Due to the developing situation in the Middle East, which has made travel impossible for the speaker, we regretfully must cancel this event
The 2026 Weinstein/Minkoff Lecture in Israel Studies
“Rootedness and Liberalism in Conflict: What the Israeli Case Teaches Us About a Divided World”
Nissim Mizrachi
Tel Aviv University
Wednesday, March 4
4:00pm
Memorial Union, Old Madison Room
800 Langdon St (Madison, WI)
This talk examines the Israeli version of the great paradox: Why do disadvantaged Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin reject the liberal-progressive agenda that ostensibly serves their interests, and instead support Likud (Netanyahu’s party) and religious-nationalist parties, which seem to undermine those very interests? I argue that their rooted identity—anchored in a deep need for belonging—constitutes a coherent and morally serious stance. Without reckoning with this rootedness, one cannot grasp the enduring failure of the liberal left to reach the hearts and minds of working-class and other marginalized communities, in Israel and beyond.
These insights laid the groundwork for Tiebreaker, a civic-democratic forum in which rooted/Mizrahi Likud activists and liberal-progressive scholars engage one another as equal yet distinct political actors. Grounded in an honest recognition of their differences, they sustain a rigorous and productive democratic dialogue. Recently emerging at the forefront of public debate in Israel, the forum’s first major initiative—a legislative proposal to establish a commission of inquiry into the events of October 7—has positioned it at the very center of the national agenda.
Nissim Mizrachi is Full Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University and Head of the Center for the Challenge of Living Together at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He served as chairperson of his department from 2013 to 2016. He received his B.A. and M.A. (summa cum laude) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan as a Fulbright Fellow, and completed postdoctoral studies at Harvard University.
His scholarship spans the sociology of knowledge, medicine, and culture, and more recently the crisis of liberalism and comparative studies of ethnicity. With Michèle Lamont, he co-edited a 2012 special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies and co-authored Getting Respect (Princeton University Press, 2016).
His book Beyond Suspicion: The Moral Clash between Rootedness and Progressive Liberalism (University of California Press, 2024) examines tensions between progressive liberalism and “rooted” moral worldviews. In 2025, he co-edited Beyond the Liberal Imagination. A public intellectual in Israel, Mizrachi has been featured in Haaretz, Calcalist, Makor Rishon, Israel Hayom, Globes, The Marker, and The New York Times, and has appeared on numerous podcasts and electronic media interviews.
In 2024, he co-founded the Tiebreaker Forum, bringing together leading Likud activists and center-left academics.