Prof. Orna Sasson-Levy

Professor Orna Sasson-Levy serves as the head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, as well as an associate professor at the Program of Gender Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Her main research focuses on the field of gender and militarism. Her publications in this field explore the construction of masculine identities in different military roles; military service and citizenship; the ambivalent positioning of women in the military organization; the meanings of gender integration in the military, the gendered consequences of the transition from a mandatory conscription to a professional military, the influence of globalization on military’s gender regimes, and the meaning of the military service in women’s life stories.

In this field, Sasson-Levy has published many articles in refereed journals (such as Gender & Society; The Sociological Quarterly; Signs; and The British Journal of Sociology), and is the author of two books:

Identities in Uniform: Masculinities and Femininities in the Israeli Military, 2006, Magnes (in Hebrew);

Women Soldiers and Citizenship in Israel: Gendered Encounters with the State, with Edna Lomsky-Feder, (2018), Routledge.

In addition, in the last few years Sasson-levy has been studying and publishing on the subject of Israeli ethnicities, focusing on the unmarked ethnicity of the hegemonic groups – the Ashkenazim; on intersectionality of gender and ethnicity in the military; on inter-generational differences in conceptions of hegemonic ethnicity, and the on the Israeli form of ethnic passing.

 A third filed of interest, in which Sasson-Levy is mainly supervising MA Thesis and PhD dissertations is the study of new social movements, especially from a gendered perspective, with a focus on LGBT activism in Israel.