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VLJI Chairmen in transition:
Tom de Swaan succeeds Ivar Samrén as Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute
Mr. Ivar Samrén succeeded the late Oscar Van Leer in 1986 as chairman of the Governing Council of the Van Leer Group Foundation. He has served as chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute since 1995. The Institute today is a testimony to his dedication and commitment.

His successor, Mr. Tom de Swaan holds prestigious positions with many international and Dutch corporate industries.
President Shimon Peres honors outgoing and incoming Chairpersons of the Board of Trustees of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute together with Van Leer Group Foundation Trustees From left to right: Gideon Frank (Trustee of the Van Leer Group Foundation, Ivar Samrén, Pres. Shimon Peres, Tom de Swaan, Wilfred Griekspoor (Chairman of the Van Leer Group Foundation)
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert awards plaque to Ivar Samrén.


Polonsky Postdoctoral Fellowships:
Dr. Salman
Bashier
The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute is proud to announce the award of two Polonsky Postdoctoral Fellowships, generously funded by the Polonsky Foundation. The two fellowships have been granted to Dr. Mical Raz and Dr. Salman Bashier for a period of up to five years each, beginning October 1, 2008. (For biographical profiles of the two Fellows, please click here.) The fellowships offer an annual stipend of $40,000, with yearly renewal contingent upon demonstrated progress in research.

Dr. Mical Raz
Raz and Bashier will work on their research at the Institute for consecutive years during the period of the award. Prof. Gabriel Motzkin, Director of VLJI, comments: "This new fellowship program is bringing young scholars at the cutting edge of their disciplines to enlighten the Institute's researchers, while they too shall profit from the Institute's unique context."

An announcement inviting postdoctoral researchers to submit their candidacy for the 2009-2010 Polonsky Postdoctoral Fellowships will appear on our website, in the Israeli press and academic publications internationally.

VLJI congratulates its scholars on recent honors:
Prof. S. N.
Eisenstadt
By invitation of the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Prof. S.N. Eisentstadt participated in a meeting on "Views on Modernity" from July 7-8, 2008. The meeting was organized in cooperation with the Event Forum of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt.
UN Ambassador,
Prof. Gabriella
Shalev
VLJI congratulates recent past member of the VLJI Board of Trustees, Prof. Gabriella Shalev who has been named as Israel's UN Ambassador, the first woman ever to hold this position.
Haifa Sabagh
Ms. Haifa Sabagh, Director of Educational Programs represented VLJI at the Copenhagen Conference: "Education for Intercultural Understanding and Dialogue", October 21-22, 2008.

Recent Publications by VLJI Scholars:
Racism in Israel
Editors: Yehouda Shenhav and Yossi Yonah, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 2008 (Hebrew).
Citizenship Gaps, Migration, Fertility and Identity in Israel
Editors: Yossi Yonah and Adriana Kemp, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 2008 (Hebrew).
Theory and Criticism, Shame Editor: Yehouda Shenhav, Guest Editor: Michal Ben-Naftali, No. 32, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, Spring 2008 (Hebrew).
The first in a new series, "Philosophy of Halakhah"
New Streams in Philosophy of Halakhah
Editors: Aviezer Ravitzky and Avinoam Rosenak, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Magnes Press, 2008 (Hebrew).
The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies
Editors: Will Kymlicka and Bashir Bashir, Oxford University Press, 2008.



The newsletter is published every four months.

For further information on any of the programs or research cited in the newsletter, please contact Harriet Gimpel at harrietg@vanleer.org.il.

Harriet Gimpel, editor

Photo exhibit, "A Safe Haven: Exile in Sweden 1943-1945" on display from August 31, 2008 through the end of October 2008


Ivar Samrén at the opening of the exhibit
The official opening of the new photo exhibit was held Sunday, August 31, 2008 at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. The exhibit is a tribute to the years of dedication of Ivar Samrén, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, upon his retirement after 20 years of service.

While the Holocaust raged across the continent of Europe, more than 7000 Danish Jewish refugees found shelter in Sweden.


Prof. Gabriel Motzkin addresses guests at exhibit opening
The exhibit highlights the remarkable effort made by the Danes in assisting the Jewish citizens of Denmark to reach safe shores in Sweden, while highlighting the significance of the decision by Sweden to welcome the refugees and grant them protection. The exhibit includes 40 rare photos which reflect the importance of compassion and friendship transcending differences of religion, culture and nationality. The photos were provided by private donors and collected by the Danish Jewish Museum as part of its project of documentation of the experiences of Danish Jews during the Second World War.



From Commemorative Discourse to Time beyond Borders

The theme at the international conference, Time beyond Borders was the transition from the commemorative discourse of the last decade of the 20th century, to current discourse. The latter considers the questions of presence and experience, radical political criticism and the increasing presence of theological concepts following 9/11. Nitzan Lebovic, Yad-Hanadiv Fellow; Amit Yahav, Haifa University; and Eran Shalev, Haifa University, formed the academic committee which initiated the conference. Historians and theoreticians, scholars from the fields of literature, history, philosophy and political science attended this conference, held in conjunction with Haifa University July 1-3, 2008.

Most of the speakers at the conference were inclined to subscribe to the claim that we are on the threshold of a new time-space discourse, making a conscious effort to traverse geographical and disciplinary borders. Lecturers returned to the names and concepts characterizing periods of radical change – Rousseau, Kant and Bentham on the one hand, and Heidegger and Levinas, on the other hand. The conference concluded with a renewed examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the viewpoint of theories of time that traverses the boundaries of space.



Identity and Status
Distribution vs. Recognition

Immigration processes, labor migration, and the legal struggle of different national and cultural groups for the right to a voice, representation and a commensurate share in the distribution of public resources have created a politics of recognition in many nations, Israel among them. A distributive approach to cultivating a just society is predicated upon a political force managing a class struggle to which all cultural groups are partners. The recognition approach, on the other hand, focuses on the issues of cultural control and recognition of the differences. It uses the politics of identities to create a new political balance which emphasizes recognition of cultural pluralism and granting equal status to different groups in the public sphere.


Journalist Gideon Eshet addresses conference on strikes
In the past two decades, Israeli society has witnessed a trend of reduced state intervention in the economy, strengthening of market mechanisms, deregulation, reduction of public expenses for social services, erosion of the social security network. Simultaneously, claims for multicultural policy are making headway in the political arena.

The "Identity and Status" research group at Van Leer under the joint direction of Dr. Yossi Dahan, Dr. Nissim Mizrachi and Dr. Izak Saporta, and coordinated by Yuval Ivri, has brought together a group of 15 young scholars aiming to propose different models for hybridization among the distributive and recognition schools of thought.

The research group participants, from a range of disciplines (sociology, literature, political science, law, education), formed four smaller groups, each focusing on empirical data of its choice. In 2008, two of the groups held conferences presenting their work. This included (1) the port workers' strike in 2001 and the university lecturers' strike in 1997, and (2) identity and status in education: practices of Mizrahi identity in the Israeli education system.



Torts claims filed against men refusing a get to their wives
- A Civil Society Roundtable


Left to right: Justice Dalia Dorner; Prof. Hanna Herzog; Susan Weiss, adv
The subject of this Roundtable addressed the matters of Jewish law coupled with civil law that plague Israeli women refused a Get (divorce by Jewish Law) by their husbands. The program was moderated by Prof. Hanna Herzog and conducted in cooperation with the Center for Women's Justice and Tmurah, the Israeli Antidiscrimination Legal Center, on July 24, 2008 at VLJI.


Roundtable participants
The panel of speakers included Susan Weiss, adv., Director of the Center for Women's Justice who reviewed the status of the issue; retired Supreme Court Justice Dalia Dorner who addressed the problem of legal coherence; Prof. Dov Frimer who addressed the issue from the perspective of Halakhah; Dr. Ifat Biton, adv., Tmurah who presented the Torts perspective.

Discussion participants included judges, attorneys, legal scholars, representatives of NGOs addressing gender issues and women's rights. Discussion reflected an apparently unilateral and unequivocal conviction that only systemic change can facilitate resolving the problems reviewed.



Recent Highlights of the Ongoing Roundtable on Israelis, Palestinians and Mediterranean Neighbors


Taghreed El-Khodary
A May meeting of the Roundtable on Israelis, Palestinians and Mediterranean Neighbors, hosted Dr. Mahdi Abdul Hadi, founder and director of PASSIA (Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs), who spoke on "Negotiations: Israel, Palestinians and Mediators – What Lies Ahead?"


Taghreed El-Khodary, Dr. Manuela Consonni, Dr. Bashir Bashir, Prof. Yossi Yonah
In June, this forum met with Ms. Taghreed El-Khodary, the New York Times correspondent in Gaza. Bearing no political affiliation, she spoke about the Hamas Government and Problems of Governance in Gaza. Subsequent discussion also raised issues regarding the status of women in politics and society in Gaza.



Are Turkey and Israel Secular Nation-States? A Comparative Workshop


Dr. Kenan Çayir, Dr. Adriana Kemp, Prof. Gabriel Motzkin, Dr. Bashir Bashir, Dr. Şule Toktaş, Dr. Anat Lapidot-Firilla, Dr. Canan Aslan Akman
The contemporary, scholarly inquiry into resurgent and "political religion," the nation state, its future, the nature of secularization and its possible political, theological underpinnings lends itself to comparative studies. A comparative international workshop at VLJI, May 26-27, 2008 addressed these issues with regard to the Republic of Turkey and the State of Israel.

The issues are particularly salient in these two non-Christian, non-European states. Both are nation states dedicated to the interests of a particular national identity. Both national movements involved an attempt to create a secular national collective identity, yet in both cases religion remains relevant to that identity.


Dr. Kenan Çayir, Prof. Elliott Horowitz, Dr. Shlomo Fischer, Dr. Şule Toktaş
Furthermore, in both cases the leadership of the national movement attempted to secularize the societies and remove significant spheres of nation and state building from the control of organized religion and the religious elites. Efforts were also made to subject their religious elites to state and national control. Nonetheless, in recent decades both countries have witnessed the rise of religious movements aiming to impact upon the public and political spheres.

The workshop, directed by Dr. Anat Lapidot-Firilla and Dr. Shlomo Fischer, not only addressed the similarities between Israel and Turkey, but also the significant differences in history, size, political and legal structure, religious traditions and in the nature and intensity of the secularization process. Lectures regarding women and recent cultural developments in the new religious movements in both countries extended the range for further comparative study.