I am an anthropologist of violence, spatiality, and temporality. Through fieldwork and ethnographic writing, I study how violence and messianism are written into acts of space-making and temporal imaginaries in Israeli society and culture. The physical sites I study are often not traditionally examined as sites of violence or as war zones per se. Yet, in my analysis, these sites carry profound echoes of nebulous and intricate forms of violence—past, present, and future. Similarly, my consideration of temporal imaginaries, of how the past and future are imagined, seeks to transcend conventional formulation of “events” and pays attention to the long durations of spaces in Israel/Palestine and their transformation under material, political, and geographical conditions. 

I completed my PhD in anthropology at Columbia University in 2024. My doctoral dissertation, “Minefield, Railway, Temple: The Violent Making of Space and Time in Israel/Palestine,” examines three sites of transience in the Golan Heights, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. I examined each site as a place where geographies of violence, formations of identity, and messianic impetuses come to the fore. Such nebulous forms and messianic formations exceed conventional religious and secular epic divides. These spaces serve me in demonstrating how, in Israel, space entails a theory of time. The sites maintain reciprocal feedback between the past and the future: visions of the future rely on the narration and re-narration of the past and create a phantasmagoric imagery of place.

My current research project, “Incandescent Territory and Experiments in Settlement,” will examine how Zionism imagines its past and future and how it seeks to materialize and test this imagination in pilot projects in the desert territory. The Zionist project encompasses Anthropocene-related sites, marginal settlement forms, and border zones. It views the desert as an experimental ground through a broad geological time scale and spatial span. In addition to my academic endeavors, I am an author and translator. My debut novel, Terminal, was published in Hebrew in 2020 (Ha’Kibbutz Ha’Meuchad Press), and my essays, short stories, and articles have been published on various literary and academic platforms.