About

Yarden Azoulay Katz is an Assistant Professor in the American Culture Department at the University of Michigan. His fields of study include imperialism, white supremacy, and racial capitalism; science and technology studies; the history and politics of biomedicine; eugenics; and exploited labor in science. He is engaged in research that critically examines the intersections of capitalism, race, and science, with a focus on anti-colonial and radical social movements. He has authored books such as 'L'Shleimut: A Jewish Radical Tradition Against Capitalist Science and Medicine' and 'Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence.' His work involves analyzing the political and ideological dimensions of science and technology, particularly in relation to Zionism, settler-colonialism, and racial capitalism. He contributes to public discourse through articles addressing issues like Zionist repression, Palestinian resistance, and the role of technology in perpetuating racial and colonialist structures.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Law
• Computer Science
• Media studies
• Linguistics
• Nuclear physics
• History
• Engineering
• Physics
• Epistemology
• Operations research

Selected publications

• 11. Make Romantic Comedies, Not War: How Televised Romance Can Help Us Reimagine Everyday Peace in Korea and Israel/Palestine

  University of Exeter Press eBooks · 2025-07-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Global TV Series and the Political Imagination explores the transformative power of television in the digital age. We live in an era profoundly influenced by the proliferation of global and national streaming services, where contemporary television series have the ability to shape viewers’ political and ethical imagina

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond peace: Media encounters between Israeli Jews and Palestinians as a new potential for connection in the face of violent conflict

  International Journal of Cultural Studies · 2023-08-07 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Peace is usually studied by looking at nation-states. Recently, peace scholars have become interested in peace found in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I argue that media scholars can contribute to this effort because they are well-equipped to capture fleeting manifestations of everyday peace. However, the problematic legacy of peace in Israel/Palestine necessitates a different conceptual framework. I highlight encounters in and through media between Israeli Jews and Palestinians and contend that they present opportunities for constructive dialogue. I demonstrate this point by analyzing the Israeli television show Arab Labor, focusing on its production process, and the plight of Jewish and Palestinian characters on the show. By fusing text and context, I suggest that media do not persuade people to believe in peace; instead, media encounters, both on and off the screen, function as cultural forums for discussing complex issues undergirding violent conflicts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• (Re)imagining Peace: Exploring Mediatized Everyday Peace in Israel/Palestine

  Deep Blue (University of Michigan) · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Peace is usually studied through nation-states operating in the international system, but recently, peace scholars have underscored the need to research peace as a part of everyday life. I argue that communication scholars should join the new conversation about everyday peace. I discuss major peace theories in broadcast and digital media that either replicate the state-centered approach or struggle to find ways to reach reconciliation. Nevertheless, I argue that communication scholars are well equipped to study everyday peace by focusing on mediatized manifestations of everyday life in popular culture and digital platforms. I demonstrate my claim by analyzing visual and sonic manifestations of everyday peace in Israel/Palestine. I investigate two Israeli television shows, Fauda and Arab Labor, focusing on Jewish and Palestinian men who try to pass members of the other community. Their identity work proves that national and ethnic identities are not stable but remain in flux, undermining Zionism which strives to silo Jews and Palestinians into separate categories. Nevertheless, Fauda and Arab Labor do not prescribe easy solutions to the conflict in their plots. Instead, they allow characters to work through the hardships of the conflict and its implications in their everyday lives. I study the texts of both television shows, illuminating the power of fiction to discuss taboo subjects at the core of the conflict. Moreover, I analyze the production of both shows. Based on interviews with creative workers, I contend that making quality TV is in itself a form of peacemaking because it brings Jews and Palestinian together, galvanizing them to process trauma and explore possible connections between the two communities. I study the sonic expression of everyday peace through a second case study — Border Gone, a digital activist project publishing stories of ordinary Palestinians from Gaza in Hebrew online. I trace the project’s evolution, which initially centered around translating stories written by young adults with the help of hundreds of Israeli volunteers. The stories reveal the humanity of Palestinians, undermining the Zionist perception that all Palestinians are terrorists. Ultimately, Border Gone transformed into an independent news outlet; the managing team was resolved to provide the appropriate political context to Palestinian stories, showcasing how the Israeli occupation of Gaza affects everyday lives. I conducted interviews with Border Gone’s managing team, and with members of its volunteers’ community. I analyze posts appearing on the project’s Facebook page and investigate the various comments uploaded to the page between December 2019-May 2021. May 2021 marked the peak of the project’s operation during a devastating war in Gaza. During the war, I joined the project’s managing team, conducting a participant observation on its news reporting process using the transcripts of a WhatsApp group where we communicated with each other. I conclude that Border Gone affords nonreciprocal listening to Palestinian stories, wherein Jews educate themselves about the reality of Palestinian life without expecting the other side to do the same. The stories captivate Israeli listeners and encourage them to engage in meaningful solidarity by insisting on lively descriptions of Palestinian experiences. Border Gone, as well as Fauda and Arab Labor, prove that peace is possible between Jews and Palestinians who use media to write and tell stories of everyday peace; moreover, media making draws members of these communities close, helping them process the horrors of violent conflict together.

  PublisherDOI

• When media events fail: the transformation of the Israeli peace discourse at the funeral of Shimon Peres

  Critical Studies in Media Communication · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Media events celebrate and re-legitimate core values of national societies. While scholars have focused on analyzing how and why media events come to matter, this article inspects how the symbolic failures of some media events reveal broader shifts in national and political cultures. After investigating the funeral of Shimon Peres, a symbol of the Israeli peace movement, I argue that while the funeral adhered to the structural criteria of a media event, it did not resonate with Israelis. Its failure results from a disinterest among Israelis in peace as a political outcome; Instead, peace was used in the funeral to brand Israel as a respectable nation. Nevertheless, the way ordinary Palestinian and Palestinian leaders responded to the funeral reveals new opportunities to reimagine peace.

  PublisherDOI

• Capturing Hearts: The Coverage of Iran's Charm Offensive during the 2015 Nuclear Deal Negotiations in the American and Israeli Press

  Journalism Studies · 2020 · 4 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  This paper focuses on the “charm offensive” of the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal negotiations with the United States. Charm offensives are strategic public relations campaigns that political leaders use to shift their countries’ reputation swiftly and temporarily in the global arena. Based on visual and textual analysis of the journalistic coverage of Zarif's charm offensive in the American and the Israeli press, we show that in his interactions with the American team and announcements to the press, Zarif focused on the future in contrast to the confusing past; he aimed at a calm and narrowly focused process of negotiations and preferred closed-door discussions among experts and one-on-one conversations with Secretary of State Kerry over public press conferences. He warmly welcomed photographers with smiles and presented a persistent readiness for “friendly” interaction. Western journalists enthusiastically covered these “unexpected” features of the Iranian diplomacy, and ultimately helped Zarif achieve a favorable international media environment conducive to making the deal. Bringing together literatures in communication studies, sociology, political science and international relations, we argue that in the form of a “charm offensive” political leaders can thus utilize the press for momentary country image transformation internationally.

  PublisherDOI

• Interacting for Peace: Rethinking Peace Through Interactive Digital Platforms

  Social Media + Society · 2020 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science

  Peace is often studied as a lull in war or as a way to make war inconceivable. In this study, I explore the ability of digital culture to promote a new understanding of peace as a communication concept. Specifically, I analyze small digital platforms devoted to making people care about peace by encouraging them to play, explore, listen, or participate in a variety of activities. Since war is centered around the occupation of spaces and places, I use time and temporality as a theoretical framework for understanding how these interactive digital platforms construct peace in a way that is meaningful to people. In this investigation of a popular meaning of peace, I argue that the epistemology of peace offers a promise for a better future while its ethics is a commitment to remembering the past. The ontology of peace is a lived experience found in daily practices in the present.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Endolymphatic immunotherapy for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma: an update of our experience

  Hepatoma Research · 2018-10-18

  articleOpen access

  Hepatoma Research is an open access journal and focuses on all topics related to hepatoma. The following articles are especially welcome: pathogenesis, clinical examination and early diagnosis of hepatoma, complications of hepatoma, and their preventions and treatments, etc.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Making sense? The structure and meanings of digital memetic nonsense

  Information Communication & Society · 2017-02-28 · 106 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper offers the first systematic analysis of ‘digital memetic nonsense’– clusters of seemingly meaningless digital texts imitated and circulated by many participants. We evaluated this phenomenon through two conceptual lenses: theories on nonsense in the pre-digital age and the techno-cultural conditions that facilitate its contemporary formations. A grounded analysis of 139 nonsensical memes led to their typology into 5 genres: linguistic silliness, embodied silliness, pastiche, dislocations, and interruptions. In each of these genres, we show how digital nonsense may potentially serve as a social glue that bonds members of phatic, image-oriented, communities. If, in the past, nonsense was depicted in both intellectual terms, as defiant deconstruction of meaning, and in playful/social terms, its current memetic manifestations lean heavily toward the latter. Rather than being a reflection on ‘referential meaning’, digital nonsense is analyzed as a generative source of ‘affective meaning’ that marks the formation of social connections preceding cognitive understanding. We conclude by highlighting the potentially subversive implications of this shift for participatory barriers and community membership.

  PublisherDOI

• Making Sense? The structure and meaning of digital memetic nonsense

  AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research · 2016-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper offers a first systematic analysis of “digital memetic nonsense.” While memetic nonsense is a new, understudied phenomenon, nonsensical utterances have been part of human culture for centuries and have received considerable scholarly attention, resulting in three main perspectives on nonsense: nonsense as lack of meaning, nonsense as play with meaning and nonsense as deconstruction of meaning. When re-examining these classic definitions in digital contexts, we highlight the relevance of three features of such environments to the augmented formation of nonsense: phatic communities, visual dominance and remix culture. Our examination focuses on nonsensical memes – clusters of digital texts imitated and circulated by many participants. A grounded and multimodal analysis of 154 nonsensical memes led to the identification of five distinct types of digital memetic nonsense: linguistic silliness, embodied silliness, pastiche, dislocations and interruptions. An integrated evaluation of these categories revealed that digital forms of nonsense mark a major shift from pre-digital ones. While the latter often deconstruct meaning as a subversive ideological act, the former lean more heavily towards mere playfulness. This playfulness has nonetheless important social roles. It replaces the intellectual approach, seeking to deconstruct or defy meaning, with a more communicative/communitive approach, emphasizing that meaning is flexible and can be negotiated between members of meme-based communities. Thus, while nonsensical memes often lack referential meaning, they always carry a social meaning. Moreover, this obliteration of meaning may enable the creation of inclusive communities, in which a variety of participants are invited to express their quirky creatively.

  Publisher

• On the Development of a Real-Time Ethernet Switch for Ultra-highly Dependable Applications

  2012-05-01

  article

  The development of systems for ultra-highly dependable applications requires restrictive development processes that adhere to industry standards to ensure that the end product is of superior quality. The knowledge of those standards and their application is, thus, essential for successful system development. Time-Triggered Ethernet (TTEthernet) is a network platform that extends standard Ethernet with hard real-time capabilities and mechanisms for use in ultra-highly dependable applications and applications with mixed-criticality requirements. Over the last couple of years two teams in Romania and Austria have jointly implemented TTEthernet in the form of TTEthernet end systems and switches. Having first target applications in the space and aerospace area, a development process based on the avionics DO-254standard has been used. This development process began with requirements capturing and ended with full verification for certification of the design. In this paper we discuss the development process of the TTEthernet switch according to the DO-254 objectives and use a small running example, the ARINC 664-p7 age check, to illustrate the application of the standard.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Limor Shifman

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  2 shared

• Giuseppe Cavallari

  Azienda USL di Bologna

  1 shared

• Caterina De Vinci

  University of Bologna

  1 shared

• Lorenza Puviani

  Policlinico S.Orsola-Malpighi

  1 shared

• Dumitru-Mircea Chimerel

  1 shared

• Noa Ruhrman

  University of Bologna

  1 shared

• Júlia Sonnevend

  1 shared

• Riccardo Bertelli

  Ospedale “M. Bufalini” di Cesena

  1 shared

Labs

• U-M LSA American CulturePI