Israeli Culture and Emergency Routine: Normalizing Stress – Personal and Academic Perspectives (Two Part Symposium)
This two part symposium will take place on Monday, March 18th from 5:30-7:00pm and Tuesday, March 19th from 10:30am-12:00pm at Club Spartan, 338 Case Hall.
Israeli Culture and Emergency Routine: Normalizing Stress: This book exposes the ways Israeli “emergency routine” leads to perpetual stress and trauma and explores how these conditions are overwhelmingly present in the cultural production of Israeli art and literature. The nine chapters engage with a variety of Israeli cultural artifacts, including poetry, prose, film, and graphic novels, and cast a wide temporal net, reaching from as early as the 1960s to 2019. In doing so, this collection sheds light upon the ramifications of the constant stress of the Israeli emergency routine on academic and cultural discourses and alerts readers to the effects of the physical world on the formulation of world views within social and political realities.
Session 1: Voices from Sapir, a College Under Attack – Irit Ronen, Avner Dinur, and Vered Weiss will share some notes from the “Epilogue” and discuss their experiences. The event will be livestreamed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/Ttk7MuqP7ds?si=8uEkxP-IoQaYhxU2.
Session 2: Trauma, Stress, and Israeli Society: a conversation with the editors and contributors – Nurith Gertz, Omri Herzog, Irit Ronen, Avner Dinur, and Vered Weiss will discuss the book, focusing on the chapters they contributed. The event will be livestreamed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/nx__wo-SY2E?si=qC-b6EiGzjKpJ8De.
Dr. Avner Dinur is a secular theologian who lives in Sderot, by the border with Gaza. He is a lecturer of Jewish Studies at Sapir College and Bar Ilan University.
Dr. Nurith Gertz is Professor Emerita of Hebrew Literature and Film at The Open University of Israel and a full professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at Sapir Academic College.
Dr. Omri Herzog is a professor of Cultural Studies at Sapir College.
Irit Ronen is a Ph.D. candidate at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and was a teaching fellow at the Department of Multidisciplinary Studies at Sapir Academic College.
Dr. Vered Weiss is the Serling Israeli Visiting Scholar and The Israel Institute Teaching Fellow at The Michael and Elaine Serling
Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel at Michigan State University.
Co-Sponsors: Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, College of Arts & Letters, College of Social Science, Department of History, International Studies & Programs, James Madison College, Office for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, and Residential College in the Arts & Humanities.
Hourly Schedule
Israeli Culture and Emergency Routine: Normalizing Stress
- 5:30pm - 7:00pm
- Session 1 - Monday, March 18th
- Voices from Sapir, a College Under Attack
- 10:30am - 12:00pm
- Session 2 - Tuesday, March 19th
- Trauma, Stress, and Israeli Society: a conversation with the editors and contributors