Taub Center Graduate Workshop Seminars 2008-2009September 19, 2008
Professor Daphne Barak-Erez, Symbolic Constitutionalism: Pigs in Israel, Cows in India The talk discusses politics and religion in Israel in the local context as well as from a broader perspective of religious symbolism in democratic society. Professor Barak-Erez is Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and Professor of Law, Tel-Aviv University Dr. Motti Inbari Religious Zionism and the Temple Mount Dilemma The talk describes the internal debate within Religious Zionist circles over the question of Jews entering the Temple Mount. It presents the positions of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, one of the most important Halachic centers of modern-day religious Zionism. The leaders of the yeshiva reject the idea of Jews entering the Temple Mount in the current era. The talk further describes the debate on the question of entering the Temple Mount within the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, whose plenum strongly negated such a possibility, although some leading members of the rabbinate permitted entry and prayer in an individual capacity. This is followed by a discussion of the decision by the Committee of Yesha Rabbis permitting Jews to enter the Temple Mount, under certain Halachic restrictions, and of the debate their decision evoked among religious Zionist rabbis. The talk presents the clear phenomenon of the erosion and weakening of the prohibition against Jews entering the Temple Mount. It is difficult to ignore the growing support for this approach among ever wider circles. Dr. Inbari is a Post-Doctoral fellow at the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandies University. He is the author of Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount.
November 7, 2008
Dr. Maina Chawla Singh 'We are not Mizrahi... We are Indian Jews': Culture and Identity in the Indian Jewish Community in Israel Dr. Singh is an Instructor at the University of Delhi. Her previous research has focused on colonialism, gender and the cross-cultural work of American Women Missionaries in South Asia. Since 2005 Professor Singh has lived in Israel, lecturing at Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University and Haifa University while researching issues of ethnicity and migration among Indian Jews in Israel. This Fall Singh is an Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (HBI) scholar at Brandeis University, where she is working on a new book on Indian Jewish women, presenting profiles of first-generation Jewish women who migrated from India to Israel from the 1950s. The project collates primary material: textual and visual which will be submitted to an archive on Jewish history. Dr. Stephen Vogt German Zionism's Confrontation with German Nationalism: The Case of Robert Weltsch Dr. Vogt is a Visiting Scholar at NYU's Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. He received his PhD in History from the Free University of Berlin in 2004 with a study on "Nationalist Socialism and Social Democracy: The Young Right, 1918 - 1945," which was published in 2006 by the Dietz Verlag. He worked for the Yad Vashem Archives and for the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin before joining the faculty of the Germany Institute of the University of Amsterdam in 2005. From January 2009, he will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for German Studies at Ben Gurion University.
February 20, 2009 Professor Yoram Peri Generals in the Cabinet Room: How the Military Shapes Israel Policy Professor Yoram Peri heads the Rothschild-Caesarea School of Communication and the Chaim Herzog Institute for Media, Politics, and Society at Tel Aviv University, where he is Professor of Political Sociology and Communication. He was political advisor to the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and served as editor in chief of the Israel daily, Davar. He received his PhD in sociology and political science from the London School of Economics. He has served as President of the New Israel Fund, and has lectured at universities and research centers in more than one dozen countries. Dr. Peri has published five books and numerous scholarly articles, editorials, commentaries, and op-ed pieces. His books include: Generals in the Cabinet Room: How the Military Shapes Israeli Policy (2006), Brothers at War: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Culture War in Israel (2005), and Telepopulism: Media and Politics in Israel (2004).
Dr. Adi Portughies What are We Debating Over? On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in Israel Since the 1970's
Dr. Adi Portughies is the 2008-09 Schusterman Fellow at the Taub Center. He is also a Recipient of the Israeli Planning and Budgeting Committee Rotenstreich Fellowship for outstanding students for PhD degrees. His field of interest is the political history of Israel, as well as the collective memory of Israeli society. His PhD dissertation deals with trends in politics and public opinion in Israel during the years 1967-1982, focusing on the ideological and radical left movements. Dr. Portughies is currently teaching two courses at NYU, Collective Memory in Israel and Left, Right and the End of Ideology in Israel.
April 24, 2009
Dr. Arie Krampf National
Goals, Economic Ideas and Policy Making: Explaining Israel's Intervention
Capacity and Its Demise
Dr. Irit Keynan Discourse on National Trauma as a Catalyst for Israeli-Palestinian Understanding Dr. Irit Keynan is the Advisor to the President of the University of Haifa for Social Responsibility, and the chair of the Haifa Conference for Social Responsibility. Her research and teaching interests include social responsibility, reconciliation and coexistence, the impact of the Holocaust on Israeli society, the impact of collective memory, trauma and ongoing wars on society's present and future. Dr. Keynan has published in academic journals, professional journals and in the public media in these areas. She is the author of an award-winning book on Holocaust survivors and their life in the aftermath of Second World War. Dr. Keynan serves on several boards of directors of research centers and NGOs. She was the founding director of the Rabin Center for Israel Studies in Tel Aviv, and the Director for Research and Strategic Planning at the Jewish Agency. Irit holds a PhD in History from Tel Aviv University. During the 2009 Academic year, she is a visiting scholar at the Taub Center. Download her abstract here. |
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