Yoav Peled Presentation

There is general agreement that Jewish Israeli society is undergoing a process of religionization, manifested in a growing saliency of religious personalities, religious themes, and the religious outlook in public life. We seek to explain the causes and significance of this process by looking at the two key aspects of it: (1) the increasing presence and influence of religious Zionists in various areas of social life - politics, the military, educaiton, mass media - with particular attention to the field of visual arts; (2) rising religiosity among Israeli Jews who previously considered themselves to be secular or traditional. Both processes, we will argue, are rooted in the decline of Labor Zionism's hegemonic position due to the transformation of Israeli society since 1967.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Fulton foyer.

Yoav Peled is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Tel Aviv University. His book, co-authored with Gershon Shafir, Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2002) won the 2002 Albert Hourani Award of the Middle East Studies Association of North America for best book on the Middle East published that year. He is co-author, with Horit Herman Peled, of The Religionization of Israeli Society (Routledge, forthcoming) and co-editor, with John Ehrenberg of Israel/Palestine: Alternative Perspectives on Statehood (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). Yoav has recently joined the University of Sussex and the Sussex Centre for Conflict and Security Research as Leverhulme Visiting Professor.

Horit Herman Peled is an interventionist artist and an Israeli cultural researcher. She established media and digital art programs in the art departments at several major institutions of higher education in Israel, where she taught studio art and visual culture theories. In recent years Horit Herman Peled has been working with Yoav Peled to accentuate the paradoxes of the in-betweens of the political and the ethical of existence in Israel/Palestine.

Please note registration is not required. Please arrive promptly at 18:00 at Fulton A Lecture Theatre, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9NZ. There are no parking charges after 5pm.

By: Katy Joanna Joyce
Last updated: Wednesday, 12 April 2017