AREAS OF INQUIRY

Symbolic Economies, Place Identity & Urban Cultural Production

Examines how cities and institutions are shaped by symbolic economies, creative labor, and grassroots cultural infrastructure. Focuses on how meaning circulates through urban semiotics, branding, cultural mediation, and representational politics — including how subcultures, creative workers, and civic networks influence identity formation and policy discourse.

Study: “Creative Class, Active Audience”
Projects: Cultural mapping + influencer strategy for the City of Jerusalem (Catalyst Group); city-branding frameworks
Essays: “On the Role of Culture in Urban Development”

Themes:
cultural capital · placemaking · symbolic mediation · urban media · semiotics · creative cities · urban imaginaries · agency–structure · cultural tourism · place-branding · subcultures & scene formation

Self-Image, Branding & Psychoanalysis

Investigates how individuals negotiate self-image, identity, and aspiration through symbolic consumption. Explores the psychodynamic mechanisms — projection, idealization, repression, identification — that shape brand attachment and cultural meaning. Examines branding as a symbolic system that organizes the cultural and psychological unconscious, including gender scripts, desire, recognition, and the emotional labor of maintaining identity coherence. Draws from consumer psychology, self-image congruence theory, and psychoanalytic cultural analysis.

Study: “Self-Image Congruence & the USC Brand”
Essays: “On Hegemonic Masculinity, Cultural Resistance, and Brands”

Themes:
identity marketing · self-image congruence · symbolic consumption · projection · idealization · repression · identification · gender & brand personality · psychodynamic branding

Narrative Illness, Translational Research & Symbolic Misrecognition

Explores narrative, visibility, and meaning-making in contested illness, post-infectious conditions, and lived-experience research. Focuses on how symbolic misrecognition, narrative silencing, and cultural invisibility shape patient experience, identity, and public understanding.

Projects: ME/CFS & Long COVID narrative strategy (Stanford Genome Technology Center); early Israeli advocacy

Themes:
illness semiotics · narrative medicine · disability visibility · psychosocial dynamics · semantic injustice · symbolic justice · symbolic translation of suffering · autonomic trauma · collapse states · lived-experience epistemology

Antisemitism, Identity & Symbolic Discourse

Analyzes antisemitism as an affective ideology — a symbolic system of projection, misrecognition, and self-reinforcing projective identification. Examines how ambiguity intolerance, symbolic anxiety, and identity insecurity fuel this mechanism, making antisemitism a uniquely adaptable form of hate: a chameleon structure that reconfigures itself across left, right, postcolonial, conspiratorial, religious, and secular terrains.

Uses discourse analysis, semiotics, and digital ethnography to map how antisemitic and antizionist narratives circulate across ideological, media, and institutional ecosystems. This includes long-term research on how antizionist discourse is engineered, legitimized, and reproduced in Western academia, activism, Middle East Studies, and NGO networks — and how these structures sustain global misrecognition of Jewish sovereignty.

Subdomain:
Antizionism, Israeliness & Global Projection

Explores how “Israeliness” becomes a global symbolic object onto which fantasies and anxieties about Jewishness, embodiment, power, and modernity are projected. Analyzes how Israeli cultural aesthetics — film, Mediterranean imagery, secular-modern narratives — are embraced when decoupled from Jewish collective agency, yet resisted when linked to sovereignty and self-defense.

This differential tolerance exposes a representational split that inverts diasporic stereotypes and produces divergent anxieties:

– on the right: Israeli vitality collapses the “weak Jew” archetype, triggering envy recoded into conspiratorial narratives of hyper-power.
– on the left: the same vitality activates purity scripts of settler-colonial ideology, where joy, aliveness, and sovereign self-protection are rendered illegible or morally contaminated.

These reversals fuel antisemitism and antizionism as mutually reinforcing symbolic systems, mobilizing Israeli aliveness — rather than Jewish vulnerability — as a point of offense.

This work includes a strategic dimension: mapping how antizionist narratives are institutionally produced (universities, NGOs, foreign-funded communication pipelines) and developing counter-narrative strategies that foreground Israel’s democratic camp, civic pluralism, and internal dissent as representational anchors.

Essays:
– “Containment, Not Conquest: The Morag Corridor and the War Over Meaning”
– essays on antizionism, Israeli embodiment, symbolic projection

Projects:
Independent research (discourse + semiotic analysis) · AJC Alef Fellowship · Shoah Foundation research proposal · ethnographies of far-right YouTube ecosystems

Themes:
projective identification · symbolic misrecognition · ambiguity intolerance · ideological adaptation · chameleon structure · racialized antisemitism · antizionism as displacement · embodiment & stereotype reversal · differential tolerance of Israeli vitality · Mediterranean cultural aesthetics · digital circulation · academic reframing · NGO ecosystems · narrative erasure · humanitarian distortion · affective radicalization · democratic-camp narrative strategy

Israeli Political Culture & Narrative Infrastructure

Examines how Israel’s political identity, legitimacy, and civic self-understanding are shaped through media infrastructures, NGO ecosystems, foreign-funded pipelines, and academic reframing. Focuses on post–October 7 worldview fracture, symbolic legitimacy, and ideological battles over national meaning.

Also studies how Israel’s internal political spectrum — especially its democratic camp and civil-society coalitions — functions as a strategic representational resource in global discourse.

Themes:
policy discourse · symbolic legitimacy · academic reframing · NGO ecosystems · media infrastructures · civic identity rupture · ideological import/export · Israel Studies · political affect · democratic-camp narrative strategy

Collective Memory, Trauma & Post-Conflict Representation

Explores how communities negotiate symbolic injury, remembrance, and representational sovereignty in trauma narratives and public discourse — including Holocaust memory and post–October 7 meaning-making.

Themes:
memory politics · trauma narration · symbolic injury · representational sovereignty · post-conflict discourse · collective meaning-making

Psychodynamic Identity, Trauma, & Symbolic Systems

Examines how identity, embodiment, repression, and symbolic coping structures form under developmental constraint — and reemerge in adult meaning-making, illness expression, and relational life.

Research Directions (conceptual / pre-doctoral):
triangulated attachment & parentification
symbolic survival roles
reaction-formation & regulatory fantasy
identity splitting · doubling · performed vs. buried selves
muted identifications & reconstructed selfhood
symbolic regulation (repetition, imagery, ritual)
chronic illness as symbolic-nervous-system expression
embodiment under developmental volatility
somatic memory · the body as symbolic archive

Themes:
symbolic coping systems · dissociated identity structures · suppression & reintegration · trauma physiology · autonomic meaning-making · fantasy as survival · psychodynamic semiotics · embodiment under constraint · narrative reconstruction after rupture

Works in Progress:
psychodynamic model of symbolic coping systems
writing on suppressed identifications, doubling, symbolic injury
lived-experience framework: chronic illness as physiological + symbolic
foundational direction for future PhD on attachment, repression, symbolic identity formation