Product Code Database
Yoram Peri (; born 1944) is a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, in the United States, where he held the Abraham and Jack Kay Chair in Israel Studies, and established and directed the Joseph and Alma Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Maryland. Peri is a sociologist and media scholar. He served as editor-in-chief of the Israeli daily newspaper, Davar; political advisor to the late Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and is a public activist. In 2003, he founded the Haim Herzog Institute for Media, Politics, and Society, at Tel Aviv University.
As editor-in-chief, Peri instituted numerous changes. The designer, Yarom Vardimon, modernized the paper's graphic design. The paper's tagline – "the newspaper of Israel's workers" – was eliminated and the paper became more open and diverse. Davar was the first newspaper in Israel to publish a section on LGBTQ issues; coverage of the Mizrachi community and the periphery was expanded; and the newspaper published "The Hammer," a critical journal dealing with the unprivileged.
Although the editorial innovations changed the newspaper and made it more critical and updated, poor management by the publisher, the Histadrut, (Israel's Workers Federation) could not end the deep financial deficits. Peri endeavored to prevent the closure of the paper and, in 1995, he left. Ron Ben-Yishai, upon his appointment as the new editor-in-chief, renamed the paper Davar Rishon, but a year later the newspaper closed.
Over the years, Peri has written various newspapers, journals and internet sites, presented radio and television programs, and published in international media platforms. He was a member of the Israel Editors Committee and chaired the Committee from 1993–1995. He was a member of the Israeli Press Council and a member of its executive committee, as well as a member of the editorial staff of academic journals. In 2009, he founded the Israel Studies Review, the academic journal of the International Association for Israel Studies, and served as its editor-in-chief until 2021.
During those years, he fostered close relationships with some of the prominent leaders of the European left in the 1970s, including Britain's Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, Germany's Willy Brandt, Francois Mitterrand of France, and Bruno Kreisky of Austria, as well as numerous parliamentarians in those and other European countries. Peri was the first Israeli to establish connections with the new leadership of the Spanish Socialist Party before it came to power. In 1977, the party, headed by Felipe Gonzalez, won the first democratic elections in Spain and formed a government.
When Yitzhak Rabin returned to Israel in 1973, after serving as ambassador to the United States and entered politics in the Labor Party, Peri, then the Party spokesperson, became one of Rabin's close advisors. Together with Dov Tzamir, he led Rabin's primary campaign and, upon Rabin's nomination as Labor Party candidate for prime minister, Peri became Rabin's political advisor.
Yoram Peri has been active in various civic organizations, and particularly in social change organizations. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the New Israel Fund, and its international president from 2000–2002. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and served on the advisory committee to the State Comptroller. In 1995, together with Shira Herzog, then head of the Kahanoff Foundation, he founded the Maof Fellowships, a program designed to increase the number of Arab-Israeli faculty members in Israeli academic institutions. Due to this project the number of tenured Israeli Palestinian lecturers at all academic institutions rose from 12 to 150. In 2017–2019 Dr. Peri was the vice President of the world Association for Israel Studies.
Peri's fields of research and publication focus on civil–military relations, and, in particular, relations between the military and politics, political sociology, political communications (and relations between the military and the media), and issues of democracy. Peri studied under Shmuel Eisenstadt, Moshe Lissak, and Dan Horowitz, and examined the involvement of the IDF in Israeli politics. His research refuted the view, widely held until the early 1970s, that Israel embodied a model according to which the role of the military was instrumental and uninvolved in politics. Peri's research demonstrated that Israel exhibits a different, dual model in which the military, although subordinate to the civilian government, is, in fact, an active political player. Thus, Peri became a pioneer among the second generation of Israeli scholars of political-military relations, describing the relations between the political and military upper echelons as "a political-military partnership."
In the field of political communications, Peri addressed the changes in the political system caused by the media with the spread of "the media logic" into the field of politics and the emergence of "media-politics." He studied the rise of populist leaders like Berlusconi, Carlos Menem, and Benjamin Netanyahu, and coined the term "tele-populism" in his book, Tele-Populism: Media and Politics in Israel in the 1990s.
After the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, Peri researched the murder, the societal and political trends that preceded it, and issues of commemoration and collective memory. He has published four books on the subject – three in English and one in Hebrew, Brothers at War: Rabin's Assassination and the Cultural War in Israel.
In 2017, the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv published Peri's book, Mediatized Wars: The Paradox of Power and Israel's Strategic Dilemma (Hebrew). Peri argues that the process of "mediatization" in contemporary society has led to changes in the nature of war. In modern warfare, including Israel's war against terror and guerilla insurgency organizations, the kinetic, physical dimension has been overlaid by a perceptual dimension.
Latest Academic Articles in English
|
|
