Haifa and Jerusalem

This week was unusually busy for me. On Tuesday I took the train from Tel Aviv to Haifa to present a paper (in English, of course) at Haifa University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. This was lots of fun. My friend U. teaches there, and he and a few of his colleagues took me to lunch, showed me around campus a little, and introduced me to some of the graduate students there. There is a very interesting archaeology museum on campus with the remains of an ancient Phoenician boat, and since the university is high up in the hills, the social science building provides some beautiful views. On a clear day, you can see the border with Lebanon.

The next day (Wednesday) I took the bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to present another paper at a history seminar at the Hebrew University. This was a trip not only across Israel (less than an hour by bus) but also across disciplinary boundaries. Most of my work is historical sociology, so I think of history as a kindred discipline. Still, I didn’t feel quite as at home here among the historians as I did in Haifa among the sociologists. For that reason it was an especially nice surprise to see my friend T. at the seminar. She’s an HU graduate student who was the G. M. Student Fellow last year at the University of Wisconsin. It’s always comforting to see a familiar face in a new place.

I wanted to make a good impression on my Israeli colleagues, especially in Jerusalem, where I will be teaching during the second term, but I was dissatisfied with my weak replies to some of the questions in Haifa and especially in Jerusalem. Maybe I’m a little rusty; I haven’t presented a paper since last fall. Still, the experiences were good overall, and the questions and criticism were useful and valuable, especially for the paper I presented in Jerusalem, which I’m now revising for publication. In any case, they certainly made a good impression on me – their questions were all extremely smart and incisive.

I’m pleased that I’m starting to learn my around Israel (the bus and train system), seeing more of the country outside Tel Aviv, and making contacts with colleagues here. Though I’m enjoying the flexibility that comes from having no teaching obligations at the moment, I have also felt a little isolated and detached from academic life – suffering, to use the jargon of my profession, from insufficient social integration. These trips to Haifa and Jerusalem helped to re-integrate me a little.