The Center for Cultural Sociology at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, is dedicated to integrating cultural theory with grounded empirical research. Because cultural phenomena cannot be divorced from the patterning of social organization, our goal is to develop concepts and frameworks that illuminate how institutional practices on the meso level interact with individual and collective experience on the micro and macro levels. The Bar Ilan center is a leading hub in cultural sociology within Israeli academic landscape. It is administered jointly by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Interdisciplinary Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies and co-directed by CCS fellows Danny Kaplan, Ilana F. Silber and Hizky Shoham, as well as Ori Schwarz. Our researchers study a range of topics, among them: social and cultural theory, civil society, national solidarity and politics of friendship, media and consumption studies, digital culture, sociology of taste, judgment and evaluation, gift and philanthropy, sociology of emotions and the therapeutic discourse, religion and performance studies, organizational and market cultures.