Joyce Dalsheim: Israel Has a Jewish Problem
Joyce Dalsheim, Ph.D.
Tuesday, February 7, 2023
7 p.m.
Reception at 6 p.m.
Open to the public at no charge.
In person
The Dubois Center at UNC Charlotte Center City
320 E. 9th Street, Charlotte, NC 28202
(Best viewed horizontally in a mobile environment.)
Jewishness is complicated. Does the word “Jewish” refer to a religion, an ethnic group, or a nation? It does not fit easily into any one of those categories, but encompasses all of them. This paradox creates particular problems in the modern state of Israel, which defines itself as a Jewish state. Anthropologist Joyce Dalsheim, a professor in the Department of Global Studies at Charlotte, discusses this paradox in the next Personally Speaking series conversation, and shares stories from over two decades of research in Israel. This talk reveals some of the complexities of Israeli society and of citizenship, nationalism, and popular sovereignty more generally.
“Israel Has a Jewish Problem,” tells stories about the multiple ways that Jews struggle to be Jewish in Israel. Some of the stories are amusing, others frustrating, but all seem counter-intuitive. Dalsheim argues that struggles over Jewishness are part of the process of producing the ethnos for an ethno-national state. But the paradox is also about how nationalism limits popular sovereignty. Self-determination can become a form of self-elimination, narrowing the possible forms of Jewishness and reproducing Europe’s classic “Jewish Question” in new ways.
Joyce Dalsheim, is a cultural anthropologist and professor in the Department of Global Studies at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She earned a doctorate at The New School for Social Research in New York. Dalsheim’s work interrogates some of the social and political categories through which everyday life is navigated. Her ethnographic research has focused primarily on what it means to be Jewish in Israel, the self-proclaimed Jewish State. Considering Jewishness in its broadest sense, she has explored the relationships between multiple Israeli Jewish communities in their struggles with each other and with their Palestinian neighbors. Employing critical and postcolonial theory, she has used the case of Israel to speak to broader issues of identity categories and conflict, temporality, historical narratives, religion and the secular, nationalism, citizenship, and sovereignty.
All Personally Speaking published experts series events are hosted by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, with The Dubois Center at UNC Charlotte Center City and J. Murrey Atkins Library. During these community talks, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences faculty engage audiences in conversation about their research findings and describe the personal motivations for writing their books. The presentation may be recorded. The author welcomes questions and comments about her book, which is published by Cambridge University Press. Get a glimpse of the content here here or request the book from your local library.
Learn about the whole series at CLAS.charlotte.edu/PS
The author welcomes questions and comments about her book, which is published by Oxford University Press. Get a glimpse of the content here or request the book from your local library. The presentation may be recorded by the University.