“Exile at Home: Jewishness, Statelessness, Abandonment”
Joyce Dalsheim
(University of North Carolina at Charlotte)
Monday, April 15
4:00pm
Union South, Northwoods Room (3rd floor)
1308 W Dayton St. (Madison, WI)
This event will also be livestreamed, via Zoom. To receive the link, please register in advance by clicking here.
Anthropologist Joyce Dalsheim will draw on her extensive ethnographic research in Israel/Palestine to consider some of the struggles over Jewishness in contemporary Israel. The talk will include thoughts and stories from Israelis across the socioreligious-political spectrum during Dalsheim’s post-October 7 trip to the field. Dalsheim will engage with questions of nationalism, sovereign citizenship, and self-determination, with attention to Hannah Arendt’s work on exile in the context of a shifting sense of abandonment among contemporary Israelis.
Joyce Dalsheim is a cultural anthropologist and professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her work focuses on questions of identity and conflict, religion and the secular, nationalism, citizenship, sovereignty, and colonialism. Her first three books are based on extensive fieldwork in Israel/Palestine: Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli Settlement Project (Oxford 2011), Producing Spoilers: Peacemaking and the Production of Enmity in a Secular Age (Oxford 2014), and Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self-Determination as Self Elimination (Oxford 2019). In 2019 she held a Luce/ACLS Fellowship in Religion, Journalism and International Affairs in residence at Northwestern University. More recently, she co-edited a brief volume on The Jewish Question Again (2020, Prickly Paradigm). She is also researching the far right and its opposition in the United States and conducted fieldwork at the events in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. She is currently working on a new project on questions of exile and abandonment, on which this talk is based.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Department of Political Science
For a downloadable PDF, click here