עברית
The head of the Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies

Prof. Hizky Shoham

Email
hizky.shoham@biu.ac.il
Personal Website
http://biu.academia.edu/HizkyShoham
CV

Hizky Shoham is the head of the Program for Hermeneutics and Culture and co-director of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He is also a research fellow at the Kogod Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

His interdisciplinary work spans anthropological history, cultural sociology, and cultural theory, focusing on Zionism, the Yishuv, Israeli society, and North American Jewry. Shoham’s research explores the intersections of religion, nationalism, and consumer culture, particularly as expressed in Jewish holidays, life-cycle rituals, and cultural symbols. He is especially interested in cultural and social processes that develop from below, independent of institutional planning, and has written extensively on childhood, family, emotions, time, space. His research approach combines meticulous archival work with non-traditional methods in the traditions of microhistory, history of experience, and anthropological history, while remaining theoretically informed. He uses historical case studies to address “big” theoretical questions about human societies. Shoham’s theoretical contributions provide a framework for studying culture from below through the analysis of unmediated social processes, sometimes focusing on Zionism, the Yishuv, and Israeli society as case studies, while situating these insights within broader comparative contexts.

His books include Carnival in Tel Aviv: Purim and the Celebration of Urban Zionism (Academic Studies Press, 2014) and Israel Celebrates: Festivals and Civic Culture in Israel (Brill, 2017). His most recent work, Why Bar and Bat Mitzvah? Gender, Spectacle, and Temporality in Modern Jewish Cultures, won the Goldberg Prize in 2022 and was published in Hebrew by Lamda Press (2023). The English edition, A Moving Feast: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah across Jewish Cultures, was recently released by De Gruyter.

Courses

 

Courses and Seminars:

  • Theories of Culture: Sociological and Anthropological Aspects
  • Is there a Modern Culture?
  • Theories of (Modern) Religion
  • Shopping, Identity, Culture: Consumer Culture in Comparative Perspective
  • Israeli Culture from the Grassroots
  • Thoeries of Religion 
  • Theories of Ritual
  • The Everyday
  • Methdology in the Human Sciences
  • The Emotional Turn
Publications

Books

Why Bar and Bat Mitzvah? Initiation, Gender, and Spectacle in Jewish Cultures (Ra’anana: Lamda—The Open University of Israel Press, 2023). [Hebrew]. Winner, Goldberg Prize. 

English translation: A Moving Feast: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah across Jewish Cultures (Berlin, De Gruyter, 2025). 

Israel Celebrates: Jewish Holidays and Civic Culture in Israel (Boston & Leiden: Brill, 2017).

Let’s Celebrate! Festivals and Civic Culture in Israel (Jerusalem: the Israel Democracy Institution, 2014). [Hebrew: a working paper]

Mordecai is Riding a Horse: Purim Celebrations in Tel-Aviv (1908-1936) and the Building of a New Nation (Ramat-Gan and Sede-Boqer: Bar-Ilan University Press and Ben-Gurion university Press, 2013). [Hebrew]

Abridged Translation: Carnival in Tel-Aviv: Purim and the celebration of urban Zionism (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014).

 

Articles:

  • Shoham, Hizky. 2025. “From “a sho’ah” to “the Sho’ah”: A History of Singularization,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 20, 2: 29–52.
  • Shoham, Hizky. 2025. “A Short History of Mangal: Unofficial Nationalism,” Israel 35: 121-146 [Hebrew].
  • Shoham, Hizky. 2025. ““Only Wailing and Protesting”? Emotion Management in the Controversy in Jewish Palestine about the Anti-Nazi Boycott,” AJS Review 49, no. 2: 531–556. 
  • Shoham, Hizky. (forthcoming, December 2025). “The Concept of Tradition: Between the Academic and the Public.” Forthcoming in Pe’amim 172-173 [Hebrew].
  • Shoham, Hizky (2025). “Performing national practices of solidarity-through-sameness.” Nations and Nationalism 31, no. 1: 113-127.
  • Boord, Matan and Shoham, Hizky (2024). “Sentimentality in the Mandate-Era Yishuv,” Tzion 90, no. 1-2: 193-218 [Hebrew; equal contribution as co-author].
  • Boord, Matan and Shoham, Hizky (2024). “‘Sometimes your heart fills to bursting’: ‘The New Jew’ and Narratives of Emotional Restraint in the Yishuv,” Journal of Israeli History 42, no. 1–2: 25–47.
  • Shoham, Hizky (2023). “Deep Conventionality, or, Tracing the Meanings of Conventional Rituals.” American Behavioral Scientist, 68, no. 5: 640-659.
  • Shoham, Hizky (2022). “’Our (Civil) way of Life’: The Folkloric Civil Sphere”, Cultural Sociology 17, no. 1: 136-156.
  • “A Tale of Two Cultures: An Outline for a Comparative Cultural Analysis of Israeli and North American Jewry,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 21, 1 (2022): 1-20. 
  • “The Jewish Consumer Culture of British Mandate Palestine,” Jewish Consumer Cultures in 19th and 20th Century Europe and America, eds. Paul Lerner, Anne Schenderlein, and Uwe Spiekermann, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, pp. 195-219. 
  • “It is about time: Birthdays as modern rites of temporality.” Time & Society 30, 1 (2021): 78-99. 
  • “The Israel BBQ as National Ritual: Performing Unofficial Nationalism, or Finding Meaning in Triviality.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 9 (2021): 13–42.
  • “’Small Sales Agents (of Nationalism) Inside the House’: Childhood, Consumer Culture, and Nationalism in Interwar Palestine’s Yishuv.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 12, 1 (2019): 88-112. 

Best article for 2019, the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth. https://www.shcy.org/news-announcements/jhcy-best-article-prize-for-2019/

  • “Zionist ‘Buy National’ Campaigns in Interwar Palestine.” Boycotts: Past and Present, ed. David Feldman, London: Palgrave, 2019, pp. 73-95. 
  • “The Conceptual and Anthropological History of Bat Mitzvah: Two lexical paths and Two Jewish identities.” Contributions to the History of Concepts 13, 2 (2018): 100-122.
  • “Bar and Bat Mitzvah in the Yishuv and Early Israel: From Rites of Initiation to Rites of Temporality.” AJS Review 42, 1 (2018): 133–157.
  • [With Nissim Leon] “Belonging without commitment: the Christocentric view and the traditionist perspective on modern religion.” Culture and Religion 19, 2 (2018): 235-252. 
  • “’A Birthday Party, Only a Little Bigger’: A Historical Anthropology of the Israeli Bat Mitzvah.” Jewish Culture and History 16, 3 (2015): 275-292.  
  • “’He Had a Ceremony—I Had a Party’: Boys’ Initiation Rites and Girls’ Birthday Parties in Israeli Culture.” Modern Judaism 36, 3 (2016): 1-22. 
  • “‘You Can’t Pick Your Family’: Celebrating Israeli Familism around the Seder Table.” Journal of Family History39, 3 (2014): 239-260.
  • “Yom-Kippur and Jewish Public Culture in Israel.” Journal of Israeli History 32, 2 (2013): 175-196.
  • “’Buy Local’ or ‘Buy Jewish’? Separatist Consumption in Interwar Palestine.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, 3 (2013): 469-489.
  • “From ‘Great History’ to ‘Small History’: The Genesis of the Zionist Periodization.” Israel Studies 18, 1 (2013): 31–55.
  • “Tel-Aviv’s Foundation Myth: A Constructive Perspective.” Tel-Aviv, the First Century: Visions, Designs, Actualities, eds. Maoz Azaryahu and S. Ilan Troen, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012, pp. 34-59.
  • “Rethinking Tradition: From Ontological Reality to Assigned Temporal Meaning.” European Journal of Sociology 52, 2 (2011): 313-340.
  • “Of Other Cinematic Spaces: Urban Zionism in Early Hebrew Cinema.” Israel Studies Review 26, 2 (2011): 109-131.
  • “‘A huge national assemblage’: Tel Aviv as a pilgrimage site in Purim celebrations (1920–1935).” Journal of Israeli History 28, 1 (2009): 1-20.

Last Updated Date : 15/03/2026