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Israel Studies Seminar
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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.
| # | Episode Title | Description | People | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Creative Commons | Adriana X Jacobs - A gift from Sinai: Translation and nation-building | Adriana Jacobs (Oxford) discusses the role of translation in the constitutive era of modern Hebrew literature. | Adriana X Jacobs | 16 Nov 2018 |
| 2 | David Tal - The making of alliance: The making and history of US-Israel relationships | David Tal discusses the making and history of US-Israel relationships. | David Tal | 16 Nov 2018 | |
| 3 | Yakov Rabkin - Israel: The Russian Connection | 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. | Yakov Rabkin | 26 Oct 2018 | |
| 4 | Yaacov Yadgar - The Nation-State bill and the meaning of Israel’s Jewish identity | 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 | Yaacov Yadgar | 10 Oct 2018 | |
| 5 | Creative Commons | Kfir Cohen - Israeli Literature as Global Literature | Kfir Cohen discusses Israeli literature as global literature (broadly defined) | Kfir Cohen | 25 Jun 2018 |
| 6 | Bashir Abu-Manneh - Habibi’s The Pessoptimist and 1948 | Bashir Abu-Manneh discusses Emile Habibi’s The Pessoptimist and 1948. | Bashir Abu-Manneh | 31 May 2018 | |
| 7 | Rami Ginat - Egyptian Communist Voices of Peace (1947-1958) | Ramit Ginat discusses the Egyptian Communist Party's stance on Israel in its formative first decade of statehood. | Rami Ginat, Yaacov Yadgar | 30 May 2018 | |
| 8 | Creative Commons | Faisal Devji: Jewish Pecedents and Muslim Nationalism | Faisal Devji discusses the surprising relations between Pakistani nationalism and Zionism. | Faisal Devji, Yaacov Yadgar | 02 May 2018 |
| 9 | Yuval Evri: Andalusian Legacies: the role of al-Andalus/Sepharad in the political and cultural history of Israel/Palestine | Yuval Evri discusses the uses of the the image of Al-Andalus in political and cultural discourses in the turn of the 20th Century. | Yuval Evri, Yaacov Yadgar | 07 Mar 2018 | |
| 10 | Creative Commons | Galia Sabar: African Migration to Israel - Chronicle of a Failure Foretold | The history and politics of African migration to Israel | Galia Sabar, Yaacov Yadgar | 21 Feb 2018 |
| 11 | Almog Behar - Between Hebrew and Arabic | The politics, culture, and reality of Hebrew and Arabic in Israel and beyond. | Almog Behar, Yaacov Yadgar | 14 Feb 2018 | |
| 12 | Eugene Rogan - The Myth of the Campbell-Bannerman Report: Arab views on Israel after the Suez Crisis | On the origins and context of a little know (for some obvious reasons) chapter in the history of the Zionism. | Eugene Rogan | 08 Feb 2018 | |
| 13 | Creative Commons | Haim Yacobi - Israel, Africa: Identity, Culture and Politics | Haim Yacobi (UCL) gives a talk on Israel in Africa, Africa (and Africans) in Israel. | Haim Yacobi, Yaacov Yadgar | 30 Jan 2018 |
| 14 | Avi Shlaim - A Jordanian Perspective on Israel | Prof. Avi Shlaim reviews the history of the Jordanian-Israeli relations, and considers how Israel is viewed and understood from the Jordanian side | Avi Shlaim, Yaacov Yadgar | 29 Nov 2017 | |
| 15 | Birth of the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi Controversy on the ‘Arab Question’ (1910-12) | On 'the mother' of all ensuing Mizrahi–Ashkenazi ethnic controversies. | Moshe Behar, Yaacov Yadgar | 01 Nov 2017 | |
| 16 | Jews, Israel and Debate: Understanding Israel in the Diaspora | Why and how should we study Diaspora Jews' relation to Israel? | Ilan z Baron, Yaacov Yadgar | 31 Oct 2017 |