Seed Money for Research Initiatives

Stemming from its aspiration to increase academic activity in the realm of religious studies in Israel, the Haifa Laboratory for Religious Studies awards start-up grants every year to Haifa University research fellows, to support research that focuses on various topics pertaining to religious studies.

An Open Call is published every year during the autumn

The startup grants for the year 2023-24: Religion and Social Change
The startup grants for the year 2022-23: Religions and the Abraham

Accords Links for further reading:

1. Modest Fashion of Jewish and Muslim Women The research of Prof. Amalia Sa’ar from the Department of Anthropology at Haifa University, and Dr. Dalit Simchai from the Department of Human Services and the Multidisciplinary Department at Tel Hai Academic College will deal with modest fashion among Jewish and Muslim women in Israel/Palestine, on its diverse manifestations in the digital and physical spaces, including the aesthetic preferences of women, activity patterns and meanings associated with buying clothes, wearing them, producing them, and marketing them.

It is a thriving cultural production realm, which is closely intertwined with the global and regional modest fashion industry, and characterized by multidimensional border-crossing, and a proliferation of seemingly contradictory discourse on pleasure, morality, self expression, modesty and openness, community and individuality.

The proposed project shall focus on three interfaces: The flourishing women’s fashion in conservative communities that historically perceive fashion consumption as immoral; the closeness and direct communication that develops between women whose communities are politically hostile; and the complex effect of the increased participation of religious women in the digital arena.

One of the fascinating – and unusual – locations where we are interested in testing these issues is the Dubai Fashion Week.

2. The Dialogue in Question: The Ethics of Communication and the Politics of Hospitality The study of Prof. Annabel Herzog from the School of Political Science at Haifa University deals with the connection between dialogue and religious identity. Disagreements and conflicts between religions arise not only because of incompatible beliefs, but also because the epistemic frameworks through which these beliefs are communicated are not necessarily compatible with each other.

Thus, the same word can be understood in many ways. Against this backdrop, the proposed project aims to investigate how dialogue is challenged in interfaith, inter-cultural, inter-ethnic and international encounters. The philosophical-theological research focuses on interfaith dialogues between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, conducted in Israel and in the countries that signed the Abraham Accords.

These religions coexisted and competed with each other for hundreds of years, thus defined their identities vis-a-vis the other religions. It was done through mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, detachment and conjunction. The dialogue with the other always raises questions of belonging and self-positioning at the threshold between the self and the other. The study’s objective is to re-evaluate the role of dialogue in resolving socio-political disputes and resolving conflicts.