AI and Emerging Technologies at the Religion-State Interface — Israel's Regulatory Laboratory
Dov Greenbaum
When an AI triages patients, whose values does it encode? Should self-driving cars operate on the Sabbath? Is lab-grown meat kosher — and who gets to rule on foods that didn't exist when the rules were written? Can an algorithm decide who's Jewish?
Israel is a global tech powerhouse — and the only Western democracy where religious courts — Muslim, Christian, and Jewish — hold binding state power over citizens' lives, with no constitution separating religion from government. That collision produces governance challenges found nowhere else, and they're intensifying as AI, autonomous systems, and synthetic biology force every society to hard-code its values.
This seminar examines what happens at that collision point — and why it matters well beyond Israel. Every democracy is starting to face the same underlying problem: when you build AI systems, write platform rules, or regulate gene editing, you're embedding somebody's values. What do you do when your citizens fundamentally disagree about whose values those should be?
Each week we take on a different flashpoint — cultured meat and food security, genetic engineering and religious food law, deepfakes and election manipulation, military AI, predictive policing near holy sites, smart-city infrastructure on the Sabbath — through debate, simulations, and policy design exercises. We ask what Israel can learn from the U.S. and Europe, and what its decades of navigating technology across deep cultural divides can teach the rest of us.
Especially relevant for students interested in AI governance, tech policy, law, or public service. No background in Israeli law, Hebrew, or religious studies required.
History of Modern Israel: From the Emergence of Zionism to Our Time
Yoni Furas
The class explores the history of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel in all its complexity and contradictions. What is Zionism? What are its roots? Is it a liberation movement? A religious cause? A colonial ideology? A set of state policies? And what is the relationship between Zionism and the modern State of Israel? How do Zionism and Israel look different when considered from the standpoint of Jewish, Palestinian, European, or Middle Eastern history? Exploring Zionism and Israel from its roots in the nineteenth century to the present, this class offers in-depth knowledge and discussion on all of these topics and more.
In Search of Lost Time: Memory in Legal Principle and Process
Daniel Levy
Human memory plays a key role in legal thought, institutions, and procedures. In a wide range of circumstances – evaluating the reliability of testimony, appreciating challenges to judges and jurors in learning and retaining information presented during a trial, assessing intent and culpability for plagiarism, or considering the admissibility of a plaintiff’s repressed memories – assumptions about the nature of memory play a vital role. This course will explore recent progress in the understanding of the nature and brain substrates of human memory. For each topic, the relevant basic cognitive psychology and neuroscience information will be introduced in non-specialist terms. We will then consider the implications of those insights for philosophical attitudes, legal processes, and societal institutions.
Protest and Activism in Israel: A Study of Social Movements
Yifat Moas
Israeli society has consistently drawn global attention, primarily in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet many remain unaware of the vibrant and intensely contested public debates within Israel itself, and of the diverse social struggles that shape its internal dynamics.
This course explores the development of protest movements and social activism in Israel—from left-wing movements calling to end the occupation to right-wing mobilizations seeking to reinforce it, as well as religious- and ethnic-based campaigns, struggles over social equality, gender and sexual identity, and the relationship between religion and state. Through these case studies, the course situates Israeli activism within broader theoretical perspectives on social movements—particularly the cultural approach, which highlights collective identity, meaning-making, and the emotional dimensions of political action.
Mizrahim in Israel: History and Culture
Yifat Moas
While Jews are often imagined as having European roots, a significant portion of Israel’s Jewish population descends from once-thriving communities in Arab and Islamic countries. Their culture, and the ethnic relations between Mizrahi Jews (i.e., Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin) and Ashkenazi Jews (with roots in Europe), have fundamentally shaped Israeli society. This course explores the history, culture, and evolving identity of Mizrahi Jews—from their historical experience in Arab and Islamic lands, through their immigration and struggles in Israel, to their cultural revival and growing political influence. These historical and cultural dynamics offer insights into the diverse forces that have shaped Israeli society, both past and present.
Sleep With Me: Literature, Rest, and the Politics of Wakefulness
Yael Segalovitz
What does it mean to remain awake? In an age marked by burnout, digital overstimulation, political crisis, anxiety, and the increasing demand for perpetual productivity, questions of rest and sleeplessness have become newly urgent. This course explores these questions through a wide range of literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic texts, with particular attention to Hebrew and Jewish literary traditions, which have long been intensely preoccupied with the tensions between wakefulness and sleep. Moving between biblical scenes of dreaming and revelation, modern Jewish political movements organized around the rhetoric of “national awakening,” and modern Hebrew literature, we will examine how writers have imagined sleep, fatigue, and reverie as sites of imaginative and relational possibility.
Our readings will include, among others, texts by Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector, Ronit Matalon, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, and Dahlia Ravikovitch, alongside thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sigmund Freud, Wilfred Bion, Jonathan Crary, and scholars associated with Critical Rest Studies, we will ask why literature persistently returns to states of sleep and withdrawal, and what forms of knowledge might emerge from them. While dreams have occupied a central place in philosophy and psychoanalysis, sleep itself has often remained in the background. We will ask, then, what might emerge if we take sleep seriously not merely as the container of dreams, but as a mode of being, relation, and thought. Along the way, we will consider whether literature itself produces altered states of attention that unsettle the opposition between wakefulness and sleep, and whether reading may at times resemble forms of drifting and surrender.