred narrative or a Herderian cultural-geographically distinct account (see Dubnov 2011). Through the empirical case study of Danish Zionist emergence, I will show Zionism as an entangled and networked phenomenon that forced the involved parts to rethink Jewish belonging as either here or there. In the lecture, I unfold how a proto-Zionist tour from London to Palestine and back in 1897 inspired the participants, among which was the Danish-Jewish physician, Louis Frænkel, to discover and make sense of what Zionism meant to them. Based on a cultural sociological framework, I show how this proto-Zionist trip became a catalyst for re-coding Jewish values for a group of European Jews. They subsequently returned to their different nation-states and local Jewish communities with a repertoire of new ways of enacting Jewish collectivity that, among other things, reshuffled the earlier marginalisation of small Jewish communities such as the Danish. Maja Gildin Zuckerman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School. She was the Jim Joseph Postdoctoral Fellow at Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford University. Her research centers around questions related to modern and contemporary Jewish citizenship, the civil sphere, and national in/exclusion relations. She has co-edited the book New Perspectives on Jewish Cultural History: Boundaries, Experiences, and Sense-Making (New York, Routledge, 2019). She holds a PhD from University of Southern Denmark in Middle Eastern Studies (2016), a MA in Sociology and Anthropology from Tel Aviv University (2012), and a BA in Anthropology and Jewish Studies from Copenhagen and Haifa University.

Reconsidering Early Jewish Nationalist Ideologies Seminar: Maja Gildin Zuckerman: The Pragmatism of Proto-Zionism: Tracing Jewish Nation-building through a Cultural Sociological Framework

Jamie Stern-Weiner (Oxford) traces the genesis and evolution of a controversial 'working definition' of antisemitism. The Working Definition of Antisemitism was originally presented in modest terms: a common reference point enabling monitoring bodies to collect data in a manner that permitted cross-country comparison. Some 15 years on, a formidable array of Jewish organisations and supportive Governments is lobbying around the world to have the Working Definition of Antisemitism institutionalised across political and social life. This juggernaut is everywhere provoking opposition - albeit disparate and poorly resourced - led by dissident Jewish groups and Palestinians. The Working Definition's advocates argue that, in order to combat antisemitism, one has to define it. This talk will examine the political genesis and instrumentalisation of the Working Definition to ask: Do we need a definition of antisemitism in order to fight it? If so, should it be this one? If not, what purpose does this definition serve? Jamie Stern-Weiner is a DPhil candidate in Area Studies at the University of Oxford. He is the editor of Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine's Toughest Questions (OR Books, 2018) and Antisemitism and the Labour Party (Verso, 2019).

Jamie Stern-Weiner: IHRA: The Politics of a Definition

Ann Prashizky discusses 'self orientalistation' by the 1.5 generation of FSU immigrants to Israel. Abstract This seminar explores the mutual influences between urban spaces and ethnic relations and hierarchies in the cultural field. It hinges on the two theoretical arguments: that physical place influences intergroup/ethnic relations, and that ethnic relations may reshape the meaning of spaces, especially in the urban context. Both ethnicity and space involve political contestations over their meaning and emerge from the interplay between materiality and culture. Young Russian-speaking ethnic entrepreneurs in Israel have invented the new cultural trope of Mizrahi or Mediterranean Russianness, expressed in various venues of pop culture in which they are involved as cultural producers: video clips, festivals, and music and dance performances. This counter-intuitive merger reflects the mainstreaming of Mizrahi styles and genres in the Israeli culture. It also challenges the Orientalist attitudes towards Mizrahim prevalent among Russian immigrants in Israel, especially the older generation. I examine the nexus between the spatiality and materiality of this new culture which has emerged within Israel’s geographic and social periphery. The third space is thus being produced that undermines the alleged Mizrahi/Russian binary and the perception of these identities as essences which are in opposition in a racial and ethnic context. It enables the mixing of categories, and the possibility of creating a new material style and new artistic objects. Anna Prashizky is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Western Galilee College. Her research interests are in the area of the anthropology of Judaism and the immigration from FSU in Israel. Her recent articles dealing with the 1.5 generation of Russian-speaking immigrants in Israel were published in such journals as Journal of Israeli History, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Ethnicities, and Social Identities.

Anna Prashizky: Connecting Ethnicity and Space: The New Russian-Mizrahi-Mediterranean Pop Culture in Israel’s Periphery

Adam Sutcliffe (KCL) discusses how Zionist ideologues have viewed the notion of Jewish purpose. The nineteenth-century emergence of Zionism was intimately connected to the idea that the Jews served a uniquely crucial role in the world. This notion is rooted in theological anticipations, both Jewish and Christian, of a messianic future. From it the 1860s took on distinct overtones of economic and geo-political transformation, and spread in various ways into the secular realm. In this paper I will show how ideas of Jewish purpose feature in both Jewish and non-Jewish Zionist thinking, from Joseph Salvador and Ernest Laharanne in 1860, through George Elliot, Theodor Herzl and Bernard Lazare, to the religious Zionism of Abraham Kook and the secularised ‘light unto the nations’ rhetoric of David Ben-Gurion. Adam Sutcliffe is Professor of European History at King’s College London. His most recent book is What Are Jews For: History, Peoplehood, and Purpose (Princeton University Press, 2020). His co-edited volumes include The Cambridge History of Judiasm, volume VII (1500-1815) (CUP, 2018) and Philosemitism in History (CUP, 2011). He is currently working on a history of the idea of empathy in historical writing and pedagogy.

Adam Sutcliffe: Light Unto the Nations - The Idea of Jewish Purpose and the Emergence of Zionism (Reconsidering Early Jewish Nationalist Ideologies Seminar)

Tal Shamur presents his work on the melancholic protest of Hatikva residents. While the concept of citizenship is often related to legal status within the nation state, the actual expression of the concept is defined by one’s standing within the political community and develops questions of inclusion and belonging where spaces of citizenship extend to the city level. According to this perspective, although people may be included in the collective by law of the nation state, they may also be, in actual fact, excluded by the unwritten spatial law. This law dictates the life conditions of minorities and creates symbolic and physical boundaries that pushes “others” to the city margins where marginalized citizens and noncitizens contest their exclusions. Whereas public demonstration of discriminated citizens emerging at the urban periphery might be seen as reactionary and as a raging outbursts, closer examination reveals they are also a site of sadness and melancholy. following this line of thought, Tal Shamur will suggest the concept of “melancholic citizenship” to describe the emotion of sadness aroused among a discriminated group of citizens in light of a process that highlights their social and urban marginality. The case study explored is the struggle of old-time Mizrahi (Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries) residents of the HaTikva neighborhood – a lower income neighborhood of south Tel Aviv – against the inflow of African migration to the area. Based on anthropological field work he conducted in the neighborhood he argues that the struggle of the long-standing residents aroused melancholic feelings among them when they realized that the global migration is a current indication of their discrimination as lower-income Mizrahim who inhabit the city periphery and are located at the margins of Israeli society. Tal Shamur is an ISEF Foundation International Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology, at the University of Cambridge. He wrote his PhD in Cultural Anthropology in Haifa University. His work focuses on questions of belonging and identification within the urban sphere. His Book titled: Hope and Melancholy on an Urban Frontier: Ethnicity, Space and Gender in the Hatikva Neighborhood, Tel-Aviv was recently published in Haifa University of press (2020, in Hebrew). His articles were published in the journals Emotion Space and Society (2019) and Citizenship Studies (2018).

Tal Shamur (Cambridge): The emergence of melancholic citizenship at the urban periphery: The case of south Tel Aviv protest against global migration

The fourth lecture in the Reconsidering Early Jewish Nationalist Ideologies seminar series. Rose Stair discusses cultural Zionism through a focus on age and gender. This paper examines the construction and mobilization of age categories in the German-language cultural Zionism of the turn of the 20th century. Presenting examples of texts and visual art that employ models and metaphors of different age identities, Rose Stair suggests that age functioned as a conceptual language through which the cultural Zionist community expressed their relationship to the Jewish past and Zionist future. She argues that these conceptions of age cannot be detached from the community’s assumptions about gender, meaning that even the metaphorical use of age imagery remained tethered to the social reality of family structures and bourgeois gender roles. Rose Stair is DPhil student in the Theology and Religion faculty at the University of Oxford, and previously studied at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her doctoral research looks at age and gender in German-language cultural Zionism, and their articulation through textual and visual sources.

Reconsidering Early Jewish Nationalist Ideologies Seminar: Rose Stair (Oxford): Age and gender in German-language cultural Zionism

Peter Bergamin presents some findings and conclusions from his recent research on the British Mandate for Palestine, focusin on the phenomena of Jewish illegal immigration and anti-British terrorism, and their role in Britain’s eventual abandonment of the Abstract: In this seminar Dr Bergamin presents some findings and conclusions from his recent research on the British Mandate for Palestine. The project examines Britain’s administration of the Mandate, and – using almost exclusively British archival documents - suggests reasons for its eventual referral of the Mandate to the United Nations in April 1947, and premature departure in May 1948, having not fulfilled the conditions of its Mandate. The seminar focuses on the phenomena of Jewish illegal immigration and anti-British terrorism, and their role in Britain’s eventual abandonment of the Palestine Mandate. A comparison of the Jewish anti-British terror campaign, from 1944-1948 – alongside the concurrent campaign of Jewish illegal immigration to Palestine – with the IRA terror campaign in London, between 1973 and 1998 shows that, in only three and a half years, acts of Jewish anti-British terror far surpassed those of the IRA in London – in scope, intensity, and indeed, casualties – which occurred over a period of more than twenty-five years. Thus, the seminar will conclude by stating outright what other studies of the period often whitewash or downplay: that the combined phenomena of Jewish illegal immigration to Palestine, and the campaign of anti-British terror waged by Jewish underground paramilitary groups Irgun, Stern Gang, and, at times, also by the Haganah (with the support of the Jewish political leadership in Palestine), were the key factors in Britain’s decision to withdraw from the Mandate. Indeed, what Britain had originally hoped would be one its most successful imperial undertakings turned out, in retrospect, to be perhaps its greatest failure. Bio: Peter Bergamin is Lecturer in Oriental Studies at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, after having gained his DPhil in Oriental Studies in 2016, under the supervision of Derek Penslar. His research focuses on the period of the British Mandate for Palestine, with a particular interest in Maximalist-Revisionist Zionism. His first monograph, The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology (I.B. Tauris, 2020), focused on the ideological and political genesis of one of the major leaders of pro-Fascist, Far-Right Zionism, in the 1920s and 30s. His current research examines British archival sources, in order to suggest reasons for Britain’s premature withdrawal from its Palestine Mandate.

Peter Bergamin (Oxford): Guns and Moses: Jewish anti-British Resistance during the Mandate for Palestine

Yuval Evri discusses his new book, The Return to Al-Andalus, Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew Abstract: Against the background of the tumultuous political and social events of the period and the processes of national, ethnic, and religious partitions that gained momentum during those years, the lecture explores the ways in which these Arab-Jewish intellectuals fundamentally challenged the nationalistic and monolingual separatist ideologies that characterized their times, and proposed an alternative political and cultural route. It looks at their efforts to establish a shared Jewish-Arab society based on a symbolic return to the Sephardi/Andalusian medieval legacy of Hebrew-Arabic bilingualism and a Judeo-Muslim joint cultural heritage. Instead of partition into two separate languages, identities, or traditions, they developed a model of a single multilingual and multi-religious cultural landscape. Thus, the fluidity that is inherent in these multiplicities becomes a source of resistance to the dominant monolingual and nationalistic forces, and dismantles any (national) claim over exclusive ownership of texts, traditions, or languages. By exploring these contested representations of Andalusian identity and culture, the lecture re-examines some fundamental issues that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century: the national conflict between Jews and Palestinians, the contacts and splits between Hebrew and Arab cultures and the formation of ethnic hierarchies between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. Bio: Dr Yuval Evri is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Kings College. His research focuses on the cultural and political history of Palestine/Land of Israel at the turn of the 20th century. The issue of Sephardi and Arab-Jewish thought lay in the heart of his research and teaching interest. His current research traces multilingual translational and cultural models that emerged in the beginning of 20th century Palestine/Land of Israel and explores how the fluidity inherent in these cultural models becomes a source of resistance to the dominant monolingual forces, and to any exclusive claims of ownership of land, texts, traditions, or languages. His new book The Return to Al-Andalus Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew was published by Magnes Press (2020). Dr. Evri is headed to Brandeis University, where he will take the Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish Studies.

Reconsidering Early Jewish Nationalist Ideologies Seminar: Yuval Evri (KCL) - The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew

Nachshon Perez discusses Perez and Jobani's co-authored book on the politics of contested sacred sites Abstract: Sacred sites are often at the center of intense contestation between different groups regarding a wide variety of issues, including ownership, access, usage rights, permissible religious conduct, and many others. They are often the source of intractable, long-standing conflicts and extreme violence. In our presentation we profile five sites: Devils Tower National Monument (Wyoming, US), Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi (Uttar-Pradesh, India), the Western Wall (Jerusalem), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Jerusalem), and the Temple Mount/Haram esh-Sharif (Jerusalem). Telling the fascinating stories of these high-profile contested holy sites, we develop and critically explore five different models of governing such sites: "non-interference", "separation and division", "preference", "status-quo", and "closure". Each model is grounded in different sets of considerations; central among them are trade-offs between religious liberty and social order. This novel typology aims to assist democratic governments in their attempt to secure public order and mutual toleration among opposed groups in contested sacred sites. Yuval Jobani is a senior lecturer of Jewish Philosophy and Education at Tel Aviv University. His research interests include the variety of Jewish secularisms, religion and the public sphere as well as religion and education in contemporary society. He is the author of “The Role of Contradictions in Spinoza's Philosophy: The God Intoxicated Heretic.” Nahshon Perez is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Bar Ilan University. His fields of research include toleration, pluralism, religion-state relations, and the rectification of past wrongs. He is the author of “Freedom from Past Injustices: A Critical Evaluation of Claims for Inter-Generational Reparations”.

Nahshon Perez (Bar-Ilan) and Yuval Jobani (Tel Aviv): Governing the Sacred: Political Toleration in Five Contested Sacred Sites

The second seminar in the Reconsidering Early Jewish Nationalism Sereis. Danielle Drori discusses Zionism and translation, with a focus on Klausner's Life of Jesus Abstract: The literary critic, historian, and Hebrew writer Yosef Klausner has never been as widely known and as celebrated as some of his mentors and interlocutors in the Zionist movement. His competing alliances may explain this. He aligned himself with Jabotinsky’s brand of Zionism, admired Herzl, and owed his career as an influential editor to Ahad Ha’am. He also published, in the early 1920s, a controversial Hebrew study of the life and times of Jesus Christ, based on his German-language doctoral dissertation. This presentation will tell the story behind this English translation and revisit some of Klausner’s ideas about Jewish history, the Hebrew language, and monotheism. It will suggest that the translation of Klausner’s Yeshu ha-notsri, executed by an Anglican priest in Jerusalem shortly after the Hebrew book’s publication, allows for reassessing some of the foundational tensions that shaped early Zionist thought: between Semitic and European languages, the Jewish “diaspora” and Jerusalem, and Jews and Christians. Bio: Danielle Drori teaches modern Hebrew literature at Oxford University. She holds a PhD in Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York University, and has taught at the City University of New York and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her research focuses on the ties between literary translation and nationalism, bringing together contemporary theories of cultural transfer and the study of modern Hebrew literature. Her writing has appeared in several academic and popular publications, including Prooftexts: a Journal of Jewish Literary History, Dibur: a Literary Journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Reconsidering Early Jewish Nationalist Ideologies Semina: Danielle Drori (Oxford): Yosef Klausner in Translation: Zionism and Christianity

Yair Wallach discusses his book A City in Fragments: Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem (Stanford University Press, 2020). Until the late nineteenth century, Hebrew was rare to come by in the streets of Jerusalem, visible only in a handful of synagogues and communal institutions. Yet in the early years of the twentieth century, Hebrew erupted into the city's urban space. It appeared in rabbinical proclamations, adverts and posters, stone inscriptions, signs of schools and hospitals, and even on "Jewish money", Hebrew-marked coins used for charity. But Hebrew's emergence into the streets took place at the moment when the meaning of the language was no longer stable and given. For Ashkenazim and Sephardim, reactionaries and modernisers, Zionists and their opponents, local elites and newly-arrived "pioneers", the language was a battleground over different visions for Jews in Palestine. After 1920, with the adoption of Hebrew as a state language by the British Mandatory government, Arab nationalists began to view Hebrew as a colonial tool and resisted its use on that basis. In this talk I will explore the dramatic emergence of Hebrew in turn of the century Jerusalem, the struggles over its meaning, and its subsequent alignment with the Zionist project. Yair Wallach is Senior Lecturer in Israeli Studies at SOAS, University of London, where he is also the head of the SOAS Centre for Jewish Studies. He is a cultural and social historian of modern Palestine/Israel, who has published articles in Hebrew, Arabic and English on urban and visual culture, and on Jewish-Arab relations. His book, A City in Fragments: Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem, which was published by Stanford University Press in 2020, looks at Arabic and Hebrew street texts (inscriptions,banners, graffiti and other media) in modern Jerusalem. Dr. Wallach is currently (2020-2022) a Leverhulme Research Fellow, and his project "The Arab Ashkenazi" looks at Jewish Ashkenazi acculturation in the Arab Levant. Wallach has also published articles in Haaretz, the Guardian, and other media.

Reconsidering Early Jewish Nationalist Ideologies Seminar: Yair Wallach, (SOAS): Language of Revival or Conquest? Hebrew in the Streets of early 20th century Jerusalem

Prof. Sandy Kedar (Haifa) discusses his co-authored book on the legal rights of the Bedouin in the Negev. Kedar presents his book, Emptied Lands (co-authored with Amara and Yiftachel). Emptied Lands investigates the protracted legal, planning, and territorial conflict between the settler Israeli state and indigenous Bedouin citizens over traditional lands in southern Israel/Palestine. The authors place this dispute in historical, legal, geographical, and international- comparative perspectives, providing the first legal geographic analysis of the “dead Negev doctrine” used by Israel to dispossess and forcefully displace Bedouin inhabitants in order to Judaize the region. The authors reveal that through manipulative use of Ottoman, British and Israeli laws, the state has constructed its own version of terra nullius. Yet, the indigenous property and settlement system still functions, creating an ongoing resistance to the Jewish state. Emptied Lands critically examines several key land claims, court rulings, planning policies and development strategies, offering alternative local, regional, and international routes for justice. Professor Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar teaches at the Law School at the University of Haifa. He holds a Doctorate in Law (S.J.D) from Harvard Law School. He was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School as well as a Grotius International Law Visiting Scholar there and a visiting associate professor at the Frankel Institute for Judaic studies in the University of Michigan. His research focuses on legal geography, legal history, law and society and land regimes in settler societies and in Israel. He served as the President of the Israeli Law and Society Association, is the co-coordinator of the Legal Geography CRN of the Law and Society Association and a member of its international committee. He is the co-founder (in 2003) and director of the Association for Distributive Justice, an Israeli NGO addressing these issues

Sandy Kedar: Emptied Lands - A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev.

Hizky Shoham discusses the 'emotionologies' surrounding the Nazi-Zionist 'Transfer agreement.' Are boycotts emotional outbursts or practical political tools? The proposed paper looks at the emotional aspects of the public debate that raged in Jewish Palestine in the 1930s about the Nazi-Zionist agreement, in order to suggest a theory of boycotts as emotional scripts. The Ha'avara ('transfer') agreement enabled Jews to leave Germany and take some of their assets with them, in the form of German goods to be sold in Palestine, therefore breaking the worldwide anti-Nazi boycott. Drawing on contemporary media and archival sources and comparative studies about boycotts and 'buy national' campaigns, I analyze the discourse on emotions in the public debate about the agreement. Rather than so-called ‘practical’ politics, the debate focused on various emotions such as humiliation, fear, anger, and vengeance, their role in politics, and the right way to contain or release them. The emotionology (as defined by historians Peter and Carol Stearns) of Zionist pride prescribed ‘practicability’ as a demonstration of restraint and respectability, and denounced the anti-Nazi boycott movement as ‘exilic’ Jewish submissiveness. Nonetheless, this emotionology did not fit the actual ability of the Jewish public to contain the harsh emotions. Under the guise of “buy national” campaigns, anti-German feeling was channeled into an effective boycott of the Templers, a small German community living in Palestine since the nineteenth century. Based on Theodor Sarbin’s theory of emotions as cognitive schemes, the paper suggests theorizing boycotts as political dramas whose ‘effectivity’ depends mainly on their emotional scripting. Bio: Hizky Shoham’s works consist of anthropological history and sociology of Zionism, the Yishuv, and Israel; and cultural theory. He is a senior lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies, and co-director of the Center for Cultural Sociology, Bar Ilan University, Israel; and a research fellow in the Kogod Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies at the Shalom Hartman institute in Jerusalem. His publications include Carnival in Tel Aviv: Purim and the Celebration of Urban Zionism (Academic Studies Press, 2014); and Israel Celebrates: Festivals and Civic Culture in Israel (Brill, 2017).

Hizky Shoham - The Emotional Scripting of Boycotts: The Nazi-Zionist Agreement in Jewish Public Culture During the 1930s

Larissa Remeniick discuss the origins and present condition of the new (post-2010) Israeli diaspora in Berlin In this lecture, I reflect on the origins and present condition of the new (post-2010) Israeli diaspora in Berlin. Based on 10 months of participant observation, I map out the main sub-streams of this emigration, elicit the economic, professional, and political reasons for leaving Israel, and explore these émigrés’ initial encounter with German society. My observations suggest that many Israeli residents of Berlin (mostly secular) rediscover their Jewishness along diasporic lines and forge ties with the local religious and community organizations. Being a small minority in the German-speaking milieu, Israelis invest in building their own Hebrew-based community networks, cultural and educational institutions. Lastly, I explore these émigrés’ ties with Israel and conclude that many are sojourners rather than immigrants and that Berlin is but one phase in their life journey.

Larissa Remennick - The Israeli Diaspora in Berlin: Back to Being Jewish?

Israel Studies Seminar: Perspectives on Israel. During this academic year, the Israel Studies Seminar will explore what it means to widen the horizons of conventional discourse about Israel by focusing on various perspectives of Israel. The seminar’s objective is to situate Israel within broader contexts, including thematic, theoretical, methodological, epistemological, and geo-strategical. Our speakers this year are invited to offer views of Israel from the socio-political or historical vantage points of various traditions, groups, cultures and states, or from certain epistemological perspectives. We hope that by doing so we will be able to illuminate topics that may be otherwise neglected in the field of Israel studies, but are nevertheless crucial for understanding Israeli and Middle Eastern politics at large.

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Israel Studies Seminar

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