Description:

"The Israeli Shas School System: The re-Creation and re-Imagination of Sephardic (Hispano-Eastern Jewish) Culture in an Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox Framework"

Description: In this lecture, we will explore the Sephardic Shas Movement and the Shas Party's Sephardic School system in Israel. The Shas movement and party's goal is to re-constitute what it considers to be an authentic Hispano-Eastern ("Sephardic") culture in Israel, but is doing so using a framework heavily influenced by Ashkenazi (northern European Jewish) ultra-Orthodoxy. This talk will discuss the re-creation of identity and its discontents, and will shed light on a community whose internal dynamism is rarely understood.

Biography: Joseph Ringel (Ph.D. Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, 2011, Brandeis University) is a post-doctoral fellow in the Jewish studies program and the Department of Religious Studies, and is a visiting assistant professor of Israel Studies at Northwestern. His research interests include the Jews of Islam, Sephardic and Mizrahi religious culture in Israel, and religious Zionist/national religious culture in Israel. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the Shas school system and its critics.

Lunch provided.

Co-sponsored by the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies