Join the Elie Wiesel Center on December 9 for the second Israel Studies event of this year. Dr. Abigail Jacobson of Hebrew University will give a talk on “Trapped Neighborhoods, Trapped Identities: Mizrahi Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the ‘Mixed City’,” followed by a talk from Dr. Erica Weiss (Tel Aviv University/Brown University) entitled “In the Shadow of the State: Lived Pluralism in Ramla.” Dr. Yuval Evri of Brandeis University will serve as discussant. These talks will be followed by a panel Q&A. Please register in advance.
Date: December 9, 2025
Time: 4:30 – 6:30 PM
Location: Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies (147 Bay State Road)
Speaker Bios:
Prof. Abigail Jacobson is the Eliahu Eilath Chair in the History of the Muslim Peoples at the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the academic head of the MA honors student program at the Mandel School for Advanced Studies at the Humanities.
Prof. Jacobson is a historian working on social and urban history of late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean. Her main research interests are the history of ethnically and nationally mixed spaces and communities, especially during times of war and conflict, as well as the history of Oriental and Mizrahi Jews in Israel. Her first book is entitled From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse University Press, 2011). Her second book, Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine (Brandeis/New England University Press, 2016), is co-authored with Dr. Moshe Naor. In 2021 the book was published in Hebrew and is entitled: Bnei Ha’aretz Vehamizrach: Yehudim Ve’Aravim Bitkufat Hamandat Habriti (Magness Press, 2021).
Prof. Jacobson completed her PhD at the Department of History at the University of Chicago. Before joining the Hebrew University she was a junior research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, was a lecturer at the Department of History at MIT and served as a visiting lecturer at the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University.
Dr. Erica Weiss is an anthropologist at Tel Aviv University and a visiting professor at Brown University in the Department of Judaic Studies during the 2025-2026 academic year. She researches liberalism and its discontents, tolerance and coexistence, political theology and democratic inclusion. She conducts much of her work in Palestine/Israel. She is the PI of an European Research Council project entitled the Praxis of Coexistence which is a comparative and bottom up investigation of non-state approaches to tolerance in religious and peripheral contexts.
Dr. Yuval Evri is an Assistant Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and the Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi, and Sephardic Jewish Studies at Brandeis University. His research centers on the cultural and intellectual history of Sephardi and Arab Jews in the first half of the 20th century.