Haim Hazan

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

He was the academic advisor for the Center for Educational Technology's curriculum on aging and old age, and served as chairman of the professional committee at the Israeli Ministry of Education for a curriculum for the Bagrut in social anthropology.

Haim Hazan is an anthropologist who researches old age as a social phenomenon.

In his work, he identifies and characterizes the reality in which the elderly live.

He uses old age to examine questions such as: in which way do the elderly constitute time and what language do they use to do it; and to examine questions of identity: how do the elderly define themselves?

Contrary to common approaches, which determine that the ailments of old age are a result of functional changes which deplete the resources of the elderly individual, Hazan believes in differentiating between functioning and function and between the elderly and old age.

The elderly are the product of physiological-biological deterioration, while functions and old age are derivatives of society and culture.

There is no "natural" affinity between the former and the latter, it is only the human environment in which the elderly live that forces that affinity on them and on itself as though it were an inevitability.

The differentiation which distinguishes between the two is similar to the differentiation between sex and gender, presenting the world of old age as one that is constructed of two circles, only partially congruent: the culture circle, defining old age in terms of stigma, expulsion and exclusion and the circle of the structured existence of the elders themselves.

The interaction between the two circles is one of tension and acceptance.

Hazan devotes most of his research to this interface, between culture and old age.

He uses ethnographies to show how, regardless of the cultural "iron cage", the elderly manage to build their own existential enclaves as an alternative to a hostile, alienating society.

However, these alternatives are not asylum cities for the oppressed refugees of society, but meaningful settings which include different ways of perceiving and interpreting reality, allowing their residents a meaningful life even after family, community and finance are no longer as they were.

This is the title of Haim Hazan's first book, an adaptation of his doctorate paper.