Arieh Saposnik, at The Blogs

Aug 25, 2024, 4:56 PM

One of the more hateful protest signs I’ve seen in pictures of anti-Israel demonstrations in recent months was one that read “Zionism is a death cult”. This was offensive on a number of levels. Intellectually, it is a demonstration...

Aug 14, 2024, 12:42 AM

Scholarship and Commitment

Last week I began my new position as director of the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism at Ben-Gurion University. Entering a new position of this kind entails a kind of dissonance between a sense...

Dec 26, 2023, 7:52 PM

Theodor—Vision and Counter-Vision

This past Friday, my daughter took me to see the Israeli Opera’s Theodor—an opera based on the crucial years in the life of Theodor Herzl. The focus of the opera is on the founding father of Zionism and on...

Nov 21, 2023, 7:04 PM

‘Let Us Search Our Ways’ (Again)

There are moments of crisis in Jewish life that call out for renewed thinking and social, cultural, political transformation. Perhaps one of the most important of them—certainly in modern Jewish history—was the all but cataclysmic trauma of the 1880s,...

Nov 10, 2023, 7:20 PM

Humanities, Humanity, and the Gaza War

This week, the New York Times featured an article that asked “Can Humanities Survive?” The concern itself is hardly new—articles posing similar questions have been appearing fairly frequently for some years now. The focus of this particular piece was...

About Me

Arieh Saposnik is a historian, an Associate Professor at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. He is the author of Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine (Oxford University Press, 2008) and of Zionism’s Redemptions: Images of the Past and Visions of the Future in Jewish Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He is a former President of the Association for Israel Studies.