Israel Studies Seminar

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 wi...

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 stude...

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 fro...

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...

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 fro...