Yehouda Shenhav and Yaacov Yadgar discuss the uses and misuses of a discourse on “Judaism” in Israel. Session 3 in a series of three.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Yolande Jansen discuss the notion of the “secular,” liberal politics of the nation-state. Session 2 in a series of three
Timothy Fitzgerald and William Cavanaugh discuss the politics and history of the conceptual duality and its current usages. First session in a series of three
Avner offer discusses how to measure -- and how to understand the measurements -- of quality of life and well-being in Israel. Israel scores very high internationally in the reported happiness of its Jewish inhabitants, and government politicians make much of that survey result. On the face of it there is a paradox: the country does not score high on other quality-of-life indicators and is not an easy place to live in. Prof. Offer reports on the construction and record of quality-of-life indicat...
Eyal Chowers considers Israeli democracy, liberalism, and the emerging notion of sovereignty in the state
How have rising power engaged with the Arab-Israeli conflict? What does this tell us about rising powers and conflict management as well as their behaviour in international politics more generally? How have rising power engaged with the Arab-Israeli conflict? What does this tell us about rising powers and conflict management as well as their behaviour in international politics more generally? The book examines these questions in relation to five rising powers - Brazil, Russia, India, China and S...
Ibrahim Khatib discusses the correlations between identity, conflict perception, and willingness to reconcile. In the context of protracted conflict, is there a relation between identity and willingness for reconciliation, and in what way does this relation exist? The current study checks the relation between individual differences in identity perceptions of a given protracted conflict along religious, national, and civic dimensions and willingness for reconciliation. The research case study is ...
Menachem Klein discusses the political biography and leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority. Professor Klein presents a portrait of Abbas as PA President including in comparison to his predecessor - Arafat. Klein deals with these two leaders in his forthcoming book Arafat and Abbas: Portraits of Leadership in a State Postponed (C Hurst and Co Publishers, July 2019)
Khaled Furani deconstruct sovereignty, and considers some alternatives. The deceits and deficiencies of the workings of sovereignty have received noticeable attention among generations of writers in Israel/Palestine. However, the sovereignty of sovereignty itself as a reigning paradigm in the Western tradition of political thought remains unduly recognized. Taking this insufficient attention as an initial assumption, in this paper I focus on a dissociable property of modern sovereignty as formul...
How did Zionist scientist see climate in Palestine? Netta Cohen presents her doctoral research which occupies the intersection between modern Jewish history, climate and environmental history, the history of knowledge, and colonial history. Her talk focuses on Jewish physicians, architects, and botanists as they examined the potential ramifications of climate on the success of the Zionist project in Palestine between 1900 and 1948. Through the prism of climate, she explores the ways in which Jew...
Brian Klug analyses the controversy around antisemitism in the Labour Party and the limits on the criticism of Zionism. In July 2018 a storm of controversy broke out in the UK when the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Labour Party published a draft code of conduct to tackle antisemitism. Ostensibly, the controversy was about Labour's failure to adopt the definition of antisemitism formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in May 2016, substituting its own definition...
Orna Sasson-Levy discusses the cast of women soldiers who decide to speak Women's military service has dual meanings: on the one hand, it includes women in the institution of citizenship and enhances their feelings of belonging to the national collective. On the other hand, the women's encounter with the state at such a formative time, becomes an initiation process into gendered citizenship, where the women learn their (marginal) place vis-à-vis the state. The aim of my paper is to analyze women...
Adriana Jacobs (Oxford) discusses the role of translation in the constitutive era of modern Hebrew literature. In the early decades of the twentieth century, as the European literary enclaves of Hebrew literature began to move and consolidate their operations in Palestine, translation reinforced its status as a major, indispensable component of modern Hebrew literary production. In this talk, I will discuss the Hebrew translation economy in Mandatory Palestine and specifically address the role t...
David Tal discusses the making and history of US-Israel relationships. In December 1962 President John F. Kennedy told Israel’s foreign minister, Golda Meir that “the United States has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East really comparable only to that which it has with Britain.” While agreeing that indeed, the Israeli- American relations could be labelled as ‘special,’ most students of American- Israeli relations argued over the question since when the Israeli-American relation...
Yakov Rabkin (University of Montreal) discusses the roots of Israeli political culture in the Zionist beginnings in the Yiddish speaking regions of the Russian Empire.
Yaacov Yadgar discusses the recently passed Basic-Law: Israel the Nation State of the Jewish People, and discusses how it plays into Israel's Jewish Identity Crisis
Kfir Cohen discusses Israeli literature as global literature (broadly defined)
Bashir Abu-Manneh discusses Emile Habibi’s The Pessoptimist and 1948.
Rami Ginat discusses the Egyptian Communist Party's stance on Israel in its formative first decade of statehood.
Faisal Devji discusses the surprising relations between Pakistani nationalism and Zionism.
Yuval Evri discusses the uses of the the image of Al-Andalus in political and cultural discourses in the turn of the 20th Century.
The history and politics of African migration to Israel
The politics, culture, and reality of Hebrew and Arabic in Israel and beyond.
On the origins and context of a little know (for some obvious reasons) chapter in the history of the Zionism.
Haim Yacobi (UCL) gives a talk on Israel in Africa, Africa (and Africans) in Israel.
Prof. Avi Shlaim reviews the history of the Jordanian-Israeli relations, and considers how Israel is viewed and understood from the Jordanian side Prof. Avi Shlaim, an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College, a former Professor of International Relations at Oxford, and Fellow of the British Academy, offers an authoritative consideration of the Israeli-Jordanian relations, as these are perceived from the Jordanian side. Prof. Shlaim has written extensively on the Arab-Israeli conflict. His researc...
On 'the mother' of all ensuing Mizrahi–Ashkenazi ethnic controversies. The question was simple: should the Hebraist Zionist movement in Ottoman Palestine invest in publishing a newspaper in Arabic and, if yes, should it be communitarian Jewish or general in its topics? What began as yet another obscure intra-Zionist deliberation gradually crystallized into what Dr. Behar argues merits the label of the earliest, explicitly Ashkenazi–Mizrahi ethnic controversy. This is with the smallest risk of th...
Why and how should we study Diaspora Jews' relation to Israel? In this talk, Dr. Ilan Baron makes a case for why studying Diaspora Jews' relationship with Israel ought to be done using a hermeneutic phenomenological approach. However, instead of making the case using a methodologically and philosophically abstract argument, he does so by going over empirical and related theoretical conclusions from his work on this topic. These include discussing recent fieldwork in California, his book 'Obligat...
