CANCELED: Rootedness and Liberalism in Conflict: What the Israeli Case Teaches Us About a Divided World

March 2 update: Regretfully, we must cancel this event that was scheduled to take place on Wednesday afternoon. Professor Nissim Mizrachi cannot travel due to the developing war in the Middle East. 

media release: Why do disadvantaged Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin reject the liberal-progressive agenda that serves their interests, and instead support Likud (Netanyahu’s party) and religious-nationalist parties, which seem to undermine those very interests? This talk will argue that their rooted identity—anchored in a deep need for belonging—constitutes a morally serious stance. Professor Nissim Mizrachi (Tel Aviv University) will explain how this research laid the foundation for Tiebreaker, a civic-democratic forum in which Mizrahi Likud activists and liberal-progressive scholars engage one another as equal yet distinct political actors. Recently emerging at the forefront of public debate in Israel, the forum’s first major initiative—a legislative proposal to establish a commission of inquiry into the events of October 7—has positioned it at the very center of the national agenda.

Old Madison Room.

Nissim Mizrachi is full professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University and head of the Center for the Challenge of Living Together at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He served as chairperson of his department from 2013 to 2016. He received his B.A. and M.A. (summa cum laude) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan as a Fulbright Fellow, and completed postdoctoral studies at Harvard University.

His scholarship spans the sociology of knowledge, medicine, and culture, and more recently the crisis of liberalism and comparative studies of ethnicity. With Michèle Lamont, he co-edited a 2012 special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies and co-authored Getting Respect (Princeton University Press, 2016).

His book Beyond Suspicion: The Moral Clash between Rootedness and Progressive Liberalism (University of California Press, 2024) examines tensions between progressive liberalism and “rooted” moral worldviews. In 2025, he co-edited Beyond the Liberal Imagination. A public intellectual in Israel, Mizrachi has been featured in Haaretz, Calcalist, Makor Rishon, Israel Hayom, Globes, The Marker, and The New York Times, and has appeared on numerous podcasts and electronic media interviews.

In 2024, he co-founded the Tiebreaker Forum, bringing together leading Likud activists and center-left academics.