Amnon Aran maps the development of Israeli foreign policy since the end of the Cold War This is the first study of Israeli foreign policy towards the Middle East and selected world powers including China, India, the European Union and the United States since the end of the Cold War. The book provides an integrated account of these foreign policy spheres and serves as an essential historical context for the domestic political scene during these pivotal decades. In my talk, I shall demonstrate how...
Nov 18, 2021•51 min
Michael Karayanni considers how the Israeli construction of religion and politics shapes the live Palestinian-Arabs in the state. The religion-and-state debate in Israel is Jewish centred and systematically disregards the Palestinian-Arab minority. This is rather puzzling. For the religion-and-state debate in many other countries does take up conflicts pertaining to minority religions, and the Palestinian-Arab minority did generate quite a diverse series of questions that could have easily quali...
Nov 18, 2021•54 min
Eldad Ben-Aharon charts the history of Israel's refusal to recognise the Armenian Genocide. In a milestone vote in late 2019, both the US House of Representatives and Senate overturned more than forty years of precedent to pass a bill declaring that the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks was, in fact, a genocide. Subsequently, on 24 April 2021, also US President Joe Biden has officially recognized the Armenian genocide. These decisions reinforced the importance of the subject ...
Nov 03, 2021•47 min
Kathrin Bachleitner remaps the road that led to Germany's "atonement" for the Holocaust The duty to remember the Holocaust, the profession of responsibility for the atrocities committed, the admission of guilt and shame on the part of all Germans with the ensuing effort to atone for the past constitute the cornerstone of Germany’s national memory approach today. However, what started this official ‘atoner attitude’ in the first instance? More specifically, what was the initial push towards the l...
Oct 27, 2021•43 min
Atalia Omer discusses restorative justice practices and the possibilities (and limits) of Jewish critiques of Zionism. In the same way that it is no longer possible to talk about antisemitism without also thinking about Israel/Palestine, it is no longer possible to imagine Jewish ethics outside the realities of Jewish power. My focus here is on when such thinking unfolds through a restorative justice prism or carries a restorative justice potential. At stake is not only a Jewish critique of Zion...
Oct 20, 2021•53 min
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. Clemence...
Mar 09, 2021•1 hr 2 min
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 eith...
Feb 23, 2021•1 hr 19 min
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 institutionalise...
Feb 16, 2021•1 hr 12 min
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 m...
Feb 02, 2021•59 min
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...
Jan 27, 2021•1 hr 22 min
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 ...
Jan 19, 2021•1 hr 7 min
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 c...
Dec 01, 2020•1 hr 3 min
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 arc...
Nov 24, 2020•1 hr 7 min
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...
Nov 17, 2020•1 hr 8 min
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...
Nov 10, 2020•43 min
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 influent...
Nov 03, 2020•1 hr 19 min
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 "Jew...
Oct 22, 2020•1 hr 23 min
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, ...
Oct 14, 2020•1 hr 23 min
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 g...
Feb 26, 2020•42 min
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 ...
Feb 19, 2020•58 min
Lotem Perry-Hazzan discusses ethnic discrimination in admissions to Haredi schools in Israel Haredi education has been dominated by the Ashkenazic Haredi Independent Education school network since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. During the 1980s the Sephardic Haredi community established its own school network so as to avoid the discriminatory practices of the Ashkenazi-dominated schools. However, many Sephardic Haredi parents have preferred not to send their children to the Se...
Feb 05, 2020•1 hr 1 min
Heather Monro discusses the implications of Ashkenazi Hegemony in the Israeli Haredi society. Discrimination against Sephardim has become a growing issue in the Haredi world in Israel, but one which has taken a backseat to the more pressing questions of gender inequality and the religious-secular divide. Heather Munro's research has revealed that new Haredi feminist movements are increasingly engaged with the intersectionality debates of mainstream equality movements, and Sephardi discrimination...
Jan 28, 2020•36 min
Peter Bergamin discusses his new book: The Making of the Israeli Far-Right: Abba Ahimeir and Zionist Ideology Abba Ahimeir (1897 –1962) writer, journalist and historian began his public life as a socialist, but subsequently moved toward the rightward extreme of Zionist ideology. One of the earliest opponents of the British Mandate, in 1930 he founded a radical organization called Brit Habiryonim (the Union of Zionist Rebels). This was a clandestine, self-declared fascist faction of the Revisioni...
Jan 22, 2020•51 min
Ali Alavi discusses the history of Iran's relations with Palestinian organisation and the Palestinian cause, and their implication to Iranian-Israeli relations. Examining the nature of relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Palestine, the talk investigates the relationship between state and authorities in the Middle East. Analysing the connections of the Iranian revolutionary movements, both the Left and the Islamic camps’ perspectives are scrutinised. To provide a historical backgro...
Jan 22, 2020•47 min
Dr. Calahorra studies some dramatic changes in the ways legislation is conducted in Israel Politicians, whether they be ordinary MPs and or government ministers (GMs), compete on the ability to influence policy outcomes. After elections and the formation of government, they do that through legislation ("Competition through Legislation"), in parliamentary democracies that allow such competition. This is a two-stage competition: the initiation of a bill – drafting the bill and filing it with parli...
Dec 03, 2019•1 hr 3 min
Nancy Hawker (The Aga Khan University) considers the developing place of Arabic in official nation-statist platforms in Israel In the governing institutions of Israel, Arabic is suppressed. This practice crystallised in the early years of the state: there were points in history where it might not have gone in the direction of suppression; some activists in the 1960s had campaigned for some kind of minority Arabic-speaking official state platform to be maintained. In relation to insider/outsider ...
Nov 27, 2019•1 hr 11 min
Yoav Ronel (Bezalel and BGU) considers representations of a melancholic national and subjective desire in the prose of Micha Yosef Berdichevsky (1865-1921) This talk deals with the representations of a melancholic national and subjective desire, in the prose of Micha Yosef Berdichevsky (1865-1921), one of the prominent figures of the revival period of modern Hebrew Literature. Berdichevsky – as critics have shown repeatedly – claimed that the national revival will come from the birth of a new, e...
Nov 20, 2019•42 min
Avihu Shoshana (Haifa University) discusses findings from his ethnography of social selection in Israeli night-clubs. This ethnographic study examines how micro-inequality operates face-to-face in everyday (or actually everynight) context of the nocturnal space of night clubs, focusing in particular on the long line awaiting entry to the club and undergoing the selection process to determine who is a bona fide customer and who will be denied access. The study entailed ethnographic observations o...
Nov 13, 2019•55 min
Jonathan Leslie considers the history of Iran's "becoming" and existential threat in Israel Years after the Islamic Republic of Iran resumed its nuclear development program, Israeli leaders began constructing a narrative aimed at instilling in their polity the fear of Iran as an existential threat to the Jewish State. Building upon Israel’s geopolitical insecurity, politicians, assisted by societal elites, repeatedly claimed that the imminent acquisition of a bomb by Iran’s religious fundamental...
Nov 06, 2019•46 min
Moriel Ram (SOAS) discusses how sand and snow produce potent imageries and physical realities in Israeli political culture. The talk examines how sand and snow produce potent imageries and physical realities which both solidify and undermine social hierarchies, cultural imagination and power relations. Focusing on Israel's fortification campaign in the Sinai Peninsula and touristic schemes in the Golan Heights between 1967 and 1973, Ram examine two projects which utilised sand and snow to shape ...
Nov 05, 2019•44 min
