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1931–2025
Alex Weingrod, who passed away at age 94 on June 16, 2025, was a path-breaking University of Chicago–trained cultural anthropologist, whose early work, Reluctant Pioneers (1966), challenged entrenched sociological models of immigrant absorption in Israel. After 13 years of teaching at Brandeis University, Alex moved to the newly established Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, where he developed anthropology within a multidisciplinary Behavioral Sciences Department. There he introduced Geertzian-inflected symbolism along with the wider-known Chicago anthropology that addressed challenges of studying local communities while re-honing its tools to comprehend societies where nation-building and related changes were occurring at every level.
Supported by a Ford Foundation grant during 1957–1959, Weingrod conducted doctoral fieldwork in Israeli cooperative villages (moshavim), mostly settled by people of Moroccan provenance. The power of centralized bureaucracies setting the economic and organizational parameters of their current lives became clear to him, while at the same time he acutely observed differing patterns from the newcomers’ pasts manifest in daily life. He stressed that “old” culture does not disappear in new milieux, but adapts and takes on novel forms that at times modify entrenched hegemonic structures.
Weingrod formulated his alternative to the paradigm of “absorbing” immigrants in the American Anthropologist(1962): “Reciprocal Change: A Case Study of a Moroccan Immigrant Village in Israel,” and expanded upon it four years later in Reluctant Pioneers. This perspective informed work in the Settlement Study Center that he headed (1959–1962), boldly guiding an applied anthropology project that predated the recognition of cultural (or social) anthropology in Israeli academia. Research within the center fostered anthropological discourse while providing training for students who later constituted the first tier of path-setting scholars when anthropology was granted formal status in Israel’s universities.
In 1963, Alex began teaching at Brandeis University, where he became full professor and served as chair of Anthropology Department. During that period, Reluctant Pioneers gained acclaim, and he used insights from that study to conduct fieldwork on “post-peasantry” in Sardinia (Weingrod and Morrin, “Post-Peasants: The Character of Contemporary Sardinian Society,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1971).
In 1974, he returned to Israel to head the innovative Department of Behavioral Sciences, encompassing psychology, sociology, and anthropology, and spent there the remainder of his career as teacher, mentor, researcher, and writer.
Over the years, Weingrod’s fieldwork and publications continued along three interconnected axes: politics, religion, and especially ethnicity and ethnic inequality. By 1985, Alex had inspired colleagues to contribute to his edited volume, Studies in Israeli Ethnicity, which presented a variety of research approaches that demonstrated the interplay of culture and politics at local and national levels. Some 40 years later in his capstone monograph, The New Israelis (2024), Alex revisited these issues by incorporating other groups seeking social recognition (such as LGBTIQ communities) into his dynamic approach.
Alex’s integrative outlook was coupled with focused and sensitive ethnography. The shifting Interplay of politics with popular traditions appears cogently in his The Saint of Beersheba (1990), while an article subtitled “Buildings and the Uses of the Past” (Cultural Anthropology, 1993), demonstrates how architecture can valorize life in the diaspora among Israeli Jews from Morocco, and among devotees of the Chabad Rabbi of Eastern European origin. In both instances Alex’s ethnography strikingly shows how the theoretical hold of classic Zionist nation-building notions comes loose in everyday life. Always keeping wider contexts in mind, Alex coauthored Living Together Separately (1991) with urban geographer Michael Romann, which analyzed practical relations emerging among Arabs and Jews in post-1967 Jerusalem.
Weingrod was predeceased by his beloved wife Bracha and is survived by their four children, Danny, Aaron, Nomi, and Dena; seven grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. A frequent presenter at annual AAA meetings, Weingrod was known as a formidable scholar and a mentsch, blessed with a generous smile and sharp wit. He will be sorely missed.