Open to faculty and graduate students only
Gray Urbanism in Israel
Erez Tzfadia, Sapir College & Israel Institute's Visiting Scholar at the Bildner Center
Modernist cities represent the rationalist vision of organized, pre-planned and orderly space. These cities promise its citizens all-inclusive egalitarian citizenship and tolerance. With this in mind, we recognize the day-to-day city, often representing the opposite of the modernist city, strewn with shades of ‘gray’. Part of the city is planned and organized, but within it exists encroaching spaces of unplanned building and an informal economy. Slums and shanty towns accommodate twenty-five percent of the world’s population, mainly in the global south but rapidly expanding northward. This presentation will focus on the central insights emerging from the study of urban informality in Israel. It will suggest a framework which adds to the understanding of the phenomenon, focusing on the encounter between the logic of ethno-nationalism and the logic of capitalism, and the way they promote the ‘gray” spaces in the contemporary city.
Tuesday, March 8, 2016 at 11:30 am
Bildner Center, 12 College Avenue
Lunch will be provided.
Cosponsored with the Department of Jewish Studies
The Evolution of the Concept of the Non-Jew in Late Antiquity
Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Department of Hebrew Cutural Studies, Tel Aviv University
The Schwartzman Visiting Scholar, Bildner Center, Rutgers
The Hebrew term goy appears for the first time in rabbinic literature as a general term for all non-Jews and has been in current use since. While the status of gentiles in rabbinic literature has received extensive treatment, the concept itself was considered self-evident and its history remained undetected. How and why did the term goy, which in biblical and second-temple literature means "people" or "nation" come to denote non-Jews in rabbinic literature? Does this terminological transformation conceal a deeper conceptual change? In this presentation, Rosen-Zvi discusses the category of the unified “goy” as a rabbinic novelty, erasing all ethnic and social differences and replacing older, less dichotomous, categories of otherness.
Tuesday, April 5, 2016 at 11:30 am
Bildner Center, 12 College Avenue
Lunch will be provided.
Cosponsored with the Department of Jewish Studies
Past Faculty Seminars