Mizrachi is a full professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University and a senior research fellow and the head of the “Challenge of Shared Life” Cluster at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
[2] His primary research themes are the sociology of knowledge, medicine, culture, social boundaries, moral identity, liberalism, ethnic studies, and stigma.
In his latest book,[3] Mizrachi argues that to understand the so-called paradoxical behavior—the resistance of minority and marginalized groups to principles of equality and freedom from which they are more likely to benefit—it is essential to acknowledge a deep-seated need for belonging.
Recognizing this sense of rootedness, which reflects the intrinsic desire for connection, is vital for grasping the conditions under which liberal values such as equality and freedom can thrive.
Nissim Mizrachi was born and raised in Kiryat HaYovel, a working-class neighborhood in Jerusalem predominantly populated by Mizrahi Jews, immigrants from Middle Eastern and North African countries.
He is the son of Doris, an Iraqi-born woman who moved to Israel in adulthood, and Rachamim Mizrachi, a native Israeli, working class parents who both lost their eyesight at two.
[6] He has been teaching in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University since 2001, was appointed senior lecturer with tenure in 2006, and has served as a full professor since 2024.
In a series of articles beginning in 2000, Mizrachi explored the abyss separating the liberal-progressive universal worldview and the social particularity of its advocates and adversaries.
[12] He showed how students in Israeli high schools, regardless of ethno-class dissemination in academic tracking, renounce identity politics and regard free will as the most significant role in their advancement.
[14] Beyond Suspicion: The Moral Clash Between Rootedness and Progressive Liberalism The book, published in the University of California Press, 2024, takes the Mizrahi Jews as a test case of a marginalized community.
Unlike most approaches to analyzing the political behavior of Mizrahim, the rural poor in America, peasants in Western and Eastern Europe and Asia, and others, which view their non-liberal stance as simply a "reactive" phenomenon arising from their structural position or historical, social, and economic forces, Mizrachi argues that these perspectives overlook the generative foundation of their behavior.
The progressive left and critical observers regard inequality as static, based on power relations and social reproduction, and hidden from the subjects.
[19][20] An embracing and exclusion exist in the work compartment, where the medical staff focuses on analyzing and treating specific disease entities.
[21][22] Along with Michèle Lamont, Mizrachi co-edited an issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies in 2012, which was reprinted as a book by Routledge under the name Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things.
In contrast, black Brazilians regard stigmatization by class rather than by race, and African Americans are more outspoken than Ethiopian Jews and Mizrahim, who tend to devalue their ostracism.
Together with Jerry A. Jacobs, Mizrachi wrote an article about the centrality of American sociology worldwide, its massive clout on the discipline outside of the US, and its ramifications for the power structure and the knowledge establishment.