Thank you for participating at our online information event "Studying in Israel"!
If you missed the event, but you are interested in spending an exchange semester at one of our partner institutions in Israel, feel free to get in touch with us: [email protected]
We are looking forward to hearing form you!

In collaboration with the Department of Contemporary History and the Department of Political Science at the University of Innsbruck, AIANI was pleased to host the online guest lecture by Prof. Csaba Nikolenyi from the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies at Concordia University in Montreal (Canada).
The lecture “Israeli Party System at Crossroads? Electoral Politics and Coalition Government, 2019-2021” took place on April 21, 2021 and focused on past and current elections in Israel and the fragmented party system.
​Prof. Martin Senn, Head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Innsbruck, welcomed the participants. Afterwards, the lecturer Prof. Nikolenyi pointed out various reasons why the past Israeli elections have all become inconclusive. He suggested that the answers lie in the convergence of the fundamental tensions in the right-religious coalition, the Covid-19 pandemic, the institutional changes and finally, political personalization. Prof. Nikolenyi claimed that the main source of Israel’s current crisis of governability may be the decay and de-institutionalization of the party system. Possible solutions could come from a leadership change in the political party Likud or a direct election of the prime minister in the future.
Following Prof. Nikolenyi’s talk, Dr. Noam Zadoff, Assistant Professor at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck, opened the Q&A session.
The approximately 50 participants included attendees from various cities in Canada, Israel and Austria.
AIANI and the co-organizers want to thank Prof. Csaba Nikolenyi for taking the time and giving an insightful talk on current Israeli politics.

Rebekka Grossmann is a postdoctoral fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History (Israel).
On April 12, 2021, she gave a virtual guest lecture on “Zionistische Sichtbarkeiten: Fotografie und Nation in Palästina“. The talk was part of a joint research colloquium of the Department of Contemporary History, the Department of History and European Ethnology and the Department of Ancient History and Ancient Oriental Studies at the University of Innsbruck.

In her lecture, Grossmann discussed photography as a tool to picture various visions of a future Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine. In this way, photography offers new insights into the debate on different conceptions of Jewish statehood in the 1920s and 1930s. The lecture put a focus on the photographers, propagandists and photo agents at this time. Dr. Grossmann talked about how the photographs provide insights into their expectations and the challenges they faced, as well as the opportunities photography offered them as a political language.

Dr. Noam Zadoff, Assistant Professor at the Department of Contemporary History, moderated the online lecture, with about 70 people attending. The insightful presentation by Rebekka Grossmann was very well received by the audience and AIANI, as well as the organizers of the joint research colloquium, want to thank everyone who participated and especially Dr. Grossmann for a very interesting talk.

On April 4, 2021, the newspaper “Kleine Zeitung” published an article on “Gesellschaftlicher Wandel im Heiligen Land“ in which the author interviewed Dr. Noam Zadoff, Assistant Professor at the University of Innsbruck, on social order and social change in Israel.
Ass.-Prof. Dr. Zadoff explains how the history of the state of Israel has been shaped by the war against its neighboring countries and the consecutive integration of Jewish immigrant groups, arriving to Israel from all over the world. He claims that Israel’s society is undergoing a massive change: It used to be a melting pot, where society was challenged by the integration of different immigrant groups, but the wars against neighboring countries strengthened the bond between the inhabitants. The wave of immigration that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union however, changed the Israeli society towards a “salad bowl society”, similar to the one in the USA. This social change poses new challenges for today’s Israeli society.
 
Read the full article here:
https://www.uibk.ac.at/zeitgeschichte/medienspiegel/2021/nachlesen/pdf/noam-kleine-zeitung.pdf