Dangerous and Disruptive: An Israel Studies Lecture

Join us for the final Israel Studies lecture of this academic year, "Dangerous and Disruptive Political Affects and Actions in Contemporary Israel and Its Occupied Palestinian Territories." Drawing on anthropological research with left-wing and right-wing Jewish Israeli activists, Profs. Michal Kravel-Tovi and Amir Reicher examine the production and consequences of political affect and action on Israel’s streets and in its settlements as activists grapple with (or manufacture) political crises and disruptions. Janet McIntosh will serve as discussant, and these talks will be followed be a panel Q&A.

This event will take place in the Elie Wiesel Center library (147 Bay State Road, Room 202). Space will be limited, so make sure to register. You can also request copies of the papers to read prior to the event.

Paper Abstracts:

No Quiet Here: The Disruptive Soundscape of Political Shaming in Contemporary Israel

Across contexts, the soundscape of civil protest is made of shouts and outcries, the blast and echo of megaphones, and moments of deliberate, collective silence. Protest is shaped as much by making noise as by mobilizing silence, as part of an affective politics of being heard. This paper examines the soundscape of targeted public shaming in Israel, directed at government politicians and their allies, figures widely seen as complicit in the government’s brutal legislative overhaul and in the state’s failures on and after October 7.

The paper focuses on the sonic practices of shaming aimed at individual politicians. These acts take multiple forms. Some unfold as spontaneous encounters in public space; others are carefully staged. Some are solo performances; others are collective and coordinated. Despite this variety, they share a common logic of disruption and amplification. Shaming works by interrupting the ordinary acoustics of institutional life and public space, and forcing an unwanted sound into them.

We argue that this disruptive soundscape responds to two intertwined political conditions. The first is a sense of learned helplessness produced by a prolonged mass protest movement that has not, so far, yielded results. Personalized shaming reflects a need to act differently and creatively, and to feel more agentive. The second is the government’s own populist strategy of “flooding the zone,” which civilians often describe in bodily terms as toxic, suffocating, and above all noisy. In protest talk, this overwhelming grip on everyday life is experienced as a constant buzz: a stream of events, conspiracies, legislative moves, and rumors, arriving at high speed and high volume, often without coherence. Public shaming, in this setting, is a way of pushing back, fighting back, answering that noise with disruptive noise of its own.

Monstrous Mimicry among West Bank Settlers: On the Creation of Doubles, Brotherly Hate, and Dangerous Empathy (post October 7th)

Since October 7 and amid the war in Gaza, there is a new type of settler violence going on in the West Bank. It comes mostly from “outpost farms” that have been frantically built in the past years. In these communities, as they terrorize Palestinian communities, a particular strand of settlers has begun to adopt what they imagine as a quasi-“Arab” identity. Based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in the West Bank since October 7, this talk examines this phenomenon of settler mimicry through intergenerational lens: we shall see how while the previous generation of settlers sought to mimic Palestinians as part of a process of ‘settler-indigenization’ (a way, that is, to transform themselves as people of the land), this new cohort of settlers imitates Palestinians in a different register. Rather than seeking to become Indigenous, they attempt, analytically speaking, to transform themselves into what they imagine as “savages.” Throughout the talk I will explain this dynamic, tie it into long term historical processes, and consider its (horrid) implications.

Speaker Bios:

Michal Kravel-Tovi is an Associate Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. Her work examines the political dimensions of contemporary Jewish religious life. Her book, When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel (Columbia University Press, 2017), received second prize for the Clifford Geertz Award (SAR/AAA) and won the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award (AJS). She is currently working on the making of sociodemographic statistics in the United States, Haredi anti–sexual violence activism, critical civil activism in Haredi society, and public shaming of politicians in Israel.

Janet McIntosh is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Her ethnographies have received the Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion (2010), an Honorable Mention for the American Ethnological Society’s Senior Book Prize (2018), and an Honorable Mention for the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing (2017). She is the co-editor of Language in the Trump Era (Cambridge University Press, 2020, with Norma Mendoza-Denton) and is most recently the author of K*ll Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics (Oxford University Press, 2025).

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