By Rabbi Rachel Esserman

In her biography on the Binghamton University website, Talia Katz lists her areas of interest as “trauma, violence, language, subjectivity, history of medicine, gender.” An assistant professor of Israeli studies who trained as an anthropologist, Katz combines a wide variety of topics in her research, including medical humanities, childhood studies, performance studies, and gender and sexuality studies to gain a better understanding of what occurs when a person or group lives through traumatic times. 
Her interest in trauma is a personal one, which comes from the traumatic history of her own family. “I grew up in a household shaped by chronic illness, migration and war,” Katz said in an e-mail interview. “My maternal grandmother grew up in Guatemala City, the daughter of an Austrian Jewish emigree who saved his mother and niece from the Holocaust. My grandmother had a formative role in raising me. This meant that questions such as – How do people go on after atrocity? What does it mean to belong to a society? What kinds of challenges do women face in the workplace? – felt intimate and alive to me. Cultural anthropology provided a vocabulary through which to make sense of my own experiences. It offered an intellectual home in which I could explore these questions across different scales and world regions.”
Katz was always interested in the study of violence, but it wasn’t until her Ph.D. studies that she began to combine that interest with Israeli studies. “As an undergraduate student at Yale, my senior thesis was an ethnography of how Rwandan women experienced pregnancy and social support in the shadows of the 1994 genocide,” she said. “I anticipated that my Ph.D. dissertation would focus on the experiences of sexual violence of Congolese refugees in East Africa. However, a series of unexpected events during my first year in the Ph.D. program guided me back to my own heritage. I chose to study psychodrama (a theater-based form of psychotherapy) and explore the plurality of theories of trauma that circulate in Israel/Palestine. Since Israel is often seen as the ‘global exporter’ of knowledge on trauma, I think it’s particularly fruitful to go back through the historical archives and speak with people in peripheral spaces to try to understand what dominant theories and frameworks often leave out.”
She is currently working on a book on the topic. “My first book project (currently in-progress) is a history and ethnography of Israeli psychodrama,” Katz said. “I tracked how Holocaust survivors brought the therapy to Israel in the first years of statehood and how it is being used today in a community theater center in the mixed Jewish-Palestinian city of Lod. I was interested in how, after the catastrophic violence of the Holocaust, therapists had to re-imagine what healing could look like. Psychodrama was founded by psychiatrists who turned to theater as a response to the forms of crisis they saw in the world. I found that the psychodramatists’ turn to theater resulted in very interesting new formulations of what healing and repair can look like in the face of both past and ongoing violence.”
Next semester, she will be teaching a course that speaks to her interests: “Law and Life: Israel/Palestine.” Katz noted that the course will introduce “students to concepts in legal anthropology, a discipline that investigates how law reflects, shapes and shifts social norms. We’ll cover topics ranging from the foundational role of the Eichmann trial in crafting Israeli collective memory of the Holocaust to how international legal institutions shape local political discourses in the present moment. It’s important for me to offer students a calm and rigorous environment in which they can explore the longer histories of the issues that we see on today’s newspaper headlines. It’s less important to me if students remember a particular detail or course reading. Rather, I hope they leave with a new antenna – so to speak – through which they can notice the world differently, specifically concepts and categories they may have previously taken for granted.”
Katz also is interested in how difference and disability are viewed in contemporary Israeli worlds and recently took part in a discussion of a film on the topic. “As part of Binghamton University’s Harpur Week, my colleague Lior Libman and I recently organized a film screening of Neta Loevy’s documentary film, ‘The Woman from the Bubble,’” she said. “The film follows the life of Lee Dan, an Israeli Sign Language interpreter. The film showcases the diverse lives of Israel’s deaf community, panning from factories and hospitals to after-school theater programs and music events. It was wonderful to see the event so well attended; the room was packed with around 50 students and community members. As an anthropologist, I strive to showcase the perspective of everyday life in my work and so screening the film fit well. Afterward, in the discussion, students expressed that it meant a lot to them to showcase the ordinary life of the deaf communities in Israel. In the discussion, we spoke about the social model of disability and how many (including some featured in the film) do not consider deafness a disability at all. We hope to continue offering programming on these themes as we saw how much demand there is to speak about different facets of Israeli social life today.”