Advertise on podcast: Israel Studies Seminar

In this lecture, Dr Stav Shufan-Biton examines how Israeli Jews living outside Israel experience holy time, focusing on Shabbat, Jewish holidays, and local religious and civil holidays such as Halloween and Christmas. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research based on interviews and observations conducted within Israeli Jewish communities in Cambridge and London, the findings show that cultural distance and a sense of temporariness enable the selective adoption of Jewish mitzvot alongside openness to local ritual practices. Interviewees with flexible religious identities, particularly those identifying as secular or traditional, actively choose rituals they perceive as enjoyable and meaningful. These include Jewish practices such as Hanukkah, Purim, or partial Sukkot decorations, as well as local practices such as trick-or-treating on Halloween, Christmas decorations, singing carols learned at school or kindergarten, and exchanging gifts. At the same time, some halakhic practices that were part of everyday life in Israel, including the weekly Friday night Kiddush, fasting or reduced activity on Yom Kippur, and partial observance of Passover, tend to be less consistently maintained in the new context. Building on Ammerman’s framework of lived religion, the analysis highlights how enjoyment, curiosity, and a sense of magic, alongside child centered and family-oriented logics, shape ritual participation and contribute to a reconfiguration of ethnic and religious boundaries in everyday life. Stav Shufan-Biton is a sociologist and currently a Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests focus on the sociology of religion, the sociology of time, and Israeli society. Her doctoral dissertation examined understandings of the weekend among Jews in Israel and resulted in several peer reviewed publications, which are available online. She currently studies experiences of sacred time among religious minorities, including Jews and other groups, across the UK, with support from the Argov Centre for the Study of Israel and the Jewish People.

Professor Elad Lapidot reflects on the relations between post-Holocaust Jewish thought and decolonial thought through the work of French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Recently thinkers criticized Levinas for his Eurocentrism. In his recent book, State of Others. Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Indiana UP, 2025), he argues that Levinas anticipated this critique and from the 1960s on sought to develop the foundations for decolonial Jewish thought – and for decolonial Zionism. To demonstrate this claim, his talk will analyze Levinas’s entire intellectual project as articulated around a fundamental turn between the period prior to 1968 and the post-68 period. The turn relates to Levinas’s understanding of the relationship between Judaism and Western civilization – and to his position with respect to the State of Israel and to the Palestinian question. Elad Lapidot is Professor for Jewish Thought at the University of Lille, France. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: State of Others. Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2025), Politics of Not Speaking (Albany: SUNY Press, 2025), Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation with introduction and commentary (with R. Bar) of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing, 2020).

Raef Zreik talks about his paper, with a focus on Zionist, Liberal and Movement. When things are presented in an alternative way, we will find out that the problem is political, not logical, it is historical and not merely concept Raef Zreik, a Professor of moral and political philosophy at Tel Aviv College and Prof. of Jurisprudence at Ono Academic college and senior researcher at Jerusalem Van Leer Institute, will talk about his paper, with a focus on Zionist, Liberal and Movement. When things are presented in an alternative way, we will find out that the problem is political, not logical, it is historical and not merely conceptual. Professor Zreik's recent publications include: Kant's Struggle for Autonomy (book), War and Self-Defense: Reflections on the War on Gaza in Analysis and Kritik, Zionism and Political Theology in the journal Political Theology; The Tyranny of Truth and the Tyranny of Opinion: Thinking with Hannah Arednt in Theoretical Inquiries in Law.

The grouping of Yiddish speaking Jews, of various origin countries in Central and Eastern Europe, into a single overarching identity of Ashkenazim, was meaningful particularly in multi-ethnic and multi-lingual Jewish contexts. This seminar examines the shaping of the Ashkenazi community in Ottoman Jerusalem, as facilitated by Ottoman legal and political context. Ottoman recognition of Ashkenazim as a corporate identity was crucial to its emergence and continuity. Dr Yair Wallach is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Israeli Studies, and the head of the SOAS Centre for Jewish Studies. He has written on urban and material culture in modern Palestine/Israel, and more recently on race and migration. His book A City in Fragments: Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem (Stanford University Press, 2020) won the Jordan Schnitzer book prize in 2022.

In this talk, Dr Sapir will present her research on the historical development of student volunteering in Israeli higher education and its current implications. Based on archival analysis of two elite universities over four decades, the study identifies three key debates surrounding student volunteering: over the purpose of volunteering; over its mandatory nature; and over the awarding of academic credit. Challenging current critiques which focus on tensions embedded in the current neo-liberal climate, the historical lens reveals that key features – such as individualisation, control mechanisms, and demands for compensation – were shaped in earlier decades. These debates reflect broader questions about the shifting boundaries of the academic mission, student equity, and academic autonomy. Connecting this study to ongoing research on widening participation in Israeli higher education, she argues that mandatory volunteering requirements tied to need-based grants function as mechanisms of disciplinary poverty governance, reproducing inequality through disciplinary practices. Dr Adi Sapir is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Leadership and Policy in Education at the University of Haifa. Her research focuses on higher education and its social, cultural, historical, and organisational contexts. She has studied early academic entrepreneurship, the evolving meanings of basic and applied research, and the commodification of universities’ public roles. Her current work examines equity in higher education, focusing on the experiences and challenges of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and the institutional barriers they encounter.

This study explores the mechanisms underlying the paradox of marginality experienced by middle-class Palestinian professional women in the Israeli labour market through an intersectional analysis of their everyday professional lives. It demonstrates that this paradox—characterised by their marginalisation despite possessing high educational capital comparable to that of highly educated Jewish (both men and women) and Palestinian male professionals—is perpetuated through biopolitical modes of power. The findings reveal that when their professional capital intersects with other axes of power such as ethnicity/racism, gender, religious norms, and tribal affiliations, it fails to receive recognition or legitimacy from colleagues and clients, thereby reinforcing intersectional inequalities. Professor Sarab Abu Rabia-Queder is an Associate Professor at the school of Education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. In her studies, she focuses on the mechanisms of control, racialisation and marginalisation of minority groups in the fields of higher education, employment and the family. She has published many papers in journals such as Sociology, British Journal of Sociology and Current Sociology and the winner of several competitive grants and prizes, such as the Toronto Prize for Excellent Young Academic Scholars, Businesses for Peace, and has chosen as the sociologist of the month (July) for Current Sociology journal (2019). In May 2024, she received an honorary doctorate from Weizman Institute of Science for promoting epistemic justice for minority groups. Alongside her academic pursuits, Professor Abu-Rabia-Queder is also a feminist activist. She serves as a board member in several NGO’s and academic committees. Her main activity focuses on issues central to Palestinian women’s agenda such as access to education, combating polygamy, and improving employment opportunities.

In this lecture I present Religious Zionism, the right-wing religious nationalist movement, which despite representing 12-16% of Israel’s population, has a prominent and influential place in the current “fully” right-wing government In contradistinction to previous research, I argue that this movement, which initiated and led the settlement movement in the West Bank and the Golan Heights, is best understood not as a fundamentalist movement, but as a religious romantic nationalist enterprise that at its philosophical core emphasizes modern notions, such as self-expression and self-realization. Thus, not only does it adopt important components of the modern cultural program, it also presents a religious theory of modernity. I briefly examine how opposing religious Zionist sub-streams developed in response to the political and cultural challenges that the broader Israeli society and government posed. Finally, I discuss the impact of recent developments: 1) the increasing acceptance of religious nationalism among the general Israeli public; and 2) the extensive Religious Zionist participation (and sacrifice) in the prosecution of the Israel-Hamas war. Dr. Shlomo Fischer is a Senior Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. Until his retirement, he taught sociology in the School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published extensively on religious Zionism and the Shas movement. His research interests include religion in Israel and its intersections with politics and class, the American Jewish community, and the relations of religious and civic education. His book, Expressivist Religious Zionism: Modernity and the Sacred in a Nationalist Movement was published in December 2024.

In this presentation, Professor Yacobi aims to discuss settler colonial urbanism(s) in Palestine/Israel, while exploring the different spatial and political typologies developed during the last few decades. He will discuss how colonial planning has been used as a tool of social, demographic, and spatial control and how Palestinian claims for the right to the city are meaningful political forms of protest. The presentation will refer to Palestinian cities (such as Lydda) that were transformed into ‘Jewish-Arab mixed cities’, to new ‘Jewish cities’ that are going through a process of ‘Arabisation’, to Jerusalem as a neo-apartheid city, and to the current spatiocide of Gaza. The argument to be articulated in this talk is that moving from the paradigm of separation into a shared homeland is the only sustainable approach which will lead to a shared future. Haim Yacobi is a Professor of Development Planning at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit. With a background in architecture he specialised in critical urban studies and urban health. Between 2006-2007 he was a Fulbright Post-doctorate fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and then joined the Department of Politics and Government at BGU. For the years 2010-2012 he received a Marie Curie Grant which has enabled him to work at Cambridge University, where he conducted a research project that dealt with contested cities. The main issues that stand in the center of his research interest in relation to the urban space are social justice, the politics of identity, urban health, and colonial planning. In 1999 he formulated the idea of establishing ‘Bimkom – Planning in Human Rights’ an NGO that deals with human rights and planning in Israel/Palestine and was its co-founder. Currently he holds (together with Prof Omar Dajani) a UKRI ESRC grant: ‘The Shared Homeland Paradigm: Reimagining Space, Rights and Partnership in Palestine-Israel’.

This talk explores the notion of obligation towards others at the intersection of Jewish feminist thought and the lived religious practices of Sephardi women in Israel. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and her involvement in Arevot — the only Sephardi feminist beit midrash in Israel — Dr Cohen examines how women who engage in practices of blessing, healing, and intercessory prayer construct a moral and spiritual authority grounded in caregiving, vulnerability, and responsibility for others. Focusing on figures such as Tamar, Menuja, and Shoshi — women of Moroccan, Bukharan, and mixed Mizrahi backgrounds — she argues that their everyday religious actions constitute a form of ‘domesticated religion’ (Lévy & Lévy), often overlooked by normative Judaism, yet central to the ethical imagination of Mizrahi feminist thought. These women’s rituals challenge the dichotomy between public and private, legal and affective, tradition and innovation. Dr Angy Cohen is a Ramón y Cajal research fellow at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean and the Middle East at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). She holds a PhD from the Autonomous University of Madrid and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has held academic positions at Tel Aviv University, Concordia University (Canada), and the University of Calgary (Canada). Her research focuses on Sephardi and Mizrahi communities in Israel and in the diaspora—particularly in Argentina—with special attention to migration memories and experiences, women’s religiosity, Sephardi feminism, and the everyday moral experiences of Sephardi women. She combines ethnographic fieldwork with feminist theory and Jewish thought to explore questions of tradition, care, and ethics and subjectivity.

By situating Hebrew textbooks for adults within their historical and social contexts, this lecture sheds light on the intricate relationship between pedagogy, national identity, and the challenges faced by immigrants adapting to a new homeland. Employing the concept of Entangled Histories, it connects global pedagogical knowledge of language instruction with the unique adaptations developed in Mandatory Palestine and the State of Israel for adult learners. Through an examination of Hebrew textbooks, their authors, and their integration into Hebrew classes for adults, often conducted as evening lessons, my research highlights the interplay between imported methodologies and local innovations. The lecture explores how Hebrew textbooks became a medium for navigating the tension between preserving cultural heritage and fostering integration into a rapidly evolving society. Rakefet Anzi is a PhD candidate in Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a 2024/25 Leo Baeck Fellow of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. Her dissertation explores Hebrew language education for adults in Mandatory Palestine and early Israel (1930s–1950s), focusing on its role in shaping national identity and society-building. She has been affiliated with the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Center and the Cherrick Center, contributing to research on German-Jewish history and the Yishuv. In May–July 2025, Rakefet will be a Junior Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Alongside her research, she teaches at the Hartman High School for Girls in Jerusalem, blending her passion for history and education.

What emotional traits are essential for building a nation? More broadly, are there such things as ‘national emotions,’ and if so, what are they? In this lecture, I will explore these questions by analysing the Zionist case through the lens of the history of emotions. I will examine emotions where the national dimension is evident, such as honour and love of the homeland, alongside emotions that may seem less directly national, like fear and happiness.

The seminar explores the discursive mapping of far-right constituents within the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history, formed under Benjamin Netanyahu’s premiership after the five elections held between 2019 and 2022. The Religious Zionism Party and Jewish Power have consistently been at the centre of heated debate—not only because their leaders hold critical ministerial positions, including finance and national security, which gained heightened relevance in the aftermath of October 7th, but also due to their self-positioning within Israel’s shifting political landscape and their anti-establishment push for political and legal changes, even before these events. The seminar examines their shared and divergent motivations during the 2021 and 2022 elections, with a focus on the division of labour between these two factions. Drawing on campaign data from X (formerly Twitter) by key leaders Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, it offers a comparative analysis of their articulation of the key issues such as legitimacy, sovereignty, and the judiciary. This lecture is based on some of the data collected and analysed during his postdoctoral research titled ‘Identifying Multiple Frames of the Israeli Settlements’ at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, funded by the TÜBİTAK 2219 International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program.

A book launch event marking the publication of Yaacov Yadgar's new book, To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism. The author in conversation with Amnon Ray-Krakotzkin

This lecture examines the commercial legacy of the Ḥibshūsh family, a prominent Yemenite Jewish dynasty that played a pivotal role in the Red Sea basin trade from the 1880s to the 1970s Utilizing a rich archive of primary sources, this global micro-historical study illuminates the intricate Jewish-Arab commercial networks that flourished across geopolitical boundaries, encompassing Yemen, Mandatory Palestine, Israel, Ethiopia, and beyond. By analyzing the Ḥibshūsh family's extensive business operations, particularly in coffee trade and textile imports, we gain novel insights into Jewish-Muslim relations from a transnational, commercial perspective. This approach reveals the nuanced interactions between Arab-Asian, Israeli, and African communities in the Red Sea region, offering a fresh historical perspective within the contexts of colonial rule (Italian and British) and the Yemenite monarchy. While existing scholarship on Israel's engagement with the Red Sea region and Africa has predominantly focused on political, and security dimensions, this study shifts the lens to long-established Jewish business networks. It explores how Yemenite Jewish entrepreneurs, exemplified by the Ḥibshūsh family, maintained and adapted trade routes connecting Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, and Israel before and after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. This research contributes significantly to our understanding of Israel's economic history and its commercial ties in the region. By examining how the Ḥibshūsh family navigated shifting political landscapes while sustaining cross-cultural business relationships, we gain deeper insights into the role of Yemenite Jews in shaping Israel's early economic connections in the region; the continuity and adaptation of pre-state Jewish trade networks in the post-1948 era; and the interplay between Israel's diplomatic efforts and private commercial initiatives in Africa. Through this focused study, we illuminate a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of Israeli-African relations, demonstrating how commerce served as a bridge between cultures and nations in this strategically vital region.

How does the global entrepreneurial discourse, which advocates for a neoliberal, individualistic, and future-oriented identity, intersects with a state education system that seeks to establish a collectivist and ethno-national identity? Over the past two decades, the entrepreneurial ethos has gained prominence in state education systems across many countries, aiming to construct an entrepreneurial identity among children and youth. The entrepreneurial ideal is frequently regarded in sociological literature as part of the neoliberal culture serving the global free market economy. The global entrepreneurial discourse promotes neoliberal values which include future orientation, personal autonomy and individualisation. Concurrently, state education systems strive to shape a national identity. In Israel, this objective is uniquely translated to promote an ethno-national, Zionist, Jewish- Israeli identity. The paradox between entrepreneurialism and ethno-nationalism raises an important question: How does the global entrepreneurial discourse, which advocates for a neoliberal, individualistic, and future- oriented identity, intersects with a state education system that seeks to establish a collectivist and ethno-national identity? The study followed the translation of the global entrepreneurial discourse into the local Israeli state education system (mamlakhti) among policymakers, educators, and within educational spaces through a multi- focal qualitative research. Findings reveal a hybrid entrepreneurial-nationalistic ideal emerging in Israeli education, merging neoliberalism and ethno-nationalism, and combining future orientation with Jewish-Israeli narratives and symbols. As neoliberal and ethno-national narratives are weaved together, the local discourse reclaims and reproduces social in/exclusion, marking social boundaries and perpetuating inequality. The research contributes to the understanding of how discourse (re)shapes the social, by showing how a global educational discourse is redesigned and translated within a socio-political context.