Winner of the Israel Prize in the field of sociology and anthropology research 2013: Prof. Yoram Billo

Prof. Billo has developed multidisciplinary studies on psychological anthropology, cultural psychiatry and anthropology of Jewish religion and mysticism.

For articles on the subject, in which Prof. Billo stars:
Supported communication - science rejected it, religion adopted it

The siege - deportation for a limited time, by Prof. Yoram Billo

The Minister of Education, Gideon Sa'ar, announced yesterday, Tuesday, the winner of the Israel Prize in the field of sociology research and anthropology research for the year XNUMX - Prof. Yoram Billo and congratulated him. The Minister of Education approved the recommendation of the award committee headed by Prof. Moshe Lisk.

In the committee's reasoning, its members stated: "Prof. Yoram Billo was a psychological anthropologist who devoted most of his research to the understanding and exposure of the cultural codes that characterize a large part of the immigration of North Africans. These cultural codes, whose roots lie in the unique culture and history of North African Jews, help to explain both the individual's personal hardships and the collective's hardships in the transition from traditional society to modern Israeli society. Prof. Yoram Billo also dealt with parallel problems among the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox. His research thereby enriched our knowledge of communities whose culture was unknown to a considerable part of Israeli society. From this point of view, his contribution to understanding the problematic of the encounter between cultures is of both practical and theoretical importance. Thanks to these things, he won a very respectable status accompanied by awards among the anthropological community in the world."

Prof. Moshe Lisk served as the chairman of the award committee, and beside him were the members of the committee - Prof. Shlomo Dashan and Prof. Tamar Horowitz.

Prof. Billo was born in Israel in the midst of World War II, lived in Haifa, Kiryat Haim and Tel Aviv during his childhood and youth and served in the army as an officer at a training base. He studied at the Hebrew University for a graduate degree in psychology and sociology and continued at the university for a certified degree in clinical psychology. As part of his clinical work, Prof. Billo worked in various settings of hospitalization and treatment with culturally diverse populations, and the meeting with those populations led him to convert his practice as a clinical psychologist into a research path in the field of anthropology in which he did a PhD and a post-doctorate. Prof. Billo has been researching and teaching at the Hebrew University for the past decades in the departments of psychology and sociology and anthropology, and over the years he chaired the department of psychology, the Eshkol Institute for the Study of Israeli Society and the Authority for Research Students.

Over the years, Prof. Billo gained an international reputation in the study of culture and mental health, lectured at the world's leading research institutions and won prestigious awards for his work. On April 16, on Independence Day, Prof. Billo will receive the Israel Award in the status of heads of state. In doing so, the researchers of the Hebrew University will be joined by Prof. Yosef Kaplan and Prof. Chava Torniansky, who will also receive the Israel Prize.

Prof. Yoram Billo - Curriculum Vitae

I was born in Tel Aviv in the midst of World War II, the son of parents who immigrated to Israel in their youth from Poland. My first years were spent in Haifa and Kiryat Haim, and the rest of my childhood and adolescence - in Tel Aviv, where I finished my high school studies. In the army I served as an officer at a training base, and was released after a year of permanent service. I did my reserve service as a company commander in the maintenance division of the Armored Division for nearly 30 years (and three wars) and was discharged with the rank of major.

The Jerusalem chapter of my life, which continues to this day, starting when I started studying psychology and sociology at the Hebrew University. After completing my undergraduate and graduate studies in clinical psychology (both with honors), I was certified as a clinical psychologist and worked in various hospitalization and treatment settings. During my work, I married Tamar Ilser, a social worker and psychotherapist, and we had two children, Yonatan (doctor of computer science in a biomedical project) and Yael (social worker in the rehabilitation bureau at the Ministry of Defense), who gave us five grandchildren over the years.

The totality of my experiences in clinical work settings with ethnically diverse populations in the late XNUMXs and early XNUMXs sharpened my sensitivity to the cultural contexts of expressions of mental distress and dealing with them. The insight that mental health frameworks should be studied as cultural systems, which in those days was still prevalent in Israel and the world, led me to convert my occupation as a clinical psychologist into a new research path, which has become the hallmark of my work ever since and to this day: the meeting between culture, society and psychology in the Israeli and Jewish context. This interdisciplinary connection, which in my humble opinion I represent the most distinct in Israel, grew out of the recognition of the importance of research that combines individual and collective levels of analysis and places mental processes and individual behavior patterns in their socio-cultural and historical context. For this purpose, I studied anthropology, which became the focus of my professional identity, and I specialized in the sub-discipline known as psychological anthropology, in which I gained international status. As far as I know from Moshgat, I reserve the right to be the first in the development of this field in Israel.

In my early works I studied phenomena from the field of mental health in an anthropological perspective. My doctoral research dealt with the "traditional psychiatry" of Moroccan Jews - explanations of disorders, their classification and their treatment methods - which I examined in moshavs and development towns throughout the country. In my doctoral thesis, which I also completed with honors, I pointed out the inner logic and cultural richness inherent in a set of beliefs and practices, which until then were generally seen as superstitions that should be uprooted. A postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley and San Francisco allowed me to expand my knowledge base in psychological and medical anthropology. Upon my return to Israel, I taught in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Ben-Gurion University, and from there I transferred to the Hebrew University - which became my academic home - with a combined appointment in sociology, anthropology and psychology. Although over the years I have expanded my interests in anthropology far beyond mental health, this research arena still occupies me. I will mention my works on possession and other "Jewish disorders", some of which were conducted from a historical perspective and required familiarity with the worlds of Jewish content, and especially with Jewish mysticism, and on the cultural construction of distress situations among ultra-Orthodox in Israel and culturally sensitive treatment of ultra-Orthodox patients.

Over the years I have gained an international reputation in this area of ​​culture and mental health. I was invited to join the systems of the leading scientific journals in the field and to lecture at the important academic centers dealing with psychological and psychiatric anthropology, at Harvard, California (in San Diego and Los Angeles), Emory and Duke universities. Two of my works on these topics won awards from the American Anthropological Association: my work on possession won the first Bryce-Boyer prize in 1986 for the best article in psychoanalytic anthropology. My work on the use of autistics as prophets in ultra-Orthodox society (together with my student, Yehuda Goodman) won the Stirling Prize in 1997 for the best paper in psychological anthropology. I know of only two researchers in the world besides myself who have won both prizes.

In the early 1994s, I significantly expanded my research areas in psychological anthropology from my Spanish to investigate phenomena and experiences such as dreams and special states of consciousness in a cultural-religious context and to map phenomena of the renewal of martyr rituals in Israel, especially among Moroccans in the urban periphery. Also on the latter subject, my research perspective was combined: on the one hand, analyzing the life stories, dreams, tribulations and woes of "holy promoters" - men and women who established a home site for the tzaddik following revelation - and on the other hand, the community response to these initiatives, which reflects the strengthening of sectarian identity while A growing sense of "locality" and excitement in the place of residence. My works in this field, which gave birth to two books and many articles in international journals, placed me, I believe, in the first rank of researchers dealing with folk religion in Israel in its various representations, from pilgrimages to old and new holy places to mystical, magical and messianic phenomena and events that have become more and more prevalent in Israeli society in recent decades. I received proof of the recognition of the importance of my research in XNUMX, when I was invited to the University of Rochester to deliver the prestigious series of lectures by Lewis Henry Morgan (which later became a book) on this topic. A very small group of non-American anthropologists received this honor (including Victor Turner and Claude Levi-Strauss). In a synoptic view, I see the renewal of the rites of the righteous as one form of activity among many, grouped under the heading of the sanctification of space in Israel. These phenomena encompass traditional religion and civil religion and include a wide variety of forms of commemoration and places of remembrance, from graves of the righteous to military monuments. Through the conceptual frameworks of the sanctification of space and collective memory, I tried to mark in my works historical and sociological changes that Israeli society is going through, which are reflected in the symbolic construction of space in Israel.

My retirement as a full professor in 2011 concluded over thirty years of research, teaching and training. Among my positions at the university I served as the head of the psychology department, as the director of the Eshkol Institute for the Study of Israeli Society and as the head of the authority for research students. At the turn of the nineties I served as the president of the Israel Anthropology Association. I have mentored over twenty graduate students and a similar number of doctoral students, some of whom teach at universities and colleges - in Israel and even abroad. I made sure to publish my main works in both English and Hebrew, so that they would also be accessible to the local reader, and indeed the main ones have become required reading in introductory courses on Israeli anthropology and society. The multidisciplinary approach, which is the basis of my professional identity, allowed me to dialogue and collaborate with researchers from a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, from psychology and sociology to history, literature, folklore and Jewish studies. My contributions in the latter field resulted not only from the application of models and conceptual frameworks from the field of social sciences to various phenomena from Jewish history and thought, but also from giving life to phenomena that were not accessible except at the textual level through a direct investigation of their contemporary equivalents at the behavioral level. The same is true of the obsession, whose dramatic return at the end of the XNUMXth century (after disappearing at the beginning) I directly studied, as well as its parallels among the Jews of Morocco and Ethiopia. And so with regard to the Messianic storm in Chabad - the subject of my current work, which allows me to investigate in a topical and prospective manner a phenomenon that until now could only be examined textually and retrospectively.

Looking back, and from the vantage point of my years, I am happy to discover that the interdisciplinary intersections that I was one of the founders of in Israel - psychological anthropology, cultural psychiatry and anthropology of Jewish religion and mysticism - still keep me busy in research, teaching (within the "Amirim" program for outstanding students at the Hebrew University) and student guidance. I hope to continue all of these as much as I can.