Prof. Danny Kaplan

Prof. Danny Kaplan teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and directs the Men’s Studies track in the Gender Studies program at Bar Ilan University. He also co-directs the Bar Ilan Center for Cultural Sociology. Kaplan specializes in the study of emotions, with a focus on the politics of friendship and nationalism. In recent years he has explored patterns of “social club sociability” in a variety of institutions (Freemasonry, military commemoration rituals, music radio broadcasting, reality television, Facebook) and developed a research strategy for studying civic and national solidarity based on an analytic distinction between public intimacy and collective intimacy. Parts of this project appeared in his last book The Nation and the Promise of Friendship: Building Solidarity through Sociability  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

In addition, Kaplan is studying masculinity ideologies and cultural models of parenting. He was awarded an ISF grant to conduct a survey of involved fatherhood and new masculinity ideology.

Kaplan held visiting scholar positions at Columbia University and in the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, where he is a faculty fellow.  His publications include:

2019. A Cultural Model of Parenthood as Engineering: How Caregiving Fathers Construct a Gender-Neutral View of the Parent Role. Journal of Family Issues 40(3), 363 –389. (with Efrat Knoll).

2018. Social club sociability as a model for national solidarity. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 6(1), 1-36.  

2017. Toward an interaction-centered approach to media events: Mediated public intimacy on the reality TV show Big Brother. Journal of Communication 67(5), 758-780  (with Yoni Kupper)

2016. What about non-traditional masculinities? Toward a quantitative model of therapeutic New Masculinity ideology. Men and Masculinities 20(4), 393–426 (with Amir Rosenmann and Sara Shuhendler)

2009. The songs of the siren: Engineering national time on Israeli radio. Cultural Anthropology 24(2), 313-345. 

2005. Public intimacy: Dynamics of seduction in male homosocial interactions. Symbolic Interaction 28 (4), 571-595. 

Previous books include:

2006. The Men We Loved: Male Friendship and Nationalism in Israeli Culture (Berghahn Books)

2003. Brothers and others in arms: The making of love and war in Israeli combat units (Routledge/Haworth Press).