Haim Hazan

This book, coauthored by Dr. Daniel Monterescu and published in 2011, is about the connection between nationalism and the stories of Arab and Jewish elderly, a product of an ethnographic research conducted in Jaffa. The main argument in the book is that the more the distress of old age grows, the national plight and devotion to the national discourse lessens, both among Jews and Arabs.

During the years 2006-2008, Hazan led a research group about the Holocaust and globalization at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. The results of the research were co-edited with Dr. Amos Goldberg in a volume entitled: Marking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global Age.

This book, published in 2001, is about the communicative world of Israeli teenagers: their myths, cultural imagery and the temporal orientations. The main conclusion in the book is that the processes of globalization – with its post-modern characteristics – which lead Israeli society, actually intensify the local components of national identity. This is because global apparatuses, such as television and the internet, facilitate the rise of collective communities while cultivating and spreading the myths that constitute them.

This book, published in 1996, is the product of the ethnographic field research Hazan conducted with 500 elderly people in Cambridge, England, who were part of the University of the Third Age. In this organization, elderly people volunteer to teach themselves and share their knowledge with others in their age group. They established a research committee for matters of old age, where they examined the representation of elderly people on television, for instance, but refused to deal with topics related to death, or what they called "The Fourth Age", meaning, sick, feeble elderly people. In his research, Hazan found that the elderly tend to develop a language of communication which separates the relationships between themselves and their relationships with the non-elderly world. They dismantled the categories of their lives, such as gender and family, in preparation for death, which could suddenly occur. They were not very sick, but healthy and active, and yet they were preparing for death by decomposing their world. They created shared myths of perennial, eternal now, through a discourse which was comprehensible only to them, thus developing a different, adaptive language of temporary, utilitarian relationships necessary for survival.

This is a theoretical book, published by Cambridge University Press in 1994, where Hazan defined and summarized his findings from his various field researches. He tries to find out if we can understand old age, or if old age has a uniqueness we cannot know. In his opinion, the attempt to understand old age is prone to failure, and there is no correspondence between the language in which old people speak in their behavioral world to the language used by the academy or society – in cultural representation, imagery, myths and stereotypes – to speak of "the elderly". The problems with representation of time, space and meaning, caused by the gap between the two, are used as keys for the existing discourse between old people, without presuming to break into the uniqueness of the experience of aging.

This book was published by New York State University in 1992. It is an ethnographic study of a retirement home in Tel Aviv, which examines the elders' adaptation to the rapid changes which occur in old age. Hazan studied various people, from the atheist Labor movement people to religious Jews who pray at the synagogue every day. He showed that despite the significant difference between them, the subjects devoted effort and imagination to forming a social space that denies the inevitable, stabilizes the present and allows the survival of meaning under conditions of constant existential threat. In his research, he even revealed a picture of Israeli society, where its center is the aging of the "founders' generation", ageless in its own mind.

This book was published in 1990, investigating Project Renewal and offering a critical analysis of the rhetorical, social, institutional and local usages of the term 'community', which prevent investment in vital channels such as employment and education. Hazan tries to examine the qualities and characterizations of the term 'community', and the main argument in the book is that there is an inverse ratio between the common use of the term 'community' and the social structure of a community which includes social institutions and communal networks – the more one rises, the more the other declines, and vice versa.

This is the title of Haim Hazan's first book, an adaptation of his doctorate paper. It was first published in English in 1980 and translated to Hebrew in 2002. Based on a research of Jews living in an impoverished district of London in their old age, the book is about the experience and conception of time among the elderly. The people in Hazan's research built themselves a cyclic, separate present, while erasing the past and the future. Through general reciprocal interactions, a joint bank of sorts where everyone gives what they can and withdraws according to their needs, the give-and-take relations are canceled out along with the conception of past and present.

Haim Hazan was born in Jerusalem. When he was 10, his parents moved to Givatayim, where he spent his adolescence. He studied for his B.A. in sociology, anthropology and literature and his M.A. in sociology and anthropology, both at Tel Aviv University, during 1967-1972. The subject of his thesis was "Revelations of Relative Totality in the Organization of Life in Retirement Homes." He studied for his Ph.D. at University College in London, guided by Professor Michael Gilsenan, during 1973-1976. While writing his doctorate, he was in contact with Mary Douglas, the well-known anthropologist, whose thinking and theories influenced the start of his career. He was appointed as a lecturer at Tel Aviv University in 1976, and appointed Professor in 1994. Since 2008, he has been editor of the magazine Israeli Sociology. He was director of the Institute for Social Research, the Horowitz Institute and the Herczeg Institute on Aging at Tel Aviv University.

Haim Hazan (born 1947) is Professor of sociology and social anthropology at Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on old age as a social phenomenon. He is also an active partner at the Herzog Institute for the Study of Aging and Old Age. He is the author of more than 15 books. Hazan is the editor of the magazine Israeli Sociology and has been the director of the Institute for Social Research at the Horowitz Institute and the Herczeg Institute on Aging at Tel Aviv University.