Israel’s Jewish Identity Crisis: Lecture & Reception

The Peter Summerfield Public Lecture for the Max and Hilde Kochmann Summer School

What is the meaning of Israeli nationhood, as distinct from, if not opposed to Jewish nationhood? How does an Israeli nationalism correspond with the state’s assumed self-identification as Jewish? What does this Jewishness of the state mean in the first place? In other words, what is the meaning of Jewish sovereignty in Israel? These fundamental questions, which ultimately revolve around Zionism’s charged relation with its own Jewish roots and Israel’s subsequent claim to a non-religious Jewish identity, stand at the core of Israeli socio-politics and shape the politics of the Middle-East at large. This lecture will discuss these and related questions by refocusing the discussion on the Israeli nation-state’s unresolved relationship with its own claim to what is commonly understood as a non-religious, not to say “secular” Jewish identity.

The lecture will be followed by a reception and vegan buffet, included in your ticket price.