Schusterman Center for Israel Studies

by Yaron Peleg

The first study of its kind, Directed by God analyzes several representations of Jewish religiosity in Israeli film and television that challenge secular Zionism in contemporary Israeli society. [University of Texas Press, 2016]

by Noam Leshem

This book examines the radical transformation of Arab landscapes taken by Israel in the 1948 war. By looking at the spatial history of Arab villages, Leshem highlights the intricate and often intimate engagements between Jews and Arabs in the present day. [Cambridge University Middle East Studies, 2016]

ed. Frederick Greenspan

The contradictions and competing views of modern Israel are the subject of this book. Over the past generation, a substantial body of scholarship has explored numerous aspects of the country, including its approaches to citizenship and immigration, the arts, the women’s movement, religious fundamentalism, and language; but much of that work has to date been confined within the walls of the academy. This book does not seek not to resolve either the country’s internal debates or its struggle with the Arab world, but to present a sample of contemporary scholars’ discoveries and discussions about modern Israel in an accessible way. [NYU Press, 2016]

by Naphtaly Shem-Tov

This research follows the history of the Acco Festival for Other Israeli Theatre from 1980-2012, chronicling it as a site of celebration as well as confrontation. The Acco Festival is presented as a borderland that brings together established mainstream directors and actors, alternative artists from the fringes, and Acco’s Jewish and Arab residents. [Academic Studies Press, 2016]

by John Quigley

During the early to mid-twentieth century, the Zionist Organization secured a series of political victories on the international stage, leading to the foundation of a Jewish state and to its ability to expand its territorial control within Palestine. By comparing diplomatic statements at the United Nations and elsewhere against the historical record, this book sheds new light on the legacies of such leaders as Chaim Weizmann, David Ben Gurion, Abba Eban, and Shabtai Rosenne. [Cambridge University Press, 2014]

by Liora Halperin

Halperin questions the accepted scholarly narrative of a Zionist move away from multilingualism during the years following World War I, demonstrating how Jews in Palestine remained connected linguistically by both preference and necessity to a world outside the boundaries of the pro-Hebrew community even as it promoted Hebrew and achieved that language’s dominance. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014]

by Ranen Omer-Sherman

Numerous sociological and economic studies have appeared, but no book-length study has ever addressed the tremendous range of critically imaginative portrayals of the kibbutz. This diachronic study addresses novels, short fiction, memoirs, and cinematic portrayals of the kibbutz by both kibbutz “insiders” (including those born and raised there, as well as those who joined the kibbutz as immigrants or migrants from the city) and “outsiders.” [Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015]

by Bruce Hoffman

Drawing on previously untapped archival resources in London, Washington, D.C., and Jerusalem, Bruce Hoffman has written one of the most detailed and sustained accounts of a terrorist and counterterrorist campaign that may ever have been seen. [New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2015]