Haggai Ram | Ben Gurion University of the Negev (original) (raw)

I teach and write about secularism, religion, colonialism, and popular culture in the modern Middle East, with particular emphasis on Iran and Israel. Initially, my research interests focused on Iranian cultural and political history in the 20th century. I published a book (Myth and Mobilization in Revolutionary Iran, 1994) and a series of articles dealing with pre- and post-1979 Iranian history in a comparative perspective. I underscored the shifts and continuities in modern Iranian history by drawing on diverse source material such as school textbooks, newspapers, political art, Friday sermons, memoirs, and cartoons. Though these articles addressed different themes, they argued against essentialist and reified notions of post-1979 Iranian realities. In addition, these studies demonstrated the extent to which modern Iranian history was entwined with broader historical processes and how Iranians reinterpreted, appropriated, deflected, and resisted the ideas, practices, and institutions they gleaned from these encounters.

In the wake of 9/11, I became increasingly intrigued by the exaggerated anxieties about Iran among Israelis, as well as with the overall failure of much of the scholarly literature to make sense of these anxieties outside the domain of geopolitics. As a result, I turned my gaze to Israeli society and culture and set out to study the cultural logic at work behind Israel's anti-Iran discourses. Two books were born in the process: Likro iran be-Yisrael (Reading Iran in Israel), published in 2006, and Iranophobia: the Cultural Logic of an Israeli Obsession (Stanford University Press), published in 2009.

The two books differed in their scope of empirical research, methodologies, narrative structure, and subject matters. Yet both provided a crucially innovative approach to studying the relationship between domestic and foreign policies in the manufacturing of the Israeli polity. Inspired by works that read metropolitan and colonial cultures as zones of encounter, the two books demonstrated that Israeli anxieties about Iran were fashioned and comprehended based on what Israelis believed to be the (dis)ordering of their society at home. Israelis went about setting Iran apart as fanatically religious and outrageously dangerous precisely because they have come to see in it the "Oriental," ethnic and religious underclass that threatened their own identity. The Israeli sense of danger emanating from Iran is linked to the defensive mechanisms of the home, given the peril of the Jewish state becoming foreign and unrecognizable to itself.

In 2020, I published a book on a topic that has radically diverged from my previous research preoccupations. Titled Intoxicating Zion: A Social History of Hashish in Mandatory Palestine and Israel, the book (which was published by Stanford University Press in 2020) deals with the social history of hashish in Palestine-Israel from the 1920s through the 1960s. In more concrete terms – but still in very broad brushstrokes – it is a transnational study that explores the transition from Mandatory Palestine to the State of Israel through the perspective of hashish both as an illicit commodity – which is smuggled across borders, sold, consumed and endlessly debated – and a metaphor or a screen on which human beings project class, ethnic-racial and gendered desires and anxieties. I have also published numerous articles and book chapters emanating from this research.

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