“And they Shall Beat Swords into Ploughshares”:

Prof. Dr. Keren Friedman-Peleg
College of Management Academic Studies, Israel

Lecture in English. Lecture in room R.007, Rodestraat 14, Antwerp.
The opening lecture will be followed by a reception.

Free admission. To register: email to ijs@uantwerpen.be. 

This lecture will discuss the cultural work carried out by Israelis who experienced the violence of October 7th on their homes and communities, aimed at restoring their shattered hopes for an Israeli-Palestinian partnership. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observations conducted in the aftermath of the attack, Keren Friedman-Peleg will shed light on the myriad ways these Israelis have endeavored to cultivate, rekindle, and renew their compassion for Palestinians living in Gaza. Through social gatherings in which they share testimonies, create art, invoke religion, contemplate the present, and envision the future, these residents continue to pursue the possibility that even amid the current emotional and political turmoil, “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks” (Isaiah, chapter 2, verses 2-4).

Keren Friedman-Peleg is a senior lecturer and the Dean of the School of Behavioral Science and Psychology at the College of Management Academic Studies, Israel. She obtained her PhD at Tel Aviv University in the department of Sociology and Anthropology. Friedman-Peleg was a visiting scholar at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2016 and 2019), and a visiting assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology and at the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley (2018 and 2021). Based on her ethnographic research on the politics of trauma and resilience in the Gaza Envelope region, she published articles in leading journals, such as Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry and Transcultural Psychiatry. The full manuscript of her doctoral thesis - entitled A Nation on the Couch: The Politics of Trauma in Israel was published by Magnes - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Press (2014), and by the University of Toronto Press (2017). She is currently working on her new manuscript, Vanquishing Helplessness, Conquering Vulnerability: Israel’s Politics of Resilience before and after October 7.