The course: “Israeliness: Tools for Historical Analysis” will seek to use historical tools to advance the cultural understanding of the society in which we live, in the State of Israel and in contemporary world, from the middle of the twentieth century onwards.

We will explore contemporary Israeli society as a dynamic laboratory in which long-lasting cultural products are melted. Certain aspects of European history, Middle East history, as well as ancient, early modern and modern Jewish history, all together perform varied and often unpredictable complexities embodied in our surrounding reality. We will try to understand these connections and to point at the stable, the variable, and the essential, or, in other words, the complex matrices called culture.