Today there are over 70,000 Ethiopian Jews living in Israel, many of whom immigrated in two mass movements in the mid 1980's and early 1990's. Among the many cultural practices they brought with them is a spirit possession complex called zar. Zar centers around a class of invisible entities that cause illness and misfortune. Zar practices include healing therapies involving trance ceremonies, fortune telling, and daily coffee ceremonies This dissertation explores the ways zar has been integrated with Israeli lifeways in the realms of mainstream religious practice, ethnic identity, psychiatry, and public culture. Critical methodological concerns arise in the study of zar in Israel connected to working in a multi-cultural, urban environment and the importance of observation and other phenomenological techniques in studying embodied cultural phenomena. The zar complex itself developed through a series of historical conjunctures leading to its recent manifestations in Ethiopia and Israel. Zar has undergone transformations and expansions as it has been reconciled with beam Israeli cultural practices, especially in terms of Judaism and biomedicine. In both cases, ethnic identity and changing citizenship status have influenced the psychiatric and religious discourses and practices surrounding zar. In addition, zar is portrayed and consumed by Ethiopian Jews and other Israelis through mass media and public culture. Mass media places zar in a public and political field of discourse. Ethiopian Jews resist and react to this process as their traditions are re-created in art exhibits, tourist attractions, and films based on zar and the related coffee ceremony Overall, zar must be recognized as a phenomenon that extends beyond essentialized views of spirit possession into many facets of daily life. Zar in Israel illustrates the manner in which contradictions between modernity and tradition, mainstream and minority religious practices, and therapeutic discourses are resolved