BGU's Prof. Uri Ram has been nominated as this year's recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the New School for Social Research, New York. Ram received his Ph.D. from the New School in 1992.
The head of the Department of Sociology-Anthropology, Prof. Ram is the author of several recent books including The Globalization of Israel: McWorld in Tel Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem (Routledge 2007) and Israeli Nationalism: Social Conflicts and the Politics of Knowledge (Routledge 2011).
His research interests focus on the dialectics of the globalization of Israeli society, and especially the encounter between the "global" and the "local". He analyzes the growing hiatus between two tendencies that struggle over the definition of Israeli identity: ethno-nationalism (neo-Zionism) and civic-liberalism (post-Zionism). Another research interest of his is the history of sociological thought in Israel, and especially the transition from "mainstream" to "critical" sociology, as he described in his book The Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology: Theory, Ideology and Identity (SUNY Press 1995).
The award will be presented to Prof. Ram by Prof. Michael Schober, the Dean of the Graduate Faculty of the New School, in a ceremony on May 23rd.
Previous distinguished alumni honorees include sociologist Peter L. Berger, Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University; Thomas Luckmann, professor of Sociology at the University of Constance in Germany; Celia B. Fisher, Director for the Center for Ethics Education at Fordham University; Frank Roosvelt, expert on economic systems and alternative perspectives in economy at the Sarah Lawrence College; Joel Whitebrook, of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research; and Pasqual Maragall, former Mayor of Barcelona.
The New School has 60,000 alumni in 115 states.
