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Episode 2 of Series 7: Animals and The Divine Transcript

I'm talking to Anat Ben-Yonatan, a researcher at Tel Aviv University whose research is as fascinating as it is disturbing. But don't let that scare you away, We won't be going into any detailed descriptions of violence, but we are talking about animal slaughter for the purposes of kosher eating. However this research is less about what happens to the animals and more about the psychology and the place in Jewish society for the slaughterers themselves.

Guest: Anat Ben-Yonatan is a social-sciences informed human-animal scholar and a Research Fellow at the "Coller-Menmon Program for Animal Rights and Welfare" in the Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University. She is the co-founder and a steering committee member of both the human-animal connections forum and of the community for human-animal studies (HASI) under the auspices of the Israeli Anthropological Association, which she also co-chairs since February 2022.

Anat's Doctoral dissertation delved into the life and work of Jewish Israeli Shochtim (slaughterers), in which she looked, among other things, into their attitudes and feelings, as well as their moral schema in concern with shechitah (slaughter).

Anat's main research interest include various forms of interspecies violence, with emphasis on legitimized versus non-legitimized violence of humans against nonhuman animals; and "the save movement" with its educational programs as possible paths to cope with these violent phenomena.

Latest publications:

Ben-Yonatan A. “The knife needs the intention of the heart” The construction of ethnic and moral boundaries in Israeli slaughterhouses. Ethnicities. April 2022. doi:10.1177/14687968221093715

Anat Ben-Yonatan (2022) “Yesterday You Slaughtered Animals, Today You Pity Them”: Ambivalence and Resolution Among Jewish Israeli Slaughterers, Anthrozoös, 35:3, 355-370, DOI: 10.1080/08927936.2021.1996023

Hirsch-Matsioulas, O., Ben-Yonatan, A., Chen, L., Sadetzki, Y., & Shir-Vertesh, D. (2022). Human-Animal Studies in Israel: A Field in the Making, Society & Animals (published online ahead of print 2022). doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-bja10095

Book Recommendation: Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy by Mathew Scully

Host: Marika

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