Israel Studies Seminar: Perspectives on Israel. During this academic year, the Israel Studies Seminar will explore what it means to widen the horizons of conventional discourse about Israel by focusing on various perspectives of Israel. The seminar’s objective is to situate Israel within broader contexts, including thematic, theoretical, methodological, epistemological, and geo-strategical. Our speakers this year are invited to offer views of Israel from the socio-political or historical vantage points of various traditions, groups, cultures and states, or from certain epistemological perspectives. We hope that by doing so we will be able to illuminate topics that may be otherwise neglected in the field of Israel studies, but are nevertheless crucial for understanding Israeli and Middle Eastern politics at large.