Professor David Peimer
Contemporary Israeli Thinkers: Yuval Noah Harari
Summary
Yuval Noah Harari is one of the most respected and renowned thinkers in the world today and author of the bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011). In this lecture, we will look at some of his ideas on the topics he writes on and examine the reasons for his popularity.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Absolutely. And yeah, he’s Jewish. And also, I mean, some of his family members were in one of the kibbutzim that was attacked and some of them were killed in the Hamas massacre. So he has a very direct personal connection to October the seventh horror. And he absolutely connects to Jewish religious in a secular way, I guess. But he absolutely considers completely Jewish and Israeli as well.
That’s a great question. More a sociologist than an historian. I think he would call himself an historian, but an historian in the broad renaissance sense of the word influenced by art, culture, literature, biology, science, medicine, anthropology, architecture, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I would say a historian with that broad, it’s a terrible word, but the contemporary academic word is interdisciplinary. But that broad open mind to see connections. I think that’s how I’d prefer to say it. That the more narrow-minded kind of scholarly approach, often pushed and demanded through publication is pushed today still I think.