Sociology on Israeli TV

Tonight I tuned into the channel 10 evening news program to watch an interview with my friend and colleague A.K. A.K. teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University, and she has written an important new book about citizenship, migrant workers, and the Israeli labor market. (Sorry, fellow Anglophones, the book has not been translated from Hebrew into English.) Even though I could only understand a few words of the interview, I still watched intently and enthusiastically. Aside from the admittedly silly thrill of seeing a friend on TV, I was impressed that Israeli TV provides a forum (however brief) for sociologists to share their research findings with the broader public, and I think A.K. was engaged in a valuable public service. As Emile Durkheim noted more than a century ago, “writers and scholars are citizens; it is thus evident that they have the strict duty to participate in public life…. We must be above all … educators.” “It is our function,” he added, not to “govern” our contemporaries but to “help our contemporaries to know themselves.” Yasher koach, A.K.!