Israel Celebrates employs the anthropological history of four Jewish holidays as celebrated in Israel in order to demonstrate how a new strand of Judaism developed in Israel from the grassroots.

Hizky Shoham is a senior lecturer at the Interdisciplinary Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel and a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. A cultural historian of Zionism, he published Carnival in Tel Aviv: Purim and the Celebration of Urban Zionism (Academic Studies Press, 2014).