Events and Conferences
The Schusterman Center offers an exciting schedule of events throughout the year. These opportunities include film screenings, book discussions, speaker panels, and an annual spring conference. Our events bring together scholars, educators, researchers, and the public in conversation to learn from each other, advance thinking, and gain new insights.
Events
See upcoming events at a glance.
October 23 - Recognition and Justice for Victims of Sexual Violence in Conflict
November 3 - Reckoning with the Rabin Assassination, Thirty Years Later: A Panel Discussion
We have a wide variety of past events archived and available for on-demand viewing for personal or academic purposes. You can view recordings of past events on our YouTube channel. Subscribe if you would like to be notified when new recordings are posted.
Conferences
Methods are shifting in a rapidly growing field, as the recent exponential growth of AI, digital mapping, distant reading, digital visualizations, large language modeling, data scraping, and a myriad of other new technologies are being applied to scholarship in the humanities. How does this affect the tasks of writing history, interpreting literature, mapping, and analyzing culture, as applied to the study of Israeli and Palestinian material? Our Digital Humanities in Israel Studies conference was the culmination of the 2024-25 Institute for Advanced Israel Studies (IAIS), and featured a showcase in which the IAIS fellows shared their digital humanities projects with the public.
Detail from Lisa Reinke's "Hymn to the Masses"
Since 2023, Israel has faced two of its biggest crises since its establishment 75 years earlier. The year began with the massive social upheaval over a proposed judicial reform that would alter the nature of Israeli democracy. Subsequently, the Hamas attacks on October 7th and the ensuing war in Gaza have had brutal consequences for Israelis and Palestinians, as well as global ramifications. “Democracy and its Alternatives: The Origins of Israel's Current Crises,” the annual conference of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, offered a scholarly understanding of a country and a region in crisis, and places these pivotal events in their larger historical, regional, and political contexts.
Rina Ingidau, from "Ethio Afrofuturism" series, 2020. Digital collage and drawing
The conference offered a fresh perspective on Ethiopian immigration to Israel. Instead of the traditional narrative that focused on the "rescue" of African Jews, it brought Ethiopian scholars, activists, and artists to the forefront. It shifted the focus to the malleable and contingent nature of this encounter, and the event explored not only the impact of Israel on Ethiopian Jews but also how these immigrants influenced Israeli society.
The Asper Center for Global Entrepreneurship at Brandeis International Business School and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies jointly presented an event where attendees learned from experts about the roots and future direction of Israel's innovation economy and its societal impact.