The lecture explores the role of the Hebrew Bible in Israeli culture and its transformation over time. Hebrew culture developed multiple texts and practices that underscored the national significance of the Bible as one of its foundations. Although scholars marked its decline within secular Israeli culture since the 1970s, the lecture explores the production of artistic works and popular forms in recent decades. It suggests that in spite of significant changes, secular Israelis continue to be engaged with the Hebrew Bible, though their interest may take different, and at times contested, directions.

Yael Zerubavel is the Director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life and Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1988 joined its faculty at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. In 1996, she was recruited by Rutgers University to found the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life and create a new department of Jewish Studies, which she chaired until 2005.

Professor Zerubavel has published extensively in the area of collective memory and identity, national myths, cultural representations of war and trauma, and space and symbolic landscapes. Her book Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1995) won the 1996 Salo Baron Prize of the American Academy for Jewish Research. She is currently completing her book manuscript Desert in the Promised Land: Nationalism, Politics, and Symbolic Landscapes, and is working on another book project on Biblical Reenactments: The Performance of Antiquity in Modern Israeli Culture. Her most recent journal article, “Numerical Commemoration and the Challenges of Collective Remembrance in Israel,” has been published in History and Memory 26, 1 (Spring/Summer 2014).

Professor Zerubavel has been a frequent speaker in international conferences on collective memory, nationalism, and Israeli society and culture. She is on the editorial board of major journal in the field of Israel Studies and has been a Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and is currently a Fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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